Street Viewed

Michael Wolf. A Series of Unfortunate Events #49. 2010

Across the road from us is an excellent new show at Bruce Silverstein. Covering four bodies of work by the photographer Michael Wolf, all dealing with the modern urban condition, the heart of the show is comprised of a series of large blow-ups of images Wolf has taken from Google’s “Street View”.

For those not up to speed on Google’s latest good/evil technology, "Street View" is a feature in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides panoramic views from various positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expanded to include cities and rural areas worldwide. Google "Street View" displays images taken from a fleet of specially adapted cars. On each of these vehicles there are nine directional cameras for 360° views, GPS units for positioning, and three laser range scanners for the measuring of up to 150 feet and 180° in the front of the vehicle.

Due to an initial outpouring of privacy concerns, in 2008, Google announced that it was testing face-blurring technology on its photos of the busy streets of Manhattan. This technology uses a computer algorithm to search Google's image database for faces and blurs them. Sadly, if you visit "Street View" today you will find it much in evidence.

A quick search will also find the web full of sites where someone has scoured "Street View" for scenes a little less aesthetic and artful than Wolf - at least that's how I see it. And like Gursky's "Oceans", it's who sees the art in the everyday first that counts. But to test this theory, below you'll see four more pictures by Michael Wolf and three images from random websites having fun with "Street View". See if you can tell which are which. Answers to follow in a couple of days.

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Lights! Color! Abstraction!

It’s never easy to write about abstract photography – the impact is in the seeing. However, if the response of the viewers who have come into the gallery over the last week is anything to go by, our just opened show of new work by Garry Fabian Miller is having quite an impact. (And it’s up until December 23, so there’s plenty of time to see it.)

GFM (as we’ll refer to him from now on) is another of the artists in the Victoria and Albert’s “Shadow Catchers” show, but he has been a presence on the English art scene for quite a while. Highly intellectual and somewhat reclusive, GFM prefers to work in the relative isolation of his studio near the rocky tors of Dartmoor where his daily walks inform his sequential experiments shining light through various forms and vessels onto to cibachrome paper. Picking up where abstract painters like Albers, Rothko, and Judd left off, GFM is the rare photographer whose abstract work is created rather than observed. Added rather than reduced. Bringing the elements of light and time to photographic paper, GFM’s prints glow and shimmer in a way that only be achieved in the darkroom.

GFM’s earliest work explored the abstract possibilities of landscape in a more traditional way. His minimal sky and seascapes of 1976 in fact pre-date similar work by Hiroshi Sugimoto by several years. Following that, GFM created a beautiful and now very rare botanical series made by shining enlarger light through various translucent plants. From then on, the work became increasingly abstract and exclusively camera-less. But as Martin Barnes, curator of the V&A’s show points out, unlike most photograms, in GFM’s work, no objects touch the paper. It’s only light.

Our exhibition focuses largely on the recently created body of work titled "Year Two". Following the form of a previous body of work titled "Year One", GFM devoted himself to making 12 different monthly series, each exploring how individual elements such as color, edge, and border affect a specific geometric composition. At the end of the year, he selected the ten images from each month that worked best as a complete chapter. Taken as an autonomous body of work, we have not only a highly personal and rigorous exploration of color and shape, but also the thought and association such forms bring forth.

I’ve illustrated this post with installation shots, because in some way, it feels like less of a reduction than a j-peg of an individual piece, and it conveys something of the constant experimentation that is the core of GFM’s work. (But if you must see the individual pieces click here.)

The Shooting Gallery

1973

Shooting yearly self-portraits is nothing new to photography, but a rather extraordinary series has just been discovered and published in The Netherlands in a book titled "Almost Every Picture #7". Starting in 1936, the then 16-year-old Ria van Dijk went into a shooting gallery - one of those fair booths where every time you hit the target it triggers a camera shutter and you win a portrait of yourself in firing pose.

This series documents almost every year of Van Dijk's life (there is a conspicuous pause from 1939 to 1945) up until present times. But at the age of 88, Ria van Dijk is still shooting!

1936. The picture that started it off.

1938

1949

1958

1967

1989

2006

Camera-less

It can't have escaped those of you who follow the photography scene that there's a lot going on in the"camera-less" photography world. Adam Fuss at Cheim and Read, Christopher Bucklow at my gallery with Garry Fabian Miller coming up next, and the major exhibition "Shadow Catchers" which just opened at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

One of the lesser known artists in the V&A show, but equally worthy of attention, is the German photographer Floris Neusüss. Neusüss was one of the first contemporary artists to return to camera-less photography, one of the medium’s earliest forms. In 1978, Neusüss created a piece that paid specific homage to William Henry Fox Talbot's 1835 image of a window in Lacock Abbey and last year he re-created the piece specifically for the V&A show.

As curator Martin Barnes explains: “Talbot’s Latticed Window anticipated the notion that photographs are often perceived as windows on the world. And yet, Talbot seems to have understood that it was rather the window itself – half way between interior and exterior – that was as beguiling as any view beyond.”

“This particular subject”, adds Neusüss “was, for us, not just a window in a building but an iconic window, a window on photography. Lacock’s discovery became a window on the world. Back in 1978, when we first photographed the window, that was the first time I worked outside of the studio, on location. It was the start of our adventures in making photograms of large objects in the places we found them".

As you'll see from these pictures, the piece that Neusüss made is extraordinarily beautiful and resonant, innovative, and chock full of ideas - a description that applies equally to the other artists in the show, So if you're in London, be sure not to miss the exhibition.

(All photographs via the London Daily Telegraph. Unfortunately no photographer's credit was attached.)

In collaboration with his wife Renate Heyne, also an artist, Neususs covered the interior of the window with photographic paper at night, before exposing the paper by shining a light from outside.

Some of the test prints are laid out on the floor of the abbey.

Floris Neusüss

The finished Neusüss piece.

Photogenic drawing negative by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877). Taken with the Camera Obscura, this photograph is the earliest camera negative in existence.

Weekend Video Face-off. Dance v.s. Story-telling.

Stiff competition in the family as my brother and daughter both submit videos for the "Weekend Video". I won't say who submitted which but please vote on your favorite by posting a comment.

Above a new concept of "Dancing in the Rain" featuring dancers, No Noize (red jacket), Man (back jacket), BJ (striped shirt), and Dreal (white shirt). Video directed and edited by Yoram Savion

Below a french fairy tale by the extraordinarily imaginative Capucine:

Fore- ctd.

To the astute observers who commented on one particular spectator in the background of the Tiger Woods photographs: you are not alone! While his identity is still not known, the man pictured wearing a ginger-coloured wig, fake moustache and chomping on a large Havana (in tribute to Spanish golfer Miguel Angel Jimenez) has become an internet sensation nicknamed "Cigar Guy". Below, a selection of some of the viral images that have begun to appear on the web!

Straight from the Heart

A new website that's a treasure trove for those who like vernacular photography and a good story - Pictures of My Mother.com posts pictures people have submitted of their mothers along with a story or recollection of the subject.

It's surprising how moving these little vignettes can be, but that's the power of words and pictures that come from the heart. Perhaps that's something that should be added to the rules I posted about what it takes to make it as a photographer!

Fore!

You can't plan these things! Photographer Mark Pain was on assignment for Britain's Daily Mail newspaper at the Ryder Cup when Tiger Woods attempted to chip his third shot on to the green. But Woods hit the ground behind the ball and duffed the shot straight at Pain who held his ground as the ball went straight for him, hit his camera, bounced on to his chest and came to rest at his feet.

Woods was furious, but neither he nor caddie Steve Williams objected to Pain's position. The shot from the rain-soaked rough, was just badly struck. Tiger and Stricker went on to win the match, but Pain got the best shot of the tournament!

For camera buffs, Pain was using a Nikon D3S camera, with a 24-70 mm lens and a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second.

Weekend Video

For the return of the Weekend Video, the music video for OK Go's new single, 'White Knuckles' , directed by Trish Sie and OK Go.

Tokyo Snaps

Looking at Andy Warhol polaroids.

It should be pretty clear that I'm crazy about Tokyo. Unfortunately this last trip was nearly all work, but here a few snaps of some of the things and people who caught my eye.

Burberry baby.

Louise Bourgeois sculpture at the Mori plaza.

Yoshioka Tokujin installation at the Mori Museum. The artist uses technology to recreate natural phenomena such as the snowstorm pictured here.

Murakami dolls in the museum shop.

Mika Ninagawa books and merchandise.

The pool and whirlpool at the Grand Hyatt.

My last breakfast at the hotel.

Meet Lloyd Ziff

In what is fast becoming a "Meet the Legendary Art Directors" series, tonight we are having a book signing for Lloyd Ziff. The former art director of magazines including Vanity Fair, House & Garden, and Travel & Leisure, Ziff has always been a keen snapper and his new book "Near North" presents a collection of photographs shot in Alaska and the Yukon. Not surprisingly, Ziff brings his graphic sense to the remote and vast wilderness, along with a strong sense of the strangeness and uniqueness of the place.

The book signing is from 6 to 8 p.m..

A Few Pictures That Caught My Eye

Like any art fair, Tokyo Photo has a real mix. Many of the big international names are being shown - Eggleston, Friedlander,
Cartier-Bresson, Chris Bucklow - but what interests me are things that seem uniquely Japanese in an original way. And you have to hunt for those. Nevertheless, here are a few things that caught my eye. Above "Form #1" by Miwa Nishimura. Click on the image to see the wigs that have been digitally added to each seagull.

Below: From Sohei Nishino's ongoing series of dioramas done in cities all over the world. It's a painstaking process where he spends weeks photographing the city from many hundreds of different vantage points. Then back in the studio he begins to assemble the individual frames from the contact strips into a collage that takes several months to create. The collage is then photographed and editioned into three sizes.

London Diorama by Sohei Nishino.

Detail from the above diorama.

Two prints from Haruko Nakamura's 19 print series "The Gift from the Sea".

What's selling is sex. Misato Kuroda's series "Sawako".

And last but not least - an early Chicago picture by the master photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto.