Michael Kenna

I have been gifted some beautiful books this week which combine some passions; photography and travel. Michael Kenna is one of the discoveries I made within the pages. Kenna has photographed Japan for years, his love of the country emerges in these soft landscapes which could be ink drawings. It is this point of metamorphosis between the tangible landscape and the incorporeal artist's fantasy which captivates me too.

Kenna writes 'Hokkaido has always been stark to me. There are towns and cities and traffic lights in places, yes, but the simplicity is what appeals to me. To be alone in the silence with only the sound of your heart beating and the snow falling...it's beautiful.'

This soft, silent beauty perfectly fits my mood today.

Another photograph of the Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina has also stirred my reflections, reminding me of this perfect piece of cinematography in Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together. This panoramic shot of the falls in the film never fails to make me weep. In the music and the motion there is absolute heartbreak and a stifling sense of loss. Genius.

Pingyao ancient city China

The mysteries of centuries lie behind Pingyao's gates and walls.

When a city becomes both the subject and the host of an annual international photography competition you cannot fail to acknowledge that something magical has been discovered. Pingyao can claim its own distinct aesthetic. An aesthetic which chimes in the twist of bicycle spokes, the steely patterning of turning wheels and the soft tones and gradients of the city walls and its crumbling brick gateways. I was not free from its monochrome spell. Labyrinths of allies which drowned you in stone surfaces turned the play of light and shadow in to a game of photographic hide and seek. In Pingyao time slipped endlessly in to past and present at every corner and through every arch way. Hundreds of years passed in a single circuit of the city walls.

Shadows create alternative perspectives, Pingyao collapses in on itself.


The sense of a world still yet undiscovered, relic still coated with the dust of its discovery. Pingyao teeters between touristic manipulation and the genuinely undisturbed.

Pingyao, in the North of China in Shanxi Province, may not be found on your typical China-itinerary, but it is gradually developing a niche market for the Western tourist and is an enriching stop-over to make between Xi An and Beijing. The survival of the walled city has earnt it the status of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Pingyao remains as a relic of an ancient China which has largely been swallowed by industrialism and urbanisation in recent years. My advice would be that however long China has been depriving you of your Western comforts (coffees, English breakfasts, pancakes and Spaghetti bolognese) you resist being enthralled by Pingyao's central axis of tourist honey-traps. There is little charm in the courtyards which have been painted and converted in to luxury hotels and inconsequential museums; it is the crumbling and derelict outskirts of Pingyao which are truly magnetic. For a pound a day you can cycle its streets and allies exhaustively and learn more about China than the entire Lonely Planet guide book can offer...While we are on the subject of the Lonely Planet, be wary of its advice and instructions when it comes to the often neglected province of Shanxi. While Hostels like the Harmony guesthouse appears to offer an Oasis to the traveller in China (which includes access to all those beautiful yet oh-so-difficult to get to places in Shanxi and a hand in the black-market of train tickets,) the Deng's don't always hand over these things graciously and will always put profit first....They are not like the harmless old couple who owned the B&B you always go to on your family holiday!

Sunday Selections-Madrid

I'm beginning to enjoy the purely nostalgic qualities of Kim's Sunday Selections which gives me an excuse to idly flick through old photographs and old memories. When I was 16 I spent three weeks with my Aunt and Uncle in Madrid, my aunt worked during the day and so I spent a lot of time exploring the city on my own. I recognise now that this was a huge thing for my sixteen year old self. These photographs are pre-digital camera and they appear to be pre-photography skills, but they have an appropriately dreamy quality. I have on this occasion, indulgently, failed to be selective.

Whilst uploading I began to feel like there was a lot of absence in these photographs, so here is some presence. When I was younger I didn't want people in my photographs, I wanted attractions and monuments unpolluted by crowds, clean lines and light. I think this isn't always true now, people add character.

I'm not sure I ever knew that I would be writing about being 16 and in Madrid so distantly.

Shadow Catchers

I know that this is an old post but today I am at a symposium at the V&A which ties in with the exhibition. So I shall refresh my own and your memory, in preparation for what will hopefully be an inspired post later in the week. The artists will be talking a long with somewhat of an idol of mine, Marina Warner. No work for me tomorrow just shadowy play!

Floris Neususs

Everybody has a camera now, everybody can take high-quality photographs without laying claim to any particular 'skill'. The artist's visual eye can be replicated with photo-editing tools and auto-correction. To take a beautiful photograph is no longer enough. So the question is where does photography go next? How will it adapt to survive?

The brilliance of the V&A's exhibition 'Shadow Catchers' is that it provides an answer to this question without necessarily meaning to. Not everybody can conjure beauty in to being out of a seeming nothing. I was genuinely captivated, awed, astounded (so much so that I require multiple adverbs) by these images and the revelation of the possibilities and processes available to the contemporary photographer.

Floris Neususs appeared to have emerged from the Cottingley fairy generation with his lifesize photograms of women. These Body-grams appear to have captured women in flight; here they are dancing with faint shadows of birds and moths or curled up vulnerably like netted butterflies. Neususs has taken that darkroom experiment, the photogram, and given it a larger-than-life ethereality. 'Be Right Back' has fixed the shadow of a woman beneath a now empty chair; the human trace we leave behind, the haunting beauty of a ghost narrated. In Untitled Kassel some parts of the work remain unfixed so that colour changes over time. Neususs is interested in the transience of his medium, the sense of preserving the absent and nurturing the human sense of emptiness.

Susan Derges

Photography has always harboured an interdependence with the natural world and camera-less photography engages with deep underground natural processes. Neususs leaves photo paper in the garden at night to be exposed by lightning; light appears to have scanned the paper leaving shockwaves and scars. Garry Fabian Miller's interest is botanical; photography, like photosynthesis, is about light. Translating plants and leaves to photographic paper these are precise botanical illustrations which track growth and decay. He describes his interest in light and time as the 'accumulation of days'. Susan Derges's element is water; her photograms map the water's surface, the flow of rivers, it's undercurrents and secret shifts. She creates 'sun prints' by placing her photographic paper beneath the water to be exposed by sunlight, revealing 'what underlies the visible', the 'absent moments' which until now we have only been able to imagine.

Pierre Cordier

Which leads on to the power to create and regenerate; the otherworldly. Pierre Cordier's use of the chemigram has enabled the patterning of geometries, labyrinthine formations, the emergence of strange new worlds. He describes his work as 'a mutation, hybrid and marginal- fake photographs of an imaginary, improbable and inaccessible world.' What is captured are shifting forms that offer strange glimpses of space and new dimensions. As Fabian Miller develops he moves towards more abstract images, his photo a day project is a portfolio of burning rings of light, new planets emerging. He says they are 'of something as yet unseen, which may only exist on the paper surface.'

Garry Fabian Miller

Adam Fuss's work is a combination of birth and death. His cibachrome photogram 'Invocation' is a halo of light in which a baby is baptised, the tail of a snake wriggles across the paper in another. Fuss likes to work with live animals, with symbols and ideas. But at the other end of the spectrum the My Ghost series shows a figure emerging/disappearing in smoke, a christening gown which has become a spectral shroud.

Adam Fuss

Camera-less Photography is engaged with themes of mortality; with what it can create and imagine but also with those absent, dead things it holds to the light. The Frankenstein's monster of the art world, with a little sensitivity it has the power to be truly beautiful. In those dark rooms at the V&A only the light of these images remains burned on to our retinas with the force of revelation.

I did a few experimental photograms, along with research in to the development of the process by Man Ray for my A-levels, but this exhibition makes me want to get back in to the dark room. Perhaps this is where the darkroom revival begins.

Sunday Selections- Ode to Light

So, although it isn't quite Sunday here in Britain, I don't want to miss the Australian Sunday fun at Frogpondsrock. As you may or may not have noticed I am obsessed with light; the way it creates shadows, blinds white, filters through glass and is channelled by constructions. Here are some photos of the light doing all the work for me and making everything beautiful.

And here is a photo for Dolly of a Cat being cheeky:

Anna Maria Maiolino

'It is a territory marked by the fragility of life
Guardian-embryos enclose the male/female
The egg coupled
Impregnated
Is on the plate
On the valuable pedestal
In the middle of the space
Lies the threat of death in the false step that crushes
In treading upon this field of seeded lives
In religious silence feet walk under the unfolded canopy
This is a portion of heaven determining the amount of earth
That will be occupied
Thus we relive that which had been forgotten
And step-by-step we recall that which is known'
Poem by Anna Maria Maiolino accompanying her egg sculpture.

At the Antoni Tapies Foundation in Barcelona I went along, lacking sleep, to the first major retrospective of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. Working with installations, videos, sculpture, photography and just about every modern material available and engaging with the political climate of her country, I will try to do Maiolino and her work some justice.

Because I don't think I can say it better; 'Seen as a whole, her work unfolds like a rhizomatic structure where all the different pieces, like semiotic steps charged with linguistic, perceptive, social, gestural and cognitive acts establish transversal connections with each other.' Wow, lets be honest I could not say that in any of the words I have.

But I do understand what the curator means; Maiolino is constantly challenging her medium, asking for new ways to communicate and experimenting with the boundaries between mediums in order to express the inexpressible. Her 'Mental Maps' and 'Secret poems' play with the powers of visual linguistics. Words can be read in any direction, as associations and voids. Locating and mapping words leads to the emergence of a narrative of the artist's life.

Experimenting with paper and ink in Marcas de Gota 2, Maiolino describes herself as 'Like a ship's captain at the helm, I move the drawings decisively in the air' so that the ink moves about the paper to make Rorschach ink blots where I find incidental letters and objects. That is the other notable thing about Maiolino; she is engaged with words. A lot of the information in the gallery is written by her, she can explain her working practice, which is a skill not every artist can claim.

Her sculptures in clay explore the organic qualities of her material; a huge landscape of thumbed clay fills an entire wall as though it were a child's obsessive experiment. The entire first floor is filled with earth colours; three tables are laid out like production benches in a pasta factory with identical clay shapes laid out. The works from the 70's explore absences and spaces. Rips and holes in paper and in rocks gape as if she is reaching towards something incommunicable.

In her photography Maiolino becomes more blatantly political. She describes a 'difficult moment for Brazil' where 'fear had gripped the country' and people were 'blindfolded'. Her photographs and portraits speak out against this blindness in their gesture towards self-mutilation.

In her Super8 films she creates what she calls 'photopoemaction' , articulating a 'totally new alphabet of images' (everything she writes is poetry.). She says that she tries to find in the 'act of poetic freedom a resistance to the establishment'. This is the problem with Maiolino, that I have to step down and admit that words defeat me, although they have not defeated her.

Streetwalking the Metropolis

I am attempting to give my second dissertation, and all of the reading and notes that have been haphazardly collected over an extended period, a direction. The dissertation is about Women walking and writing about walking in London between the World Wars, there might be a little surrealism involved, some chorography and a lot of feminist discussion. Beyond that I can offer little else by way of explanation.

Walking the streets of Barcelona, thinking, daydreaming, creating stories and then returning to look in detail at the city itself, I began to experience my dissertation. To walk in the city is to feel at one moment utterly alive, a part of an energy and movement beyond us, and then at the next moment to feel overwhelmed, lost in the dark and foolish for wandering aimlessly. I understand both these emotions from my walkings in Barcelona. I love walking the city and this time I decided to document it, writing and photographing as I weaved my way through the metropolis. I am not the first to do this, but am tying myself to a tradition.

Lee Miller in Blitzed London

The city overwhelms us with a superflux of sensory data; sounds of cars and people, signs, posters, architecture, rubbish, the lives of other people, windows in to other worlds, lights and shadows. Lee Miller was associated with the surrealist movement in Paris, working with the artist Man Ray, but she came in to her own independence as a photographer and war correspondent for Vogue magazine. Her incidental photographs of blitzed London, of sculptures and pianos amongst the rubble have a bleak beauty which communicates the power and the desolation of a city destroyed and its accidental surrealism.

Berenice Abbott in New York

In 1929 Berenice Abbott closed her studio in Paris and came to New York City, a city she recognised as having exciting potential for her photography. She spent six years documenting the city, a city that was beginning to change, to be destroyed and regenerated.

'Abbott's project was primarily a sociological study imbedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa).'

Brassai in Paris

Hungarian artist, Brassai, spent his evenings in night-time wanderings of the city of Paris and began to document it. Brassai captured the feel and atmosphere of the city at night; going in to bars and back alleys, as well as focussing on the beauty of fog and light in the dark streets.

These photographers have left behind them documents of their own personal impression, as well as capturing some inherent element of the city itself. We might look at these photographs and see things which we recognise, but perhaps the perspective and the essence of the vision is something beyond us; a thing which only Miller, Abbott and Brassai feel as intensely as the photograph suggests.

So here are a few of my own attempts to document my time in the sloping labyrinth of Barcelona. For me the city was filled with light and it was the ways in which buildings and spaces manipulated light which interested me.

So much of Barcelona is buildings climbing parallel up steep hills, occasionally there are street escalators to help you out. The escalator focusses perspective and reflects the light of the setting sun.

I like this street photo because of the angle which curves inwards and the lingering Christmas decorations which seemed so incongruous with the bright January sun.

Strolling through parks in the dazed shadows of trees, this menage of women captures the living sense of the city.

Now I just have to decide what all of this means and how women use their mappings of the city.

Sunday Selections

So I decided to continue with the Sunday Selections at Frogpondsrock because it is quite fun indulging my inner photographer. These photographs are of reflections in water, but they reveal new worlds and intoxicating possibilities. Two worlds are merged and turned upside down, to leave us with only a giddy sense of perspective.

Sunday is all about escapism. So here are the reflections to lose yourself in.

The Eyes of Paris

So here is your first art-story from Barcelona. On my final day I made a slightly exhausted trip to MACBA (The Museum of Contemporary Art) and stumbled upon some photographs by Brassai from his Graffiti Series.

Technically stunning, light partially illuminates the rocks and throws shadows in to crevices to create photographs of subtle perfection. Taken over a period of thirty years the images are of Parisian Graffiti that Brassai stumbled upon during his wanderings of the city.

They capture something primitive, they are like newly discovered cave-paintings; the naive cave-paintings of the contemporary. Incidental mark-making which is unaware of its potential to outlive its authors and speak in the future. They become, focussed by Brassai's lens, monumental statements of archetypal stories.

Presenting to us the innocent stories of children's book, faces like masks and dream-creatures, I wish I had stumbled upon graffiti this good. But I am satisfied, at least, to have stumbled upon Brassai's photographs.

Sunday Selections

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So a little blog called Frogpondsrock has a photography project running to post old, neglected photographs on a Sunday. Here is my contribution:

I took this photograph in a hostel in Marrakech. I love the puzzling of light and the strange perspective the broken colour offers. I love Frogpond's idea, it offers the chance to be a little narcissistic and publish photographs which you are quite proud of, but would probably never be seen otherwise. So join in.

Which reminds me, it would be lovely me if my followers could introduce themselves, I can't seem to find links to (or back to) all of your blogs.

Tints and Shades of Grey

Veyre, I think this interior now hosts the Museum of Moroccan Art in Marrakech. The image is grainy and there isn't very much light, but I think it demonstrates how susceptible to Black and White the Arabic aesthetic is.

Flandrin, here the photographer is playing with light. There is a sense in Morocco of being closed in, of grates and Henna patterns which bar against light so these glimmers are poignant.

At the beginning of the summer (the summer that gets further and further away) I went on a little trip with some friends to Marrakech. To say that I was in awe would be an understatement. The thing that captivated me most was the qualities of light; as the bulbs burned through the smoke on market stalls, as daylight fell through woven rooves in to the dark souks, as the sun cast and stretched shadows and the day changed to a warm darkness. At the Museum of Moroccan art we saw a small exhibition of old photographs of Marrakech, and in black and white the power of the light to touch and transform was lyrical and suggestive. I have just spent ages trying to search for some of the photographers and some example images, but I have failed miserably. Above are the meagre results of a long and fruitless search on the internet. Anyway you will have to survive on my poor attempts to emulate. Perhaps I will work on finding the real thing!

The continual sense of looking out, of having your vision always framed and restricted.

These trellis walkways cast beautiful layers of shadows on hot walks.

Where the Souks were neglected an older roofing remained, made from straw and branches, the light created was more evocative of those old photographs.