“The Dusseldorf School of Photography” by Stefan Gronert

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I bought this book to learn more about the famous Dusseldorf School of Photography.  The book does a good job of reinforcing and dispelling some myths about the school.  It consist mainly of large format printed photos and an essay titled “Photographic Emancipation” written by Stefan Gronert.  The photos are divided into three parts: part one focuses on the school’s founding gurus Bernd & Hilla Becher; part two its more famous pupils; and part three its lesser known practitioners.  There is a very well researched and comprehensive “Biographies, Exhibitions and Further Reading” section by Isabelle Matz and Maria Muller at the end of the book.

Stefan Gronert’s essay serves as a legend for the photos by covering the 11 approaches of “Photographic Emancipation”.  Although Gronert doesn’t spell out these 11 approaches exactly one can assume they roughly follow his headings.  These sections effectively sets up a dialogue between the artists.  Gronert points out that it was Axel Hutte who first started to do portraits but Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth who later became more well known for them.  The author also compares and contrasts: the library photos of Candida Hofer with Andreas Gursky; and the street photos of Petra Wunderlich with Thomas Struth.  Gronert seems to dedicate a special section to Thomas Ruff’s work due perhaps to his more diverse oeuvre.

The insights in Gronert’s essay adds more flavor to the photos.  Some examples being Thomas Struth’s pictures of pictures or as Gronert refers to them as meta photos.  These photos of paintings in museums (the bottom photo on the book’s cover) are given another dimension when you learn that each scene was methodically captured over and over until one image “fit the bill”.  This according to Gronert gives the photos a much more authorial constructed reality.  For me personally they look somewhere between staged and found.  Jorg Sasse’s “Speicher I” is a photo-sculpture and image database system that allows the viewer to organize photos by themes.  In this day and age of The Cloud it’s interesting to see how artist physically interpret these concepts.

The Photos

Here are some personal observations about the photos by the various photographers in the order they are presented in the book:

Bernd & Hilla Becher

In so much as the photos are seen to be reproductions of reality, the repetitive nature of the photos’ subject matter are also reproducing themselves as well.  The repetition also encourages you to stop seeing the subject matter all together and start seeing the abstractions.

Andreas Gursky

By having AG follow B&HB’s work in the book helps to emphasize B&HB’s influence of scale on AG’s photos.  This arrangement also helps to contrast the non-monumentality of AG’s photos when compared to B&BH’s .  In AG’s photos it is the tableaux that becomes the monument.  One of my favorite photos from this series is “Baharain I” for its “all over-ness” and abstraction.

Candida Hofer

In contrast to AG, CH’s focus is more on space and depth.  There’s also a fractal thing going on in the photo of the room with boxes on the shelves alludes to the further subdivision of space in to smaller and smaller modules.  He seems to use this compositional strategy quite frequently.

Axel Hutte

Perhaps it’s the influence of Gronert’s essay but AH’s work seem to contain the seeds of the work of his peers.  There are fractal like spaces, deep voids, all over hill side/jungle foliages and icebergs, atmospheric environments, objects in far off distances.

Thomas Ruff

First time in the book that portraits appear in the artists’ represented photos.  And also one of the first to incorporate found “objects” (space photos, jpegs from the internet) in his photos shown in the book.  As mentioned before TR’s photos cover a diverse range of subjects.

Thomas Struth

His work deals with the topic of public spaces in his museum photos and also private spaces in family portraits taken in homes.  In the former the people are seemingly unaware of their presence in the photos whereas in the later there is a direct confrontation between viewer and subject.  It’s interesting to see these polar opposites side by side in the book.

Petra Wunderlich, Laurenz Berges, Elger Esser, Simone Nieweg, Jorg Sasse

PW has a series of stone quarry and stone buildings which I like for their negative and positive spaces respectively.  There’s an awesome photo by LB called “Delmenhorst” that has a snow laden tree against a blue wall that looks like a silkscreened sky.  EE’s photos are very painterly and I particularly like the one of the ocean wave called “265 Dieppe”.  Of all the foliage themed photos I think SN’s are the most successful.  I particularly like “Garden Fence with Rug, Gelsenkirchen” which has an all-over and consistent feeling that is present in all her photos.  Three photos from Jorg Sasse which I absolutely admire.  There’s the photo of the yellow vase against a purple background that is very abstract and Escher-esque.  The volcano and the butcher photos (actually two photos) for their texturing and patterns.  And I also like the speeding train photo for the strong horizontal composition and color contrast.

Conclusion

The book serves as a good overall guide to the key figures of The Dusseldorf School.  It’s a good starting point to help the reader explore more about the individual photographers.  The book is also very effective at putting everything in context so that influences and offshoots can be seen more clearly.  Most importantly it enables the reader to discover and appreciate the work of the lesser known students of the school.

Bessa III Review Part 3

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This final installment of the Bessa III review will focus on its unique bellows and Heliar lens. Some sample images from the camera will also be included as requested.

Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the camera is its collapsible bellows. But unlike a large format camera, the Bessa III bellows only allow the camera to be more compact and does not enable any tilt shift effects. (An interesting experiment would be to unhinge and shoot the lens in a non-perpendicular position to the film plane.) With the bellows collapsed the camera can fit in any large coat pocket or side pocket of your bag for easy access. It is very secure so no worries about it opening or closing accidentally.

Both the aperture dial and focus ring on the lens turn smoothly. The focus tab is comfortable to use even for large sized thumbs. The aperture ring is notched so that it’s easy to locate and turn. The numbers on the aperture dial are large enough to be seen through the viewfinder. This enables the shooter to keep their eye on the subject without removing it from the viewfinder to check aperture and shutter settings. And with a viewfinder magnification of only 0.7x it is close enough to 1:1 to keep both eyes open without much disorientation.

As for the lens, I must admit I have some mixed feelings about it. In optimal lighting conditions the optics yield wonderful results. With the correct focus setting the images are very sharp and crisp. However, in poor lighting conditions the contrast is quite low but nothing that can’t be fixed with some post processing. From this table you can see that the Bessa III’s 80mm Heliar lens is equivalent to a lens somewhere between 35 and 50mm on a 35mm camera. As mentioned previously it does feel a lot wider compared to its 35mm format counterpart. Overall the performance of the lens will allow you to take a wide variety of shots day and night, handheld and with a tripod.

Sample Images from the Bessa III with Heliar 80mm F3.5 Lens

High contrast handheld outdoor day shot with Bessa III

Low contrast handheld indoor shot with Bessa III

For all the Bessa III related post including photos taken with the camera please click here.

German Photography 1960 – 2012: A Survey

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My colleague and I attended Ben Brown Fine Arts exhibition of German photography this past week.  We both had our favorites and it was interesting to hear her reasons for picking hers.  She liked the Candida Höfer pictured above for its strong perspective and also how the horizon line in the photo matched the horizon line in the gallery adding to the illusion of extended space.

She also picked this one by Andreas Gursky for its spartan composition and how the man pictured in the photo creates a sense of expectation which is shared by the viewer. Here’s a link to the gallery’s site which has a nice slide show of all the pieces.  The photos are on display from now until May 5th.  Let me know which are your favorites as well!

PJ Harvey “Let England Shake” – 12 Short Films By Seamus Murphy

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For the 100th post of this blog I’d like to share my review of the DVD version of “Let England Shake”.

PJ Harvey “Let England Shake” – 12 Short Films By Seamus Murphy is a collaboration that started when PJ saw Seamus’ exhibition and book of photographs ‘A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan’ and decided to make a couple of films for her new CD.  It is a powerful tour-de-force that combines poetry, rock music, video and still images to weave a multi-textured narrative of Seamus’ road trip across England, and PJ Harvey’s haunting performances of her songs. It’s also the debute of Seamus as a film maker who has covered war torn countries around the world for decades in his photographs.

Each of the twelve films starts with seemingly random strangers reading the first verse of the songs.  These performances are at times serious and at times tongue in cheek outtake-like clips. This adds to the sense of joy in the production found throughout the film which was made entirely in-camera. After the brief reading the film than cuts to PJ’s singing or the footage of Seamus’ road trip which run the gamut from idyllic sea and countrysides to hectic city streets.

The video and stills are edited together so that they reinforce each other: moving when you expect stillness and stillness when you expect movement. All the while working in near perfect unison with the music. Sometimes, the materials match up too nicely for my taste – like crashing ships and crashing waves in Track One – but that’s just being picky. In general it works beautifully like when cutting from the human skeleton to PJ or from the old woman to PJ – the ephemeralness of human life.

One of the more memorable scenes is the old folks in a dance hall swaying their hips (unbeknownst to them) to PJ’s song titled “The Words That Maketh Murder” – the video and audio incongruence is perfectly surreal. Then there’s the slightly out of focus projected images of people being pointed to by a disjointed hand from inside a camera obscura. All the while with the lyrics “I’m going to take my problem to the United Nations” playing over top.

There are a few recurring images that symbolize death such as the sea, fog and snow. One particularly potent image is a line of roses along an iron chain by the docks on a grey snowy day. Roses are repeated again when soldiers lay them on top of a hearse at a memorial service for a fallen comrade.  Lots of beautiful flowers in the snow images makes one wonder what flowers in the winter?  Then there are the images of death portrayed in Seamus’ war photography interspersed throughout the DVD.  For the majority of the piece the adventures overseas are subtly alluded to by shots like the Afghan rug hanging on a roadside railing in the snow.

The film is not so much a contrast of war abroad and peace at home but rather the signs of death brought back and remembered through the everyday living.  If all the images of actual war were removed from the film this message would still come through effectively.  After watching the DVD I went to Seamus’ site to look at his still photos and found much sensitivity and poetry in his war photography.  Which is a striking contrast when compared to his shots of regular life in the film which are at times tinged with violence and sadness.