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2 / 2 0 0 6 G B P 9 , E U R 12 . 8 0
THE PRINTED PAGE
STEFAN KRUCKENHAUSER
HOUSTON FOTOFEST
RENCONTRES D ’ARLES
LEICA OSKAR BARNACK AWARD
PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS 2007
PHOTO METROPOLIS NEW YORK
INTERVIEW WITH PETER GAL ASSI
LEICA M8
HEIDI BRADNER
JAMES WHITLOW DEL ANO
ESTEBAN PASTORINO DIAZ
ANDREW Z. GLICKMAN
BENEDICTE L ASSALLE
ANDREAS MEICHSNER
TOMAS MUNITA
PIERRE WITT
PAOLO ROVERSI
10 YEARS OF
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Photo - Metropolis New York
THE PLACE TO BE
Let there be no doubt: if you deal with the medium as collector or critic, curator or editor,
art buyer or professional photographer, you cannot ignore New York. This is where trends are
created, and prices. For 20th century photoart at any rate, New York remains the place to be.
ON AME RICA’ S LE F T WING - LIBE R AL east coast, where the Hudson
meets the Atlantic, is New York, a city whose size and population of
more than eight million, whose pulsating business and cultural life
make it one of the world’s few true metropolises. Architecturally and
structurally it is the 20th century’s first modern city. It is also the place
where a modern medium like photography has a presence unparal-
leled throughout the world. So New York is not only a center within the
USA, but also in a global sense. To date, its number of museums, gal-
leries, agencies, publishing companies and other institutional and
commercial facilities concentrating on the photographic image is
beyond compare, as is the high level, the matter-of-course and the pro-
fessionalism of people’s approach to photography. Certainly one rea-
son for this is that, soon after the first practicable method had been
announced in 1839, the medium became very popular in the New
World – as regards its creative use as well as its marketing, publication
and reception.
Although New York claims the role of the USA’s leading cultural
city for itself, it does not have a single museum that is dedicated exclu-
sively to the medium of photography. But the city is distinguished by a
number of world-famous museums and institutions where photogra-
phy is collected, exhibited and communicated. One of the most
famous is without doubt the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Mid-
town Manhattan on 53rd Street and not far from the famous Fifth
Avenue. When it was established in 1929, the avowed aim of its initia-
tors – three progressive and influential patrons of the arts, Miss Lillie P.
Bliss, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan – was to
reshape the conservative museum scene and create a location for mod-
ern art. Under founding director Alfred H. Barr, who operated with an
extended concept of art oriented on the Bauhaus curriculum, a struc-
ture was created for the first time that included separate departments
for architecture and design, film and video, and photography – along
with the ‘classical’ ones for paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and
illustrated books. In 1933, with Walker Evans’ photographs of Victo-
rian houses, the museum exhibited photography for the first time. The
Department of Photography was established in 1940 – the first in the
world at an art museum. The curator to be appointed was Beaumont
Newhall, who was one of the few art historians at the time who under-
stood the medium as a means of personal expression and advocated
this approach in his epoch-making exhibition Photography1839–1937.
(His [art] History of Photography became a standard work). Other per-
sonalities followed, for example, in 1947, Edward Steichen, a leading
representative of pictorialism, and in later years a prominent fashion
and advertising photographer. With the The Family of Man he con-
ceived, and was curator of, probably the “most successful [photo] exhi-
bition of all times” (Philipp). The exhibition, a production schooled in
modern magazine layout in the service of an ‘ideology of a humanist
universalism’, opened on January 24, 1955 at the Museum of Modern
Art and was afterwards presented in 69 countries and at 85 locations.
Paul Strand, ‘New York’ 1915, Courtesy Aperture Foundation
Edward Steichen, ‘The Flatiron’, New York 1905, Courtesy Aperture Foundation
2/2006 Leica World 19
S P E C I A L N E W Y O R K
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Houston Fotofest
AH YES, REALITY
Houston seems a long way off, but the trip is worth the effort. It is not the famous stars who are
celebrated here. It is the emerging artists who are presented at the Fotofest. Every kind of visual
strategy is pursued, without adhering to one single restrictive concept. A link to the problems of this
world, however, is not unwelcome.
ONE WOULD NOT BE FAR wrong in associating the name of Houston,
Texas, with high-tech, cattle and folklore, even if this is not the entire
story. Houston also stands for art and culture, mainly on account of a
wealthy upper class with an interest in art. Aficionados of surrealistic
art are well acquainted with the Menil Collection, which has probably
the world’s largest number of Magritte paintings. Those interested in
photographs have heard of the Museum of Fine Arts, which quite
recently acquired the superb Manfred Heiting Collection (cf. p. 9). The
problem is that Houston is not necessarily on the roadmap of interna-
tional art tourism, a fact that had also to be taken into consideration
when it came to establishing a photo festival in America’s fourth
biggest city. Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, both prominent photo-
journalists, now retired, had to come up with something special if they
intended to attract attention and tempt a public with an interest in pho-
tography into coming to Houston. Their concept was as follows: we do
not show what is shown in New York, for example. And we give young
photographers a genuine chance to make a name for themselves.
‘Start-up’ is the word that springs to mind. And with their ‘Meeting
Place’, that is, the portfolio reviews that are held here, the initiators in
fact set a genuine standard that meanwhile has its imitators from Arles
to Birmingham.
Houston is the festival for discovering mostly young or contempo-
rary photographers, a fact also true of this thirteenth edition of the
biennial – again supported by Leica Camera. Once again the slightly
more than forty exhibitions had been subsumed under one or rather
two topics that only at first glance had nothing to do with each other:
the environment (‘The Earth’), and art and violence (‘Artists Respond-
ing to Violence’). There were also various sideshows, for example, the
Discovery Show showing the finds of the last festival. One of these is
the young Argentinean photographer, Esteban Pastorino Díaz. Díaz is
an example of the new generation of photographers who are no longer
concerned simply with well seen, beautiful pictures, but – against the
background of a changed media world – with questions of seeing and
the perception of reality. From a technical point of view, his large-for-
mat photographs are aerial pictures taken from heights of 15 to 120
metres and acquire a distinctly surreal touch owing to the angle of
vision and a deliberately selected partial sharpness of focus. One
might speak of a ‘Gulliver’ effect that not only makes big things appear
small, in other words miniaturises our world in an amazing way, but
also compels us to look anew at familiar objects by suddenly bringing
them irritatingly into focus and leaving the rest of the picture blurred.
A young British Leica photographer who has already made a name for
herself in the world of photography is Heidi Bradner, who presented
herself at a well arranged exhibition with an essay about the Nenets, a
nomadic people in northern Siberia. Looking at the pictures one might
be reminded of Ragnar Axelsson or Claudine Doury, and this impres-
sion is not so wrong. Their reports are also dedicated to a life under
extreme conditions, in snow and ice. And there is something else this
new generation of young documentary photographers has in com-
mon: their commitment to the Leica system, which never fails to work
even at extremely low temperatures: “I used my Leica in storms”, says
Heidi Bradner, “because it just kept working even though I had snow-
drifts on my camera.” What distinguishes Bradner’s essay is the close-
ness, spiritual and real, to a people that has completely submitted its
life’s rhythm to nature. In quiet, well constructed pictures, Bradner
tells of a frugal life far away from what we usually refer to as civilisa-
tion, proving not least that, even in the era of the jet and the Internet
there exists – in the best sense of the word – ‘something foreign’ that is
worth exploring with conventional means.
Andrew Z. Glickman is the name of our discovery at the portfolio
reviews. The young American presented himself, strictly speaking,
with a topic that is not exactly brand new. Walker Evans had already
photographed people using public transport. Luc Delahaye did the
same a while ago. ‘Leica World’ readers will also remember the portfo-
lios of Tom Wood and Luis Mallo. What distinguishes Glickman is that
he does not come as a stranger or an artist or a photographer. He
comes as a participant, not looking for the exceptional but the normal.
Glickman, who lives in Washington, uses the subway every day to go
to his office. Like Wood he has also made a virtue of necessity and
turns the ride underground into a photographic challenge. Equipped
with the discreet Leica M he seeks, not the bizarre, not the event, but
the ‘study’, as Roland Barthes has it; in other words that cool natural-
ness which – pictured so plainly and clearly – appears artificially
staged. Thematically and stylistically Díaz, Bradner, Glickman may go
different ways. What they stand for is a critical interest in our reality.
And in a photographic art that does not derive its possibilities from the
computer. hmk
This year’s Fotofest was held from March 10 to April 23. The 14th edition of the
festival, which is supported by Leica Camera AG, is planned for the begin-
ning of 2008. www.fotofest.org
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A R L E S / B E N E D I C T E L A S S A L L E
50 Leica World 2/2006
A R L E S
Rencontres d’Arles
SO WHERE THEN IS HAPPINESS TO BE FOUND?
What concerns the new generation of photographers in particular? The annual Rencontres d’Arles,
with their exhibitions and projections, and the portfolio reviews, now something of an institution,
are a perfect guide to current trends in the language of pictures and the choice of themes.
SHE DID NOT HAVE far to go to find her subject. Bénédicte Lassalle, a
young Leica photographer in Paris and graduate of the private Centre
Iris photographers’ school, explored her grandmother’s kitchen. That
does not sound exactly spectacular. But haven’t we learned from the
movies how the mildest and gentlest of stories can trigger the most
devastating emotional aftershock? What do we see? An artificial hand
on the kitchen table, the battered legs of which disappear into the blur.
A kitchen clock on floral-pattern wallpaper, the hands pointing to
twelve. A well-worn apron. A brush with a barcode that somebody for-
got to remove. And, finally, a cracked sink you can tell has seen more
than its fair share of dirty dishes. These are signs of a life lived out,
metaphors of a yesterday that knows no tomorrow. This was home to
someone whose time is up. What was broken is no longer repaired,
what was used up no longer replaced. The very objects breathe exhaus-
tion. Some day, in the not too distant future, someone is bound to
come and dispose of these mute companions of an existence that was.
For one last time the photographer has recorded a condition that is
familiar and yet under threat: someone close, reflected only in the mir-
ror of her belongings.
Bénédicte Lassalle was not, not yet, part of the official festival pro-
gramme. But calling attention to young talents beyond the compass of
the exhibitions, colloquia, workshops and projections – this, too, is
typical of the Rencontres d’Arles: not by chance does the title include
the word ‘meetings’. Incidentally, Arles 2006 was marked by the pres-
ence of those old ‘Compagnons de Route’, who had come at the invita-
tion of Raymond Depardon, this year’s artistic director of the Rencon-
tres d’Arles. Among them was Leica photographer Guy Le Querrec,
whose multi-facetted work, where jazz meets reportage, many people
have yet to discover. Or Jean Gaumy, whose dramatic exploration of
the sea must be counted among the most exceptional achievements of
contemporary Leica photography. Or Claudine Doury, one of the
younger generation of dedicated Leica photographers: she, too, is a
sensitive observer of non-European cultures.
One of the traditional items on the agenda is the Leica Oskar Bar-
nack Award, where the winner is presented, along with the finalists, at
an evening projection. The winner of this year’s competition was
Tomás Munita, who was born in Santiago (Chile) in 1975, proving once
more that unknown photographers, especially the younger ones, have
a real chance of winning this award. The only thing that counts is the
quality in a coherent, self-contained series. ‘Kabul – Leaving the Shad-
ows’ was the title Munita gave to a work created between March and
November 2005, while he was working as a correspondent for The
Associated Press news agency in Afghanistan. What he shows is every-
day life in a country that is still far away from peace, but nevertheless
also enjoys its moments of civilian life. Munita consistently exploits
the possibilities of modern colour photography, relying on the drama
of light to find atmospheric formulas that can be read as highly per-
sonal statements in a pictorial language that sometimes borders on
abstraction; statements also in opposition to the customised deluge of
pictures in our media. On the other hand, the intention of photogra-
pher James Whitlow Delano, who lives in Japan, is to overcome the
usual patterns of seeing. In a combination of the Leica M and highly
sensitive black-and-white film, he has found the technical means for
getting closer, in pictorial terms, to the foreign country he has chosen.
Japan, a cosmos between tradition and modernity, may for a start be
read as a great conundrum. Delano’s complex, sometimes perfunctory,
pictorial language emphasises the enigmatic nature of a culture that is
both fascinating and different, familiar and sometimes irritating.
What is happiness, or rather is anywhere its home? The ancient
Greeks knew the way to paradise, which they called Arcadia and which
could be found in the highlands of the Peloponnese. A place whose
daily challenges amounted to nothing more than tending sheep and
which otherwise was free of any kind of earthly demands. The techno-
logical era, accustomed to doing what is feasible, creates its own
untimely paradises and Andreas Meichsner shows us what they look
like. The Berlin photographer, a graduate of the Hanover University of
Applied Sciences and Leica Oskar Barnack Award finalist, has found
‘his’ Arcadia in Holland: a holiday village whose standardised architec-
ture seems to regiment and control the activities of the people who live
there. Leisure time as an industrial product, holidays off the peg. One
could call Meichsner’s work a conceptual report – nothing, as he
emphasises, is staged. In short, work with a claim to being documen-
tary that asks questions about individuality and conformity – without
suppressing the moment of irony. And one more finalist: Pierre Witt,
41 years old, graduate of the École Nationale Louis Lumière in Paris and
a freelance photographer since the late 80s. His photographic work
focuses on the exploration of traditional forms of living, or rather their
crisis, against the background of ever-increasing technicalisation,
automation, urbanisation and globalisation. This is also true of the
essay he submitted that examines the life, present and future, of the
mountain farmers in the Vanoise. Life in the Haute Savoie has always
been one of privation – and the work hard. Only that today nobody is
prepared to do it any more. In Pierre Witt’s calm, sober pictures, the
eye is drawn to a world on the way out and a life in the mountains – far
away from the ski slopes and the folklore. Incidentally, the response to
the projection from the traditionally critical Arles audience was almost
frenetic. Photography pure and simple. hmk
Entries are now being accepted for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2007.
The deadline for entries is the 31st January. Further information online at
www.leica-camera.com
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