Zemni Photography Blog

Category: Theory and Concepts

  • Toshio Shibata

    The photographs of Toshio Shibata achieve a unique harmony by focusing on the interweaving and equilibrium of natural forces with man-made objects and structures.

    The question of beauty is personal of course. And the places I photograph are actually quite ordinary. They may be found in locations where the surroundings (mountains, sea, and sky) are unquestionably beautiful. But the things I photograph are not always beautiful in themselves.

    To me, beauty is not the only reason for taking photographs. There are various reasons to click the shutter – for example form, texture, and graphical interest, depending on the situation. Whether viewers see my works are beautiful or not, I hope they will have feeling and inspire the viewer’s imaginative power…I want people to see my works freely with their own eyes, perceiving something deeper from the entire work, its movement, structure, texture.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p195.

    At the moment of taking a picture, I almost don’t see details. I concentrate on the overall structure, forms and movement, and before I lose sensation I capture this as soon as I can. In many cases, I only notice details later in the enlarged print; sometimes I only see it when someone points it out…

    In printing, I can transform detail into a strong weapon.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p196.

    I think of my subjects like still lifes, separate from their surroundings. I aim to remove the subject from history and stories related to the land. In this way, I try to create images that are open to various interpretations. By eliminated the skies that exist in our real world, I hope to eliminate emotion or sentiment. Even though there are no clouds in my photographs, I feel strong sympathy with the idea of ‘”equivalents” – the idea to be free and reset subject matter from literal interpretation.

    SHIBATA, Toshio 2023. Japan. Munich, London, New York: Prestel. p199.

    Using a large format camera, he eliminates most references to scale, sky, and horizon while providing crisp detail and texture. Long exposures capture water’s strength and innate grace as it spills, crashes, and glides over constructed sluices and channels. Arching paths of highways are seen carving into mountainsides and sheer cliff faces are transformed into repeating patterns as they are interlaced with human engineering.

    Works in Black and White


    https://deadbeatclubpress.com/en-gb/products/toshio-shibata-day-for-night

    As the title Day For Night implies, the book shows a progression through a sequence of night-time photographs into a set of images made in the day. But in Shibata’s camera light and darkness swap roles. Intense light sources, both indoor and outdoor, make the nocturnal scenes even stranger than they would be if enveloped in darkness. The daylight pictures depict heavy masses of constructed earth and stone in a world that is anything but bright and airy. In the pivot between day and night lies a foreboding tunnel that subsumes both the luminous and the murky.

    “The title gives another layer to the book, I knew that technique since my childhood through watching ‘Rawhide’ on TV but until now I’d never seen my own work with such an eye.”

    The title “Boundary Hunt” refers to the intersection between natural and human landscapes. Landscape fragments – nets against landfalls, piles of stones, encrusted metal, blocks of cement – are set together with large monumental dams that are made to look small, skyless crops of combinations of landscape elements like trees against rocks and waterfalls. With the occasional dwarfed person with their back to the viewer.

    This large paper back flexible book is a series of polaroid snapshots shot between 2000 and 2004 in Japan and the United States.

    “The imperfection of the Type 55 film border has always fascinated me. When I look at the resulting image, I find myself on the boundary between a photograph and an art drawing”

    from Toshio Shibata’s afterword (included in English).

    The second video (Italian) discusses the importance of minimalism and negative space in Shibata’s black and white work, and Japanese photography in general. Arguing that the use of grey-black and white gives a sense of ‘morbidezza’, a word that in Italian art combines the senses of sensitivity/fragility with perishability/impermanence/death. The book has one photo on the right hand page of each spread, apart from one foldout panorama of multiple versions of the same image towards the end. This design emphasises the meditation on fragility.

    ‘Falling Water’ is a series of black and white images of dam infrastructure across Japan and the USA.

    “About two decades ago, I had the opportunity to photograph a set of photos for the large vertical book DAM. To view my subject in vertical way gave me the impression that I was losing delicate materials in the photo. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t make the assignment in time. However, I continued photographing dams, and the result is this book.”

    Available at https://beyondwords.co.uk/falling-water

    Colour

    The book Painting reveals 16 unpublished colour photographs by Toshio Shibata, a Japanese photographer who is known for his rigorous and meticulous compositions. The representation of intimate yet spectacular landscapes — natural, and especially artificial — are at the core of Shibata’s work. In keeping with the tradition of painting that Shibata studied in his early years in 1968, this book celebrates the abstraction of beauty. It has been designed in a concertina format that can also be turned into a suspended object — just like a kakemono, a Japanese unframed scroll painting made on paper or silk and displayed as a wall hanging.

    http://www.laurencemillergallery.com/artists/toshio-shibata

    • Nihon tenkei (日本典型) / Photographs by Toshio Shibata. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1992. ISBN 4-02-256508-X.
    • With Yoshio Nakamura (中村良夫, Nakamura Yoshio). Tera: Sōkei suru daichi: Shashinshū (テラ: 創景する大地: 写真集) / Terra. Tokyo: Toshi Shuppan, 1994. ISBN 4-924831-12-3.
    • Landscape. Tucson, Ariz.: Nazraeli, 1996. ISBN 3-923922-46-9.
    • Toshio Shibata: October 11, 1997 through January 4, 1998. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997. ISBN 0-933856-51-2.
    • Shibata Toshio Visions of Japan. Kyoto: Korinsha, 1998. ISBN 4771328056.
    • Type 55. Tucson, Ariz.: Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-075-4.
    • Dam. Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-081-9.
    • Juxtapose. Kamakura, Kanagawa: Kamakura Gallery, 2005.[1]
    • Landscape 2. Portland, Ore.: Nazraeli, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59005-238-9. Color photographs.
    • Still in the Night. Koganei, Tokyo: Soh Gallery, 2008. Black and white night views, 1982–86 of expressways in Japan. Captions and text in Japanese and English.
    • Randosukēpu: Shibata Toshio (ランドスケープ: 柴田敏雄). Tokyo: Ryokō Yomiuri Shuppansha, 2008. ISBN 978-4-89752-285-2. Black and white and color photographs.
    • Contacts, Poursuite Éditions, 2013, ISBN 978-2-918960-70-6

  • Origins of the Picturesque and aesthetic consumerism

    In the second half of the eighteenth century, definitions of types of landscape or view, seen from an aesthetic or artistic point of view distinguished between:

    • the sublime (awesome sights such as great mountains)
    • the beautiful, the most peaceful, even pretty sights.

    See discussion in Part 1 Beauty and the Sublime

    In between came the picturesque, views seen as being artistic but containing ‘pleasing’ elements of wildness or irregularity. Together with Gothic and Celticism it became part of the romantic aesthetic of the growing numbers of leisured middle classes.  Improved road communications and travel restrictions on continental Europe saw an explosion of British domestic tourism in the 1780s and 1790s. Many of these picturesque tourists who flooded areas like the Lake District sketched or painted using Claude Glasses  or used the camera lucida.

    The word picturesque, meaning literally “in the manner of a picture; fit to be made into a picture”, was a word used as early as 1703 (Oxford English Dictionary), and derived from an Italian term pittoresco, “in the manner of a painter”. Prime examples are French landscape painters like Claude Lorrain. Gilpin’s Essay on Prints (1768) defined picturesque as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture” (p. xii) and proposed a number of “principles of picturesque beauty”. Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price (1794  An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful) and Thomas Johnes, developed Gilpin’s ideas into more comprehensive theories of the picturesque and apply these more generally to landscape design and architecture advocating more organic shapes to views and structures such as follies and grottos.

    After 1815 when Europeans were able to travel again after the wars, Italy became a favourite destination for picturesque-hunters and artists. This reinforced ideas of the ‘picturesque’ in the sense of a view that has been ‘perfectly’ composed according to compositional and perspective theories (eg leading lines, golden mean) that were key developments in art in Renaissance Italy). Grand theories of wild natural beauty gave way to the tamer and more commercialised picturesque of the mid 19th century using these broad principles. These ideas also underlie standard compositional prescriptions in many books and magazine articles on techniques of landscape photography today.

    See Posts:

    Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque

    Francis Frith’s poscards.

    and weblinks:

    Susan Sontag describes this commercialisation of the picturesque as ‘aesthetic consumerism’ (Sontag, 1977, p.24). As Malcolm Andrews (1999) remarks, there is “something of the big-game hunter in these tourists, boasting of their encounters with savage landscapes, ‘capturing’ wild scenes, and ‘fixing’ them as pictorial trophies in order to sell them or hang them up in frames on their drawing room walls”. They ignore the complex social, political and economic interests and conflicts between classes, conservation and industrialisation, commercial interests and local people, those living and working in the countryside and those who simply enjoy it for leisure or regard it as part of their heritage.

    Fay Godwin suggests that ignoring the different interests and conflicts exacerbates polarisation of interests between users of the countryside: “I am wary of picturesque pictures. I get satiated with looking at postcards in local newsagents and at the picture books that are on sale, many of which don’t bear any relation to my own experience of the place… The problem for me about these picturesque pictures, which proliferate all over the place, is that they are a very soft warm blanket of sentiment, which covers everybody’s idea about the countryside… It idealises the country in a very unreal way.”
    (Fay Godwin 1986 South Bank Show Produced and directed by Hilary Chadwick, London Weekend Television quoted Alexander 2013 p84.)

     3.1: Reflecting on the picturesque

    Going beyond the picturesque requires thinking very carefully about what one is trying to say about ‘landscape’ and why. It also raises aesthetic challenges about how to communicate this in terms of following or subverting conventional theories of composition and the likely interpretation by different viewers.

  • The Beautiful and the Sublime

    “The Sublime” radio 4 podcast In our time

    Concepts of beauty

    “Beauty and art were once thought of as belonging together, with beauty as among art’s principle aims and art as beauty’s highest calling” Beech 2009 p12

    “Why is form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life mat be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning” Adams 1996 p25

    “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Edmund Burke 1757.

    Beauty is very much an aspect of aesthetics or more simply our ‘senses’; sensuous music and sounds, textiles and textures, pleasant flavours and smells. There are essentially two perspectives:

    1) beauty as  ‘objective’ universal within human nature. Mathematical and geometric evaluations of pieces of music, human features and pictorial composition have been used to support this view.

    2) beauty as subjective ‘taste’  ‘beauty lies in the eye of the beholder’. As personal and/or a matter of cultural identity, what is beautiful to one group of people may be vulgar and repulsive to another.

    Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), was regarded as the antithesis of sublime since it exemplified classical beauty through its formal harmony, elegance and subtle luminosity.

    Modernist debates and Marxist critiques of beauty have made it a political matter – a bourgeois preoccupation and tool of repression.

    Dadaists Otto Dix (1891-1969) satirised images of conventional, romantic notions of beauty and fascist ideals of perfection in his politically challenging paintings made around the dawn of the Second World War.

    Conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp‘s urinal placed in gallery context.

     Concepts of the sublime

     “the sublime is associated with awe, danger and pain, with places where accidents happen, where things run beyond human control, where nature is untameable.”
    Liz Wells

     Longinus (c300AD) passage about poetry and rhetoric in ‘The True Sublime’ in Book 7 of the Peri Hypsous: For by some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls; we are filled with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy; just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard.

    Kant, Hegel, johann sciller.

    Etymology: 1580s, “expressing lofty ideas in an elevated manner,” from Middle French sublime (15c.), or directly from Latin sublimis “uplifted, high, borne aloft, lofty, exalted, eminent, distinguished,” possibly originally “sloping up to the lintel,” from sub “up to” + limen “lintel, threshold, sill” (see limit (n.)). The sublime (n.) “the sublime part of anything, that which is stately or imposing” is from 1670s.

    British Art and the Sublime Christine Riding and Nigel Llewellyn

    The English word derives from a conjunction of two Latin terms, the preposition sub, meaning below or up to and the noun limen, meaning limit, boundary or threshold. Limen is also the word for ‘lintel’, the heavy wooden or stone beam that holds the weight of a wall up above a doorway or a window. This sense of not only striving or pushing upwards but also against an overbearing force is an important connotation for the word sublime. By the seventeenth century, the word in English was in use both as an adjective and as a noun (the sublime) with many shades of meaning but invariably referring to things that are raised aloft, set high up and exalted, whether they be buildings, ideas, people, language, style or other aspects of or responses to art and nature.
    By about 1700 an additional theme started to develop, which was that the sublime in writing, nature, art or human conduct was regarded as of such exalted status that it was beyond normal experience, perhaps even beyond the reach of human understanding. In its greatness or intensity and whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, by the time of the Enlightenment, the sublime was generally regarded as beyond comprehension and beyond measurement.

    Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757 broke the idea of the sublime down into seven aspects, all of which Burke argued were discernible in the natural world and in natural phenomena:

    • Darkness – which constrains the sense of sight (primary among the five senses)
    • Obscurity – which confuses judgement
    • Privation (or deprivation) – since pain is more powerful than pleasure
    • Vastness – which is beyond comprehension
    • Magnificence – in the face of which we are in awe
    • Loudness – which overwhelms us
    • Suddenness – which shocks our sensibilities to the point of disablement
    The ‘romantic sublime’ was a particularly common theme throughout 18th and 19th century painting with religious and spiritual overtones. Sublime was a term that was used in art writing alongside adjectives such as ‘awful’, ‘dreadful’ and ‘terrible’, which today tend simply to denote ‘less than ideal’ but which in the 1700s were understood explicitly as expressions of awe, dread and terror, and were associated with the sublime as standard elements in aesthetic discourse. Sublime landscape painters, especially in the Romantic period, around 1800, tended to take subjects such as towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms, rough seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches that, if actually experienced, would be dangerous and even life-threatening.


    John Martin

    JMW Turner

    Caspar David Friedrich Wanderer above the sea of the fog / above the mist 1818 

    James Ward:  Gordale Scar 1812-1814

    Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) defines the sublime as not just an aspect of aesthetics, but of psychoanalysis. He related it to his idea of ‘the uncanny’ which refers to a feeling of discomfort when seeing something that is simultaneously familiar and alien. ‘Das Unheimliche’ not just in terms of location, but in terms of identity. The un-settlement, or cognitive dissonance that can result from an encounter with the uncanny is what can stir the sense of the sublime.

    So becomes something that occupies the imagination. Something that triggers a psychoactive response in an individual.

    Philip Shaw ‘Modernism and the Sublime’

    Lucio Fontana (1950s) punched holes (or buchi) through his canvases, the aim being literally to break through the surface of the work so that the viewer can perceive the space that lies beyond. Fontana regarded this gesture as a means of disclosing the unlimited space of the sublime, announcing ‘I have created an infinite dimension’. In some works slashes executed with a razor seem to erupt outwards, conveying the force of the original assault towards the viewer in a way that is both energetic and terrifying.

    Mark Rothko   Robert Rosenblum in‘The Abstract Sublime’ (1961) writes: ‘the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths’. Rothko’s biographer James Breslin writes: ‘Rothko … constantly felt the imminent danger of being ‘smothered’ by encroaching physical, social, or domestic circumstances. His new paintings created a breathing space. Yet these paintings do not seek simply to ‘transcend’ the walls of an unalterable external reality by soaring upward into either an untrammelled freedom or a vaporous mysticism. Rather, by (in Rothko’s words) pulverising the verge of dissolution – his works free us from the weight, solidity, and definition of a material existence, whose constricting pressures we still feel. Rothko combines freedom and constraint and if these paintings create ‘dramas’ with the shapes as the ‘performers’ they stage a struggle to be free.’

    “in many cultures, a confrontation of the sublime is a requisite rite of passage. Within my project, Threshold Zone (2008) I explored and attempted to rationalise my own response to both man-made and naturally formed underground spaces. I felt curious, and was determined to make some work in these spaces, but I was also acutely phobic of being underground, particularly when working alone. These spaces were generally physically unfamiliar to me, yet my mind was filled with familiar fairytales and contemporary narratives relating to the dangers that lurk below ground in the darkness. I channelled these feelings into a creative strategy, in which I placed my camera in a space referred to as ‘twilight’ or ‘threshold zone’ of a cave that receives some daylight, and the ‘dark zone’ that receives none. The resulting, highly contrasting images which are presented as back-lit light-boxes, I hope illustrate my encounter with the sublime’ Jesse Alexander 2013 p 40.

    The sublime radio 4 Podcast In our time

     Exercise 1.6 The contemporary abyss

    Since the very beginning of photography, the city has provided opportunities for the photographer: landscape and other subject matter.

  • Eugene Atget

    The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced documentary photography that
    was far removed from the frontier of photojournalism. During a working life that lasted from
    1890 to 1927, Atget produced 10,000 images of Paris, working with a large format 24x18cm
    wooden camera and making and coating his own large glass plate negatives. Atget cared deeply
    about the small traders, street musicians, actors, artists, ribbon sellers, etc., who were being
    squeezed out of their livings by modernisation. He also cared for the architecture of the republic,
    much of which was crumbling and in a state of squalor, just waiting to be demolished. Atget
    was motivated more by the need to re-create, preserve and document the old city’s existence
    than by a desire to create imagery for sale.
    It’s not difficult to imagine these
    works as paintings. (Compare Atget’s
    Bitumiers with Gustave Caillebotte’s The
    Floor Scrapers, for example.) You’ll find
    more Atget images in the Bridgeman
    Art Library. Follow the link on the OCA
    student website. Some of Atget’s work
    showed surrealist elements. Look at his
    famous ‘corset shop’ photograph, for
    example.
    Project Photography as art
    Water Lilies Eugène Atget. Not Paris this time, but recognisably
    in a fine art tradition i.e. Monet.
    Bitumiers

  • Frank Newbould

     

    One of the most striking campaigns in relation to the developing mythology of the British rural landscape was a series of posters painted during 1942 by Frank Newbould (1887–1951).The resemblance between Newbould’s posters and travel advertising of the time is also worth noting. Substituting strap lines encouraging would be holidaymakers to explore their country with a command to defend it was a novel strategy.

  • Marcus Bleasdale

    Marcus Bleasdale (born 1968) is a photojournalist, born in the UK to an Irish family. He spent over eight years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and has worked in many other places. Much of his work is linked to fundraising for aid and human rights agencies and there is often a link to ways t donate. His videos are extremely powerful and also discuss what people can do to change the situations the are seeing.

    His images are in both black and white and colour and he also does video. They get their power because he is well informed about what he is shooting and knows why he wants hat shot and also has access to people and situations most outsiders would not. But he also has an extraordinary sense of composition and tone. Some of his images at composited (no examples available for download) but I generally find these less powerful.

    http://www.marcusbleasdale.com/sources/ipad/index.php#home

    Rape of a Nation.    http://mediastorm.com/publication/rape-of-a-nation

  • Matthew Brady

    Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.

    short documentary film on Brady

    Brady was born in Warren County, New York, the youngest of three children of Irish immigrant parents. At age 16 he moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met famed portrait painter William Page. Brady became Page’s student. In 1839 the two traveled to Albany, New York, and then to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page, and also with Page’s former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, and returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerrotype invention of capturing images. He soon became the center of the New York artistic colony who wished to study photography. He opened a studio and offered classes; Brady was one of the first students.

    In 1844 Brady opened his own photography studio in New York, and by 1845 he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans. He opened a studio in Washington, D.C. in 1849.

    Brady’s early images were daguerreotypes, and he won many awards for his work; in the 1850s ambrotype photography became popular, which gave way to the albumen print, a paper photograph produced from large glass negatives most commonly used in the American Civil War photography. In 1850 Brady produced The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, a portrait collection of prominent contemporary figures. The album, which featured noteworthy images including the elderly Andrew Jackson at the Hermitage, was not financially rewarding but invited increased attention to Brady’s work and artistry. In 1854, Parisian photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri popularized the carte de visite and these small pictures (the size of a visiting card) rapidly became a popular novelty as thousands of these images were created and sold in the United States and Europe.

    In 1856 Brady created the first modern advertisement when he placed an ad in the New York Herald paper offering to produce “photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes.” His ads were the first whose typeface and fonts were distinct from the text of the publication and from that of other advertisements.

     Civil War documentation 

    He was head of a team of photographers who documented
    the American Civil War. Brady and his team recorded the cruelty and futility of war through photography of the dead.

    At first, the effect of the Civil War on Brady’s business was a brisk increase in sales of cartes de visite to transient soldiers. However, he was soon taken with the idea of documenting the war itself. He first applied for permission to travel to the battle sites to an old friend, General Winfield Scott, and eventually he made his application to President Lincoln himself. Lincoln granted permission in 1861 with the proviso that Brady finance the project himself. His efforts to document the American Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio right onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the obvious dangers, financial risk, and discouragement of his friends, Brady is later quoted as saying “I had to go. A spirit in my feet said ‘Go,’ and I went.” His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he barely avoided capture.

    He employed Alexander Gardner, James Gardner, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, William Pywell, George N. Barnard, Thomas C. Roche, and seventeen other men, each of whom was given a traveling darkroom, to go out and photograph scenes from the Civil War. Brady generally stayed in Washington, D.C., organizing his assistants and rarely visited battlefields personally. This may have been due, at least in part, to the fact that Brady’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate in the 1850s.

    In October 1862 Brady opened an exhibition of photographs from the Battle of Antietam in his New York gallery titled “The Dead of Antietam.” Many images in this presentation were graphic photographs of corpses, a presentation new to America. This was the first time that many Americans saw the realities of war in photographs as distinct from previous “artists’ impressions”.

    Mathew Brady, through his many paid assistants, took thousands of photos of American Civil War scenes. Much of the popular understanding of the Civil War comes from these photos. There are thousands of photos in the National Archives taken by Brady and his associates, Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, and Timothy O’Sullivan. The photographs include Lincoln, Grant, and common soldiers in camps and battlefields. The images provide a pictorial cross reference of American Civil War history. Brady was not able to photograph actual battle scenes as the photographic equipment in those days was still in the infancy of its development and required that a subject be still in order for a clear photo to be produced.Like Fenton, Brady and his colleagues moved people and objects
    to create a more graphic or telling image.

    Following the conflict a war-weary public lost interest in seeing photos of the war, and Brady’s popularity and practice declined drastically.

    During the war, Brady spent over $100,000 to create over 10,000 plates. He expected the U.S. government to buy the photographs when the war ended, but when the government refused to do so he was forced to sell his New York City studio and go into bankruptcy. Congress granted Brady $25,000 in 1875, but he remained deeply in debt. Depressed by his financial situation, loss of eyesight and devastated by the death of his wife in 1887, he became very lonely. He died penniless in the charity ward of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City on January 15, 1896, from complications following a streetcar accident.

    Brady can be considered a pioneer in the orchestration of a “corporate credit line.” In this practice, every image produced in his gallery was labeled “Photo by Brady;” however, Brady dealt directly with only the most distinguished subjects and most portrait sessions were carried out by others.

  • Jo Spence

    Jo Spence (1934–92) had a highly politicised approach to photography, creating photographs that run counter to the idealised imagery offered by advertising. Spence often worked collaboratively and sought alternative distribution models, laminating work for durability and renting out her photography to conferences, libraries, universities and public spaces to broaden its audience. She also documented her own struggles with cancer. Website: http://www.jospence.org   ‘Putting Myself in the Picture’ (Camden Press 1986) brought together her raw and confessional works to inspire a younger generation of photographers. Remodelling Photo History (1982)  a series of self-portraits in collaboration with Terry Dennett. The work consists of a series of diptychs where two photographs of Spence are juxtaposed. In some pairs, the first is a parody of a more traditional pictorial image; the second shot is less conventionally framed and the irony is articulated with less subtlety.
    ‘Industrialisation’ places the female figure between the viewer and the view beyond, challenging the male gaze and the objectification of women.
    ‘Victimisation’ “Here we see that the estate will not admit trespass, and that it stands in for the heroic (male) defender of the ground, repelling weak opposition at its border. Jo Spence failed to cross the barrier, allowing the absent landowner (through his gate and sign) to become hero, male, the creator of difference… her mockery diminishes the victory won by the landowner.” (John Taylor 1994, p.282 quoted Alexander p133)   ————————————-

    Jo Spence (1934–92) had a highly politicised approach to photography, creating photographs that run counter to the idealised imagery offered by advertising. Spence often worked collaboratively and sought alternative distribution models, laminating work for durability and renting out her photography to conferences, libraries, universities and public spaces to broaden its audience. She also documented her own struggles with cancer.

    Website: http://www.jospence.org
     


    ‘Putting Myself in the Picture’ (Camden Press 1986) brought together her raw and confessional works to inspire a younger generation of photographers.
    Remodelling Photo History (1982)  a series of self-portraits in collaboration with Terry Dennett. The work consists of a series of diptychs where two photographs of Spence are juxtaposed. In some pairs, the first is a parody of a more traditional pictorial image; the second shot is less conventionally framed and the irony is articulated with less subtlety.
    ‘Industrialisation’ places the female figure between the viewer and the view beyond, challenging the male gaze and the objectification of women.


    ‘Victimisation’ “Here we see that the estate will not admit trespass, and that it stands in for the heroic (male) defender of the ground, repelling weak opposition at its border. Jo Spence failed to cross the barrier, allowing the absent landowner (through his gate and sign) to become hero, male, the creator of difference… her mockery diminishes the victory won by the landowner.” (John Taylor 1994, p.282 quoted Alexander p133)

  • Simon Roberts

  • Clive Landen

    Clive Landen is a British wildlife photographer concerned with our relationship with animals. His pictures are quite explicit and upsetting to view, but he photographs horror with profound sensitivity and an almost painterly quality that makes us really look at the subject matter.

    The Abyss  series about the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak (only one photograph now available on line?). Landen began this project because restrictions meant that he couldn’t pursue his work on the relationship between the land and hunting. The impetus also came from childhood memories of the foot and mouth outbreak of 1967. Whilst the body of work is a pertinent historical document, it is also a personal one. Landen collaborated with the military and was seconded to a regiment, which allowed him free rein to access the sites where cattle were being burned and buried. He describes a photograph of one dead sheep amongst many as a “portrait of the sheep which looks benign, at peace.” (Landen (2007) in Source no. 51.)   His landscape containing a row of dead dairy cows and skeletons of trees is one of the most moving of the series. The pall of smoke that clung to these sites is visible, providing an almost painterly, pictorialist quality.

    Familiar British Wildlife series of images of roadkills. Article Source magazine  Camera Club images