Exhibit Review: Of Women By Women, Charlotte, USA

Of Women By Women: Selections from The Do Good Fund
The Light Factory, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

The Do Good Fund is a Georgia-based charity building a museum-quality collection of post-war Southern photography. The fund lends its collections to museums, galleries, and other institutions interested in promoting photographic art, and its latest is on display at The Light Factory, a Charlotte, North Carolina gallery and institute of photography education.  Of Women By Women fairly well describes the exhibit theme, an unexpectedly powerful collection of images that left me wanting to see more. The images did not appear especially agenda-driven, apart perhaps from the preponderance of subjects that appeared to be working class and rural poor. The display, as can be seen in the photos here, was simple but effective.  On my visit a young lady welcomed our small group, explained the background to the exhibit, and then left our group alone to wander and view.  If I were living in Charlotte, I would be happy to explore more of Light Factory’s exhibits and education offerings.  It looks like a happening place in a happening neighborhood.

The Do Good Fund maintains an online catalog of its collection, for those who’d like to see what they’re doing but won’t be making it to the southeast United States.  Check it out at: http://www.thedogoodfund.org/

The Light Factory: http://lightfactory.org/

Susan Worsham

Margaret's Rhubarb

2010

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Book review: Ihei, Kimura. Akita. 1978 (2011).

Mutsumi found this book at a beer bar in Ikebukuro Station.  We were slaking our thirst after a long day of walking, not there for the books.  In fact we were lucky they didn’t have a table for us when we came in.  We sat at the bar instead, near which is a bookcase with a small collection of mostly magazines.  When we found Akita, we cleared the bar, started at the front, and worked our way through what must have been around 200 plates, all black and white, and shot in the post-war period, from the 1950s-70s.  As the title indicates, the subject is the prefecture of Akita, still a rural area of Japan that from the looks of these images has changed drastically in the past half century.  Apart from the occasional bit of English – the word “post” on a postbox, for example – or a motorcycle or car in the background, it seems these photos could have been taken 100 years ago, or even 500 years ago.  There are no signs of mass produced anything – no TVs, radios, cell phones, watches, name brands, baseball caps, or even something as simple as zippers.  All the clothing appears to be hand-made, everyone walks or in winter uses sleighs, motor power is provided by animals, and home life appears to center around eating, drinking, talking, and smoking.  The images are absolutely amazing for revealing a way of life that when it was recorded neither the subjects nor photographer could have imaged disappearing within 50 years of having been recorded.  Sometimes we can’t see the significance of what photographers record until years later, after which we are incredibly thankful for the investment in time and effort, despite others not being able to see the value in the work as it was being produced. Thank you, Kimura-san.

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Exhibit review: Jigoku Wonderland: Buddhist Hell Scenes, Tokyo, Japan

Jigoku Wonderland:  Buddhist Hell Scenes
Mitsui Memorial Museum

Opening day was not as crowded as expected.  Not crowded at all, in fact.  Mutsumi said it was because this was a B-grade exhibit, not something likely to draw hordes of fashionistas.  The building was perhaps more impressive than the exhibit, an early 20th century construction that has been designated an Important Cultural Property.  The exhibit featured approximately 100 pieces ranging from the 13th century to the present, all connected to the theme of hell as conceived in Japanese Buddhism.  A few texts were on display, but most items were paintings, drawings, or sculpture.  As with the work collected in the exhibit of the Belgian Fantastic, many of the paintings and drawings demanded close inspection to appreciate the detail filling out the corners of the canvas or paper.  Common themes included the depiction of Emmao and the ten judges of hell, the corresponding ten levels of hell, and the various tortures perpetrated by the guardian monsters against their human victims, which consisted in the main of burning, boiling, dismembering, and impaling.  Altogether this was a well conceived and interesting collection of art.  It might have been improved by a suitably gruesome soundtrack of roaring flames, sawing bones, banging metal, dripping blood, breaking bones, screams and moans.  Museum management needs to rethink customer relations.  We were told off by a guard for using our mobile device within the exhibit.  We were not photographing or talking on the phone, just searching maps for our next destination.

A selection of small images of some of the exhibit items is available on the museum's Japanese language website:  http://www.mitsui-museum.jp/exhibition/index.html

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Exhibit review: A Life 1968--2017: Shunji Dodo, Tokyo

A Life 1968--2017:  Shunji Dodo
Gallery 916, Tokyo

This was the most inspiring exhibit of summer, the one that opened new possibilities in my own work.  The inspiration wasn’t terribly radical.  It was more like a sympathetic understanding of possibility, of seeing my work in Dodo’s, and his in mine, and realizing mine might one day look as interesting.  I appreciated seeing how what would seem ordinary worked well, which suggested I can perhaps look again at such scenes when they present themselves.  I saw many images which seemed excessively dark in their exposure and development, far more than I would be comfortable working with but suggesting that such images are not outside the range of possibility.  Dodo created both posed and spontaneous street portraits, the former largely in rural communities, the latter in urban. Despite their somewhat repetitive appearance (of groups of people smiling at the camera), I began to appreciate the posed images for revealing the character of the photographer, someone able to convince large numbers of strangers to participate in his work.  Two types of images made me want to try my own experiments:  still life of the commonplace, stuff you might come home with in your pockets or in your bag; and images of half-things, cars or people, for example, shown only partially and inviting the viewer to fill in the rest.

Review: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

While this is a lovely facility in an upscale neighborhood, I was disappointed on three counts.  The first seems to be rather common to Japan, the prohibition of photographing exhibitions.  I would have liked to have taken an image or two for this blog.  I’ve been to exhibits that actually encourage the taking and sharing of images on social media as a form of free advertisement.  It makes for a more interactive experience of art than simply acting as a passive consumer/viewer.  Secondly, there is no permanent display.  Apparently there used to be, but it was long ago removed.  And lastly, there was no display during my visit of Japanese photography.  Fortunately, I found an excellent exhibit of a Japanese photographer -- photography permitted -- at Gallery 916.

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Exhibit review: World Press Photo 17, Tokyo, Japan

World Press Photo 17
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

Since this is a collection of news photographs, it wasn’t unusual, while viewing the exhibit, to come across a familiar image. What was helpful here were the descriptions and often the context, as some were part of a larger series.  The collection included around 100 images from the annual journalism awards, printed on poster board with background information in both Japanese and English.  Some of the more interesting images in the collection were from long-term projects, such as a series by an Iranian photographer working within his own culture, as well as a Finn shooting a small rural community in the US midwest.

Worth a visit if you're in the neighborhood, but not perhaps a special trip.

The entire collection can be viewed online here: https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2017

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Exhibit review: Dayanita Singh: Museum Bhavan, Tokyo, Japan

Dayanita Singh:  Museum Bhavan
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

According to the bio provided by the museum, Ms Singh is a well-known photographer who began her career doing commercial work before "retiring" to develop her own projects, a retrospective of which made up this exhibit. Included was a documentary series on Indian eunuchs, on which she has published at least two books, perhaps the most direct and honest work on display, images which spoke of a need to share her witness clearly and unambiguously.  The remainder of the exhibit consisted of two installations, which the artist refers to as Museums, including a series of books, called Pocket Museums, that fold out accordion-like to reveal a group of images arranged in themes that unfortunately weren’t terribly obvious. Seven of these were presented in frames up to a meter long, each with its own title, with copies on sale in the gift shop.  Other Museums were presented as collages arranged in large wooden frames, featuring images of a type in which I am interested – architecture, still life, textures of everyday life – and may have better appreciated in a different context.  Apart from the museum on women, and another on files (consisting of images of rooms stacked top to bottom with paper files), I didn’t see how the images in the other Museums hung together, what kind of stories they were attempting to tell.  Perhaps I wasn’t trying hard enough.  Or perhaps I was trying too hard.  The most difficult piece of work in the exhibit consisted of 20-30 images of a box wrapped in red cloth, all shot with the same set-up, with no change in perspective, framing, or exposure.  The box was wrapped, shot, unwrapped, rewrapped, and shot again. Over and over.  Close inspection, the description notes, reveals small differences in how the box was wrapped.  This is the kind of work that might indulge the image maker’s experimental impulse, but is perhaps best left in the photographer’s private collection. Photography in the exhibit was prohibited.  The two images here are copies of the TOP Musuem's flyer. This is not an exhibit I would especially recommend and not one that I would visit again.

Dayanita Singh's website:  
https://dayanitasingh.org/

Tokyo Photographic Art Museum announcement:
https://topmuseum.jp/e/contents/exhibition/index-2779.html

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Exhibit Review: Nihon Eiga: The History of Japanese Film, Tokyo, Japan

Nihon Eiga: The History of Japanese Film
National Film Center, Tokyo

Nihon Eiga is a permanent exhibit featuring a small portion of the National Film Center’s large collection of film artifacts, such things as posters, scripts, still images, camera equipment, and props. Like many Japanese spaces, the area is small but used to good effect by layering and stacking.  There is very little unused wall or floor space.  Material is organized chronologically beginning with visual storytelling before the arrival of film and continuing on through to a final section on animation. Throughout there are small video screens displaying clips of historically relevant films.  During my weekday visit, I saw only three other guests and had no difficulty availing myself of several of the available stools, a nice to chance to relax while also enjoying parts of the display.  Japanese cinephiles are sure to find some mention of their personal favorites here, though there may be only one or two items per person.  Kurosawa, for example, probably Japan’s best known director to audiences outside Japan, is represented by costume sketches for Dodeskaden and a scrapbook of production stills of Ikiru collected by its star, Shimura Takashi.  Among the other items of interest was an original script of Tokyo Story, a collection of personal items of Tanaka Kinuyo, and the original puppets in the 1964 production of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.  The Center also has a regular screening schedule, often centered around a director, actor, genre or theme.

Exhibit review: Fantastic Art in Belgium, Kobe, Japan

Fantastic Art in Belgium
The Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe

One hundred twenty pieces of the fantastic, mostly sketches and paintings, with an emphasis on Hieronymus Bosch.  Given the nature of the work, which typically features detailed illustration filling up all corners of the canvas, close inspection was necessary -- but unfortunately often not possible. The weekend crowd made viewing a laborious exercise of standing in a slow moving queue, or dancing around the room trying to find spaces in the crowd in order to get a glimpse of at least a few pieces.   Layout was fairly typical, each painting or drawing in it's own frame, hung eye level, perhaps 50cm apart. No photography was permitted within the exhibit. Jet lag drug me down more quickly than I anticipated and the visit was mostly a disappointment.

(Poster for same show after it moved from Kobe to Tokyo.)

Shooting unmotivated

It's been a while since I've been on a photo walk in Dubai, so I headed out this morning to Al Fahidi.  I haven't yet looked at the results, but I already know the image count is quite low.  Its not that I'm terribly familiar with the area and there is little left to shoot.  I simply didn't have any desire to make images.  I'm not sure why.  These days I'm feeling somewhat disengaged, and not just from photography.  I know from previous experience that one way to get past this is to get up, get out, and do.  Sitting around waiting for something to happen usually means nothing happens.  What I need is a project, but there are no voices calling just now.

I wrote the paragraph above two weeks ago and did no shooting in the days between.  Yesterday I went out to the same location and again I found myself listless and disinterested.  The only thing I can think of to do is keep trying.  Mutsumi will be leaving soon and I'll be on my own for about two months. I hope I can get back into a regular practice by then.

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Review: Franklin, Stuart. The Documentary Impulse. 2016.

Franklin, Stuart. The Documentary Impulse. 1st ed. London: Phaidon Press, 2016. Print.

The publisher’s promotional text promises insights into “how we, as humans, are driven to visually document our experiences and the world around us.”  Taken together with largely laudatory reviews, my expectations were perhaps higher than could be satisfied by a text that turned out to be a fairly standard presentation of the history of documentary photography.  While ideas are presented succinctly and in clear prose, the conclusion is something of a letdown.  The author concedes that, in effect, there may be as many documentary impulses as there are documentary photographers and that ultimately the need to document may be a manifestation of an underlying need to understand what it means to be human.  For me, the book fairly begins where it ends.

Book and Film Review: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (2009), Grab A Hunk Of Lightning (2014)

Gordon, Linda. Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. 1st ed. London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Print.

American Masters: Dorothea Lange: Grab A Hunk Of Lightning. Dyanna Taylor, dir, 2014. DVD.

It’s not difficult to understand why this book was a prizewinner.  The writing is crisp, sufficient background is provided to contextualize the actions and behavior of the actors, and the main subject is presented as a complex, contradicted human, one who through her images expressed great empathy but was so driven in her work that she often took for granted the people with whom she shared her life.  This was my first extended exposure to Lange and so I had no preconceptions to be challenged or reinforced.  As presented by Gordan, I found her someone with whom I could sympathize in her curiosity about the working and living conditions of others, in her interest in exploring new surroundings, her sense of adventure, and her sensitivity to injustice.  I also appreciate her approach to photography as a method of communication and a tool for changing the world.  Lange was foremost a documentary photographer, one might argue even an ethnographer, who first honed her skills making commercial portraits and who took the portraitist’s sensibility, of making people look their best, into the field.  She was least interested in photography as a means of exploring self, though of course no conscientious image maker can deny the power of the process to affect the camera operator.  It is clear from comments made late in life that she was fully aware of the transformative potential of engaging in the visual arts.

The American Masters film was directed by one of Lange’s grandchildren and provides a concise summary of the photographer's life and work should you not have the time to devote to Gordan’s biography.  The film is actually a suitable companion to the book, allowing the reader to hear Lange’s voice, to witness her gait (caused by childhood polio), to see her interact with grandchildren, and with photographic colleagues such as John Szarkowski, who aided her in preparing her retrospective at the MoMA.  The granddaughter’s presentation appears a bit more idolatrous than Gordan’s, but does not entirely overlook some of the less romantic aspects of Lange’s life.

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Shooting Hong Kong in 3.5 days

Images taken:  472
Images flagged:  157
Images developed:  95
Images selected for album:  50

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I had no plan and did no research on shooting Hong Kong.  The trip was occasioned by an invitation for a job interview and I expected to simply wander the streets for a couple of days apart from attending the interview itself.  The only bit of planning was to look for a photography museum (an account of my visit to which is reported here) and a suitable hotel.

On two previous visits to the city I stayed in Kowloon and so wanted this time to stay somewhere different.  I didn’t really want to stay on the island, as my impression from previous visits is that it is highly developed and in many regards similar to other large, over-developed cities.  I was looking for something more Chinese, something a little grungier and middle to working class.  I found it in the area around Ya Ma Tei.

Review: F11 Photography Museum, Hong Kong

F11 exterior

In preparation for this month’s visit to Hong Kong, I checked online to see if the city had a photography museum.  There is in fact a lovely new facility housed in a recently refurbished early 20th century building, but viewable only by appointment, and only on certain days of the week.  Planning ahead was fortunate and is imperative if you don’t want to miss a visit.

F11 is one of the few private museums in Hong Kong and the only one dedicated to photography.  At present there is no permanent exhibit apart from the Leica camera collection, some pieces of which are rotated on a regular basis.  Photo exhibits are held several times a year, running from a week to a couple of months.  On display during my visit was a collection of 85 black-and-white images by Swiss photographer Werner Bischof taken during his one and only 1952 visit to Hong Kong.  These were what you might think of as street or travel photography, impressionistic images of a Westerner’s first visit to Hong Kong.  Perhaps a third of the images exhibited were noteworthy, images I would look at more carefully or care to revisit.  The remainder were perhaps notable 50 years ago; today they appear rather pedestrian (though may be of great historic value, as revealed in the following paragraph).   Included in the exhibit were several period artefacts, including magazines featuring Bischof’s images, a guide to Hong Kong, and a horse-racing guide, among others.

From the OCA Blog: The Big Issue in the North – 600 photographs later

A bit of background on the publication and initiative that published four of my images in 2016:

Thanks to the generosity of the editor of independent street paper The Big Issue in the North, more than 600 photographs by around 100 OCA photography students have featured in the magazine. OCA’s partnership with the magazine began in 2011. Now that we have become part of UCA and no longer have the charitable status we had back then, we’ve agreed not to continue the partnership in 2017.

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The Big Issue in the North has a circulation of over 20,000. It’s sold on the streets of towns and cities in the north of England (Lancashire and Greater Manchester, Yorkshire and the Humber and the North East) by vendors who want to earn a living to help them get off the streets. The partnership has given OCA students the opportunity to bring their work to a wider audience and exposed the readers of the magazine to the possibilities of photography they may not previously have considered. 

More at the link.

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