It was with great sadness that I read yesterday of the passing of fellow Glaswegian, the great Jack Bruce who was the musical brains and driving force behind the much copied, but never matched Cream. Their classic Disraeli Gears album which was released in 1967 I believe, was a prized possession of mine with its psychedelic cover and classic tracks and of course the never to be forgotten ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ which I think was Bruce’s finest moment even although he always lived in the shadow of Eric Clapton. Music has always been a fundamental part of my life, much as photography is now. My mum was a beautiful singer and we always had a radio playing from as far as my memory will take me back, and I can clearly remember shows with dedications to members of the British armed forces stationed in far flung places like Malaysia and Guam and Ceylon as it was then called. The radio in those earliest years was the domain of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and big band sounds but then suddenly in the sixties a real change began to occur and newer sounds by younger artists began to emerge along with the now more easily available technologies on which the listener could now choose what music they wanted to listen to, rather than be guided by the then elitist BBC. That is when my real musical journey began.

Back in the Christmas of 1964 my sister and I got a joint Xmas present of a record player and a Long Playing record. The LP that we got to share was Beatles For Sale and my sis was pretty annoyed that we didn’t wait and get Rubber Soul with its incredible Norwegian Wood amongst other classics. Anyway, I was very impetuous even at aged eight (a trait that has never really left me) and I really loved the songs on For Sale. There was a kind of unwritten set of rules that went along with our little player that sat on the living room floor and, although it probably made as much noise as an iPhone speaker, it was considered as highly disruptive and was not usually used in the evenings and certainly not after 8 pm as a rule, except if there was a party and then it could be played at lower volumes and my mum preferred singing anyway as opposed to recored music. One of the reasons I mention this is that even although there were ‘the rules’ using the record player was a very social event and everyone listened in, there were no headphones and we would sit around it and often sing along with John and Paul and we played and played that album until it was nearly worn out. It was a shared time event even although we didn’t think of this new piece of family technology that way. It seems that as we develop technologically, and boy have we come a long way since then, we become more isolated and individual, the technology itself dictates this. I am struck that even media titled as ‘social networking’ is actually done in a very isolated way and in fact one of the key drivers of its use seems to be personal expression of individuality and a desire to be heard and acknowledged. We all know and see how people spend more time interacting with their phones and devices than other people, including their husbands, wives, lovers, children or parents. This is a fascinating subject and in a way this isolation of the individual and nostalgia for the past seems to me to be the theme of Mizutani Kanji’s ‘Indigo’ although his subject matter is landscape and industrialisation, I think it deals with a similar idea in a different way, that of a technologically driven shift from family structured, agricultural living to the modern individual and more isolated existence, almost lost and disorientated in the industrial landscape. This may initially sound like a huge leap from the LP record player to Japanese ‘New Landscape’ photography and I freely admit that maybe these linkages exist only in my mind. I also get a sense of something that crops up very often in Japanese and any other photography for that matter, the search for belonging and meaning.

Landscape photography is not really something that normally interests me very much, however despite the rather extravagent editorial claims of; ‘at this moment, we are witnessing the appearance of a “new photography.” That is how I feel. And, that would be equal to saying that it is the emergence of a “new landscape.” I find that Kanji’s ‘Indigo’ is indeed an extremely interesting work and so decided to share some thinking on it in this weeks review.

I need to get this out of the way first. I have never liked when photographers feel some need to explain their photography and especially when its the kind of academic drivel that accompanies Kanji’s photos at the end of this book. This reads like a submission for a degree assignment with its carefully referenced quotes and supporting arguements and I find it a complete turn off, especially when I read the quote from the start, ‘new photography’, ‘new landscape’, what bullshit.

Ok, now I feel better.

If you ignore the editorial text (as I will from now on) this is a really lovely and thoughtful book that I personally don’t find to be a landscape work at all, I also find it more universal than the editor seems to think.

The work was shot over a decade between 1993 and 2003 and has the flowing form and movement of a journey or trip around Japan. This leads to an early point that I want to make and I often wonder if others will see it this way too. I find that the interplay that Kanji creates between the land, rivers, sea and people in an industrial setting is completely universal and far from unique to Japan. This could easily have been shot in my home country Scotland, England, Ireland, Sweden, France you name it because the underlying principle is the same: people move from family based agricultural structures to the more individualistic life and existance in the industrial landscape.

I mentioned earlier what a lovely book this is and I mean that in every sense. Its beautifully made with a cardboard slip cover and extremely well printed. This type of photography really needs high quality printing, paper and presentation and this book does not disappoint in any way in these departments. Its a shame that I haven’t been able to capture all of the important detail in my snaps of the book but rest assured that this is quality stuff.

Its never an easy task to try to look at a book and make any sensible observations about it without the reader being able to join in the experience. This is going to sound a bit odd, however, photo-book reading has become a bit ceremonial for me. I like to settle in my favourite chair at the window, put on some mood music, have a nice coffee (perchance a McVitie’s digestive) and open up the book. This also brings a tactile element into things and I always find it really nice if the book has a slip cover, and ‘feels’ right when I touch the cover material, it all seems to add to the overall experience. Then of course its down to the more important elements of the paper and printing quality and, absurdly, I always like to start at the back of a book and work towards the beginning. In every respect this books hits all of the right notes and I really enjoyed reading it and, for me, its a visual delight. I am very fond of the atmosphere and mood that these tones and images create, I feel totally empathy with the emotions and experiences as visually communicated by Kanji. I think its far from original in concept and its a commonly explored theme but he does it real justice and I firmly believe that books like this simply improve over time, they have an enduring integrity about them that lasts.

I alluded to the sense of movement that Kanji has been able to create and I believe that is a really important element to support the books themes. There are unfortunately some isolated very weak moments for me in terms of individual shots but somehow their impact is diminished because they form with the flow and general sense of fluidity in the book. I have no idea where shots like the following come from at this level of photography, but as I said it doesn’t disrupt.

Kanji also seems to have shot quite a few of the photographs from through the windows of trains or a car and again this adds to the constant movement and transitory feel of the work. It also gives a little bit of mystery to things and this is a very common tension vehicle in Todd Hido books for example.

and again with people.

There are very few ‘stand out’ shots that would make iconic photos in their own right and I must say that I don’t see that as a bad thing at all. Perhaps the opposite, the whole book is nice and tightly integrated and works well in its own right, rarely releasing your imagination and building a strongly developed sense of completeness.

There is one final personal comment that I would like to make about this book and its something that I firmly believe would have elevated this into the realm of being a definitive book. I am completely with Kanji on the movement and vehicles (cars, boats, trains) and mechanisms (water, roads, railways) but what is missing for me is the people themselves and I dearly yearn for some insightful portraits much along the lines of what Vanessa Winship did on her American road trip. I know that you could argue that its the very absence of this personalisation and the ultimate anonymity of people in the landscape that are part of the point of the book and I do accept that, and it works very well on that level as I have said, however, if you buy the book, and I think you should if you like what you see here, I think you should consider what effect showing more of the people themselves would have had.

All in all though, for me a very fine book that I also find very nostalgic in a strange way and, as I mentioned earlier, I think that is down to the universality of the books themes and the skill of Kanji in seeing and being able to communicate his ideas so cohesively and in such a lovely package.

Ok, I am really on a bit of a nostalgia and musical trip this weekend as you can probably guess from the intro and I have been overdosing on Television’s Marquee Moon. I clearly remember seeing them live in Glasgow’s Apollo as support act to Blondie in 1977 on a UK tour to promote the just released album, how funny is that!!!!!. With all of this in mind I thought I might show a few of my fave album covers in the free art slot this week. I know album cover photography is old hat, but I really like these and they are around me a lot and are superb examples of great photography.

I had the fun of playing these classics on my modern (1970’s) record player while writing this, Bill Evans was just such a genius.

Fave Photo, Jacob Aue Sobol

Its probably wrong of me to call this a fave shot of Sobol’s, I like it a lot but he has many photographs that I favour more than this one. Its choice though was very deliberate to fit with what I said about Kanji’s book as this is exactly the kind of photograph that I personally believe would have elevated his book into being a ‘classic’.

The photo here doesn’t come from a book but from a catalogue that Leica Warsaw published in support of his ‘Arrivals and Departures’ exhibition there. For me its a slightly unusual shot for Sobol in that more often than not when shooting people he will have engaged with them and worked to create his own reality within the photos. I get the impression that this was just a grab shot through a bus window and it doesn’t have as many of the normal Sobol stylistic cues as you would expect. I like the universality of the photo and the expression is one that can be read many ways depending on your own point of referance and mine aligns very much with the Kanji themes of someone that doesn’t quite know where the are or are going but they are clearly in transit to somewhere. ‘Arrival and Departures’ is of course a very fitting title for this work of Sobol’s which was based around a trans - Siberian railway trip, but you have to think deeper than that behind the title as I guess we are all arriving and departing all of the time as we move through the myriad of encounters that comprise our life experience and I think this is what Sobol is really driving at with this work. Incidentally, I think that the book will be released later this year and Sobol’s books sell very quickly as you know and if this catalogue is anything to go by the first edition will go very quickly indeed so get ready if you like this kind of work. I do like this very much and I also like the work that Klavdij Sluban also did on the Trans-Siberian railway that pre-dates Sobol but has a very different sensibility as you would expect. I am going to review the book shortly and hope to be able to show what I mean by that comment.

Wow, we covered a lot of time and territory there, I hope at least some of this stuff makes sense and if it doesn’t, ignore the text and at least have a look at the wonderful work of the photographers whose work was shown this week. Finally, how about this for a bit of nostalgia and a leap in time and place within my own life from where we began this week in 1964 Glasgow to Tokyo in 2014, arriving and departing indeed.

Oh, by the way, Happy Birthday to my dear friend Andree Thorpe, please accept this as a humble birthday gift to you although I am sure you are far to young to remember any of this stuff.

Colin Steel, Sunday 26th October 2014, Singapore

I have always loved Captain Beefheart. Ever since I saw him and the Magic Band on the now long departed Old Grey Whistle Test growling his way through the incredibly melodic for him, Upon the My oh My. What was strange about his interpretation of traditional blues music was that it often went all over the place, the quirky guitar lines, somehow offbeat drumming and his snarling all seemed like a very strange blend of odd bits and pieces but somewhere in this concoction there was an underlying rhythm of sorts that ultimately brought it into sense, albeit in a totally original and unique way. I mention this for two reasons: firstly it gives me an excuse to show what I consider Anton Corbijn’s best ever photograph and, secondly; because I have been reading a new photo book that I got by Olga Matveeva and I couldn’t quite grasp what was unsettling me about it until now.

The Captain by Anton Corbijn

What an incredible portrait. By the way, I saw a marvellous documentary on Anton Corbijn on an aeroplane trip recently where, amongst other things, he went through the making of his awesome movie The American, easily George Cloony’s finest moment. Don’t read any of the moronic reviews by ‘movie critics’, this is classic cinema and is beautifully directed by Corbijn.
Enough of this tangent, lets take a look at Olga’s recent book, Feud, and let me share my thoughts on the book.

This book has been printed in a limited run of 600 and I was lucky enough that my friend ‘The Librarian’ Sebastian had the smarts to get me a signed edition. The book has been pretty well received and won first prize in the Vienna Photobook Festival in June this year, and its small but beautifully designed so that the spine allows the double page spreads to be looked at flat, and that is an extremely important feature as we shall see. So what was all that nonsense about the good Captain at the start? lets take a closer look at the book and let me share my personal take on it.

With this book Olga takes on a extraordinarily difficult topic in my opinion, that of national and ultimately personal dissonance which she describes as: ‘Feud is a category of intimate space. Close people who share common bed and who have common past, suddenly become real enemies. ’ The book was shot in Crimea over the space of a year from December 2013 and reflects the complex conflicts that have emerged (or surfaced) since the fall of the former Soviet Union. I have been reading the book for a couple of weeks now on and off and there are some wonderful photographs in here that I want to look at however, I kept having a nagging feeling about it that I couldn’t get straight in my head. Despite its compact size and excellent mechanics, its not an easy book to digest. That can of course be an excellent attribute as it challenges you to think, it can also leave you a little confused though, and that is what has happened to me. I think a deliberate part of the editing and sequencing of the book by Olga has been to mix not only medias but also formats, so we have black and white and colour and we also have double page full bleed, single page small 3:2 horizontal and vertical and double page, seperate 3:2, also, the photos themselves are a mixture of personal, often intimate shots and snaps of everything from television screens to toilet bowls….phew…… This is why I used the good Captain as an analogy at the start, if you are going to have diverse and offbeat elements you need an underlying rhythm to hold it all together and that is what I think is missing here and leads to the niggling doubts I have about the book. Take this sequence from early in the book as an example:

and……

then……….

My problem is that I simply can’t read this sequence, I can’t find the tempo to help me get whatever meaning or emotion that Olga wants me to draw from this. I can see the nipple, the exploding circle and its reccurance but its not enough . Having said that, there are some sequences that I enjoy even although I don’t find it easy to understand why, and that takes us closer to Magic Band world.

and…..

then…..

There are two things at play here with this sequence that are missing from the earlier episode we looked at: firstly, these are in my opinion simply just much better and more interesting individual photographs, and secondly; there is an underlying structure here that I can sense, the swell of the waves and the ring garland, the floating bed of foliage and then the foliage with ring light. This works in my mind and I can make artistic sense of this and I really like the separate shots. If we leave the rhythm thing aside for a moment I want to look at some really nice shots that Olga has in the book and strangely I find the best ones that I enjoy most to be the colour full bleed spreads and, as I mentioned earlier, the books physical design allows these to be spread flat which makes it easier to full appreciate them. Have a look at this one first.

I think this is shot, like a few others, is from a tv screen and this is something I like doing personally as well, I am fully onboard with the Daido idea of photography as making copies. This shots also fits Olga’s theme very well with its fiery colours and flag motive. Here is another quote from her short paragraph of notes at the back of the book: ’Everyone prepares his own concealed plan and builds the strategy of envision. Who started this provocation and what is the source of its nature?’

Here is another of these lovely double page colour shots that are a standout of the book for me.

Unfortunately, there are I think some pretty weak shots in here that break things up and disjoint the flow. I am not sure where some of these come from but I suspect that they might be shots that are personal to Olga but they don’t make sense to me as a viewer without inside track.

and again, I find this very weak and obvious and it’s a real shame because there aren’t that many of these but I personally find that this is probably the root of the missing tempo that I mentioned at the start and, as you can easily see from the other photos, Olga is a much more thoughtful and creative photographer than this kind of easy take suggests.

Getting back then to the shots that really work for me, have a look at these two shots that unfortunately for my money are too far apart in the books sequencing to have the potentially extremely powerful impact that they could have had.

and……

I think these are great and could have formed part of a really meaningful and poignant verse in the overall storyline.

Ok, I have now reached the point where I begin to panic that I have been overly critical. It would be unfair to make the judgement that this is not a good photo book, that is simply not the case, there are a large number of positives about the book that I hope came out loud and clear, right from the physics of the book to the lovely colour spreads and the short episodes where the book catches a vibe that I think works. I hope I have pointed out the challenge that my perceived lack of tempo brings, however, I freely admit that you could argue that this is a book about dissonance and the ragged pacing adds to that effect. Personally I don’t buy that but its still a nice book that tackles an original topic in a reasonably innovative manner, I just feel that Olga let something really important off the hook, maybe next time. I will certainly be keeping an eye out for her next work.

Free Art

I am a bit pressed for time this week so am going to skip the zine round up of the Kitajima set that I mentioned last week and instead will move straight into some nice free art shots from flyers that I have been picking up in my travels and there is a really nice mix this week. Then it will be on to a lovely fave photo by Jeff Jacobson.

I will say it again, I love these freebies and for a bit of fun at some point in the future I am going to try to sequence an edit of the rapidly growing collection just to see what happens.

Fave Photo, Jeff Jacobson

The fave photo this week is from Jeff’s ‘Last Roll’ book that I reviewed back when I started these mini reviews. My thoughts about it as a book have not changed a bit and, in fact, if anything I am coming to respect and love it more and more as time goes by. It really is a wonderful book for many reasons and it means a lot to me personally. I have wanted to show one of the photos from the book as a fave for a while, and in fact even had one in the draft a few weeks ago and took it out. The reason for this reluctance is that I find the entire book enchanting as a whole and I didn’t want to isolate any one part for fear of breaking the magic of the overall work. I have decided to choose this one though and show it this week and try to challenge myself to rationalise some of the reasons why I find this photo and Jeff’s book in general so compelling.

What I think it comes down to for me is this. Jeff has seen things that we will all see in some form eventually, he was just pushed ahead of us a bit and had the artistic ability to interpret this intrinsic, poignant but ultimately beautiful part of existence and non-existence. Jeff has seen a part of the true nature of things that we can’t because we are too absorbed in the meaningless trivialities that surround us and blind our vision. Not all of the photos in his lovely book have this spiritual quality but many do and this one is not the exception, there are far too many for it to be a coincidence for me and I am so grateful to Jeff for revealing these magical, sometimes paradoxically personal, yet universal moments to me.

Colin Steel, Sunday 19th October 2014, Singapore

Oh man, I feel so frustrated this week. I attended a talk by Klavdij Sluban at the Singapore Photography Festival and only around twenty of Singapore’s five million inhabitants could be bothered to turn out to listen to him. Had anyone with a genuine interest in photography and art turned up, they, like me, would have been treated to a precious hour with someone who really understands what its all about and has the eloquence to verbalise his thinking in a meaningful way. I mention this because I had no idea who Klavdij was prior to this event but I have been blessed with extraordinary good luck in my intuition about these things in recent years and listening to Klavdij and looking at his very beautiful photographs reminded me of something very important that was being diluted in my head. My intuition, sparked by my very good friends, Brindusa, Monica and Anja led to my first introduction with Ernesto Bazan in Sicily a few years back and it was a browse through Bazan Cuba that convinced me to go and spend some time working with him in the place of his birth. It was the start of a very special relationship and friendship for me that has completely altered the course of my thinking and in many ways my life.

What Klavdij reminded me of was twofold: firstly, that very little comes fast in art and it often takes a very long time to mature or refine something with real depth; secondly, and most importantly, that the best photography that I love personally is completely devoid of novelty and trickery but brimful of soul and humanity, that is why I chose to review Bazan Cuba this week.

Before I get into a look at the book itself and what I think personally about it, I want to start by looking back at a photo that Ernesto took in 1978. The shot shown here is from his third publication I Primi Vent’ Anni, the first twenty years and the reason for showing it here in this review of Bazan Cuba is to demonstrate that Ernesto always had the innate artistry to photograph, in a way the challenge was to find a grand subject and calling near to his heart and that came in the shape of the at that time almost inaccessible, Cuba.

The Ernesto Bazan Trilogy, Part 1 Bazan Cuba

It is my intention to review each of the books in the Cuban trilogy over the next four or five months and today we kick off with the first in the set, Bazan Cuba. I know that pretty soon the people reading this blog will get very bored by the repetitive nature of the things that I say and that is why I will probably quit this pretty soon, maybe after I review Isla, the final book in the Bazan series. What I want to say here is simple though. I have been looking at a lot of photography, photo books and exhibitions recently along with attending artist talks and events and something very personal is becoming clear to me. I fully acknowledge the beauty and necessity for diversity in this world so please remember that this is nothing more than my personal view, and many others will see things differently, and thats the way it should be. What is becoming evident to me though is that much of contemporary photography is similar in proposition and structure to the way we are fed through the media, movies, magazines, music, tv and so on. What I mean here is that somehow we are presented with things in a novelty manner, packaged in short, easily digested and very often spelt out for you manner so that you don’t have to think too much or be distracted from your iPhone for too long in case you miss some other similarly ‘exciting and new’ piece of media stimulation. Unfortunately for me, this is like blasting down a can of Coke or eating a Maccie D’s cheeseburger, its instantly gratifying but insubstantial and has no lasting benefit. That is why I personally believe that artists like Robert Frank, Jason Eskenazi, Klavdij Sluban, Nikos Economopoulos and Ernesto Bazan are so important, they are the Miles Davis’s, the Edward Hopper’s, Bill Evans’s, Rothko’s and Tarkovsky’s of the photography world and their work is substantial, artistically soulful and a clear reflection of their humanity. This marks them out from the quirky, and sensationalised or novel work of many of todays photographers who focus on the uniqueness of their project idea over the quality and depth of the photographic art. Unfortunately, and very sadly, in our conditioned world of the 3 minute song, the 1.6 hour movie, the 13, 40 minute episode tv mini-series, and fast food dining ‘experience’ that I alluded to above, there is not so much appetite for things that make you think or require a modicum of attention or are not laden with the basest violence or sexuality. For that reason, (with the obvious exception of Robert Frank) the work of these and other similar artists is relatively obscure and not as mainstream as it deserves to be. That for me, is very sad but hopefully in some very small way my ramblings might prompt someone to have a look at the work of Ernesto and the others I mentioned and that would be great because they deserve to be looked at and appreciated by a much wider audience.

Anyway, lets get back to Bazan Cuba and I know that many of the people reading this will know the work very well so please stick with me if I state the obvious for you guys.

I mentioned the ‘novelty project’ nature of much of todays contemporary photography and this is never the case with Ernesto or the other photographers I mentioned (not a definitive list by any means, just the ones that were front of mind) I almost get the impression that they do not have defined project concepts in their head and that rather they go somewhere they like and photograph………………a lot. Their work also seems to be grand scale; America, Wonderland (Russia), the Balkans, Trans Siberia and of course Ernesto’s Cuba. Many, many photographers have photographed Cuba, some very famous but I don’t think any of them got at the heart of the country, its people or its soul the way Ernesto Bazan did in his three books. How could they? they brought their photographic formulas and visited, often creating good and artistic work but ultimately lacking the kind of depth and intimacy that Ernesto was able to achieve over the fourteen years that he shot and lived there. I think David Bailey summed this up for me in his cliche ridden Havana 2006 publication: “just a superficial look, not a soul searching investigation, a quick impression of a place…”

For me the ‘cliches’ are unavoidable because they are a very intrinsic part of the country and its people, its how you use them that makes the difference, look at how Ernesto shows the famous classic, vintage American cars:

These are not separated out as anachronistic curios, instead they are an everyday part of these peoples lives and have a functional use beyond being photographed by visiting foreigners. Look also at how Che appears in the next photo:

He is of course everywhere but in Ernesto’s photos not in some obvious and too easy juxtaposition and even when the icons do appear in a more specific combination, they are never the dominant subject, more they are omnipresent almost lurking in the sub-conscious and ever present, and even sometimes to have a bit of ironic humour poked at them. Have a look at the intricate composition below, everything just seems to be in the right place and all of the elements in the frame plays its part to combine to lift this shot well above the ordinary. I want to come back to frame structure later and have a closer look at some of Ernesto’s compositions.

Ernesto spent a large part of his adult life living and photographing in Cuba and integrated fully into Cuban life, also marrying there and having his twin sons born in the country. Part of the initial attraction of Cuba for him was the compelling impression he had that he had rediscovered the Palermo and Sicily of his childhood and I think that heartfelt fondness is nowhere more apparent than when he heads into the Cuban countryside. The city shots are all very beautiful but out of necessity they are often tinged or counterbalanced with an irony that almost becomes a frustrated bitterness and that is a very strong and intrinsic part of their reality and power. Personally I believe that much of this disappears to a large degree when he heads into the countryside and it is there that his real love of people and simple humanity really shines through. I am going to harp on about this again because I think this is where where our modern lives get filled with the need for instant gratification and sensationalistic novelty that all of the time obscures and moves us farther away from our true individual personalities and common nature and these photographs return me to that with their beautiful simplicity and soulful heart.

There is always a deep sensitivity in Ernesto’s photography but I personally feel that it becomes heightened when he is amongst country people and I have witnessed this mutual affection first hand. It is as if there is a deep empathy born of trust and mutual respect that can only exist on a human level. No one feels at all exploited when they appear in an Ernesto Bazan photograph.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the countryside aspect of Cuba as I want to deal with it more thoroughly when we take a look at Al Campo which, as its name suggests, deals with the rural Cuban heartland.

To break away from the countryside themes then, I want to talk for a minute or two about the structure of Ernesto’s shots and how he uses the camera frame. I mentioned this when I wrote about Jason Eskenazi a few weeks back and there are huge similarities in the way these photographers exploit the camera for artistic purposes. What always comes into my head is that there is an economic efficiency in their shooting that wastes absolutely nothing in the photographic frame. Lets not kid ourselves though that these guys just pull the camera to their eyes and deliver these masterfully composed shots every time. Sure they have the innate artistic ability honed by many years of practice but they also have massive depth of material in their work and that is what allows them to edit down until only the most important and artistically valuable shots are left. Have a look at how these shots are composed and marvel at the tiny details that make such a difference in the frames:

Not only are the shots beautifully composed, they have a rhythm to them that is important to the sensibility of Cuba and Ernesto’s interpretation of the Cuban heart.

Its the age-old and well proven artistic requirement of Light, Form and Content and if I refer back to my earlier statements on some contemporary photography, these novelty driven concepts and projects almost never combine these three intrinsic elements completely or even satisfactorily. Sometimes the subject is interesting but the form is not there or the project will be dominated by some trickery of light or colour. This doesn’t happen in a Frank, Eskenazi or Bazan photo, these guys are puritanical about these basics and that is where much of their artistic success is drawn from - they refuse to comprimise and the basics are always absolutely rock solid and then you can start to be adventurous because you have a very substantial platform to build from.

I also mentioned in the earlier rant about the explicit, sensationalistic requirements of modern media and the desperate need to ‘spell things out for you’ Anyone who has ever watched and enjoyed a Tarkovsky movie for example will know that their artistic strength comes from simply creating a framework and perhaps infering something thereby leaving you entirely free to create your own realities and use your personal experiences and imagination to do so. That is their enduring strength and of course their fatal weakness in the snapshot, soundbite modern world where few seem to have the patience to sit through a whole movie that is not riddled with cliche and explosion and violence.

Just look at how these photos work in respect of creating possibility without spelling everything out or being sensationalistic in any way.

I was absolutely horrified at the Sluban talk in Singapore when one of the audience asked him ‘if you don’t have captions how do we understand your photographs’ !!!!! I can think of how some photographers would have answered that however Sluban politely tried to explain the artistic viewpoint that they were reflections of himself and an attempt to capture something intrinsic or soulful in the nature of our world and that is how Ernesto’s photos always appear to me. I know they are photographs of Cuban’s in Havana, walking, sitting and drinking on the Malecon, living their lives out in a particular environment and political climate that Ernesto comments on however the best photos in Bazan Cuba go way beyond that. They are comments on humanity, often shown in a beautifully simplistic manner, the glances, the looks, the shapes and light strike at something that renders where the subjects happen to be entirely irrelevant.

I think this is something that elevates the work of the artists I mentioned at the start out of project world. Their photography, although structured and presented on a theme (Cuba, America, Russia etc.) in a way is not at its heart about those thematic titles at all. You could probably take stills from all of the above mentioned artists and interweave them with each other because they are not reliant on the theme or concept for their success as photographs or photo books and that is the key difference between them and the type of work that I was critical of. The novel project approach relies almost entirely on that idea for its success and is therefore extremely narrow in what it is capable of. Think about that for a moment, if I fish Anders Petersen’s Rome off my shelves there is almost nothing in that book that anchors the photos in Rome at all !! These are photos of Anders personal realities and they could (and often are) be easily interchanged with shots from any of the other locations that Anders has shot in. These photos are not concept bound at all in any way shape or form and I feel that about Ernesto’s photography as well. I know that these shots were taken in Cuba over the ‘special period’ during the fall and collapse of the Russian wonderland and the economic consequences that held for Cuba, however, they are not recordings of that at all they are much deeper and more universally human in their nature.

Incidentally, please forgive the quality of my snapshots of Ernesto’s photos. They are obviously just intended to illustrate points and you really need to see these in book form to appreciate the sequencing and flow. Which is another point worth making. Part of Ernesto’s teaching process in his workshops is to get his students to select from his own collection of contact prints and this obviously has the dual benefit of helping the students to learn how to critique and edit while Ernesto gets important feedback on his own work. I mention this because I know from personal experience that Ernesto can produce boxes upon boxes of extremely good photos for these reviews and at times there seems to be a bottomless depth to his work. This just underlines the point I made at the start about very little coming fast in art, his current South American work began mainly in 2006 when he was forced to leave Cuba with his family and is still being developed nearly ten years later.

Its always hard to close these reviews out and this one is harder than most because of the personal aspects. I will remind again that you really need to hold, handle and look at these books time and time again to begin to apprecaite them fully and all I try to do here is to give my honest view on what I think personally about the book being reviewed. It should be obvious now that this book is one of my prized possessions in life, it stands up there with The Americans, Wonderland, Balkanlarda, City Diaries and the other classics that I am lucky enough to own and I use the oft abused word ‘classics’ very deliberately for, as I hope I have described, the true nature of these books lifts them well out of the world of photography.

IN THIS THERE IS NO MEASURING WITH TIME, A YEAR DOESN’T MATTER, AND TEN YEARS ARE NOTHING. BEING AN ARTIST MEANS: NOT NUMBERING AND COUNTING, BUT RIPENING LIKE A TREE, WHICH DOES NOT FORCE ITS SAP, AND STANDS CONFIDENTLY IN THE STORM OF SPRING, NOT AFRAID THAT AFTERWARD SUMMER MAY NOT COME. IT DOES COME. BUT IT ONLY COMES TO THOSE WHO ARE PATIENT, WHO ARE THERE AS IF ETERNITY LIES BEFORE THEM, SO UNCONCERNEDLY SILENT AND VAST. I LEARN IT EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE, LEARN IT WITH PAIN, I AM GRATEFUL FOR: PATIENCE IS EVERYTHING.

Free Art

As with last week I thought I would put a little breaker in here with some free flyers that I have been adding to my collection so here we go:

I really like these and I hope you do too.

Zines, Kitajima Photo Express Tokyo V3

Here we are back again for a dose of 70’s Japan with our old friend Kitajima and we are up to No.3 in the twelve zine series. As you can see, this is the first of the colour covers and personally I think it looks really cool with the yellow and black hi-contrast look. I am glad that he didn’t over milk this and used it on the cover only as inside are two or three shots that exemplify what Kitajima was about and I have chosen a few of these to show today.

I won’t bore you again by giving my opinion on why and when his shots work but suffice to say that the sequencing and content is strong in this particular edition and its one of my faves in the series.

I really love the look and feel of these photos and would dearly have loved to have attended one his shows to see the full process live. I mentioned last week that he often shot and developed all in the same session and this added to the almost random vibe that you can sometimes feel from the zines. One thing is for sure and that is that many of these shots and pairings have a real energy and buzz about them that I think perfectly matches the impression that I have of Japan at that time.

My original idea with these was to look at all twelve zines in the series but to be honest I am now realising that its going to be impossible for me to add anything to the views that I have already given on the series so I think I will wrap it up next week by taking a selection of my favourites from the remaining zines and that way it won’t get tedious. I sincerely hope that its been enjoyable looking at these so far though.

Incidentally, I got an e-mail from Sarah who edits the lovely little Goose Flesh zine from Glasgow that I looked at a few weeks back and there is a new issue (no.4) out and I will be trying to get my hands on one as soon as possible to have a look at here with you.

Fave Photo, Nikos Economopoulos

I mentioned Nikos above when I talked about the short list of ‘classic’ photographers that were front of mind for me as examples of photographers that shot epic works without having to resort to novelty or trickiness. The photo that I have chosen here (sorry again about the quality of my shot of it) is from his stunning Balkanlarda book which I think stands alongside Ernesto’s Cuba and the others that I mentioned as the definitive work on this particular region by someone who spent a long time driving around in his camper van observing and creating an incredibley deep but highly artistic work on the Balkan countries and the people who live work and die there. The photo itself might at first glance appear to be a strange choice but I chose it very deliberately for its importance to me personally and also because I think it says a lot about how Nikos observes and uses photography to express himself. By crazy coincidence, I also bought this book on the same trip to Istanbul that I mentioned when I bought Jason Eskenazi’s Wonderland and this was the second serious photography book that I ever bought. The reason for the visit to Istanbul was a workshop with Nikos and I have to attribute him with really showing me what was possible with photography. The workshop itself was a really uncomfortable experience for me as I struggled to come to terms with the shift in thinking that Nikos was enabling for me and I will be eternally grateful to him for opening my mind to a new world of possibility. Back to the photograph itself and what I find remarkable about it is the simple arrangement of lines and motifs and the incredible use of space that is a Nikos trademark. Nikos is a true artist in every sense of the word, his grasp of dynamics and placement in a photographic frame is just amazing and you can see it time and again in his work. Many of the photos in Balkanlarda almost fall for me into the category of modern art because of the way Nikos provokes beautiful but challenging form and I think you will agree with me that the photo above looks amazing yet it appears so simple in its elements. I can’t think of a single other photographer that would have seen this shot and been able to compose it so beautifully and with such well balanced attention to detail. Just look at what an absolutely critical role that the little feather on the line plays, it somehow snaps the whole photo into artistic sensibility and without it the whole thing would lack that mysterious interest that only Nikos can create in this way. I have said it before in this post but it takes real command of the photographic medium to be able to make this kind of shot and if you take the time to look at his work you will quickly see how bold he is with structure and how thought provoking and enduringly interesting the photos become as a result.

I sincerely hope that you can find some sense in what I have tried to say about the work of Ernesto, Nikos and the others that I have mentioned this week and I am very much looking forward to reviewing Al Campo which is the second in Ernesto’s Cuban trilogy, I will probably get around to that one before Xmas.

Thanks again for reading, hope you will catch up again next week.

Colin Steel, Sunday 12th October 2014, Singapore