Kevin Fox Photo Blog

Sean O'Hagan - Photo finish: judging the Taylor Wessing portrait prize

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:20:00 +0100

Just got sent a link to this. This is what my last post alluded to. I dont think democracy is the best way to judge photography . In fact the very idea of judging photography by consensus seems wrong to me (and in my role as a lecturer the irony of that sentance is not lost on me). Perhaps the organiser should consider a different structure to the judging where there is a lead judge who rather makes call on disputes rather than individuals putting forward opinion and argument. This would still not be a perfect system but would perhaps give the awards a voice or approach rather than a haphazard selection.

Thanks Sean for the insight.

“Now it’s done, I have to say I will think twice about knocking the judges in future. The two days I spent looking at 5,340 photographs submitted by 2,352 photographers (a maximum of six prints per entrant is allowed) was a crash course in the discipline and the sheer doggedness involved in judging an open competition which, as the National Portrait Gallery brief put it, showcases “the work of some of the most talented emerging young photographers, alongside that of established professionals, photography students and gifted amateurs.”

Taylor Wessing 2012

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:32:00 +0100

Lynne Brighton by Jennifer Pattison

Ah, the Tyler Wessing award… another girl with red hair and a nude or two and a few actors and or well know faces. I really enjoy the images in the Tyler Wessing awards for a variety of reasons. The first reason obviously is the photography. The second reason is a little game I play with my self before I see the short list. I try and guess how many motifs will be reselected for short list this year. Red haired women in particular seems to be a big draw for the judges, the poor but proud is another which is a common theme which we can be sure we see each year. Then there are the curve balls, images which I just don’t understand at all. Now, that I don’t understand them means absolutely nothing, photography is a very subjective medium, but each year I leave the National Portrait Gallery inspired, annoyed and confused in equal measure. Perhaps that’s what the judges want. Perhaps secretly, they scatter the images on a large floor and then release a headless chicken to spend its last few seconds of life selecting the short list by neglecting to spurt blood on the prints which can then be used as the short list. Perhaps they print each photograph and fold it into a paper aeroplane and throw them through the gallery with the planes which make it furthest being selected. Or perhaps they sit around all day looking at so many images they are completely punch drunk and end up selecting a short list so they can go home. Regardless of which method they use, I can never figure out what the criteria of a good portrait is based on the short list.
As ever this year contains imagery which I think is stunning and imagery which is bland and pedestrian. The Pastry chef by Jason Price Williams for example bores me to within an inch of my life. Now perhaps the remainder of the series is amazing, perhaps the entire project is fantastic but is this taken into account when considering the short list, I wouldn’t have thought so. Now maybe you think its great, maybe what you have been waiting for all your life is a rather bland black and white image, reminiscent of August Sander, of a pastry chef, in which case, good for you. However, I cant see why this image would be selected. Perhaps when I get to it in the flesh I will be moved… to eat some pastry…?
Here’s a thought for the people behind the short list, next year, off site it might be an idea to run the images which didn’t make it. I would pay good money to see the imagery which has been negated in favour for this short list, and I would be amazed if there was no better options than this.
Working in Education I realise that any process which is completed by committee may struggle to have a definitive voice, and perhaps that’s what happened here. Perhaps some of the imagery has been selected tactfully to reach a wider audience or perhaps in a selection committee you simply can never have a coherent short list.

‘Camel - a horse designed by a committy’.

Pasty Chef by Jason Pierce-Williams

Life magazine - GANG OF NEW YORK: THE REAPERS, 1972

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:51:20 +0100

Continuing with the gang Stuart Shearers image published in life magazine of the Reapers.

The Hell's Angels - Life Magazine

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:43:00 +0100

Its hard to believe that the Hell’s Angels were once a feared band of outlaw of motor cycle riders who’s very name striked fear into the hearts of clean living post war americans. When Hunter Thompson wrote his seminal novel charting his time spent with the Angels and their leader Sonny Barger the times indeed were a changing. However in 2012 my over riding vision when I think of the Angels is not a hard drinking, fighting gang of bikers but rather middle aged over weight white middle class americans who wear band fitting jeans and terrible leathers. Fans of South Park will know what I mean when I say.. ‘BrummBrummBrummm…’

However the images here from life magazine show the bikers before they became a parody of them selves and were still a genuine counter culture.

ROGER MINICK: "SIGHTSEER"

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:27:35 +0100

Some great images form Roger Minick - Sightseer. I have been working on something similar for a long time, but these are great.

ASX.TV: Bruce Gilden – “Fort Myers”

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:22:57 +0100

ASX.TV: Bruce Gilden – “Fort Myers”

Coney Island - Bruce Gilden

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:20:59 +0100

Coney Island - Bruce Gilden

ASX - ROSWELL ANGIER: “Sticky Floors and White Men Roars”

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:03:19 +0000

ALL BELOW TAKEN FORM ASX -

Stripper-stretch marks and desert-devil-dust… Mexican-Men and Tequila-Worm-Lust… jiggling breasts and white men roars, sticky palms and sticky floors… booze-boars and bottle-breath, broken-teeth smiles and flailing-fist-death… curse and crawl, stumble and fall… warm wind blows through desert-window holes, pitiful views, men and rage, coming in two’s, alcohol-slaves. Dangerous dusty towns, jukebox-caves, neon sex-comin’ in flesh-filled waves… livin’-lost f-k’s, can’t be saved, drink some more, find-a-whore… hear ‘em roar.

Dark shadows, big-truck-monster-men, testosterone-smackdown-fears. This is photography.

For Roswell Angier and your gift. Thank you.

Regards,

Doug Rickard

"FEAR, DESIRE, DRUGS AND, FUCKING" the fascinating work of ANTOINE D’AGATA

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:59:10 +0000

This article was taken from the Vice magazine website. A great interview and some fascinating work. The above image is superb in my humble opinion, very reminiscent of Francis Bacon in particular. The below article is well worth following the link to read more.

By Alex Sturrock, Antoine D’Agata

Antoine D’Agata is a contentious character in the worlds of photography and art. Signed up by the Magnum photo agency in the period when they started to realise there was little money in photojournalism, his work’s brutal and self-destructive content has a habit of upsetting people.

Born in Marseilles in 1961, D’Agata left France in the early 80s. He later studied at the International Center of Photography in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, with whom he shares a fascination for the seamier side of things. D’Agata has lived a murky and nomadic life. He regularly immerses himself in his subjects, which typically tend to be prostitutes and other marginalised misfits, often throwing himself into dangerous, drug-addled and sex-fuelled situations. We spoke with him about photography as art, honesty, morality and what it’s like to be addicted to the drug ice while living with Cambodian prostitutes.

READ MORE HERE

Gillian Wearing at Whitechaple Gallery, March 28th

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:27:20 +0000

From The Whitechaple Gallery

“The films and photographs of British artist Gillian Wearing (b. Birmingham, 1963) explore our public personas and private lives. This Turner Prize winner’s remarkable works draw on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world.

Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves.

The exhibition begins with the artist herself, dancing in a shopping mall, blissfully unaware of her bemused audience. The idea of performance continues with works including Wearing’s 1997 masterpiece, 10–16. Adults lip synch the voices and act out the physical tics of seven children in a captivating film which moves from the breathless excitement of a ten year old to the existential angst of an adolescent.”

READ MORE HERE

Terry Richardson - The Naughty Knave of Fashion’s Court

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 20:59:00 +0000

By LAURA M. HOLSON

For the past two years the once-loquacious Mr. Richardson, 46, has stopped giving interviews, telling friends that his work should speak for itself. But his reserve subsided over breakfast as he described an evening photo shoot in the late 1990s for the British fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, during which he rounded up some friends who were models and photographed them in various states of coupling as they wandered between his apartment and clubs of the East Village.

“When I got the contact sheets back there was this one image, two frames,” Mr. Richardson said. “There was a shot of a girl, with her legs open, she had white panties.” Then he noticed that her pubic hair was visible. “When I was shooting her, I didn’t see that,” Mr. Richardson said, adding, “It’s like a happy accident.”

Canon 5d III Released

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 19:32:00 +0000

The affordable high res Digital SLR which changed the game with the introduction of HD video, amongst other features, has, at long last, got its update. The New Canon 5d has been shown off at a canon lanuch event in Shanghai. The features look interesting, the 61AF focus for example, but, I must say, rather disapoiningly the mega pixel remains pretty much the same. My concern here is with the development in printing standards for outdoor going from 8 to 16 bit in many places, the mega pixel of the 5d III leaves it slightly shy of the needed quality.

Canon 600ex Flash

Perhaps a more interesting development may be the new top range canon flash. The canon 600ex is the first flash to feature radio technologies. It will be interesting to get testing these and see how they compare to pocket wizards and pixel kings.

Much more here at the excellent canon rumors

Every World Press Award Winner since 1955

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:34:00 +0000

And what a vast and varied collection it is. An interesting slice of life and the news from the last 57 years.

SEE ALL WINNERS HERE

Two lives blurred together by a photo

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:08:11 +0000

From the LA Times

Really interesting piece on Luis Sinco and Cpl. James Blake Miller. The video piece in particular is very much worth a watch.

By Luis Sinco, Times Staff Photographer

November 11, 2007

Times photojournalist Luis Sinco documented the Marine’s assault on Fallouja, Iraq, in November 2004. While capturing the ferocity of the conflict, he took a photograph of Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller. Weary from battle, the Marine lighted a cigarette, and Sinco’s shot of that moment became an icon of the Iraq war.

But the connection between Sinco and Miller runs deeper.

After Iraq, Miller tried to return to his previous life but found his nights haunted by images of war and his life fractured by depression. This is the story of how Miller struggled to heal his scars of war. But it is also a story of how two disparate lives intersected on a rooftop in Fallouja, and how they both continue to struggle with what happened.

Sinco’s work was a 2005 Pulitzer finalist for feature photography.

“The young marine lighted a cigarette and let it dangle. White smoke wafted around his helmet. His face was smeared with war paint. Blood trickled from his right ear and the bridge of his nose.

Momentarily deafened by cannon blasts, he didn’t know the shooting had stopped. He stared at the sunrise.”

READ MORE HERE

Lise Sarfati On Hollywood

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:19:00 +0000

Lise Sarfati ‘On Hollywood’.

Interview by François Adragna

François Adragna: What is a photographic series?

Lise Sarfati: It is a set of photographs which are linked to each other and which create a whole. Something which shuts us in and in which we cannot find the exit. It is also a way of thinking. A form.

FA: Is ‘On Hollywood’ a series?

LS: On Hollywood is a series. But each photograph can be looked at individually. It is a series because the images interrelate and reinforce the photographic form.

FA: When did you start this series?

LS: I started it in 2009 and finished it in 2010.

FA: The colors and texture of your photographs have a particular quality. What film did you use?

LS: I worked with Kodachrome 64 transparency film. The rolls were sent to Kansas in the only laboratory which still developed this film. I never saw the results immediately. I realized that this element of not seeing, not knowing, was a determining factor. This situation : where I had to wait and did not know brought me back to the mystery I felt when I discovered photography at the age of 13. A revelation, but after the fact. This Kodachrome film stock is also the one used in Hollywood movies of the 1940s. I wanted to complete the loop and end the story of Kodachrome film on Hollywood. I used this outmoded film stock in the context of Hollywood, which is at the peak of technological advancement and colossal production costs.

I was not part of a huge Hollywood production but on a boulevard where I photographed real women (without paying them, this I insist on in my work) who are considered outsiders. Their weaknesses became their strength, raising them to the rank of anti-heroes.

It is true that film, photography and video have surpassed painting and sculpture and that it may seem odd to return to Kodachrome slides when analog film, photography and video have been overtaken by the digital format. But it is precisely this paradox which interested me.

One often wrongfully compares photographs to paintings. This is nonsense. The image does not refer to painting but to something alive through which passes silence…

READ MORE HERE

Dust Book - Review

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 12:05:36 +0000

Lovely review, lovely book. Nice.

Dust Book

photographs by
Aline Diépois and
Thomas Gizolme

Dust Book is one of those wonderful genre-defying, hybrid-style books that arrives on the scene unexpectedly. Part photobook, part travel journal, part hallucinatory fantasy and stream of consciousness, this book purports to be the record of a trip made by two French photographers through the Arizona desert wilds.

One of the authors shoots with a Leica. The other with a Polaroid. Both indulge in drugs, alcohol and other substances while they encounter a very strange cast of characters in remote communities and random encampments of outcasts and misfits, real or imagined.

Early in the book we have a long rambling rant against William Eggelston (“poor dumb fuck”), which later evolves into a sort of hero worship. There’s also a rather long segment of fiction in the middle touching on drugs, alcohol, guns, rape, incest, murder, and the effects of extreme desert heat on people who live in small remote trailer parks. It is bizarre and disjointed, but somehow it seems to fit in the flow.

READ MORE HERE

Charles Saatchi: the hideousness of the art world

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:14:00 +0000

Well, what can one say… When Charles Saatchi is complaing about how uncouth the art buying world has become, you get the felling that we have indeed perhaps drifted into the realm of the un-well… Interesting read but to be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

“Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. They were found nestling together in their super yachts in Venice for this year’s spectacular art biennale. Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another.

Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.”

Trading to Extinction

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:49:00 +0000

Text Taken form the Daily Telegraph Website.

Crowd Funding is a relatively new form of publishing, in which photojournalists pitch their projects directly to the public.

By agreeing to back a story, you are making sure that the issues that you care about receive the in-depth coverage they deserve. In return you are invited along on the journey.

In this section of Telephoto, we highlight some of the projects currently looking for backers, and hope to connect those interested in photography and storytelling with those making it happen, out in the field.

This week: Patrick Brown

Day by day, hour by hour, our planet’s rarest creatures are being hunted, trapped and slaughtered to feed a global black market in wildlife products.

This is my attempt to expose that trade. I could use your support.

For years, I have traveled across Asia to document the devastating impact of wildlife trafficking. Now I’d like to bring my work to a worldwide audience, by producing a campaigning photographic book called “Trading to Extinction.”

It is a shocking tale of cruelty, crime and human greed. As with drug trafficking, money fuels the animal trade. Its tentacles wrap around the world, from the remote forests of Asia to the trafficking hubs of Beijing, Bangkok, London, Tokyo and New York.

READ MORE HERE

Ins and Outs: Michael Marten

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:33:00 +0000

In the Mediterranean, the tidal range (the difference in altitude between high and low tide) is usually measured in centimetres. Around Britain, it varies from one metre on parts of the North Sea coast to 15 metres in the Bristol Channel – the third greatest range in the world. The foreshore of Britain is therefore a vast debatable land, concealed and revealed in a twice-daily tidal magic trick.

For eight years, English photographer Michael Marten has been travelling the British coastline, recording this lost-and-found littoral landscape. At the start of his project he became “a student of tides”. He began with the rudiments: the daily rhythms of flood and ebb; the lunar-monthly rhythms of high spring tides (occurring around the full and new moons) and low neap tides (when the moon is on the wax or wane); the existence of solar as well as lunar tidal pulls.

Interesting Aside to the Selgado Show

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:28:08 +0000

I discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens – and photography immediately started to invade my life. I finished my PhD in economics, and become an economist, but the camera gave me 10 times more pleasure. Eventually, I abandoned everything and started a new life as a photographer. That is still my life today.