Chromasia

As featured by the BBC and Time Magazine, the Chromasia website is an exemplary photo blog. Often featuring images from around Blackpool, it casts an area I (unfortunately) know well in a new and beautiful light: the colourful neon of the fair, storm clouds rolling off the sea, stunning sunsets, the cast of blue over beach. Technically perfect, and artistically innovative, with a lively readership and owner offering comments which help to educate the viewer in how to take better photographs, visit the site now, and you will want to go back every day.

Cheap Beer

Saw this recently in my local branch of a well-known supermarket chain. Now I know every little helps, but is this not a wee bit stingy?

Kienholz at The Baltic

The exhibition of Ed and Mary Kienholz*, in what is the first showing of their work in the UK for 30 years, is both expansive, sexual and violent, and minutely detailed, intimate and comic.

In one of the pieces entitled Bear Chair, from which I had to turn quickly away, a bear straddles a doll-like young girl tied with frayed rope to a small chair, the words, "IF YOU EVER TELL I'LL HURT YOUR MAMA REAL REAL BAD" scratched into a child's dressing table. But in the corridor leading up to the small room in which it is contained, the walls are covered with dollar bills, the artistic product of an amusing domestic anecdote: Kienholz, desperate for a particular screwdriver, made a watercolour and stamped on it "For Nine Screwdrivers," ultimately trading this unique piece for a set of tools of his neighbour; from this small barter, others followed, from a Mercedes to a fur coat, and spawned a variant theme in which he literally painted money, watercolour recreations of dollar bills which sold for more than their face "value."

At the other end of the size scale, a kitsch fairground ride entitled Ozymandias Parade, British and American leaders mounted on snarling horses drag by wires armies of plastic toys in ranks: toy soldiers, toy cars, missiles, jedi knights. A protest made in 1985, I was tempted to note how particularly relevant it is two decades later in the context of Iraq of today (and, in the case of the latter toy, of a new Lucas film); the depressing reality, of course, is that it would have made itself heard in any year of the last half-century (I assumed, at first, that it must have been a rebellion against Vietnam). As the coloured lights circle relentlessly round the base, so this plays like a piece on repeat, endlessly of the imperialistic moment.

Kienholz founded the concept of installation art, and the centerpiece of this exhibition, filling an entire room, is The Hoerengracht, a recreation of an Amsterdam street. With contemporary pop playing on tinny radios in the background, one feels like a seedy voyeur, creeping around, peering in at the prostitutes, dressed plastic marionettes, sitting in provocative poses behind warped glass. The double aspect of this voyeurism is that not only do they occupy a particular space from which to be observed, but they are also frozen in time by the copious amounts of glue which literally hold the exhibits together, sprayed against everything as if from a hosepipe, oozing down walls, forming sticky tear-like streaks down the dolls' cheeks.

Whilst contemporary installation art often presents itself as instantaneous, simply removed to a gallery from the coincidental circumstances of its creation (Tracy Emin's infamous Unmade Bed is a prominent example), in fact much of it relies on careful planning and expertise: the logistics of emptying a room in a house, or exploding a garden shed, careful lighting and filming, the preservation of animals in toxic substances. What characterises the Kienholz exhibition is the haphazard nature of its construction, the way things found on the street or in junk yards (the raw material for all these works) appear to have been placed swiftly together and bonded by adhesive before gravity had a chance to make them fall apart. In spite of the glue preserving things in time and space, the overall impression is one of speed and chaos, and of the fact that these works have been catalysed by impulsive and furious reactions to the humanitarian and political situation of the late twentieth century.

* Kienholz runs at the Baltic in Gateshead from 14 May to 29 August 2005

Europe in Crisis

Although I am no great fan of Tony Blair, I am totally behind him on the hard stance he is taking on Europe's need for economic reform. It is not a question of the money - in the grand scheme of things £3 billion is relatively small change. It is about the intrinsic unfairness of a system which rewards those economies with large and cumbersome agricultural sectors, and penalises those with small and efficient systems.

Chirac's home support is at an all time low, and those who can strike on a whim hold the reigns; Blair has just been returned to power (albeit by an electorate still unconvinced by Europe). This is domestic politics played out in Brussels, but ideologically Blair has the high ground. Were countries to be rewarded for what they put in initially, and get out ultimately, from European trade, and if this meant Britain ended with no credit from the EU directly, although increased trade (and hence taxes) Blair would quite rightly be happy. Chirac (and his farmers) would not.

Happy Snappers

A recent post on Ephotozine complained that "I recently bought a Canon S70, and enthused about it. I started snapping away with great joy. Then somebody commented that it was just a snappers camera.... and that took the wind out of my sails. I began to think that there was no art in the pictures I was taking."

Since I sometimes feel the same way about my Photos, I gave a slightly-ranting reply:

I sometimes have the same crisis of confidence as you. I am not able to afford an SLR, and just have a Nikon 35mm compact and a Nikon coolpix: surely 'snappers' cameras if anything is. Am I, then, a 'photographer'?

The way I look at it is this. Suppose it takes 5 minutes to take a serious photo. Of that five minutes, four minutes fifty-nine seconds of the work is done by your observations, setting up the camera, framing. Another fraction is the moment when you press the shutter (and again here, the skill of the photographer avoiding camra shake is what counts, rather than the design of the button). Only the final, say, quarter of a second of that great photograph is down to what goes on in the optics of the camera itself. Of the great image, the camera has a vital, but physically minute, part to play. (And even here, small modern cameras are still so good optically that the difference between a cheap and an expensive camera may not be noticed by the non-specialist viewer.)

A good photographer will always be able to take good pictures; he or she may be limited by the range of possible images that can be captured (maybe no macro or night shots), but that often forces one to look harder to find the less obvious images that *are* within the scene and within the range of the camera; taking that image can be all the more satisfying when you know others with more capable cameras may have missed it.