Critical Review of the Introduction/ Essay to Elinor Carucci's Closer - Mike Bennett

The introduction to Closer by Elinor Carrucci is a kind of justification of the photographs themselves, and partly a biography of herself and of the images contained in the book. Seven paragraphs long, it, along with the book, tends to predominantly fixate on her mother and her mothers presence.
Explaining how the camera both helps her to maintain a  distance yet document a closeness, and how the process brought in her extended family, father, brother, lover, and how zooming in specific details made the the images more universal, and how she has now two different memories of these situations, the real but fading memory and the photographic version, frozen in time.

Nataly and I, Carrucci, E, Closer, 2001, Chronicle Books

One cant but help but be amused by her idea that this is a normal family with normal levels of intimacy, when it could be easily argued that her entire fame comes from the unusual amount of either closeness or familial nudity on display, all by a group of very attractive people which presumably has in no way hindered her cause either.
Despite that, the essay, co-written with Gadi Taub, is an insightful piece, clearly carefully considered,
and helping us to see her view of her own work and her view of the world. She obviously is devoted to both photography and to her family, using one to see herself through the other and vice versa.
In many ways, the text is a reflection of the imagery, allowing you to look inside her particular family politik.

Carruci, E, Closer, 2001, Chronicle Books

A Review of Go by Bruce Gilden - Mike Bennett

Gilden, B, 2000, Go, Trebuk Publishing

Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer, well known for his confrontational approach and fearlessness in the face of danger, an approach no doubt severely tested by the work presented here, given it includes bosozoku (bikers ) yakusa (Japanese mafia ) and various street people, tramps and a whole list of the forgotten.
“Go” is a game, very popular in Asia, where the idea is to acquire territory, suggestive of the Yakusa who feature heavily in the book,  whose aim is broadly similar. The book is laid out in bright blocks of red, a colour strongly associated with the Japanese in both negative and positive ways, though all the photos are single or double page, slightly above A4 size, no borders, no captions, all in black & white, stark, monochrome. The title is on the last page in small type, the only writing a very atypical one page Q & A near the back, the chapter breaks are more culturally standard manga type images, oppressive yet familiar, schoolgirls and samurai, the expected and the known. The introduction is noted as such as its first, but is a scrawled list of slight descriptions of picures taken, annotated, circled, a virtually secret language of Gildens own understanding.
The work seems to be almost photojournalism, a harsh realism, a document of the hidden people of Japans cleancut and perfect image of harmless automatons. Certainly there is no lack of emotion displayed here, amongst the mass of pain, there is confusion, sadness, distress, anger, though mostly pain. It tells us that every society has its fringes, an underground or underclass that is kept from the publics view, a dirty secret.
My conclusion as to the success of “Go” is that Gilden has tried to portray a societies forgotten or ignored people in a very direct and documentarian way, using design and sequencing to elevate the already brilliant photographs, until the book comes across as a sort of bright, and despite its content, beautiful artifact, a elegiac museum piece for the disaffected and the dispossessed.

Gilden, B, 2000, Go, Trebuk Publishing

Gilden, B, 2000, Go, Trebuk Publishing

Summary of Mary Warner Marien's Essay on Charles Nègre's Chimney Sweep Walking.

Chimney Sweep Walking, Negre, Charles, 1851

The essay initially starts with a discussion on what were seen in 1839 as the strengths and weaknesses of photography and its limitations as an art form at the time. she mentions that Negre was a painter as well as a photographer and tells us that his interest was in making photography not just about realism and exact naturalism, but to take a more artistic and painterly approach, to experiment with shape, abstaction, pattern and tone.

She relates how under his painting tutorage under Paul Delaroche, gave Negre the confidence to try and relate painting technique to photographic technique, and how this led to him using the mediums of both formal art and photography to produce his best work. Using standard and traditional stock figures as a basis, he would use the underclass/ working class people of Paris to depict his scenes.

She then relates the historical context of using the chimney sweep in recently industrialised towns and cities, and the area in which the picture was taken, and also writes about how the technical limitations of the time may have determined a certain amount of composition, and then about the controlled ideas of the composition itself, the appaerance of movement, the shadowing of faces, the imagined or implied relationship between the sweeps themselves.

She goes onto discuss the how it was seen as a sort of documentary photograph (before that term existed) and how there was no real provision, thanks to lack of proper social outlets, for this to be seen as a sort of confirmation of social ills, though Negre himself was likely aware of it, no real meaning existed to explain this at the time.

She explains the enormous amount of technical work, from line drawings to highlights, and suggests his use of composition and technical work perhaps romanticise the image toward a nobler image. She discusses themes of western art and the ages of man, and how visual devices relate to certain time periods. The faces of the sweeps are obscured, which she suggests implies a deeper historical meaning.
The mid nineteenth century critic Frances Wey has suggested it was no longer art, and Mary Warner Marien  believes " Negre's image was thoughtfully composed by the photographer through an act of will that separated it from the mechanical rendition and moved it closer to the principles of art".

From Mary Warner Marien's Essay on Charles Nègre's Chimney Sweep Walking taken from Howarth, S and Alexander, M. D. 2005. Singular images: Essay on Remarkable Photographs. New York: Aperture

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - An Exhibition Curated by Jeremy Deller

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - An Exhibition Curated by Jeremy Deller at Manchester Art Gallery.
15th January 2013

OVERVIEW

An at first seemingly unconnected group of artifacts, paintings, photographs and sound recordings, the exhibition uses the well known photograph, taken by Dennis Hutchinson in 1973, of the wrestler Adrian Street visiting his father at the pit of the mining village he grew up in. This gives an indication of the rest of the works, as the whole thing is one long juxtaposition of industrial, working class culture.

Adrian Street with his father at the pithead of Brynmawr Colliery, Wales, 1973 Hutchinson, Dennis.

Although not immediately obvious, despite the amount of wall space given up to it, the centrepiece in many ways is the jukebox, which plays old worksongs, folk songs and sounds from industrial machines, neatly showing the connection between music, industry and working conditions, many of the songs being comments or complaints about the working conditions themselves.  Paintings of male miners are placed directly opposite photographs of female workers, the paintings crudely done and uniform, no way to differentiate the miners at all, no identity to speak of. There are more recent but still historical photographs of Salford, a city born from the docks that are no longer in use, then a ravaged post industrial mess, now a bustling network of glass fronted offices, shopping malls  and expensive hotels. Is there any real difference between a miner from the 1900's and the Amazon warehouse workers of today? It seems to show that overall, however modernised we seem to be or think we are, that the working classes are treated with the same casual disregard as they ever were, and that the management and the owners may well have to present a friendlier face, but in the end, its the same as it ever was.

Connections

James Sharples (1825-92) was a self-taught English artist born at Wakefield in Yorkshire. . During his spare time he learned to read and write.  He subsequently began to make figure and landscape drawings, and copy lithographs.
Sharples took up painting when he was eighteen. The following year he started work on The Forge, after which he made this engraving. He completed it in 1847, having worked on it in his spare time for three years. While making the painting he attempted to work full-time as an artist, but he was unable to sustain himself financially.

The Forge, Sharples, James, 1847

The painting shows a predominantly dark picture, the only point of light being the forge itself, a searing highlight of white, a group of men working hard, but as a team to make whatever it is they're forging, something made of iron or steel.
The Judas Priest album, Unleashed in the East, recorded in Japan in the late 1970's, isnt obviously connected, yet is a group of men working to make something tangible, a group of working class men, all from the Midlands, all whose recent forefathers were miners or factory workers, all wearing a type of uniform connected to the music itself, the music called Heavy Metal, arguably invented by another 4 working class men from the Midlands, Black Sabbath, a sound that the band freely admit was inspired by the rhythm
of industrial machines from the factories they worked in.

Unleashed in the East, Judas Priest, cover art, Photography Costello, Fin,1979.