Finding a Yashica...will it work for my street photos?

P803

Inspired by Vivian Maier's photography using a Rolleiflex and remembering my father in law was a keen photographer forty years ago, I rummaged around at home to discover this old Yashica ..now wondering if I can get it working well enough to try it out on the street..seems it needs a 'greener' replacement for the original mercury battery and slightly newer film than the 40+ year old film shown above...like the idea of holding the camera at waist level though...

Hmmm...a longtime since I used film...watch this space!

Finding Vivian Maier

Fascinating insight into this very eccentric street photographer.Working as a nanny for forty years, Maier was a keen photographer during her spare time. Her photos were unknown and unpublished during her lifetime - she took over 100,000, in fact many of the negatives were undeveloped. Then in 2007 John Maloof came across some of Maier's photos and published them initially on the internet and then due to little interest shown linked his blog to a selection of her photos on Flickr. They went viral leading to critical acclaim and interest in her work.This DVD charts what happened from the initial discovery by Maloof to the present day with many interviews with the families that thought they knew her - we get to see some of her work which is amazing..

Maier used a Rolleiflex up until the late 1970s...this allowed her to really get up close to subjects something I can really appreciate now in my attempts to use my DSLR to capture 'street moments' !   Most images are black and white and look to be casual shots of passersby  captured in 'transient' moments.And interestingly she often appears herself in the images.
 

Critics have compared her work to that of 

Robert Frank , Diane Arbus, 

Helen Levitt, Lisette Model and 

Joel Meyerowitz... 

 

OK....the above images do not really do this intriguing photographer justice...the DVD is definitely worth viewing to get a better tasters of her work..

Conflict, Time, Photography...31 January study visit

Really enjoyed this study visit to the Tate...

Much of the interest here lies as much with the way the exhibition is curated as with the works selected. Certainly much of our discussion after looking round the exhibition centred on why order the works through the act of looking backwards.

The starting point is the ' challenge of looking back, considering the past without becoming frozen in the process' This resonated with me in a personal way as one of my recent projects tackled the concept of memory ..looking at and recreating traces.

The  exhibition is made up of work by photographers and artists from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day. The first thing we see are images made moments after the event or the events they depict; then come those made days later, then weeks, months later and at the end we come across images relating to events over 85 years ago.

Fellow OCA students

   

I found this is an emotionally draining body of work that encompasses widely differing events and conflicts, showing photographers in different roles i.e. embedded within armed forces e.g ?., not embedded but in  the midst of the fighting e.g Don McCullin there in a sense of their own will ( Shell-shocked US Marine Vietnam, Hue 1968 ) and there to take photos in a prescribed fashion e.g.George N. Barnard, General Sherman's official photographer in 1864, ( hiw work interestingly influenced in composition by the preRaphaelites).

Initial thoughts were, well this is all about ensuring that the  'memory' of the event / conflict is not lost albeit reinterpretation by the very process of executing the work - does the style interfer? Is abstract better than personalised images? Is the  photographer  wanting to secure 'memory' or evoke emotion or both?  

Simon Norfolk also  provides  interesting insights to his work, large scale images of landscape and architecture where he uses beauty as a wrap around to get people inside and begin a conversation, in this interview with Julian Stallabrass at:

http://tariqalitv.com/portfolio/19-julian-stallabrass-talks-to-simon-norfolk/

I was interested in comments by fellow students regarding the desert images below taken by Sophie Ristelhueber ( Fait 1992) in Kuwait seven months after the First Gulf War to show the 'wounds' inflicted on the landscape.

Sophie Ristelhueber Fait 1992

  

Some were surprised at the mix of black and colour; that they just showed items that would soon be hidden by sand so why bother? For me, the images were traces evoking the brutal conflict; the black and white aerial images a clinical record  juxtaposed opposed to more a personalised record captured in colour.I agreed with the comments of one student who, it seems was out in Iraq, that such traces or memories continue over time both physically and within the psyche of those  who experienced conflict.

What stood out for me and why? 'The Day that Nobody Died'  ( Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin 2008 ) - a striking interpretation and comment by a photographers embedded with the British army on the restriction of  being embedded..embedding being a system invented by the army to 'sanitise ' reporting from the theatre of war. During their visit  to Helmand Province casualties occurred during the first four days of the visit until the fifth day when no one died. Instead of recording all these events as embedded photographers would normally do, they unrolled a six metre section of phootgraphic paper and exposed it to the sun for twenty seconds. 


Shot at dawn  by Chloe Dewe Mathews ?  A series of images taken 96 years later of locations where British, French and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice. Very evocative landscapes...perhaps because of what is left out?

Not surprisingly, there were many works focusing  on and interpreting  Hiroshima and Nagasaki over a long period of time.This for me reinforced the fact that timescale has a definite effect on the approach and photographic interpretation of a conflict .As the years moved on from the American presence in Japan and its hold over the photographic record of the effect and impact of the nuclear bombs on the people and land itself so the visual and creative interpretation changed.

Two approaches  stood out for me.Firstly, Joao Penalva's From the Weeds of Hiroshima 1997...

Joao Penalva  1997

Joao Penalva 1997

These images, photograms, created by placing the plants onto light sensitive paper and exposing the paper so that the plant material creates a negative imprint. It both  emphasised the way nature renews itself       well as focusing on the nuclear 'flash' of light.. 

 

Joao Penalva  1997

Secondly, Hiromi Tsuchida's powerful images of museum artefacts 1982-95.Despite an overheard comment querying whether taking pictures of museum objects was really 'art', for me these images were stark, simple but at the same time complex and emotive memories of what happened to individuals-  a viable juxtaposition to the consideration of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who died at the time of impact and for weeks, months and years after.

 

Hiromi Tsuchida  Damaged Lens with One Frame

The personal spoke out to me more than the abstract in this exhibition, maybe a reaction to the negativity and anonymity of conflict and perhaps this was what many of the photographers were looking for? To remember, you have to  an image or whatever that resonates with you which is what was happening here.

So did the curating help or hinder here? Maybe there were two many images to take in on oine visit and in some respects what we were looking at were a series of exhibitions drawn together. On balance, I preferred the arrangement to one more centred in a direct timeline from 1864 to today... For me the photographer's approach and creativity inevitably influenced by how long after the event ( with all the 'baggage' that the passing of the years bring in terms of  cultural and political changes ) was really interesting.

So a good  study visit leaving plenty to think about and made all the more enjoyable by being able to share the exhibition with fellow students and tutors  and hear their views.