Paris Photo and beyond

It's that time of year: once again Paris Photo is breathing down the back of our neck and my diary is already getting out of hand. As always there is a lot to look forward to at Paris Photo itself, but the key to making it through these five days alive is leaving Paris Photo at regular intervals and reminding yourself of the existence of natural light. So here are a few of my picks, at Paris Photo itself...

• Ryuji Miyamoto's photograms at Taro Nasu Gallery
• The Arab Image Foundation in Beirut's selection from their collection. I know very little about the photographic tradition of the region and I'm not usually a fan of Paris Photo's central exhibition, but this promises to be an eye-opener.
• 'Hanging out' with Roger Ballen (Saturday, 4pm, Project Room)

... and beyond

• Irving Penn at Thierry Marlat. Penn passed away very recently and Marlat has represented him for many, many years. If anyone has got good Penn, it is Marlat and apparently Penn was involved in all aspects of the show down to the invitation.
• Daido Moriyama, Lettre à Saint-Lou at François Sage. I'm sure there will be some Moriyama at Paris Photo, but if you feel in need of a bigger dose of 'are-bure-boke' then try François Sage's (appointment only) exhibition, which judging from the invitation alone, should be rather good.
• Pablo Hare (who I discovered at Photoquai), Alejandra Lavadia and Cinthia Marcelle at Bendana-Pinel.

After today blogging is likely to be patchy at best, so bear with me until next week.

Pascal Fellonneau

Pascal Fellonneau's images reveal a different side of Iceland to the quasi-lunar scapes that we are used to seeing from this extraordinarily beautiful and strange country. The sweeping vistas are still there, but he focuses more on the details of how people live on this island. His images are crisp with eye-popping colours and people are pretty scarce. They made me think of an abandoned toy-town (which may well be the case given Iceland's recent financial woes) with only a few passers-by left coming through.

Stormy weather over the US museum landscape

There is a very interesting debate going on at the moment in the US blogosphere and press over the New Museum's series of upcoming shows entitled the "Imaginary Museum." The stir is caused by the fact that this series of exhibitions will be based around private collections, the first of which belongs to Dakis Joannou and will be curated by Jeff Koons, who features heavily in the collection. Tyler Green has been covering this issue for several weeks and it is now spilling over into the mainstream press. It raises some very interesting questions about how museum exhibitions get made these days and the broader realities of today's art world. This is something I have written about before and it seems that the situation is not exactly improving. I highly recommend following all of this on MAN.

Steven B. Smith

Steven B. Smith's Close to Nature and The Weather and a Place to Live "chronicle the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia." They are studies of the ridiculous ways that man interacts with nature, by turn extraordinarily strange, funny and depressing in their bleakness. The man-meets-nature-and-produces-weirdness thing is not exactly uncommon, but I think Smith has a very keen compositional eye and does not go for the obvious subjects, often focusing in on the more easily overlooked details. A great trip into American suburbia that makes you want to go back for more but to never, ever live there.

His work will be on show at Sasha Wolf in NY in January.

Photography has died (again)

A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk at the American University of Paris given by Fred Ritchin, the author of After Photography, who has been thinking and writing about the future of photography in the digital age for longer than most people. The session was tantalisingly entitled Photography and human rights, but mercifully it was far more interesting than the title suggests.

His talk (given in total darkness so that we could see the slide show that he had prepared), was much like the man's career: it darted off in several directions at once, with ideas constantly being eaten up by new ones. While I did will him to slow down on more than one occasion, his rapid-fire thought-process is fascinating and the quantity of ideas that get thrown at you at once are in keeping with Ritchin's message that we need to wake up and smell the digitally enhanced coffee.

In his view (one which I share) slick, glossy photo-journalism is antiquated and only has a minuscule impact on the contemporary audience. In recent times it has been replaced by 'citizen photo-journalists' taking photos with whatever cameras they have to done. Somewhat strangely, poor quality, pixelated, uncomposed images have become a mark of authenticity, some kind of indication of a raw truthfulness. In the era of reality TV we want images made by insiders not outsiders, no matter how good the latter are.

Ritchin's central thesis is that we are lagging way behind technological innovation in terms of the way we use photography to address issues of human rights and more broadly issues of sustainable development. He illustrated this idea by a number of image-related tools (not all of them photographic), which Ritchin sees as having huge, virtually untapped potential: Google's Street View, Photosketch, Photosynth, etc. One great example of the use of technological innovation to make photography do something completely new and actually useful is the Extreme Ice Survey, a project that provides visual proof of how the glaciers are melting using time lapse photography.

I had to keep stopping myself from thinking about Ritchin's propositions in the context of fine art photography, which is where I spend most of my photographic time, because these are ideas that are centred around press or, more loosely, documentary photography.

Overall, while I don't agree with Ritchin's doom-mongering message that press photography is all but dead, I think he is right in his provocative call for shaking things up and, more importantly, for making use of the amazing technology that already exists. This applies far beyond the realm of photography to much of web 2.0's innovations, particularly to social networking. If we could get Facebook to be about more than looking at drunken photos of college frat parties or throwing virtual sheep at each other, it could potentially make some kind of difference.

Further reading: for some reasons why photography may not be entirely dead, try reading these Asian photographers' answers to the question, "Why photography now?"