iPhoneography

iPhone's have been on my mind recently as E just had hers brazenly stolen straight out of her hand on the metro last week. I may be just a bit behind the curve writing about the iPhone when Apple have just launched their new revolutionary (and badly named) iPad, but I recently received an email from Chicago-based Jeremy Edwards with information about his From the Pocket iPhone photography project, a kind of visual diary of his city, which he is planning to publish as a series of print-on-demand books starting this year. His site comes with a kind of (dis)claimer, "All of the images featured on this site were captured using iPhone cameras. Images were processed using various iPhone photography applications only." Jeremy calls himself an iPhoneographer and refers to photographs taken with an iPhone as a specific genre, "iPhoneography".

This reminded me that a few months back I had been surprised to discover that Joel Sternfeld, one of the big names of American colour photography known for his large-format work, was going to publish a book of photographs of Dubai entitled iDubai taken exclusively with an iPhone (amusingly iDubai is also the name of a 50-storied residential development), and I've caught glimpses of other iPhone photography projects since. The impact of the iPhone is not limited to photography either. There was quite a bit of excitement when the New Yorker featured a cover 'painted' using the iPhone application Brushes and a few 'serious' painters and draughtsmen like David Hockney have begun to use the iPhone instead of a paintbrush or pencil.

In relation to painting and drawing, the iPhone does seem to offer something genuinely new to artists. This kind of pocket-sized touchscreen technology is groundbreaking and it goes far beyond what carrying around a pen and paper can offer. I don't have much experience using computer software to draw or paint, but it seems to me that being able to cut out the mouse and to be able to draw with your finger directly on to a screen must feel far more immediate and intuitive. I have yet to see any iPhone art that I have enjoyed in and of itself rather than thinking, "that is quite impressive for something produced on an iPhone," but I'm sure I will soon enough.

However, when it comes to photography I fail to see what distinguishes photographs taken with an iPhone from photographs taken with any other cameraphone. One of the big gripes people have with the iPhone is that the camera isn't all that great, although that has been improved on more recent models. I find mine to be noticeably worse than on my previous cameraphone. The touch-screen is irrelevant in the process of taking a photograph: what difference does it make whether you press an actual button or one that appears on your screen? So what is it that has made people so excited about the iPhone as a camera. Is it the iPhone applications that allow you to edit photographs on your phone directly instead of having to upload them to a computer first? While I think that apps are really one of the greatest innovations about the iPhone, I don't see how this brings much to the table in terms of photography. Sure there are now lots of applications that are essentially extremely basic versions of Photoshop, allowing you to make a photograph look like a Polaroid or apply a virtual selenium toner, but I don't see the advantage of being able to do this instantly instead of waiting a few hours and doing it on a computer with better quality photo-editing software.  iPhoneography strikes me as more of a brand name than a distinct photographic practice. In that sense it is closer to Lomography, the craze that two very marketing-savvy Austrian students managed to create around the Russian Lomo Kompakt Automat camera.

Review: Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder

"I like seeing things and I like words. There is something revelatory about the two together, an almost pentecostal feeling of seeing in tongues" Lewis Koch

Lewis Koch's Touchless Automatic Wonder started out as a web-based project quite a few years ago (the site is optimized for Internet Explorer 5, so it shows its age) and has recently made the leap into book form. For more than 20 years, Koch has collected fragments of found text from all over the world with his camera. As someone who obsesses about what font to use every time I open a Word document, I was naturally curious to see Koch's textual world. After a first viewing of the book, I realised that this is a much more difficult project than I had initially thought. Finding bits of quirky or visually interesting text around the world is one thing, but there is a lot more required to go beyond visual gimmickry or typology (in both senses of the word) to create a coherent photographic project that says something about the world in which these fragments of text are found.

The text does not always take center stage in Koch's photographs, and instead often acts as an element of intrigue that is there to enrich the photograph. The book jumps from India to the Deep South, from Paris to Mexico, with a big chunk of time spent in Wisconsin and there is a feeling of universality which this nomadic wandering brings to the series. More interestingly, Koch has collected text in very different forms: this is not just a succession of amusing billboards or old peeling posters, but also of dollar bills, broken bottles, TV subtitles, children's sanskrit scrawl on a blackboard, and a peeling stencil in the window of a photo studio that felt like a nod to a certain Walker Evans. Importantly I found a lot of these images to be interesting photographs without whatever textual element they might contain. There are a couple of weak points and I felt that the book would have been benefited from a slightly tighter edit, but overall Koch succeeds in weaving some very disparate elements into a world that feels like his own.

The quote at the beginning of this review is also revelatory of one strong characteristic of this work. Koch's photographs do not contain many people, or no more than a hand, a silhouette or a few shadows. Often the words that appear graffitied on a wall, carved into stone, or plastered across a billboard feel almost like direct pronouncements from some kind of God. ART, MODESTY, THE PROMISE, SEE, STOP. They don't combine into any form of coherent message, Koch is not trying to unlock the codex of life, but instead I think he succeeds in creating a real feeling of (touchless automatic) wonder.

Lewis Koch, Touchless Automatic Wonder: Found Text from the Real World, (Madison: Borderland Books, Hardback, 267 x 222 mm, 112 pp, 80 duotone illustrations, 2009).

Rating: Recommended

Frauke Eigen, Shoku

Frauke Eigen is currently showing her series Shoku at London's Atlas Gallery. The series is "inspired by recent visits to Japan" and this comes through in both the subject matter and the approach. These black-and-white images are taken right up close to their subject bringing texture and form to the fore. These are arguably distinguishing features of Japanese photography. In general, Western art presents a framed scene where the totality of the subject is displayed, whereas in Japanese art the subject of a piece may be a small detail (please forgive this gross generalisation). This focus on texture and detail has led to some of the great series of Japanese photography, Kikuji Kawada's Chizu (The Map) and Shomei Tomatsu's Nagasaki 11:02, which I posted about on the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombings.

On first viewing I really liked Shoku. The images, although very different, fit together well to form a coherent series. I particularly like the 'portraits', if they can be called that. The way these are tightly cropped, leaving out the eyes, draw the eye to things that we often don't see, the roundness of a cheek or the slope of an upper lip. The lines of a face or a naked breast combine well with the geometry of a window pane or paving stone (some of these images reminded me of Yasuhiro Ishimoto's New-Bauhaus-influenced early work). But despite all of this, there is a certain orientalist, exoticist quality to the work that makes me a little uneasy. I have seen a couple of interesting posts recently on this issue that I recommend reading. Maybe it is the shots of the fabric of a kimono or of cherry blossoms in bloom, but sometimes the Japaneseness of these images is laid on a little too thick for me. The gallery's spiel doesn't help, but that is to be expected, "a gentle rhythm leads the viewer from one print to the next, always balanced, always serene, an aesthetic of simplicity akin to Zen." I think this bothered me because many of the images manage to take inspiration from a Japanese aesthetic while taking it into what feels like a new direction.

Apparently the prints are on super-matt paper which is laminated with a rice starch. I would like to see the prints themselves as  with subtle work like this, the print is often a crucial part of the work.

Marion Poussier

Marion Poussier has just been awarded the Joy of Giving Something's first artist award (they throw in $15,000 with the award which is nice). I've written about JGS before and I'm glad to be reminded of their great virtual exhibition space. Poussier is a young French photographer, who already has a few interesting series under her belt. JGS are showing work from two of these, One Summer and The Free Movement of Desire. I preferred the latter, which focuses on Israel, Lebanon and Iran. As the title of the series suggests, these images show how love and desire exist in the context of the Middle East. I found it refreshing to see a photographic portrayal of this region where war is not the central focus and where passion and even joy are brought to the fore. Some of these images even have a certain sense of insouciance and normalcy. Poussier's website is a little underdeveloped but you can see more of her work there.

Update (28 April 2010): Poussier just sent me a link to her new website which is much better than the old one!

Minutiae

After a period of overuse I barely give Flickr a glance any more. The proliferation of animated gif 'awards' for best-super-duper-gr8est-pic-ever that get handed out to anything that is posted and the intricate descriptions of what kind of strobe lights were used to take some of the world's most boring images just makes me want to run a mile. To use an analog analogy, I think you have to have a crate-digger of great skill and patience to find the good stuff on Flickr (Mrs Deane is among the best that I know of).

But once in a while Flickr does throw something pretty unexpected at you. The level of detail that goes into these photographs by Michael Paul Smith is pretty astounding. Models fascinate a number of contemporary photographers (Thomas Demand, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Honjo) and while I don't think Murphy is driven by the same motivations, there is something inherently fascinating about this kind of photographic 'illusion'. Check out the full set here, complete with mustachioed 'behind the scenes' evidence.