A quote

My favorite quote by my favorite photographer, Lee Friedlander:

"I only wanted Uncle Vernon standing by his own car (a Hudson) on a clear day, I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography."

Review: Transsibériades

I really know little about this book or the photographer. The reason I bought is that I read on lensculture.com that he had won the European Publishers Award for Photography 2009, they showed some of the pictures from the book. I liked those and ordered it from Amazon. Oddly enough, not all of the pictures shown on lensculture are actually in the book and on his homepage, www.sluban.com, there is no mention of this series of pictures. All I know is that he is born in Slovenia and lives in France. He has conducted photography workshops in prisons around the world, so he seems like a nice guy.

The book seems to be about a trip from Eastern Europe through Russsia to China and Tibet, although the photos are taken from 2001 to 2008. The narrative is roughly linear with the first part of the book in Eastern Europe and ending up in Tibet but with flashbacks to Eastern Europe all along the way. Many of the pictures look like they're taken through a train window, passing through.

The quality of the book and the printing is good, the photos being matte on heavy white paper with wide margins. I like the feel of the pages, you can almost close your eyes and read the pictures by touch. Sometimes there are two pictures to a spread, sometimes only one. At the end there is an overview, telling us where the pictures are taken but otherwise there´s no accompanying text.

On to the pictures. These photos are not preoccupied with technical details. They are willfully underexposed, with a lot of movement blur and rough grain. One is reminded of the Provoke style of Japanese photography. Here is a typical spread:




The atmosphere is uniformly bleak. It´s dark, it´s cold and wet. The houses look like prisons and the people feel like ghosts. Animals appear, dogs, cats and camels. A photo I particularly like is taken in Shanghai. A white cat is literally flying through a blurry, rough looking neighborhood. It looks like a visitor from another world:



Another typical picture is of an empty birdcage, hanging by a large hook in what looks like a window or doorway. In the background is a grim fence and beyond that a background of skyscrapers on an inhuman scale, wrapped in fog:



Like I said before, the human presence does not add much life to the pictures as they look like ghosts, lost in their surroundings. Here is an image I like very much, where a white hat seems to float among the dark mass of people outside a train window:



In summary, I love this book, although many people might the uniform bleakness and darkness hard to digest. Definitely recommended, good luck finding a copy!

Photography is hard

The reason photography is so hard is because it´s so damn easy. All you have to do is press a button and you have a photo. Everybody´s doing it, millions of photos are being created everyday, lots of them are great images, either by accident or design. Which is of course why it´s so damn hard to make meaningful images. I´m not even sure that the phrase meaningful image makes any sense. My approach to photography is not to have an approach other than to walk around with camera in hand and keep my eyes and my mind open. Hopefully someday out of this mass of images there will crystallize some kind of vision of the world. I´m not averse to beauty but I like to find beauty in unexpected places. I´d like to illustrate this by a picture I took some three weeks ago and I´m pretty pleased with. It´s taken in the town where I was born, Akranes, Iceland, behind a fish processing plant. The wall behind the structure is bright red in color, in open shade on a sunny day. To me it´s an illustration of an enigma. I don´t know what this thing is for or why it´s there. I really don´t know why it stands out quite so clearly against the background and most of all I don´t know why this thing caught my eye and why it continues to draw my eye still.

Apology

This is to the two or three people who may have stumbled upon this blog in it´s previous incarnation. It was a halfhearted attempt to create a "real blog" where I would in a slightly amusing way comment upon the happenings of the world. Maybe I just don´t care enough about what´s happening in the world but my postings became fewer and fewer and lately I´ve only been using this blog to follow other people´s blogs, most of them in English and most of them about photography. Tonight I looked back upon the posts that I had written so far and found them of little interest. So I deleted them all, therefore the apology, although I don´t think I´ve done any damage to the world of thinking by removing these random ramblings.

Why English? For the simple reason that most of the blogs I follow are in English and I want to be able to participate in discussions on those blogs and the things I want to write about will be of interest to few people in Iceland (maybe they will be of interest to few people, period, but hey, give me a chance). This will not be a personal diary and it will not concern itself with politics. I will post some photos and my thoughts about them. As I have started a small collection of photobooks I hope to write some reviews of these. Maybe I will stray into music, my other main interest. Time will tell.