#7 Chas Ray Krider

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#6 David LaChapelle

DAVID LACHAPELLE
Photo by Jake Langbehn

"David LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1969. He trained as a fine artist at North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to New York. Upon his arrival LaChapelle enrolled in both the Arts Student League and the School of Visual Arts. Andy Warhol offered him his first professional job shooting for Interview magazine. Recently ranked among the top ten Most Important People in Photography in the world by American Photo, he has continued to garner numerous awards."
http://www.davidlachapelle.com/bio.shtml

© David LaChapelle, Death by Hamburger, for Italian Vogue, Los Angeles 2001


© David LaChapelle, Pamela Anderson studded with stars, 2001


© David LaChapelle, Angelina Jolie in Poppy Field, 2001

"Throughout the 1980s LaChapelle became well-known as a photographer in the New York art world. In the early 1990s he began to take photographs of celebrities and fashion for magazines such as Details and London´s The Face. He developed a signature style, characterized by super-saturated colors and the shocking poses and contexts in which he got celebrities and models to appear. He has been photographing famous subjects and fashion for magazines ever since. His images are now seen regularly in such publications as Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, The London Sunday Times, i-D, Flaunt, Arena, Interview, and Vanity Fair, among others. He is currently under contract with Vanity Fair. Selections of his work have been brought together in two books, LaChapelle Land (1996) and Hotel LaChapelle (1999), and exhibited in galleries and museums internationally.

LaChapelle has done advertising campaigns for a variety of clients including Pepsi, Camel, Levi´s, Diesel Jeans, and recently the Got Milk? campaign. He has completed commercial projects and print advertisements for Armani Jeans and MTV, as well as commercials for Sprite, Comedy Central, and Citibank. He shot the entire print campaign for the MTV 2000 Video Awards, and has photographed numerous album covers and packages for such artists as Whitney Houston, No Doubt, Perry Farrell, Lil´ Kim, Elton John, and Madonna."
http://www1.kunsthauswien.com/english/austellungen/lachapelle.php



© David LaChapelle, Posing for Postcards


© David LaChapelle, Cameron Diaz

check out LaChapelle's website or go straight to the gallery

#5 Richard Wentworth

Richard Wentworth Born Samoa 1947 - lives and works in London


Richard Wentworth, from Making Do and Getting By

" Richard Wentworth is one of the generation of younger, internationally acclaimed British sculptors who have fundamentally altered traditional definitions and perceptions of sculpture. His work allows us to recreate our perception of the world by forcing us to reappraise the objects with which we are surrounded. He has said 'I live in a ready-made landscape and I want to put it to work': he takes manufactured objects and re-presents them, stretching affinities and creating unions with fresh elements. The object and our perception of it are thus fundamentally reconceived."
http://www.site-walsall.co.uk/square1/rw_cont.htm


Richard Wentworth, from Making Do and Getting By

Introduction to 2001 exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery:

"In this unusual exhibition, Richard Wentworth's extraordinary series of photographs Making Do and Getting By(1974-2001), is brought into dialogue with the work of Frenchman, Eugène Atget, a figure who stands at the beginning of thinking about photography and Modernism.

Both Atget and Wentworth are authors of photographic compendia which describe the great cities of London and Paris poised at two very different moments of change - at the twentieth century's beginning and at its end. For both, the city is a vivid yet fugitive place, continually undergoing cycles of renovation, disintegration and renewal once more. Its pavements are a 'stage' for social activity, and its physical details, however fleeting, full of meaning about the nature of an urban society - and what the individuals within it, own, do, make and improvise.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a repertory actor with a flagging career, turned to photography. Over the next thirty years, he produced an inexhaustible stream of photographs documenting every corner of a Paris entering the new century. With the intention of selling his 'documents' to painters, set designers and craftsmen, Atget built up a massive inventory - some 8,500 photographs - of the city's streets, alleys, shopfronts, and peripheral zones: street by street, building by building, door knocker by door knocker. He divided his work into 13 categories - among them the ambulatory street traders of Paris (plate menders, lampshade makers, baguette sellers); the vehicles of the city (59 horse-drawn contraptions and one steam-roller); domestic interiors across the class spectrum (including his own which he coyly described as the home of 'Mr R, dramatic artist'), and the glazed shop fronts and mannequin-filled displays that were to so enthuse the Surrealists.

Although separated by a century in time, it is perhaps not so far from Atget's extraordinary Zoniers album - photographs of the colony of ragpickers and scrap merchants living in shanty towns on the edge of Paris - to Richard Wentworth's scrap-sifting street traders on the Caledonian Road. Both squeeze the last drops of economic value from objects which might be deemed commodities in the morning, and rubbish by evening. It is this battle with utility which intrigues Wentworth, as he documents objects which may have failed in one function, only to find an entirely new one - like the leaky wellington boot now adapted into a perfect door wedge, or the finger of fudge which stops the school bell ringing.

It is the 'manners' of the street which absorb Wentworth. Those manners are manifest in the language it speaks, in the form of helpfully scrawled signs - 'Press for long time', a home-owner has written, encouragingly, by their doorbell. It is in those final 'gestures of politeness', which prevent someone dropping their half-eaten sandwich on the ground, and decide instead to tuck it in the craw of a tree. Or the infectious behaviour that spreads in the streets, when, for instance, one person's discarded coke can, is joined by another and another...

Wentworth, like Atget, rarely photographs people, and yet his world is human, all the more human, for being uninhabited. Whether in his gentle anthropomorphism - a decrepit car, its drooping bumper bandaged with carpet as if wounded - or in his alertness to the practical, yet curious decisions made when dealing with the vicissitudes of life - like the hurried shopper who abandons his dog in the street, chained, not to the railings, but to his shoulder bag - Wentworth's photographs make us look afresh at the cityspace and the humanity it contains."

Kate Bush, Senior Programmer
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/10/06/29200.html


Richard Wentworth, from Making Do and Getting By

Tuesday October 9, 2001 _ _ _ article in The Guardian

Snap, crackle and pop

'Connections are made, broken, remade, lost and found again'... Adrian Searle on two photographers who capture the ramshackle, makeshift chaos of city life

Since 1974, the sculptor Richard Wentworth has been taking a series of photographs called Making Do and Getting By. You could describe the photos as a visual notebook, or even as a small anthropological investigation. Whether they have been taken on the hoof through London or Istanbul, their subjects are consistent. What the images record are small moments of human ingenuity, vivid yet ephemeral disruptions of the commonplace, breaks in the order of things.

Wentworth has always been interested in our relationship with "things" - with the world of use, overproduction, disposability. This doesn't mean just the stuff we keep in our pockets or in a drawer, but cars, wardrobes, doors, buildings, walls, the streets themselves. He records our improvisatory negotiations with a recalcitrant world. The objects in the images fall loosely into categories of acts: piling, propping, wedging and leaning. Many of Wentworth's photos also focus on more or less startling displacements, what might almost be misuses, even abuses.

A door wedged open with a gumboot, the clapper of an alarm bell silenced with a Fudge bar still in its wrapper, a catering-size tin of peas used as a cafe doorstop. These kind of uses have always been the mainstay of Making Do, but many other photographs are less to do with the utilitarian, and more to do with the happenstance arrangements of things, or ad hoc kinds of display, especially the pavement displays of second-hand furniture outside the junk shops of Caledonian Road in north London. Rows of old armchairs lined up by a bus stop, vacant sofas at the kerb, upended chairs like fallen men.

What is there to connect Wentworth with Eugène Atget, both of whose works are on show at London's Photographers' Gallery? They occupy adjacent rooms and different epochs. The Atgets - which mostly date from the turn of the last century - sit in dim light, framed and fading. The Wentworths are perched on a shelf which runs around the walls of a brightly lit room. Contrast and compare, the exhibition seems to say.

From the late 1880s until the 1920s, Atget wandered Paris, photographing the streets, doorways, facades and shop signs of the city. His photographs are mostly unpeopled. It is not that his Paris is deserted - just that the humans do not linger for enough time in the long exposures of his camera to be much more than a fleeting blur. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the photographer, but only as a shadow on a wall, or a presence reflected in a shop window or mirror.

The dates of Atget's pictures tell us something of how the photographer crossed and recrossed Paris, sometimes returning to the same corner, the same address, years - sometimes decades - apart, to photograph the same subject from a slightly different angle, in a different light. Atget was taken up by the surrealists, but insisted that his images of shop-window dummies be reproduced anonymously. He did not, publicly at least, conceive of himself as an artist.

Wentworth, on the other hand, most certainly is an artist, of the most self-conscious sort, whose works might be seen as having been born under the sign of Marcel Duchamp. Atget spoke of himself as an "archivist" and called his photographs mere "documents". Man Ray had Atget as an interesting "primitive", yet there is nothing remotely primitive in Atget's talent.

John Szarkowski, for 30 years director of the photography department at New York's Museum of Modern Art, writes in a recent book that it was Atget's "recognition of the endless plasticity of the world that enabled him to return... to the same motifs, knowing that they would always be anew". It is this recognition of "endless plasticity" that unites Atget and Wentworth. Apart from the fact that both artists' images are the result of their wanderings around cities, they have little else in common.

I enjoy their work, but for very different reasons. Wentworth's images do not have the density and richness of Atget's, from which Szarkowski teases an entire world, making a point about Atget that also applies to Wentworth: "In an ideal world there is a place for everything, but in the real world things tend to migrate to places where they do not belong."

And so we find, among Wentworth's discoveries, a wine glass upended on the cast-iron spike of some railings, a car seat wedged in a plastic dustbin. We might groan at these examples of the out-of-place, but they have a kind of abject poetry. It is impossible not to be aware of Wentworth's self-conscious artist's eye, his sculptor's feel for things - how things are piled, or angled, how the plastic cups are crumpled and stuffed into the space between wall and drainpipe. He notices things that look like his sculptures, which seem to operate by the same organisational principles.

For Atget, everything is in his photographs, even if his ultimate intentions were more shadowy. Many of his images - over 8,500 of them - were made to be sold to architects, designers, artists, archives. But the thing about Atget is that there is more going on in the photograph, and in the world, than the superficial record of a thing or a place. Exactly where he places himself, framing the shot, is of absolute importance. This is not so with Wentworth. What Atget's camera captures is more than an intention, more than evidence.

Wentworth's images cannot haunt you the way an Atget can. The mis-aligned chequerboard lino in a Bloomsbury kitchen has none of the intensity of the ex-Austrian ambassador's rococco apartment. But it isn't just the content of the photograph that counts, it is the viewpoint, the arrangement. Faster, more portable cameras, have changed the tenor and the tempo of photography. Wentworth, I feel, in common with many photographers, shoots from the hip, kerb-crawling his subjects, on his way to somewhere else.

Wentworth photographs junk stalls and pavement furniture displays, as Atget did sometimes, but is there anything in Wentworth to match Atget's streets, alleys, doorways and facades? I don't think so. You can consume a Wentworth. Atget consumes you. And yet perhaps Wentworth and Atget are interested in something similar here - not so much in strata of muck piled in the streets, nor the stratification of society, but in another kind of layering of the world: how things go into freefall, how connections are made, broken, remade, lost and found again. This is how city life is. This is where we lose and find ourselves at every turn, chasing the ghosts of past selves. If this exhibition has a lesson, that is it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,728547,00.html

#4 Martin Parr

Martin Parr
British, b. 1952

"Born in Epsom, Surrey, Martin Parr has studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic (1970-73) and gained early recognition in Europe and abroad as he won three successive awards from the Arts Council of Great Britain in the late 1970s.

To support his career as a freelance photographer, he took on various teaching assignments between 1975 and the early 1990s. Then, after much heated debate because of his provocative photographic style, he became a Magnum member in 1994, and his work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States and acquired by a large number of public collections.

In recent years Parr, a prolific photographer who best expresses himself through books, has continued shooting assignments in medium-format color, but has also experimented with fill-in flash and a 35mm ringflash camera. His subject matter continues to be the study of the idiocies of mass tourism as well as the spiritual crisis of the lower classes and the middle class. He shows us an environmentally destroyed world in which the major saving grace is a gritty, very British sense of humor. He has shot several film documentaries and a TV documentary, "Think of England"."
http://www.magnumphotos.com/c/htm/TreePf_MAG.aspx?E=29YL53UHBZX&Det=T

Parr specialises in the boring. He loves and collects boring photographs. There is a lot of humour and cynicism in all of his photographs. He is also obsessed with objects and now has the biggest collection of Saddam Hussein watches (he made a series out of them - see below). Martin Parr prolonges the documentary tradition, with a twist. A must see. He had a big influence on Stephen Gill (see link for his work) who is now receiving a lot of attention as well.
Parr also organised the exhibitions in the "35es Festival international de la photographie" in Arles in 2004, a show where he has been participating since 1986.




Martin Parr - Europe (From the Phone Series)


Martin Parr, Ocean Dome [bath center], 1996
C-Print, ex. no. 2/25, 41,5 x 51 cm [65,5 x 74 cm framed]


Martin Parr, from Common Sense 1995-1999. Martin Parr, courtesy Rocket Gallery


Martin Parr, from Common Sense 1995-1999. Martin Parr, courtesy Rocket Gallery

Partial Bibliography

Bad Weather, 1982
A Fair Day, 1984
Last Resort, 1986
One Day Trip, 1989
The Cost of Living, 1989
Home and Abroad, 1993
Bored Couples, 1993
From A to B, 1994
Small World, 1995
Common Sense, 1999
Boring Postcards 1999
Martin Parr. Autoportrait. 2000
Think of England. 2000.
Martin Parr, 2002

Martin Parr will be exhibiting his Fashion Show at the Rocket Gallery from 20 MAY to 3 JULY.
Rocket (New Space in the Tea Building)
Ground Floor, Tea Building, 56 Shoreditch High St, E1 6JJ

CT: Do you use only small format cameras for your fashion work and is this a conscious decision?

Juergen Teller: "I always use 35mm cameras. They are very magical for me, I think it is very close to life. With a medium-format camera, the image is flat and looks like a photograph because it becomes studied and structured. Using a 35mm camera, it feels like I have caught something out of life. It provides a way of breaking down certain barriers because I'm shy, and it helps ease down the person I'm photographing. It gives a certain rhythm and the other person has a sensation that this is not that precious or important. The interesting point is where things start and end. What is reportage photography, portrait photography or fashion photography? How can you separate photography's capacity both to trace something real - the event in front of the camera - but also to express the photographer's pre-conceived ideas and sensibility? Photography carries both real and fictional elements and I enjoy the slippage between the traditional genres of photography that this combination allows. With everything in life, we want to put things in categories. I think there aren't many photographers who are able to blur the lines. You do have a slightly different way of working with different subjects but , in a way, it is all the same. Sometimes the reason you take photographs is to find out something for yourself. You are really curious to see how something looks in a picture. I want to show what I am curious about, go into areas that I am unsure of and that are uneasy for me. The camera opens doors to places you would never get without it. As long as I have emotion, I am sure I will explore things."

Imperfect Beauty: The making of contemporary fashion photographs. Charlotte Cotton. 2000. London: V&A Publications
p.123

#3 Richard Billingham

Richard Billingham
born 1970 in Birmingham. Lives and work in Brighton.

Richard Billingham, still an art student, wanted to be a painter. He started taking snapshots of his family in their council flat. The photographs were crude and sincere, starting with B/W and then turning to colour. Attention was drawn on the textures and fabrics, varied patterns giving great visual results. Yet his intentions were only to make paintings from the photographs. His first book of photographs, Ray's a Laugh rocketted him to success as a photographer in the 1990s. It all came quite unexpectedly for Billingham. Feeling he has exploited the snapshot aesthetic enough, Billingham is shooting in 6x7 medium format since 2000, concentrating on nature, landscapes and more abstract kinds of work to turn away from the snapshot. How long will it take for him not to be associated to the snapshot anymore?
Billingham won the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 1997 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001.




Untitled, 1994


Untitled, (Dog Licking Floor), 1995
cibachrome mounted on aluminum
41 1/3 x 62 1/4"


Untitled, (Liz's Kitten), 1995
cibachrome mounted on aluminum
19 4/3 x 29 1/2 "


Untitled, 1995


Ethiopian Landscape III, 2001


Untitled n.13, Black Country, 2003

An exhibition of his new work, Black Country, is on at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London. 24 April - 28 May.
60 Great Marlborough St, W1F 7BG

#2 Gregory Crewdson

Born 1962 in Brooklyn, lives in New York City.

Crewdson’s intricate compositions require up to four weeks of planning on the part of the artist and many hours of set design and lighting with the help of more than 35 stagehands, electricians, gaffers, and actors. These elaborate techniques, coupled with powerfully suggestive scenes, have garnered Crewdson recognition as one of the major forces in narrative photography.


Untitled (pregnant woman/pool), 1999. Laser direct C-print, Edition 4/10, 50 x 60 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee. 2000.70.


Untitled (sod man), 1999. Laser direct C-print, Edition 8/10, 50 x 60 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council. 2000.92.



Untitled (family dinner), 2001–02. Digital C-print, 53 x 65 inches (framed). AP 2/3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee. 2002.30.

He was recently on show at the Whitecube Gallery in London, Hoxton Square.

"American photographer Gregory Crewdson's work is notable as existing within the photographic tradition initially developed by the likes of William Eggleston and Walker Evans in a head on collision with filmmakers Stephen Speilberg and David Lynch.

Crewdson primarily depicts the home and suburban disquiet within his photographs, creating elaborate sets worthy of a Hollywood production in order to enhance the sense of malaise and unease. Crewdson's still images act as disturbingly incomplete sentences, with little reference to what went on before and what may follow. Crewdson himself has referred the 'limitations of a photograph in terms of narrative capacity to have an image that is frozen in time, (where) there's no before or after' and has turned that limitation to strength.

Earlier pieces such as 'Untitled' (Suburban Lawn) from 1987-1988 and 'Untitled' (Mulch Circle) of 1997 are most remarkable for what is omitted from the picture frame. Eerily silent gardens on hot summer days where children do not play and the garden table, layered with food appears hurriedly abandoned. A darkened desolate lawn, a car erratically parked on top of the immaculately cut grass and the sparsity of the surroundings emphasised by the illuminated windows. In the series 'Twilight' (1998 - 2002), Crewdson takes these ideas further and makes vivid our imaginations and hidden fears. The mother that appears naked at the dinner table, bearing a vapid expression, whilst the family 'carries on regardless' is chilling in it's closeness to reality, the feeling evoked by these psychologically charged cinematic stills is one that this really 'could happen to you', whilst other images - the man climbing the floral beanstalk, could be straight out of dreamland.

Fantastical in outcome, Crewdson's photographs are often the result of highly complex staged scenes that are constructed by the artist and then digitally manipulated. This process from concept to conclusion is lengthy and again subverts the age-old conviction in the power of the camera to record 'truths'.

Gregory Crewdson teaches at Yale University, from where he graduated in 1988 and has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain (1998), Emily Carr institute of Art and Design, Vancouver (2000) and Site Sante Fe, New Mexico (2001). Aspen Art Museum will present a survey of Crewdson's work in 2002/03 and he also curated the exhibition 'American Standard (Para) Normality and Everyday Life' at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York in 2002."
http://www.whitecube.com/html/artists/grc/grc_frset.html


Untitled (flower pile). 2001. Digital C-print. 48 x 60 in.


Untitled (woman stain). 2001. Digital C-print. 48 x 60 in.

#1 Erwin Wurm

Born in Bruck/Mur, Austria in 1954.
Lives and works in Vienna and New York.

Before being a photographer, Wurm is a sculptor. He uses photography to record obsolete sculptures acted out by people he meets on the street. His interest lies in traces. He documents performances.


Outdoor Sculpture, Taipei 2000, 159.1 x 126.5 cm


Outdoor Sculpture, Appenzell 2000, 120 x 80 cm


Outdoor Sculpture, Appenzell 2000, 120 x 80 cm

Le lièvre et la tortue?

Jose Pedro Cortes has photographed extensively in three cities across Europe, including London, Paris and Berlin. His work forms a dense poetic narrative of encounters with city, inhabitants and loose events of the street. In his recent series, "Untitled Light," the late, slanting city light catches pedestrians mid-stride in a subtle game of disclosure versus darkness. Pedro Cortes received a MA Photography (with honors) from Kent Institute of Art and Design in 2004, and is currently working toward an exhibition at the National Gallery of Photography in Lisbon, November 2005.

Raymond Depardon

En quarante ans de carrière, l'auteur a souvent mêlé, en photographie comme au cinéma, souci documentaire et préoccupations intimes. Il vient de tourner le deuxième volet de son film sur le monde rural.

Il a passé l'année 2004 en trombe : six nouveaux livres, deux expositions, un film en salles. Sans compter la sortie en DVD de six de ses précédents documentaires. Déjà difficilement classable - il brasse du texte, de la photographie et du cinéma, passe de la fiction au reportage -, Raymond Depardon est devenu une usine à produire des images.

On le croit à Rio ou à Tokyo, il est à Paris mais repart bientôt sur les routes de France. Il s'apprête également à présenter, début 2005, le deuxième volet de son film sur le monde rural. Bien sûr, cet éclectisme n'est qu'apparent. On retrouve toujours chez lui les mêmes obsessions : la lumière, la justice, l'errance, les déserts, la peur de l'enfermement, la politique saisie et bousculée par l'image.

Après quarante ans de métier, sa curiosité semble intacte. Elle a été aiguisée par sa formation : photojournaliste dès l'âge de 17 ans, fondateur puis directeur de l'agence Gamma et, enfin, coopté par ses confrères de l'agence Magnum. De son origine paysanne, il a gardé la fascination et un certain refus de la ville, une timidité qu'il dissimule sous des sourires aimables et des flots de parole. Un coup d'œil incisif porté sur les gens et aussi une sorte de roublardise. C'est avant tout un solitaire, un instinctif, un sensitif qui, dans le domaine de la création, privilégie l'émotion plutôt que l'intelligence. Ce qui le range du côté de Proust, contre Sainte-Beuve.

Cela ne suffit pas à expliquer cette boulimie, cet activisme forcené. Pourquoi tant de livres d'un coup ? "Il ne s'agit pas de recycler de vieilles images. Mais je fais partie de cette génération qui a plus de quarante ans d'expérience. A l'époque, on ne bouclait pas un projet, on le mettait de côté, jusqu'à la rétrospective - toujours différée. Aujourd'hui, les photographes veulent aller jusqu'au bout, explorer toutes les possibilités de leur travail, jusqu'à l'exposition et au livre. Dans mon cas, j'avais accumulé du retard, des travaux parallèles s'étaient croisés avec d'autres activités. En 2004, j'ai fait le ménage. Maintenant j'ai l'impression de n'avoir plus rien derrière moi. Cela me rend plus libre pour avancer à nouveau."

Avancer, cela veut dire répondre à la commande. Car le gros volume Paris Journal, qui vient de sortir, est né d'une proposition des éditions Hazan ; c'est la Fondation Cartier qui l'a expédié filmer des villes aux quatre coins du monde pour les besoins de l'exposition "7 ? 3", présentée boulevard Raspail ; et c'est le ministère de la culture qui le relance, début 2005, sur les routes de France. "Les trois quarts de mes travaux sont issus de commandes, admet Raymond Depardon. Elles ont l'avantage de me sortir de moi, de bousculer mes priorités, de me faire découvrir des choses nouvelles, de m'éviter les idées préconçues, de me replonger dans le réel, de pouvoir rester aux aguets. Même la publicité m'a appris à travailler. D'ailleurs, j'ai du mal à boucler les sujets qui me sont personnels et qui n'existent qu'à l'état de fragments - les paysans, les déserts. S'ils étaient achevés, j'aurais l'impression d'être mort. Finalement, seule la pression économique de la production cinématographique m'oblige à terminer mes films."

Comment passer de l'image fixe au cinéma ? "Il y a un côté un peu schizophrène - pas désagréable - dans ce va-et vient. Passer d'un sujet à l'autre, d'une forme à l'autre, me permet de relativiser les choses. D'ailleurs, je n'ai jamais vraiment choisi. J'ai longtemps été un photographe professionnel et un cinéaste ponctuel." Si le cinéma semble avoir aujourd'hui sa préférence, Raymond Depardon considère pourtant qu'Errance (Le Seuil, 2000), texte et photos, marque pour lui une vraie coupure. Notes (Arfuyen, 1979), où il avait introduit la subjectivité du photographe, et La Ferme du Garet(Carré/Actes Sud, 1996), une sorte d'autobiographie, ont également été des tournants. Mais, avec Errance, il a simplifié, dépouillé à l'extrême son propos, évacué l'anecdote.


ÊTRE "SIMPLE ET LISIBLE"


"Je suis assez primaire, assez naïf. J'ai besoin de comprendre ce que je vois. Je travaille toujours au premier degré - l'image et le son sont tellement complexes, tellement riches. Même si je suis sensible à l'élégance des choses, j'estime que la photographie doit être simple, lisible. Mon seul but est de mettre de l'ordre dans le réel. Et l'expérience me permet d'y arriver. Aujourd'hui, je travaille de plus en plus vite et je fais confiance à la rapidité de mon regard. Car la photo, ce n'est pas parler aux gens, c'est quelque chose d'instinctif. Avant de déclencher, l'image est déjà fabriquée dans ma tête. Pour moi, la nouveauté, c'est que je peux faire de petits films de quelques minutes, de petits visuels sans commentaires et des photos au 20 ? 25 qui diront qui je suis."

Pour cet ancien paparazzi, ce ne sont plus les prémices de la chasse qui comptent. "Dans les photos, je me méfie de l'événement, et dans les films, de l'intrigue." Seule l'image compte : "Quand on est dans le Sahel, ce n'est pas notre trouble, notre colère qui est importante, c'est l'image qui apparaît : elle vient contredire notre première impression. Car il y a un décalage entre ce qu'on ressent immédiatement et le résultat."

Raymond Depardon poursuit sa carrière en solo, refusant même d'enseigner. Aujourd'hui, la soixantaine dépassée, il s'approche de l'ère des bilans : "Je m'aperçois que j'ai encore beaucoup de choses à faire. Retourner sur des lieux que j'ai fréquentés, cela me permet de me confronter avec le temps. En 1984, j'avais été fasciné par la ville d'Harar, en Ethiopie. Elle était pour moi la synthèse de l'Orient. Je l'avais photographiée avec un Leica. J'y suis revenu dix ans plus tard avec le même éblouissement. Mon retour ici, en 2004, a été très différent. J'avais un autre appareil et j'étais moins dans l'orientalisme. Ce sont les traces de la modernité urbaine qui m'ont intéressé. Cela m'a réconforté : j'avais avancé dans ma quête du lieu acceptable."

On a souvent reproché au photographe de mêler ses soucis intimes à ses reportages. "Pour regarder les autres, il faut tourner la caméra vers soi-même. J'ai suffisamment dit qui j'étais pour pouvoir filmer les autres." Il se dégage de ses propos une sorte de mélancolie voilée : "Je suis parti pour photographier le général de Gaulle, Brigitte Bardot, et j'ai raté mon père. Mais ce détour m'a permis de filmer le monde rural, que tout le monde disait disparu. Ma trilogie entamée avec Profils paysans n'est pas un document critique, c'est sûr. Je veux seulement saisir ce monde qui va basculer dans l'oubli, rendre un dernier hommage à mes parents paysans. Ici, je ne suis plus cinéaste. Quand je filme sans éclairage, avec juste un preneur de son, je travaille presque avec un sentiment de honte de ne pas avoir été paysan, de faire un métier pas très sérieux. En réalité, je réalise une sorte d'autoportrait de ce que j'aurais pu être."

Emmanuel de Roux

"La photographie est autonome"

"Je reste formaté par mon passé de journaliste. Pourtant, j'ai fini par comprendre que la photographie ne relève ni du journalisme ni de l'art. Elle est autonome. Même si, selon les époques et les intérêts de chacun, elle est tiraillée entre l'un et l'autre. Bien sûr, il est facile de distinguer photo de presse et photo d'art, bien sûr un photographe peut faire du journalisme. Il ne sera pas journaliste pour autant.

Il est vrai, en revanche, que le photographe est proche de l'artiste, par son côté angoissé, anxiogène : il accouche d'un seul coup de quelque chose qui va le représenter. J'ai d'ailleurs beaucoup appris du milieu de l'art. Grâce à lui, mon travail a pris un autre sens, cela m'a libéré. Les cimaises me font encore un peu peur. Je préfère l'intimité d'un livre ou celle de la projection d'un film dans l'obscurité. Ainsi, j'ai l'impression de diriger le spectateur, d'avoir du pouvoir sur lui.

On dit qu'il est plus facile de filmer que de photographier, qu'il suffit de faire tourner la pellicule. Pourtant, même des scènes statiques dans un tribunal, celles de 10e Chambre par exemple, sont très difficiles à capter. Il faut une longue attente, une énorme concentration, pour saisir l'expression d'un homme qui apprend soudain sa condamnation à une peine de prison.

Cette rencontre entre une émotion violente et moi, je n'ai réussi à l'enregistrer qu'une seule fois. Et ce n'était pas un hasard. Mon geste n'a duré que quelques secondes. Mais je l'ai préparé pendant plusieurs mois. Car il fallait que je sois en embuscade, au bon moment, au bon endroit, avec du bon matériel. Et une embuscade, comme le piano, cela doit se travailler tout le temps."

Biographie

1942
Naissance à Villefranche-sur-Saône (Rhône).

1958
Arrivée à Paris.

1980
Tournage de "Reporter".

1987
Mariage avec Claudine Nougaret.

2000
Exposition "Errance" à la Maison européenne de la photographie.
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU MONDE DU 08.12.04

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-389961,0.html

Michals on portraiture

I AM MUCH NICER THAN MY FACE AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT PORTRAITURE

We spend our entire lives looking into mirrors believing the illusions reflected there and comforted by the reality of appearances. Unfortunately, people are seldom what they appear to be, and what is seen is what we expect to see. We look for reassurance not revelation. We do not know.

I knew my mother and father my entire lifetime and not once did they ever reveal themselves to me. To whom have you revealed yourself? Who shares your secrets? What do you know about yourself to tell? Who is reading this now?

For those being photographed, portraiture is essentially about vanity. We want to be told that we are in some way attractive, almost desirable, still young and of value. Anything less is disturbing. We hope for flattery. And all the time we are looking for the wrong thing. We should want clues to our own truth.

High style photographers tend to take the same portrait over and over again. It is essentially the same picture, only the face has been changed to protect the innocent. Each person should be a different solution. The photographer should approach each sitting as if he had never taken a portrait before. He should be surprised by what he has done.

Some photographers can be very presumptuous in their self delusions about “capturing” another person with their cameras. I know of one who actually believes that he reveals the soul of his sitters with his photographs of them. What you see is what there is. It is also nonsense to reduce people to just their costumes, mere social, racial, and sexual clichés. That is looking at people with the pretentions of looking into them. We never see anyone at all.

My portraits in this book have revealed nothing profound about the subjects or captured anything. They were almost all strangers to me. How could I say anything about them when I never knew them. What I did was to share a moment with them, and now I share that moment with you, no more no less.

I always look mean when photographed, yet I am much nicer than my face. I am not just this chin, these wrinkles, this nose. Do not be deceived by my face.

Bizarre looking people are very easy to photograph. All the photographer does is simply record what they bring to him. The more peculiar looking they are, the easier the job is. We all love to slow down and look at accidents on the freeway. Celebrities are the easiest of all to photograph. There is no such thing as a bad celebrity portrait. Even a bad picture is a good one. Essentially these portraits tend to be a kind of P.R. photo, puff muzak photography that is a form of celebrity packaging. One must never confuse the profound with the clever.

When someone says, “what a beautiful photograph”, upon viewing a portrait of a handsome man, what they are really saying is “what a handsome man”. Most often it is an ordinary photograph of a beautiful person. If the photograph were of an ugly person, would it then be an ugly photograph?

I prefer to photograph people in their environments. I hate studios. The things that people choose to spend their lives with gives us clues to whom they are more than their hairlines.

One day, when we have forgotten our names, the only proof that we were ever here may be hose old portraits some where in dusty albums.

As I age, while I still have time, I yearn to know now, more than ever, my true self, that random and illusive thing, decorated with personality. We believe ourselves to be this kaleidoscope of passions and distractions. We are a brilliant and unknown moment, suspended between memory and anticipation, anxious in our uncertainties, and doomed to fade with our consciousness. How can such a mystery be photographed? What is left for us but amazement?

Duane Michals

from: Michals, D. (1988). Album: the portraits of Duane Michals 1958-1988. Pasadena: Twelvetrees Press.

Duane Michals - Things are Queer (1973)

What a monstruous and blissful moment to come accross a work we dreamt we had done not so long ago. My photographic obsessions of the moment, my beliefs and desires, are revealed by this work made in 1973. I didn't exist then, but I saw it and this sequence had been haunting me for years. Read Borges, live in chinese box worlds, and kneel before His queerness Michals... I have to start all over again.