Camera Toss The Blog: Camera Toss, Mini-HOWTO

I can’t resist sharing this ! It is very crazy, but then the results can be quite intersting and beautiful…

tagline: “Best cameras are ones you can afford to destroy…”

A few amazing pictures on archibase.net, showing the remains of Gukanjima, a city covering a small island, off Japan’s shore. There is something instantly capturing the mind about ruins of cities, be it as ancient as Angkor Wat, or as recent as Chernobyl.

The pictures of Gukanjima look like a disaster, the end of a civilisation, and in a way, it is: coal mining coming to an end, man exhausting resources…

From his headquarters in Mexico, Pedro Meyer has been commenting on the journey from film to digital, from a creative point of view, for as many as ten years now. He hasn’t kept at commenting, though, and ZoneZero is a perpetual online exhibition space where many have shown work of superb quality and definitive interest.

To celebrate this anniversary, two PDF documents are made available, among which “de fiesta”
by Raúl Ortega, a very powerful book.

read the editorial and download the PDFs:
www.zonezero.com/editorial/diciembre06/december06.html

Happy birthday, ZoneZero!

When loading a film in a camera, the first shot always runs the risk of more or less fogging, it actually isn’t counted and bears the number zero, on the film. Some advance the film cap on lens, some take a picture casually, and others take the picture normally at the risk of losing a good photo because of fogging.

Jean-Christophe Bechet belongs to that last category and, while archiving is 2000^th film, browsing through his contact sheets, he realised a number of things. The pleasure of turning these pages, touching them; the way these thumbnails tell the story of years bygone, the difference between the pictures selected then and those he would select today; the singular poetry emerging of these half-fogged frames starting the films.

These #0 frames only have in common their being initial in the film. They weren’t shot for the purpose of this project. Their selection is almost arbitrary and, thus, are an almost objective vision of the real secret of the photographer: his negatives, the sequence of shots, their totality, successes, drafts, failures and accidents all together…

The exhibition is accompanied by not one, nor two, but three books. Taking the opportunity of the month of photography’s theme, the printed photograph, the author has teamed up with various professionals to create three printed interpretations of these #0 frames. It is the paper that changes, and with it, inks and processes. Pictures take on a different character on each and preferences vary. I guess that some years from now, like the author revisiting his contact sheets, the reader’s preferences may well evolve.

In the end, it is a great reportage on the journey a photographer takes in the mysterious lands of contact sheets, fields of paper, caves of printing until the fire of the exhibition!

The Henri-Cartier Bresson foundation presents what could simply be called an object of legend. In 1946, the photographer collects in a scrapbook a selection of his photographs to prepare the exhibition the New York MoMA is about to devote to his work. This exhibition will finish to establish his celebrity, it is also at the bar of this museum that with Robert Capa and David Seymour, they’ll start their photographer agency: Magnum. It indeed is a pivotal point.

There are two types of pictures on display: prints by H.C-B, from the scrapbook, in a small format roughly 12×10cm; and prints that were shown at the MoMA exhibition in a larger format in the order of 30×20cm. These little prints set a pleasant intimate mood. I recognize some photographs, like this woman in black carrying a child under her veil, a photograph exhibited at the same place as in a previous exhibition (”the interior silence of a willing victim”). It is a different print, less contrasted, smaller, it gives me a feeling we’re getting closer to the genesis. I then see three photographs shot in Mexico, in 1934. Same body on the ground, three times, three different angles. A window is ajar on the work of H.C-B, before the final selection! A bit further, gipsies in Grenada, three versions. And then Alicante, Valencia, where more variations are found, and the exhibition goes on like that, mixing pictures that were selected for the MoMA exhibition and those that weren’t. Up to the “Informer”, this frightful image which is shown with two siblings.

Page du « Scrapbook » reconstituée : Interrogatoire, Allemagne, 1945 - © Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum

This exhibition is to be seen absolutely, if you’re interested in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, in his way of photographing.

Don’t try to resist buying the book that goes with the exhibition, either. “Henri Cartier-Bresson, « Scrapbook »” published by Stiedl. 65€ extremelly well invested.

Fondation HCB - 2, impasse Lebouis - 75014 Paris
from 21 september to 23 december 2006
open from tuesday to sunday from 1pm to 6.30pm, saturdays from 11am to 6.45pm
evenings on wednesdays until 8.30pm
closed monday and holidays
fee : 5 € , 3 € reduced

Let’s start with my favourite photographer. It may not be very original, but I appreciate this naïve&deep way, the wit too. You smile a lot looking at his photographs, enjoyment smiles, nodding smiles, smiles of truth.

The Paris town hall hosts the Doisneau exhibition, three seconds of success, to follow his arithmetics: three hundred pictures that withstand the test of time, at a hundredth of a second each… You’ll need more time than that to appreciate this exhibition, I spent an hour and a half there and could have gone round for another go… But, as often at the Paris town hall, it’s not as simple as that: getting in means either queuing for between an hour and two or getting there early. I took the second option, a thursday, arrived 9:20, fortieth or fiftieth in the queue, got in after a wait of “only” 45 minutes and I advise you do the same !

Entering the exhibition, we’re greeted by shots of visitors of an exhibition, I’m immediately fascinated by one of a peasant, hands in his pockets, steadily standing facing a painting, half-evaluating, half contemplating. The photo on the right shows a woman with devout eyes and the one on the left, a father looking like Superman and his son. What better introduction? Immediately collection, smiles and reflections…

Here, three nymphs and four helicopters. There, seven black cats cross the path of a woman. The (too) famous “baiser de l’hôtel de ville” shares space with a kiss on motorbike (”baiser casqué”) and a kiss in delivery tricycle (”baiser Blotto”). A nude causes twelve entertaining reactions outside the window of an art dealer. Mr and Mrs Constant both carry coffee in both their hands. A portrait of the hand of Jean-Paul Gaultier and a joke by Picasso flank figures of Parisian fashion. Some statues gather to tell the story of a kid from Paris… And all this dominated by the pack of cars hunting pedestrian on the Concorde square.

Central to the visit is an area dedicated to the Halles area (Paris main marketplace before it was destroyed and replaced by a shopping center). Images from 1949 to 1974 set a mood of life, activity, a feeling of reality, until the two last shots. One shows a bunch of pigeons, like vultures around a corpse. The other shows passers-by pressed together to see the large hole, to watch when there is nothing left to see. Turning around, seeing the images from the past, one can’t help feeling touched.

The exhibition ends on the sound of old interviews with passers-by asked if they know Robert Doisneau, we realise it’s far from always being the case. I felt happy to leave knowing a little more, it also made me think that a photographer often prefers being invisible…

The catalogue is published by Flammarion and contains more pictures than the exhibition. It’s a pleasure to dive into and, at 35€, is worth adding to one’s library.

Paris town-hall - 5, rue Lobau - 75004 Paris. Métro “Hotel de Ville”.
From 19 october to 17 february, except sunday and holidays, 10am-pm.
Entrance fee: free

I created webphotomag one year ago, wanting to praise the work of photographers I kept finding while wandering the web: there is an awful lot of talent online! The idea was to create a medium that would be as convenient to read on screen as in print. The idea of a landscape format PDF file soon came up and rapidly felt quite obvious. Looking at photographs on paper rather than on screen is a different experience, more tactile, with more of a place in space. It also allows for more details in the reproduction of the work, better quality.

For all its advantages, the format used this first year has big drawbacks. The main one is that it isn’t fast enough for the web. The hungry web wants new content on a daily basis, on an hourly basis, on a click basis, even! webphotomag in pure PDF form can’t do that. I don’t want to either, the whole point of the project is to give space and time to the selected authors rather than a quick flash of light.

The second drawback is that webphotomag isn’t interactive enough, in pure PDF form, you can say it isn’t interactive at all.

So today, taking the “month of photography, 2006″ as an opportunity to start again, I’m exploring this “blog” format. This will let me post links to sites I like on a more regular basis, but also to talk about the news in the world of exhibitions and publications. This will address the issue of content update rate. It will let people comment on each article, too, in a better format than the forum that was there before (before it was shut down, the forum was used by spammers only!)

You may wonder if this is the end of webphotomag in PDF format. Rest assured, this is not the case, the PDF mag still is what is the most important to me: issues you can collect, print and display.