Florian Maier-Aichen

Florian Maier-Aichen is a 36 year-old German photographer whose interesting experimental landscape work positions him somewhere very different from his more famous peers, such as Gursky and Strüth. Based between California and Cologne, his images are an individual, unique reinterpretation of classic landscape and cityscape photography. Referencing the work of masters of the field such as Carleton Watkins or Ansel Adams, Maier-Aichen often shoots clichéd scenes but does something strange with them. Aerial views, subtle comping of pictures, or odd effects applied to the final print create images that feel both familiar and ‘off’, playing with our sense of perception.

Using different techniques for different projects, Maier-Aichen questions what an idealized landscape photograph should look like. In 2005 he shot images in California on colour infra-red film, rendering well-known American vistas like the Pacific Coast Highway or the popular tourist location Lake June as inhospitable, martian landscapes. His 2004 photograph of Long Beach is like an industrialized Ansel Adams take on a huge, mechanized city; a view no human eye could ever see. Deliberately choosing the industrial backside of Los Angeles and adding the mountain range in post-production, Maier-Aichen, shows us a strange, dystopian, sprawling view of an instantly recognisable city in a new and unexpected way.

In ‘Chamonix, 2007’ he mimics a Kodachrome postcard of an idyllic alpine scene, but shoots the image from a dirt car park, complete with tyre tracks in the foreground. Another mountain scene from that year shows a winding alpine pass zig-zagging under a sky whose clouds are all printed out of register, creating a psychedelic sky above the snowy peaks.

Other images are shot at night from the air, with only twinkling lights alluding to the presence of a city, or in an alpine valley in the middle of a snowstorm, all but obscuring the view. The Maersk tanker photographs are also disconcerting – one showing a vessel seemingly reflected in glassily calm water, the other showing a capsized tanker with its cargo bobbing in the ocean…or does it?

Unfortunately a computer screen really doesn’t do these photographs justice. Some of the prints are 1 or 2 meters wide, and the level of detail is breathtaking. If you’re ever somewhere like The Whitney, MOCA or the Saatchi Gallery they are definitely worth seeing in person.

Untitled, 2005

Above Lake June, 2005

Untitled, 2005

Untitled, 2005

Untitled (Long Beach), 2004

Untitled, 2007

Untitled, 2005

Spiral Jetty, 2009

Chamonix, 2007

Untitled (Capsized), 2001

Untitled (Maersk), 2001

The Best General View, 2007

Untitled, 2007

All images © Florian Maier-Aichen

A Portrait of a Photographer as an Artist - The Flesh and the Spirit by Sally Mann

What I’m really interested in when I look at photography is art. A photographer might take photographs of her children to talk about her family. An artist takes photographs of her children to talk about the human condition. A photographer might take photographs of a particular region to portray it, mostly for the sake of the people living there. An artist takes photographs of a particular region to ultimately produce images of no particular region other than the one that we all share, regardless where we live. A photographer might stick to that tried, old method and produce the same photographs, using the same style, for many years. An artist will not shy away from experimentation - and the potential of astounding success, at the risk of sometimes even more astounding failure. (more) 

Sally Mann clearly is such an artist. When asked about a retrospective of her work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, she rejected the idea. A little back and forth between the museum and the artist then resulted in “an in-depth study of the role of the body in her work,” now available in book form as The Flesh and The Spirit (the quote is taken from the acknowledgments).

I’m tempted to compare Sally Mann’s approach to photography with Thomas Ruff’s. Such a comparison probably strikes most people as utterly ludicrous. But the many superficial differences aside, what unites Mann and Ruff is their dedication to the image, using whatever it takes to get it. Ruff has never shied away from employing digital technologies, up to the point of not even taking the photographs himself any longer. Mann has focused on the extreme opposite, working with all kinds of archaic photographic processes (incl. the use of very old, uncoated lenses). What matters, of course, are the images. Just like talking about computers and/or Photoshop misses the point of what Ruff is after, I feel that focusing on the fact that in Mann’s case we are looking at photographs produced with, say, collodion wet plates also does not do the artist much, if any justice.

In other words, I am not interested in the considerable technical expertise needed by both Sally Mann and Thomas Ruff to produce those images. This doesn’t mean I do not appreciate it for what it is; but at the end of the day, I want to look at art. In the same way, I am not interested in whether a writer uses a typewriter, a fountain pen, or Microsoft’s Word, just like I don’t care about what brushes and oil or acrylic paints a painter used.

You’re probably not supposed to write this in a review, but I will happily admit that I don’t like all of Ruff’s or Mann’s work. Some of it is so fantastic that every time I look at it it’s almost as if I was seeing it for the very first time. Some of it I find… well… let’s just call it flawed. But here’s the thing, in both Mann’s and Ruff’s case even the most flawed work makes it obvious that we are in fact in the presence of an accomplished artist. The human condition again: We cannot possibly succeed in everything we do.

Failure (we might argue it’s not even true failure) is also part of art - something we forget too often when we compare some photographer’s new work with that one body of work that we love so much. As understandable as this might be, how can we do that? Do we really want to hang all that weight on her or him? Could we ourselves always live up to our finest moments? Furthermore, who is to say that what at a first glance might fall short of some fine moment, seen outside of that context might not be a completely different, a new fine moment?

What point is there in art that is supposed to behave like, for example, an iPod, with each new model being the same, except very slightly different?

I do not want to make it sound as if Mann’s (or Ruff’s) work is filled with failure. On the contrary. But some work I like much better than some other work. Leafing through The Flesh and The Spirit had me think what I was doing when I dismissed the work that I didn’t like, thinking here the artist had clearly failed. Better to take that work for what it is.

As I mentioned above, as a retrospective The Flesh and The Spirit differs from those standard retrospectives we are being exposed to so often. The book does not present a “best of.” Instead, it samples Sally Mann’s work over the years, using the human body as a tracer, including previously unseen work.

This is bold. It allows us to make new connections, to find new meaning in the work.

Before going into any details, I want to make another comment about this particular artist (needless to say, I am writing the following based on my own personal background, as someone who came to the US only a decade ago). It was probably inevitable that Mann’s problems in the early 1990s would have to be mentioned, during what people like to call “the culture wars.” I suppose speaking in some sort of historical capacity this makes sense. But then again the “culture wars” had very little to do with actual culture, and a lot with bigotry and ugly politics. Does talking about this particular period really make so much sense any longer? Aren’t we acknowledging that bigotry yet again, by bringing it up, instead of letting it rest? Isn’t the fact telling us something that there is a major show of Sally Mann’s work - and this publication - right now, while many of the zealots are long forgotten? It is true, there are new zealots and new bigots right now; the political body seems to be unable to shake recurring “culture wars” just like the human body, once infected with herpes, will never be able to get rid off it again. But we need to realize that art (and especially great art) is unbesmirchable, and it will stand - even though its makers might suffer, often considerably.

The Flesh and The Spirit contains images from Family Color, taken with a medium-format camera, instead of the vastly more well-known images fromImmediate Family. Replacing those famous photographs with the way less well known ones is a yet another bold move - and it works tremendously well, in many different ways. If you are familiar with the b/w work, you will be surprised how well the colour work stands up to it.

There is another case, where you get to compare two versions of the same body of work: Matter Lent, images of decomposing human corpses on the grounds of the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center. I prefer the colour images. One image, a close-up of a man’s face (or actually what’s left of it), is available in two almost identical versions. The colour one is stellar, you can see the maggots crawling over what used to be the face. The curtain of death has been pulled back, to expose the man behind it. The b/w one, while probably still being way too gory for most people, transforms the fact of death into abstraction, the maggots are a barely visible blur.

The landscapes in the book are a - the sole - diversion that doesn’t quite fit in - and coincidentally, that’s the work that I’ve always liked the least. In this context, the relation to the body seems just too strenuous. The rest of the photography is simply stellar. There are many images I had never seen before, including self portraits, both of the artist’s upper torso and of her own face - the latter reproduced as a grid of images (parts of the grid are visible on the dust jacket). This work needs to be taken in, it needs to be seen and re-seen.

Beautifully printed and produced The Flesh and The Spirit clearly sets a new benchmark for artist retrospectives. Highly recommended.

The Flesh and The Spirit, photography by Sally Mann, text/essays by John Ravenal, Anne Tucker, David Levi Strauss, 200 pages, Aperture/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2010

Lucas Foglia. People living off-the-grid.

Stephen Shore - New Düsseldorf Photography

Der Rote Bulli is an important new photobook that explores the relationship between the Becher-School, New Dusseldorf Photography, and The New Color Photography of Stephen Shore.
Edited by Werner Lippert and Christoph Schaden with text by Christoph Schaden, Tony Hiss, Christoph Ribbat, Gerald Schröder, Jeffrey Ladd, Maren Polte. With photography by Stephen Shore, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Volker Döhne, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Tata Ronkholz, Wendelin Bottländer, Andreas Gursky and more.

Format 22.5 × 21.5 cm, 250 pages, Hardcover, 33,- Euro
Available now from Schaden.com

To support the book the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf has a just opened show, focusing on this transatlantic influence on photography in the 1970s and 1980s.
At its heart is a friendship between three artists that was forged in New York in the year 1973. It was here that the 26-year-old Stephen Shore met the Düsseldorf photographer Hilla Becher, whose typological photographic documentation of water-towers, which she had put together with husband, Bernd Becher, had gone on display at Ileana Sonnabend’s renowned gallery the previous year. Two years later, Stephen Shore and the Bechers became the only colour photographer and Europeans respectively to be part of the legendary New Topographics group exhibition.

The focus of the exhibition is on Stephen Shore, a key figure in the US New Color Photography movement. From the mid 1970s onwards, Shore made several road trips through the United States, documenting ‘American Life’, the apparent banality of which caused incredible irritation among his contemporaries. The first part of the exhibition will provide a comprehensive overview of Shore’s ground-breaking work in the 1970s and 1980s with bodies of works from the projects American Surfaces and Uncommon Places.

The exhibition also explores the innovative motifs that Becher’s class developed in the area between their own photographic tradition and that of the US tradition.
The exhibition investigates the extent to which the students on Bernd Becher’s photography course at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, were inspired by US subjects and image concepts from the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition juxtaposes works by students on Becher’s course that bear the hallmark of this transatlantic influence and Stephen Shore’s own photographs.

Participating artists: Stephen Shore, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Miles Coolidge, Martin Rosswog, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, Claus Goedicke, Simone Nieweg, Stefan Schneider, Kris Scholz, Wendelin Bottländer, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Boris Becker, Bernhard Fuchs, Laurenz Berges, Andi Brenner, Volker Döhne, Claudia Fährenkemper, Matthias Koch

Lori Nix, Dioramas

Library, 2007

"In my newest body of work The City I have imagined a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it's human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theaters, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man's encroachment. I am afraid of what the future holds if we do not change our ways regarding the climate, but at the same time I am fascinated by what a changing world can bring."

Map Room, 2010

It's been a long time since I mentioned Accidentally Kansas by Lori Nix - what I did not mention were all the other amazing diomaras she keeps creating year after year.

Aquarium, 2007

All images taken from The City © Lori Nix

Tom Philips

Morbid, yes, but also at times hilarious, Tom Philips' Dead Photosseries is an ongoing project photographing an apparently dead body in various locations around the world. Details on the series are deliberately scarce, so its hard to tell if the act of playing dead is a performance in itself at these places, but the resulting images are chilling and sometimes surreal. The figure slumped from a tree branch in San Jacinto could be a piece by an artist like Robert Kinmont orCharles Ray, but those on the rubble in Suakin or by the grey water's edge in France are more akin to troubling forensics photos.

Its interesting to see passersby's reactions in different cities: people stop and stare on The Bowery in New York, whilst they rush about their daily business in Tokyo, barely registering the prone figure in the street.

Dead At Gilgo, August 22nd, 2008

Dead On The Bowery, March 14th, 2010

Dead On St Mary's, June 9th, 2009

Dead In San Jacinto, Jan 2nd, 2010

Dead In The Yaraab Shrine Temple, May 26th, 2010

Dead In Camaret-Sur-Mer, August 30th, 2008

Dead In The Minimalist Dream, May 18th, 2006

Dead In Suakin, December 24th, 2008

Dead In New York, April 28th, 2010

Dead In North Carolina, May 12th, 2008

Dead In Lisbon, October 14th, 2009

Dead In Japan, March 2nd, 2010

Dead In Historic Filipinotown, May 31st, 2008

Dead In Dahab, December 9th, 2007

Dead In Heaven, July 26th, 2010

All images © Tom Philips

Yao Lu

Yao Lu

Work from New Landscapes.

"Rarely exhibited in the West, Chinese artist Yao Lu (b. 1967) documents his changing country in atmospheric works that look to the future through the lens of the past. In his first show in the U.S., Yao presented 16 photographs, most circular or rounded windowlike compositions floating on a white ground, 47¼ inches square, with two horizontals measuring 6 and 10 feet across. The neutral backgrounds and compressed spaces suggest traditional Chinese landscape paintings; the works even bear the red signature stamps and collection seals known as chop marks. But these mist-shrouded scenes (ranging from 2006 to ’08) are digitally composed montages of photographs taken by Yao of China’s ubiquitous construction sites and trash heaps.

In these cleverly disguised scenes, Yao subtly critiques China’s willingness to sacrifice its history and despoil the environment in its breathtaking sprint to modernization. Deceptively pastoral scenes of rivers, lakes and mountains blanketed with flora or dusted with snow are, upon closer inspection, ravaged landscapes awaiting development. Lush-seeming hillsides are actually green mesh-covered mountains of debris. A flowing river is revealed to be a road wending around mounds of rubbish, and rocky outcrops are broken chunks of concrete. Some scenes are nonspecific, while the titles of others provide locales—fishing boats near Mount Yu, a house on Mount Fuchun, a spring picnic beside Lake Dongting—all soon to be lost, presumably, to sprawling construction. The lone tree, pagoda or house illustrates not an ideal but the lone holdout still standing in the revision of a national narrative.

Yao’s work is akin to that of Masami Teraoka, Yun-Fei Ji, Shahzia Sikander or any number of artists who recycle traditional art forms to suit contemporary themes. With tiny human figures visible in some works, Yao’s pictures also touch on the tradition of the sublime, here with humanity overwhelmed not by nature but by the forces of commerce and “progress.” While many of his compatriots found expression in physical feats or Western modes of representation, Yao’s message seems more poignant and mournful than defiant. His transformation of environmental depredation into nostalgic renderings of natural beauty raises the question of whether the new China, like Yao’s fabricated scenes, is built on falsehood." - Stephanie Cash for Art in America.