Paris Exhibitions

The other day I visited a couple of exhibitions in Paris. One was the controversial retrospective on Larry Clark; quite frankly, I can’t really see what the big deal was all about, and this in a dual sense: a) so yes the exhibition contains nudity and drugs – hence access was restricted to an 18+ audience – , so what? As if nudity and images of drug use were hard to find in our society  b) I was seriously disappointed by the range of work that was exhibited and supposedly represented Clark’s achievements over a period of 50 yrs. Certainly not worth the hype it got in the press.

The second and far more enjoyable exhibition I saw, was Depardon’s work on his home country, France. The gigantic prints of French urban & village areas shown at the BNF Francois Mitterand are quite overwhelming and one can easily spend several minutes in front of each picture; there’s that much detail in every single one.

While I was wandering about in and around the gallery spaces of these two exhibitions, I snapped a few pics.

Visa 2010 – Perpignan

Another edition of VISA gone by; quite a decent year but not a vintage year. Whilst economies across the globe are gradually emerging from the crisis, photojournalism, at least as we knew it, is still struggling to recover, if it ever will. My personal impression was that this year’s festival saw fewer attendants both in the photographers’ and the media & agencies’ camps, hopefully not the beginning of a trend.

On the brighter side, young and outstanding talent keeps emerging:Stephanie Sinclair’s story on polygamy within the FLDS church was the exhibition I shall remember from this year’s edition. Other inspirational works were Andrea Star Reese’s “The Urban Cave” and Cedric Gerbehaye‘s story on the Congo River. Two media events of 2010, the Haiti earthquake and the violent clashes between the military and Red Shirts in Bangkok were to my taste excessively represented across both the exhibitions and the nightly projections. I am not questioning the quality of the work covering these two events  but in an era where even the most talented of photographers experience difficulties getting their work published, do we really need to have more than  one exhibition (plus evening projections) on the same story. The very catastrophic and spectacular nature of these events does guarantee them press coverage anyway. Should a festival like Visa – which for two years running deplores the death of photojournalism – not open more of their scarce exhibition space and projection airtime to those photoessays  which precisely stand in the frontline of the media machinery that mows down what is now considered ‘non-commercial’ documentary work. Just a personal thought.

And as usual, the festival offered lots of opportunities to form connections & make contacts and see old friends again from across the planet.

Last but not least, this year I was glad I could make a modest contribution to the Visa Off festival with my own exhibition; a series of images that were taken in Belgium in Dec 09 and that were meant to transmit the feeling of being “On the Road”. The exhibition is showing at Declic Cafe on the Place de la Republique, Perpignan and will be on until 14th September. Below are a few pics of the exhibition.

Why do we photograph?

Most people in the developed world own at least one camera in their homes and that is not counting the embedded cameras in their mobile phones. Digital cameras, along with the internet as a publishing platform, have truly democratised photography. However these two technological advances are just the tools that facilitate the act of taking and publishing pictures. The fundamental question remains: Why do people take pictures in the first place? What drives them to – at least nowadays – constantly press the shutter release? I was recently on a trip to Indonesia and whilst visiting a museum I could not help noticing the large number of local visitors who were wandering from room to room with their arms stretched out holding a camera and who – at least it seemed to me – were looking at  the objects on exhibition through the screens of their digital cameras. Western tourists do not fare any better. We visit far-flung places for a couple of weeks, come back with thousands of pics and believe we have experienced the real thing. I feel that travellers ‘experience’ foreign places more and more through the lens. Well let’s close this parenthesis – it takes us to a different subject – all I mean to express is that all of us seem to have this relentless mission to snap away and capture something.  Take facebook; half a billion members; most likely billions of photographs, be they good or bad is irrelevant here . Do we post pictures on such platforms  simply to share real moments of our lives; i.e. do we photograph to capture reality? If the latter is the case, I must congratulate all facebook members on their blissful lives. Personally I have never seen pictures of couples fighting, people crying or other expressions of sadness or misery. People photograph to remember? Again looking at the evidence it leads me to believe there is a strong bias towards selective memory. Does the need to photograph and subsequently publish have something to do with the celebrity-obsessed and trash culture we currently live in. We flaunt our private lives to the world in the hope we will be ‘discovered’.

Much has of course been written on the subject of photography by some very eminent thinkers ( e.g. W Benjamin, S Sontag). What interests me is our own opinions, those of the general public. There are multiple answers to the question, I am confident. Not looking for anything too profound or intellectual, just some personal thoughts on why you think you take pictures. If you are a professional photographer, please state so. Thank you.