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Another London

This summer sees Tate Britain host to Another London, an exploration and celebration of London through the eyes of international photographers. Featuring work from 41 non-British photographers, Another London boasts a panoramic view of the capital that is by turns idealized, skewed, empathetic, voyeuristic and surreal. Though as a concept ‘London’ may seem too loose to tie together such an extensive body of work, the Tate manages to pull it off.

Moving through the 20^th century from the beginnings of mainstream photography and culminating in the 1980s, Another London is best viewed as a study of the London of the recent past rather than as an explicit statement about the capital today. This is not to say that the exhibition has no modern relevance – on the contrary, it acts as a kind of timeline, documenting the massive changes London went through over the past 100 or so years that turned it into what it is in the present day.

Several different photographic schools and institutions are represented here, most prominently Bauhaus; artists such as Ellen Auerbach and Horacio Coppola feature, as do various photographers directly influenced by them, including Herbert List and several other contemporaries. The Magnum Photo Agency is also a strong presence in the exhibition, with works from founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud, Bruce Davidson, and Sergio Larrain, among others.

Arguably the most interesting section of the exhibition (and definitely the most extensive) is the collection of photographs taken in the periods before, during and immediately after WWII. Often taken by photographers who had fled Nazi Germany or other occupied countries for London, these photographs create a vivid picture of the capital in wartime – Wolfgang Suschitzky’s 1942 ‘View from St. Paul’s Cathedral’ is particularly striking, fully exposing the complete destruction and misery certain parts of London fell victim to during the blitz, while Felix H Man’s ‘The Lights Go Up In London’ captures the opposite extreme: the almost dreamlike haze of relief and jubilation the announcement of the war’s end brought to the city.

Robert Frank’s dramatic and slightly surreal representations of a smoggy, grey London reveal a different side to the city in the post-war period – that of an industrial nightmare of elitism and social inequality, a society struggling to find its way after the drama of the war, all the while dealing with rapid social change. This theme is similarly explored in Milton Novotny’s of the romanticized ‘Swinging London’ of the 1960s – images capturing the glamour and excitement of the time go hand in hand with those that expose the poverty many people of the era lived through. Karen Knorr and Oliver Richon’s foray into the punk scene of the 70s almost feel like a continuation of Novotny’s non-sentimentalized exploration of the prior decade – describing the London their work is framed by as in feeling almost ‘in ruins’, Knorr and Richon’s exploration of this particular subculture captures the climate of political frustration and disenchantment felt throughout the decade.

London’s transformation into a global and multicultural city is well documented here, as is the prejudice and social friction that haunted this process. None do this better than Neil Kenlock’s fascinating photographs of new Caribbean immigrants in London and their daily experiences with racism. Leonard Freed’s photographs of London’s Hassidic Jewish community similarly capture everyday life for another group of people often shunned by the city’s more reactionary forces.

Never giving into the temptation to fall into sentimentalism, Another London is more than a just an Olympic tie-in – it succeeds in painting a well-rounded, realistic picture of 20^th century London. Though it doesn’t necessarily break any new ground, it is an interesting and worthwhile retrospective on a global city, and definitely worth a look.

Photograph by David Liittschwager

Look

“This is really about looking closely at a small place, about showing how complicated, lovely, and connected, all the things in the world might be,” David Liittschwager tells me one afternoon on the phone. 

He’s discussing the process up to creating a book for his A World in One Cubic Foot project that originally appeared in National Geographic in February, 2010. He’s on speaker phone and doesn’t know I take a ruler off my desk, stand up, and discover that my feet, spaced at a comfortable distance apart, take up about 12 inches of space on this earth. 

His essay for the book is entitled “A Lap-Size Sample” and begins, “This book started with a question: How much life can be found on a small piece of the world, in just one cubic foot, over the course of a normal day?”

It occurs to me this is a question to put on a post-it note above one’s desk, to consider daily on a literal or metaphorical level.

The answer, it turns out, is quite a bit. 

Visionary biologist, researcher, and theorist E. O. Wilson wrote the preface for David’s book. Wilson’s work is known to focus on the interdependency of all things, large and small, and he’s the leading expert on ants. He writes, “When you thrust a shovel into soil or tear off a piece of coral, you are godlike, cutting through an entire world.”

The mathematics of chance with each footfall. Fieldnotes of things lost and found in the dirt on our hands. Here, wherever here is. And mostly, that everything, every speck of flora, fauna, action, interaction, everything and everyone understood, misunderstood, known, catalogued, and yet to be discovered is of value and affects the other. 

E. O. Wilson continues in this vein in his foreword, “If all the organisms were to disappear from any of the cubic spaces depicted in these photographs, the environment in it would soon shift to a radical new state.”

For the one cubic foot project, David constructed a 12” cube made from quarter-inch stainless steel, creating as he called it, “a miniature photo studio” in which he watched, counted, measured, and photographed “as precisely and faithfully as possible, every creature found in the cube.” He, his camera, and said cube travelled the world and the book includes a look at six ecosystems: Central Park in New York; Table Mountain National Park in South Africa; Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest; a coral reef in Moorea, French Polynesia; under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; and the Duck River in Tennessee. 

David tells me about saying to himself while working on this project, “Stay very close, this is cool, don’t step on the thing you want to use...because even if you stop at just a tenth of a millimeter, you’re still just scratching the surface. There is still so much more.”

David looks for everything we whir past. He’s made a career out of watching and noticing, out of relaying through imagery that every single minute detail matters. We all know how to stop and peer at the world underfoot, we just don’t usually. 

I ask David where his love of the natural world was rooted. “I think my conversion occurred while helping to photograph a San Joaquin Kit Fox, an endangered species, in 1986,” he replies. “The same thing that made me, made this creature, too.”

  His photographs are a promise that belief vested in both the seen and unseen is warranted. That the patch of grass in our front yard holds the story of our lives as much as the landscape inside our kitchens at dawn. The happenings in a handful of soil, the ecological and biological continuing-on day after day is perhaps one of the few aspects of this ever-changing, oft-disappointing world, we can count on.

David Liittschwager's book A World in One Cubic Foot, published through University of Chicago Press, drops in stores this October. Information may be found at:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo14365301.html

And a selection of images from the original National Geographic spread are at:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/02/cubic-foot/liittschwager-photography

David’s site is at:

http://www.liittschwager.com/

In all fields of occupation, we are usually encouraged not to push the envelope when it comes to regulations and guidelines. We take example of what people have done in the past and rarely think to change the process or the output. However it is refreshing when we occasionally see a clever swaying of the rules. David Lykes Keenan has created a photo book that disobeys one of the cardinal rules of making a photo book. Published by ZDTravis Books, check out this new quirky book now on sale!

Information and Purchase:

www.dlkphotography.com/daylight

Photograph by Christopher Churchill

Faith

For his book, American Faith, photographer Chris Churchill and his 8 x 10-inch view camera traveled around the United States searching for faith. Chris gave himself a few rules: One, no plans. Secondly, make audio recordings along the way and transcribe the stories as told. “Thirdly, I would travel with faith – not the religious kind of faith, but a belief that this random sampling would somehow make sense in the end,” he writes in the preface.  

When I read that, it occurred to me that this project is a wise one, embodying through its very scaffolding a metaphor for how to maneuver through life. I have learned probably not enough in my days, but the few things I know are: If you plan out your life, every one of those plans will change on you; if you ask people to tell about their lives, if you look them in the eye and sincerely ask, what you hear is truth. Every time. And mostly I’ve learned that most things don’t make sense to me, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make sense somewhere.

“I set some very loose parameters for sanity’s sake and then explored the possibilities of what photographs can be made within that structure. In this instance it was to travel through every state and stop random people along the way and make audio recordings for the text. The evolution of what I was seeing and responding to while working on this was constantly changing.  I lived with a 30 x 14-foot wall covered in 8 x 10-inch contact sheets for years and I think that wall looked different every day,” he tells me.  

Philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “The worth of a great day is not measured by the space it occupies in the calendar.” Well, by what then? Perhaps by how it’s remembered. And documented. For the book, quotes from the people photographed are presented alongside the images, acting as signatures, allowing the subjects to share the responsibility of relaying the story. In a podcast or exhibition setting, music and cadence of voices from people telling their own stories in their own way interact, share, and inform Churchill’s own experience as mapped in the images, their composition and suspension of moment authentic to his own eyes and history.

The dedication to his book reads: For my daughter Isabelle, whose birth gave this project purpose, and to my father Eton, whose death gave it meaning. 

“Photography and I have a little pact that as long as I work hard and am humble to those gifts then my life as a photographer might just be okay. To that end I'm still learning what all photographs can do. What they can't do. It will never be a objective medium. Every photograph you see no matter how it was made is a manifestation of a relationship between author and medium. It’s spawned from that relationship and therefore is never really honest to the moment it’s recording,” Chris says to me. Perhaps not. But if we’re lucky, everything we make hovers somewhere in between the actual truth of a moment and what we remember it, need it, want it, to be. And harbors every birth and death we live through, as well.     

“Photography can so accurately represent the world to its viewer yet, only be representational in its accuracy of what's being displayed. This ambiguity and the fact that it can play with the continuum of time in a way that is just ever so slightly different than how we see, enables it to be amazingly effective in visually affecting our subconscious. I think it is in the back of the brain that you can present the topic you can't see and photography is really a perfect medium for that because of its skewed accuracy,” Chris says. 

There’s a snowball named Harold in my freezer. He’s in a ziploc baggie with the date marked in Sharpie in my children’s dad’s handwriting. Harold’s been in our freezer for now eight years, more than half the life of both my kids. I’d forgotten about Harold until seeing him wedged in the back of the freezer the other day, prompting an instantaneous recall of the distant January night out in the backyard, snow falling like everything was ours, and always would be. Like a photo, it symbolizes something, too many things, maybe. Innocent in its origins, it’s now a round planet from some distant galaxy of my past, reminding me on a dark early morning in August that the past will continually thread together with now, that it’s all jumbled together and it all matters, even if we don’t know in what ways or why, that the stories of our lives as told to each other on street corners or remembered by ourselves in the quiet of our homes is something, all there is perhaps, to believe in.

To listen to and view the podcast on this project go to: http://www.daylightmagazine.org/podcast/december2009

For additional information on the book visit: http://www.nazraeli.com/bookdetail.php?book_id=100406

Chris Churchill’s site is: http://www.christopherchurchill.com/

Photography is alive in San Juan, Puerto Rico! This weekend FotoVisura Pavilion will launch to welcome participants to various exhibitions, events, dinners, and private events. Sponsored by the Viso Lizardi Family and guest curator Whitney Johnson (Director of Photography at The New Yorker), the FotoVisura Pavilion is sure to be an event filled with like-minded photo enthusiasts and artists.

For more information check out:

http://www.fotovisurapavilion.com/2012-PR/blog/