photo: © Ryley, 2008
Two very early contenders for my Album of the Year.
The first, MASSIVE ATTACK’s fifth studio album ‘Heligoland‘, will no doubt garner the mainstream attention it deserves when it’s released in the coming weeks. However the second, ‘There is Love in You‘, will likely slip under the radar.
Kieran Hebden (aka ‘FOUR TET’) is an avant-garde legend of ‘IDM’, which, being an acronym for ‘Intelligent Dance Music’, is perhaps the most pretentiously termed genre of music out there…
But don’t take it out on the artists that make it what it is, remembering that AUTECHRE, APHEX TWIN, & JAMES HOLDEN all fall into the same basket. It seems ‘IDM’ is just a lazy term; used to broadly define a minority group of producers who have consistently challenged the status quo of ‘Electronica’.
Preview (or even better, buy) ‘There is Love in You’ here. And also check out this collaboration with BURIAL – arguably the finest dubstep producer around.
Beautiful stuff.
Stoked to hear two of my favourite bands of 2009 in Triple J’s Hottest 100 countdown yesterday:
The XX & The Middle East.
Incidentally, they’ve both been included on this year’s bill of one of the best festivals I’ve never been to… Coachella.
Amazing bands. Tiny font…
As a follow up to yesterday’s post, I’ve just spent a couple of hours with my jaw on the floor, trawling through this archive. It might just be the most incredible series of photographs I’ve ever seen.
Save for that proclamation, I’m speechless…
Just “discovered” William Gedney today. It makes me wonder how many more amazing photographers are out there that remain “undiscovered” by me. Plenty, I’m sure.
I think the photos speak for themselves, but the accompanying article is really quite profound, particularly the final paragraph.
More here.
(Excerpts from a lecture given by William Gedney in 1970)
“A photograph is a two-dimensional visual delineation of reality made with a camera. …the important thing here, and one that is frequently overlooked, is that photography is the only visual medium that has an inherent relationship with reality. The only other mediums that have inherent relationships with reality are the sound tape and, of course, film which essentially is a marriage of camera and tape recorder.
One of the realisations that photography brought about in painters was that there is no inherent relationship between a painting and reality… and everyone knows there is little relationship between the word and reality; not only in novels and poems, but unfortunately even in journalism where there is a pretence that here is such a relationship. …Painting is putting paint on a surface. Sculpture is making a shape out of a materials. Writing is putting words on paper. Photography is making image delineations of reality.
To put it all another way: to make a photograph, there has to be something other than the photographer and his medium – film, light, camera. There has to be something in reality. For a painter there just has to be the paints and his medium – paint and surface. For a writer, pen and paper.
This brings us to a fundamental distinction. Photography … is not … art. It is something totally new in human experience: something humans have not been able to do until the last century or so. Like flying.
…The basic impulse of the photographer is diametrically opposed to the basic impulse of the artist no matter what the artist’s medium.
The artist is trying to bring into existence something (even if only a concept) that never existed before. The photographer is trying to preserve, with the lens and especially the shutter, something in reality that will cease to exist in just that way in the very next moment, or hour or day.
One curious thing is that you can’t take two pictures of a human being and have them be line for line the same, unless the person is dead. And then you can only do it for a while. Change. Photography is deeply related to change, but in a conservative way. It wants to stop change. It also wants to lay claim to immortality. We can see pictures of Abraham Lincoln. In a way, because the photograph exists, not all of him died. We can still reclaim a particular visual moment of his life that occurred over a century ago. You can’t do that with any paintings of him. All you can reclaim is the artist, not really, really Lincoln. Not for sure. Not as inherent in the medium of painting itself.
The product of the photographic medium is itself a medium…. In a photograph one goes beyond the photograph to what was photographed as well as how or who was photographed.
If we now had a photograph of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed or Caesar, we would first of all want it to be very good technically. If it were nicely composed at a decisive moment, all of that would be a bonus, but not essential. Because what we’re seeking is the surface visual reality first; the niceties second if at all. All that painting has as inherent in the medium is the niceties. That is why there’s so much stress on style and why the fashions change so.
… I think that this sense of life, of immediacy, of quickness, of simple visual sense perception is the point at which great photographs are made. …I think great photographs come from that moment in the process of cognition before the mind has analysed meaning or design and at which the experience and the person experiencing are fully, instinctively, existentially there.
…photographs in which there is a tremendous sense of discovery, rather than analysis of stopped time … Photography is at its best when it deals with perception – with seeing – and not with recollections in tranquillity or dilettantism of design.
…design is imposed on the photograph as a consideration from another medium. It is a hangover from … the days when photographers thought of themselves as artists.
…the best use of design in photography flows from the discovery of the inherent design structure in reality ..
…the best photograph is that in which form and content are deeply interrelated, where one discovers the meaning through the form and the form through the meaning – the form is inevitable given the subject.
…reality has its own form and … the super-imposition of form can be misleading.
…if we are open to reality, we in fact perceive its meaning through its form in reality. The job of the photographer is to discover reality’s forms and meanings.
…the effort to achieve a personal ’style’ in photography depends much more on the repetition of technical gimmickry…
…the print is not the goal of photography but the sharing of perception and …the sharing of reality.
…the grandmother with her box brownie knows what photography is all about. She wants to take a picture of junior because junior is going to grow up, and we’re all going to get old and complicated and right now in the summer sun, junior is a source of joy. Click. Now nothing, not age, not trouble, not vicissitudes, not dope, not long hair. Nothing no thing can take that moment away from grandma. Change. And she doesn’t care if any one else wants to appreciate junior or correct him at all.”
- William Gedney
photos: © William Gedney
Coolum Beach, Australia. December 2009.
photos: © Ryley, 2009
“Keep Cool.
One day, Leo will score a great header.
And it will be a good goal.”
- FC Barcelona’s coach Josep Guadiola… after being asked about Messi’s heading qualities.
A collegue of mine, who is obsessed with the Tour De France, sent me a link to Timm Kölln’s website during the Tour of 2009. Based solely on the beautiful B&W image on the front page of the site, I instantly bookmarked it.
Kölln’s images of the Tour were unlike anything I’d ever seen before. They’re iconic snap shots, capturing the spectacle of the event in equal parts to the spirit of the fans who live and breathe it. When I look at them, I envision the entire race being played out in extreme slow motion; as if time is literally standing still. The same can be said about the above photo of Lionel Messi, taken at the European Champions League final in Rome, 2009. I can feel the thunderous roar of the crowd, yet somehow Messi seems to be consumed by blissful silence. The evidence of the despair he has inflicted on the opposing team lays clearly in his wake as he is swept away by a rare euphoria.
(A larger viewing of the photo here is recommended).
Admittedly, I romanticize it because I’m a football fan, and the Champions League is the most prestigious trophy in world club football. But even so, I’m struck by the cinematic quality of Kölln’s photograph when compared with the scores of others that I would have seen in the media at the time. How beautiful it is to see some context in an image like this. A newspaper would have likely cropped it so that Messi’s upper body filled the frame. Or indeed the news photographer taking the picture would have been zoomed in already; robbing themselves of the chance to see anything other than what all the other photographers sitting next to them were seeing at precisely the same moment.
I recently had the pleasure of contacting Timm, as the production company I work for is interested in featuring one of his photographs in an upcoming commercial. I couldn’t resist attaching a video still from a youTube clip of the Messi goal; I asked him about where he was positioned and the gear that he used for the shot, to which he replied “I’m one of those anonymous pixels down there behind Heineken…. I guess my camera was the only film camera in the whole stadium! 50mm, manual focus, Contax RTS.”
Amazing…
I was lucky enough to experience the 22-year-old Woodford Folk Festival over the New Year break, and I’ve gotta say, it was one of the most beautifully bizarre, cultural experiences I’ve ever had.
The spirit of Woodford is difficult to describe. It truly is a festival of the people, for the people. So many vastly different souls in the one place, somehow existing in perfect harmony. The young & the old; the boisterous & the subdued; the confused & the enlightened, the weird & the wonderful… all bound together by a love of the arts. Couples that met at Woodford 20 years ago are now bringing their children along, and you get a sense that in another 20 years time their children’s children will be there too.
I seldom enjoy photographing as much as I did on this day. It’s a shame I only had one roll of film…
photos: © Ryley, 2009
