Splinter

Every once in a while, a reminder is overdue that photography does best what, well, it does best. It’s shocking to see how often photographers feel the need to dress up their wares by comparing their pictures with other media (“painterly”, “poetic”, …). Ignoring the question which paintings they actually refer to — Titian’s, Rothko’s? — or what exactly “poetic” is supposed to mean, it’s weird to observe a medium that is as insecure about itself as photography frequently is.

This is not even to say that photography only does one thing. If you wanted to summarize painting, you would have to describe it as people attaching pigments to surfaces in order to try to get at that medium’s sheer wealth of expression. The same is true for photography: it’s people creating what look like opto-mechanical images that might or might not have been created with the help of a lens.

But there are some things photography is simply especially well suited for. This includes the capture of fragments of life in very short moments of time, an activity that freezes those moments, and those caught in them, forever. For Henri Cartier-Bresson, this approached formed photography’s truest expression, and it has remained with us as the so-called decisive moment.

The problem with that concept — as with any other concept in photography — is that it’s one thing to satisfy the criteria. But it’s quite another to do it in such a fashion that the outcome is more than merely an exercise. In other words, the decisive moment will not give you great pictures. As you see in Cartier-Bresson’s work, it will mostly give you good pictures.

What is usually missing from discussions of the decisive moment is the fact that art does not derive from the application of opto-mechanical principles alone. For true art to arise, the person pressing the shutter button will have to bring something unquantifiable to it, something that cannot be summarized with a few words. The viewer’s wonder, in other words, is not contingent on the application of a formula.

Instead, photographs can only communicate passion, wit, and/or excitement if the person behind the camera is equipped with passion, wit, and/or excitement — possibly the decisive moment be damned (just look at John Baldessari’s photography to get an idea what I’m talking about).

Ever since I first saw Ela Polkowska‘s Splinter, I had been waiting for the book, which now has been published. Ela is one of those photographers who somehow managed to carve out her own little, easy recognizable niche. You’ll simply recognize one her pictures immediately the moment you see it. To describe only the technique — the compositions, the use of flash — would not get at the wit communicated by them.

In a number of places on the internet, Splinter is described as being “a story of people living in continuous disorder” (for example here). I get it, we all have to succinctly describe our pictures somehow so that curators can file things away in their mental filing cabinets. But honestly (and I don’t mean to offend whoever came up with that description), if you forget all about the words and simply enjoy the photographs, you’re going to be in a much better position.

While there is a vaguely Eastern European feel to some of the environs Ela photographed in (this might not be surprising, given that the photographer who now resides in Sweden originally is from Poland), what you’re looking at is less the story of some people as these visual gems she unearthed with her camera. It is as if this photographer were to tell us that good pictures can be found everywhere: you just have to pay enough attention.

Many of Ela’s pictures work so well because they squeeze that one thing so tightly into their frames. In this photographer’s vision, a sandwich that was made with hyperprocessed meat with what might or might not be ketchup added and that’s sitting on a surface that has not been cleaned in a million years turns into a good picture because the sandwich gets so much focus. There really only is the sandwich in all of its “glory”, a disgusting sight for anyone who has even only a remote awareness of healthy food. But it’s a really good picture because that’s all you’re getting as the viewer (thankfully, you won’t have to digest the sandwich itself).

In general, there is an intriguing simplicity that governs these pictures. Simplicity, of course, is good. Anyone can try to make a really complicated photograph; but have you ever tried to make a really simple picture and do it well?

Splinter is suffused with a really charming sense of playfulness. Crucially, at no stage of looking through the book do you feel as if the photographer were making fun of the people in front of her camera. If anything, everybody appears to be in on the joke, even if there might never have been a discussion around what might be going on once the camera enters the game.

There is no snark (or any of the other nasty sentiments) that so often pop up when photographers bring their cameras to people and places where a viewer might infer a difference in class and/or economic well being. I find that particular aspect of the work especially welcome.

However, what really sets Splinter apart from so much other work made today is the fact that for me as a viewer, there is a visceral experience when I look at the pictures. I can feel the pinch in the old man’s nose by the child’s hand. I smell the animals, and I feel the warmth of the light on my skin.

Recommended.

Splinter; photographs by Ela Polkowska; 68 pages; Blackbook Publications; 2024

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The long sunset: Daidō Moriyama’s Record

It’s fair to note that Daidō Moriyama’s photography have found their true expression through print publications. The same can be said for many other Japanese photographers, given that in Japan the gallery system did not play the role it did in the West. For a while Moriyama even maintained his own private gallery, entitled Camp.

Camp existed during the years when Moriyama’s own photography appeared to be on the back burner. After his initial flurry of publications, some of them directly connected with the short-lived and influential Provoke group, starting in the mid 1970s until the late 1980s, there is a curious gap in many biographies of this photographer, which, unfortunately, has resulted in Camp not being as well known as it ought to be.

As a brief aside, given the crass neoliberal turn the commercial world of art photography has taken in the West, the idea of Camp has much to offer for photographers today who can’t find their place at the table where the crumbs dropped by the wealthy are being distributed.

In 1972, Moriyama published the first issue of a magazine he called Kiroku (or Record in English, which I will use from now on). “I would like to create a certain tension or antagonism between myself as portrayed in other media and myself as portrayed here in Record,” he wrote in that issue. There were four more issues, and then Record stopped — until it was revived in 2006, following a suggestion by Akio Nagasawa, an acquaintance of Moriyama’s.

“I was addressing myself rather than other people,” Moriyama wrote in issue number 6 about the past, “I wanted a simple, basic title. Sadly, Kiroku ended with the fifth issue. Production costs had doubled in the wake of the seventies oil crisis. I can’t deny that I was also a bit tired of the project.”

A selection of work from the first 30 issues of Record was published in 2017 (Moriyama’s quotes are taken from the book). A second selection, from issues 31 up to 50, has now been published as Record 2.

Both books were edited by Mark Holborn. In a nutshell, while Record contains occasional reproductions of spreads from the magazines (an approach well known from the various books about photobooks), in both books you get parts of the magazines reproduced (all in full bleed), alongside translations of the short introductory texts written by Moriyama.

If you wanted to think about the various issues of Record as a zine, I suppose you could. As far as I understand it, the term zine contains an element of setting things apart: whether it’s their makers proclaiming that they’re not part of the crowd or the crowd proclaiming that, well, those are zines (pronounced in a fashion that evokes the mental image of one’s fingers touching something unsavory).

It might seem a little bit strange to consider one of the most well known Japanese photographers as a zine maker. But if you look at Moriyama’s career, there certainly are many occasions of him brushing against the grain, whether as part of Provoke, as driving Camp, or his various approaches to making his own books. Someone who published a book entitled Bye-Bye Photography for sure wasn’t trying to play it safe.

Alternatively, you could view Record as coming closest to a form of diaristic photography. After all, the 20 issues contained in Record 2 cover the six-year time period from April 2016 until March 2022, meaning that there were roughly three issues every year.

These contain a mix of material, with some issues focusing on the by now familiar photo walks (“I crisscross the central Tokyo area, taking pictures almost daily.” — Record 34) or others produced during trips abroad to attend to an exhibition or prize ceremony (“Last November, while Paris Photo was on, I went to Paris for the first time in two years for business connected with the fair.” — Record 40).

But there also are occasions for Moriyama to look back and to reminisce, and it is these in which the emotions manage to break through what clearly has become the routine of essentially taking the same kinds of pictures over and over and over: “In early November I had some business to do in the town of Zushi,” Moriyama writes for Record 36, “I have a house there and usually visit two or three times a year. The more I drive along the coast and through the streets of the town, the more the images of a young Takuma Nakahira flash through my mind. It’s natural considering that fifty years ago we were close friends eagerly discussing photographic dreams while we walked together through the summer mornings, noon and evenings.”

It is too bad that there is the long gap between 1974 and 2006. To imagine the kinds of issues Moriyama might have produced, chronicling his life and events around him… While especially the years around Camp deserve to be unearthed, an endeavour made difficult by the photographer’s personal problems at the time, the issues of Record we have available cover his earliest, artistically most fruitful time period and the time today, with his name forever etched into the pantheon of contemporary photography.

To approach Moriyama’s Records with the idea of looking for great pictures would miss their point. Even as there is something to be said for careful editing of one’s work, not doing that at all has its advantages as well. If one decides to live one’s life with and in photography, one might as well delineate both — the life and the photographs — with a steady stream of publications that give witness to it all.

After all, the chase for the good pictures that can survive a ruthless edit can be crippling — I’ve encountered as much in students when teaching. What if the idea of the photograph as that precious gem can simply be discarded?

In retrospect, in a world where so many people now do what Daidō Moriyama has been doing for decades, namely relentlessly photographing and sharing their daily lives (much to the chagrin of curators and photography critics wedded to outdated, lazy thinking around photography), this Japanese photographer could be seen as being the true avant-garde yet again, first as a member of a new generation of photographers challenging their elders, and then as the prototype photographer for all those who now make good daily use of the cameras in their smartphones.

Even as it seems clear from Record 2 that the sun is slowly setting over a life in photography, Moriyama’s true legacy is going to remain with us for many years to come. But you will have to look past the harsh contrast of the black and white in the photographs to discover the multi-faceted human being behind them.

Record; photographs by Daidō Moriyama; edited from Records 1 through 30 by Mark Holborn; 424 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2017

Record 2; photographs by Daidō Moriyama; edited from Records 31 through 50 by Mark Holborn; 352 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2024

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I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears

If a rock falls from the sky that must mean something. Because if it didn’t why would it happen? At last that’s we humans approach it. There is something magical about a falling star, even if it isn’t a real star and even if it’s not as rare an event as one might imagine. After all, that rock appears to be coming from another world, a world beyond ours, a world we have no access to other than with our own eyes.

I remember seeing a piece of rock astronauts had brought back from the moon. In the museum setting, the rock had been encased in plexiglass, but there had been a small opening left. If you wanted to you were able to touch the rock with a finger or two. I remember that people must have done exactly that, because the rock looked noticeably different where it had been touched. Thousands and thousands of finger tips had rubbed off part of its surface.

Truth be told, a rock falling from the sky isn’t any more magical than the much larger one we live on. Or rather, a rock falling from the sky is just as magical as the one we live on. But what’s easily available does not come with magic (unless one has managed to keep one’s former childhood sense of wonder and curiosity alive).

For as long as human beings have lived on this planet, they have looked at the sky in wonder, and it’s not hard to understand why. What at first looks like the spherical dome sitting on top of our visible world — much like in medieval illustrations — reveals itself to be a space that has depth once you move away from light pollution. The spherical dome is in fact not a dome: it’s a vast space whose end is not in sight (and which in fact might not have one).

This space reveals itself with time, as you allow your eyes to become sensitive to light that initially you simply would not be able to see. In other words, you see something that you were not able to see before (or you thought that you were unable to do so), and it’s a world that is not merely black and white. Every little sparkle in the sky has its own colour. Some of the sparkles are indeed white, but many are yellow or red or blue.

And out of that vast space — it is vast once you see it the way people saw it before our own lights made it almost disappear — come little rocks our way, crossing the sky in fiery paths, and then crashing into the ground. Again: how is this not magical?

All of this is the premise of Emilia Martin‘s I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears. Using the by now familiar contemporary recipe of assembling the artist’s own photographs (some post-processed) and archival ones and including a similar mix of texts, the book dives into our fascination with meteorites.

For someone with a background in astrophysics these kinds of books have a harder job than others. After all, I am very familiar with the science, and I know some of the history as well. Thankfully, the artist did not attempt to play a scientist (in my book one of the gravest mistake an artist can do). Instead, the book mostly centers on the magic of the experience and on the many ways human beings have tried to make sense of these rocks.

As can be expected, the text and images work in different ways. In effect, they complement each other to build up the overall story (“story” is not necessarily the best word to describe it, but for the sake of simplicity I will stick with it). The book itself contributes through its smart and elegant production choices (may I add that at 32 Euros, it will not break the bank — a most welcome price point in a world where now $75 or $85 books have become the norm).

There is, of course, Regine Petersen‘s Find a Fallen Star, a three-volume book that also covers meteorites. Contrary to what many teachers and art critics want us to believe, there is much to be said for the same idea or topic being covered by more than one artist. After all, art is no competition — even if it’s often treated as such.

If I had to pick one book… Which I don’t, because as I said, art is no competition… But still, if I had to pick one it would be Martin’s book, mostly because it is more magical. The older I get, the more magic I want. Plus, magic allows for uncertainty, and uncertainty allows for the space that art, and only art, can fill.

That said, at times even I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears is a little bit too cerebral. It would seem that contemporary photographers and their book makers just can’t help themselves. Do I really need to see a grid of similar looking photographs on a spread, supplanting actual magic with whatever this photography game is supposed to be? I think not. I probably also didn’t need any of the explanatory texts.

Maybe there should have been even more magic, even more playing around with possibilities and uncertainty — but then it might just be a different book, and what point is there is discussing an imaginary book over the one at hand?

My minor misgivings aside, I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears demonstrates the strength of contemporary photobook making and storytelling. It’s a charming and engaging book that invites the viewer to come back simply by offering surprise revelations here and there. If you miss something the first time around, there always is that second time.

But the book also is a reminder of the simple fact that magic can be had in the simplest of ways: by looking at the stars. Maybe one of them will even fall in front of your feet. You never know.

I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears; photographs and texts by Emilia Martin and various authors; unpaginated; Yogurt Editions; 2024

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Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

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