The Ant!foto Manifesto

The Ant!foto Manifesto

The latest installment in the ongoing series of photography eating itself comes courtesy of the consistently innovative and extremely prolific German duo of Oliver Sieber and Katja Stuke (confusingly known as Böhm Kobayashi). They have just released their latest Ant!foto publication in the form of a Manifesto newspaper. The paper includes contributions from a bunch of photo types from across the spectrum of which my favourite would have to be Jeffrey Ladd's list of demands/wishes/grievances. There is also a website (how could there not be) which allowed you to contribute your two photographic cents to a Visual Manifesto event organised with Markus Schaden at the Dusseldorf PhotoWeekend but sadly it is now too late and you have missed your opportunity to enter the Ant!foto Hall of Fame. If you are interested in all the navel-gazing and existential self-interrogation that photography has been getting into of late (and yes, I am actually interested), then this Manifesto is worth checking out.

Lost and Found

It will soon be the first anniversary of the huge earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan's Tohoku region. Hundreds of thousands of images have been taken since the disaster and most of these naturally focus on documenting the scale of the devastation. In my view, little interesting work that goes beyond straightforward visual description has emerged as yet. One of the strongest projects started up immediately in the aftermath of the disaster when the photographer Aichi Hirano decided to distribute disposable cameras to the people in the shelters in the devastated region. He retrieved the cameras, developed the film and published the results at www.rolls7.com. I have written about the Rolls Tohoku project before on the blog and Hirano has continued to add new images to the Rolls website since then.

This week, I discovered another project which is a fascinating companion to Rolls Tohoku. The Memory Salvage Project was started two months after the earthquake by a team of young researchers from The Japan Society for Socio-Information Studies who felt the need to return the photographs which were swept by the tsunami to their owners. A group was set up to gather photographs that were retrieved after the tsunami, to clean them, digitize them, and to attempt to return them to their owners. This could seem like a herculean and perhaps misplaced undertaking given the scale of the problems that people face in the affected areas, but I think it is a wonderful reminder of what photographs can mean to people and how closely they are linked to our memories.

An exhibition of some of the retrieved images took place at Akaaka's gallery in Tokyo earlier this year and, for any readers in Los Angeles, a second exhibition at Hiroshi Watanabe's studio is taking place from 8-25 March. Details are on the Lost & Found website.

Cruel and Unusual @ Noorderlicht

© YANA PAYUSOVA - Holy Trinity - Holy Ghost, 2004

The Cruel and Unusual exhibition that opens at the Noorderlicht Gallery in Groningen tomorrow is a rare breed. This is a project that started out (and still lives) on the internet, became a road trip across America, and is now both a newspaper and an exhibition. With work by eleven different artists, Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin and Lori Waselchuk, the exhibition focuses on prison photography, a subject that receives very little exposure. The show is co-curated by fellow photo-bloggers Hester Keijser (Mrs Deane) and Pete Brook (Prison Photography) who write two of the most dynamic and esoteric blogs that you will find on the web (aside from their dozens of other writing, curating and photographic projects). To state the obvious, prisons are not exactly a sexy subject and the fact that they have managed to put this show together is very impressive. Instead of a 'traditional' exhibition catalogue, the curators have put together a newspaper (print run of 4,000 / 1.50 € per copy) in an attempt to reach more readers than an expensive photobook could (they lay out their reasons for this choice in detail here). The world of photography online can be an exasperating, sprawling mess, but the fact that it can lead to projects such as this one makes it genuinely worthwhile. I'm providing a few visuals of the work on show with this post, but if you can make it to Noorderlicht before the exhibition closes on 1 April, don't miss this.

© AMY ELKINS - 6/44 (Not the Man I Once Was)
© CHRISTIANE FESER
© NATHALIE MOHADJER - Detention cell in Muyinga, Burundi 2009

© ALYSE EMDUR - Anonymous Backdrop Painted in Shawangunk Correctional Facility, New York 2005-2011

What's Next?

I've just written a piece for the magazine European Photography in which I touch on the lack of substantial online discussion on current trends in photography and where things are going. I'll be posting the piece on eyecurious soon, so I won't go into detail here, but in general my feeling is that although online activity on photography is growing by the day, it is becoming commensurately shallower as a result. Fortunately there are examples which buck the trend. Foam, the Amsterdam photo-museum, has recently added What's Next? to its expanding range of content. What's Next? is a supplement to Foam's quarterly magazine but also an online discussion forum which is designed to spark discussion on current trends and how they are affecting the development of photography. The museum recently organised an expert meeting in Amsterdam around the What's Next project with an impressive line-up including Charlotte Cotton, Fred Ritchin, Thomas Ruff, Joachim Schmid and many others (you can see a number of the presentations from the meeting on Foam's youtube channel). Although the design of the site messes with my eyes and head a little bit, there is some terrific content on here running from photobooks to photojournalism. As a blogger I find that the most satisfying experiences writing online are those which spark a discussion, debate or even an argument. If you are interested in any of the above, I highly recommend a visit to What's Next?

The photographers' cookbook

I have just received a couple of emails from students at Falmouth University in the UK. Instead of the usual print auction to fundraise for their end of year show they have come up with something a little different: they are producing a cookbook with recipes by a pretty solid selection of contemporary photographers (Alec Soth, Elina Brotherus, Richard Misrach, Martin Parr, etc.). I think this is kind of great and proof that the future of photobooks although uncertain, is definitely not getting any less surprising. Find out more (and buy yourself a copy) here.