Brassai :PARIS AT NIGHT

I found a book in a second-hand shop ‘The Secret Paris of the 30s’, by Brassai. First published in 19333 as ‘Paris de Nuit’ and later in Britain, it is full of remarkable images of Parisian nightlife. Some are daring for their time: he photographed whores, brothels and opium dens.
Brassai was first in Paris in the 1920s, where he lived by night, going to bed at sunrise and getting up at sunset, wandering the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre.
In his book, he said that even though he had ignored and disliked photography before his night wanderings, he was inspired to become a photographer by his desire to translate all the things that enchanted him in the nocturnal Paris he was experiencing.
His text is every bit as fascinating as the pictures – he would go into buildings in areas of Paris not many people would venture into, knock on doors and ask if he could photograph them. Often he would frighten the locals – night photography was so uncommon. ‘But oddly enough, doors were almost always opened to me, and I never got shot at, as might have happened, for disturbing a nocturnal household.’
He admits to being arrested by the police three times – once when they refused to believe anyone might want to take pictures by the canal at 3am. He carried some prints of night shots with him, just to prove it could be done.
He uncovered a secret world, not of just night workers, but of love, vice, crime and drugs. Sometimes treated with suspicion, other times asked to leave a bar or club, Brassai managed to get behind the walls, to see a different side to Paris. He befriended people on inner circles where he could – ‘I hung out, made myself as invisible as I could’. He tried to gain the trust of naturally suspicious people, usually on the wrong side of the law.
Being invisible, capturing the moment in true photojournalistic style was difficult as he was working with plate cameras but whether the shot is posed or capturing a private moment, a view from the attic room or a street scene, Brassai’s images are wonderful and arresting, telling a story we wouldn’t otherwise know.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank was born, wealthy and Jewish, in 1924, in Zurich. He made his way to the USA in 1947, where Alexei Brodovitch of Harper’s Bazaar, took him on as a fashion photographer. But it wasn’t for Frank.as his felt there was no real spirit to the work. Instead, he went to Peru, Paris, London, Spain and Wales, taking photographs as he travelled. He constructed home-made books of his pictures. In 1955, encouraged by Walker Evans – the photographic chronicler of the rural American Depression – he applied for a Guggenheim scholarship to make and photograph a journey across the United States.

He spent two years looking for things that, he said, were easily found but not easily selected and interpreted. He drove some 10,000 miles across the US, often with his wife and two small children. He used at least 760 rolls of film, mostly Kodak Tri-X – which had come on the market only six months earlier. He took 28,000 photographs.
In 1958, he published The Americans, a distillation of his journey. The book made his name and reputation. It contained just 83 photographs, each on its own right-hand page, with captions at the back of the book. He photographed bars, drive-ins, elevators, crucifixes, offices, factories, department stores and coffee shops, political conventions, urinals, cemeteries, roads.

The car window as framing device is perhaps his most distinctive formal innovation. A lot of images are lopsided, taken in low light, with intentional blur and fuzziness, they are in complete contrast to other contemporary photographers, such as Irving Penn.
The work did not appeal to many who thought it a degradation of the nation (Aperture Magazine) but in time, most people saw it as non-judgemental and realistic: a view of modern American.

After the book was published, Frank practically gave up photography and went on to make movies and documentaries and experimented with Polariod but he never achieved the reputation for greatness that his photography had bought him.

http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/382

John Stezaker collages exhibition in London

British artist creates collages from found photographs, vintage postcards and book illustrations
John Stezaker;s work was shown at The Whitechapel Gallery in March. The images, which are comprised of found photographs, movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, are designed to give new meaning to the original work.
The show includes over 90 works ranging from the 1970s until today, including the 'Mask' series fusing together the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets or waterfalls.
The 'Dark Star' series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, while the 'Third Person Archive' removes single figures from travel illustrations and presents them on their own.
British artist John Stezaker was born in Worcestor and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

for more information check out http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/john-stezaker-whitechapel-art-gallery-london-2198232.html

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall is arguably the most important photographer working today. Phaidon recently published a book showcasing 1,000 masterpieces from more than 30,000 years of art history. It contained only one photographer. Rather than Atget, Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson, the experts editing the book chose Wall. Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he lives and works today.
Jeff Wall has had retrospective exhibitions at London’s Tate Modern and New York's Museum of Modern Art. He recently had a show at White Cube Mason's Yard, consists of three large-scale colour transparencies mounted on aluminium light-boxes, of the kind that Wall has been making since the late 1970s, and six black-and-white photographs. All the pieces have been created in the past year or so, and are priced between £100,000 and £400,000.
One image I really like is ‘Dressing Poultry’, in which three women process chicken carcasses in a cluttered barn on a small farm near Vancouver. The women laugh as they go about their gory business, loading headless chickens into an old plucking machine, before transferring their corpses to a table. To the left, hunks of pink and pimply flesh hang from a rope. He paid farm hands let to him document their work over several days.
Although famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage, for this he did not digitally manipulate the image but still took several hundred shots. But in this case, he paid the farm-hands to let him document their work.
I like his heightened sense of the surreal – the happy women with dead chickens and it seems to almost present a vision of hell, with the detrius of modern life, like a Bruegel painting. It is his sense of form that means critics have placed his work not only in context of the history of photography but of art.
Much of his work records everyday objects and people but not in a grand way. A bar of soap in a dirty sink, a takeaway carton, it seems to represent everyday life of people and objects that are disposable, that have been discarded and thrown out as rubbish. They are not happy pictures but are often a depressing representation of the bottom of the heap.

Dressing Poultry (2007) by Jeff Wall