Making an exhibition of myself

Not in the mood for sneaking around taking photographs of unsuspecting characters today I thought I’d go an have a look at the prospective gallery spaces in the two shopping centres that appeal to me the most. First was Europa (www.europa.lt), which having looked at it in a new light (no pun intended) is by far the best shopping centre in Vilnius. Banana-shaped and on three floors, it’s mostly fashion outlets plus a few restaurants and cafés and it’s in the new swanky business district. Best of all it’s got a glass roof, and the light during the day is perfect. I’d been told yesterday that there was a space inside for exhibitions, but this wasn’t exactly true. There were six appalling photographs hanging on bits of string and in crappy frames, but they were just against a wall on the top floor. What was interesting was that a lot of people were looking at them. If I decide to pursue exhibiting here I’ll need to design the whole thing (or rather I’ll need to get somebody to design it for me). The two spaces I like are the bridge on the top floor that joins the two rows of shops on either side and one of the two hanging pods that belong to a café. Next up was Akropolis (www.akropolis.lt), the most popular of all the shopping centres in the city and always packed. The exhibition space here I already knew about, and it runs down a corridor where the toilets are. It’s dark and depressing and nobody was looking at the (dreadful) photography on display. So, Europa it almost certainly is… unless things happen at the Prospekto Gallery or I decide to exhibit in the café-bar I mentioned before (or at least I think I mentioned before). In Akropolis I also couldn’t resist buying a camcorder, the cheapest one they had, which is an old MiniDV camera that I bought because of another project I’m working on here (www.freevilnius.com) and also because the 20 hours or so of footage I shot in Cuba a decade ago is all on MiniDV and I want to digitise it all before the tapes degrade too much. As for the actual content of the photographic exhibition, I’m almost certain now that it’s going to be a black and white Nokia retrospective with ongoing work as well, all shot blind and all printed on an inkjet printer. I need to put some of the pictures I’ve been working on for this online soon. Work is mental at the moment and once again I find myself with no time to get completely stuck into this.

Lithuania

And because it's Lithuania, three of the six email addresses don't work.

Exhibition

I've just sent an email to six major shopping malls in Vilnius enquiring about exhibition space. Should be interesting to see what kind of replies I get. Some of them I know for sure have exhibition space.

I'm invisible

This is interesting. An experiment with software for stitching pictures together I was messing around with last year, and that I just came across. This is three pictures together, taken in broad daylight inside a supermarket in the UK. I'm 6'3" and I don't blend in easily. Look how there's no recognition of the fact that I'm photographing. Would this picture be possible if taken using anything than a mobile phone? Just a thought to add to the rest.

Daily Lives Revisited

Wiki

After finally getting access again to the MAPJ wiki I managed to get my citizen journalism stuff up. However, not unlike the back end of Wikipedia, this particular wiki was (and I suppose thinking about it all wikis are the same) the most unfriendly, unintuitive piece of programing I've come across in a long time. Does anybody reading this understand it? This is an important point I believe, that technology on many occasions holds back creativity. I'd like to read everybody's citizen journalism pieces but I'm buggered if I can find them. What a piece of crap.

More of the same

I honestly don’t think you can beat printing on an inkjet printer, at least not if you’re doing what I’m trying to do at the moment. Not only did the chirpy anorak at the Kodak Pro shop not get the idea that I wanted to print pictures complete with their original aberrations and colour indiscretions, the finished prints (which cost an arm and a leg and a bit more) were lifeless and, in a word, crappy. Having also had my Nokia work published in a full colour separation magazine before and seen equally dull results, I’m more and more excited by an inkjet printer’s extraordinary ability to squirt vast amounts of delicious ink onto shiny paper and produce the most stunning photographs. Since starting printing a few weeks back (why did it take me so long to do this?) I’ve tried just about every kind of paper available and, interestingly, I’ve found I get by far the best results from the cheap generic stuff (acme®) from the local supermarket. The black and white prints I’m working on now, which may or may not end up as the Daily Lives Revisited project, end up with a slight brownish tint, which really make the images absolutely perfect. What’s also extremely interesting is that having printed out a range of prints over the last day on A4 paper with the images considerably smaller in the middle I’ve noticed that they’re all photographs I shot blind. Zen archery again? Anyhow, ordinary people in ordinary situations captured sneakily and presented using the most basic and amateur of equipment seems to be where I’m heading for the final term. This is a glorious path of discovery, and I really feel like I’m producing work in a style that’s really me. It’s a crazy project, especially with such a crap camera (I could of course go out and buy an 8Mp cameraphone and take the same pictures only in ‘much better quality’… but I won’t), but it’s unique, and of course the pictures are good. Now on with the project and work out where to exhibit the final stuff at the end of the year. I think a quick trip to the UK is in order too, to show some of these pictures I keep going on about.

In a nutshell

These weekend trips aren't bearing fruit.

So, stick to Vilnius and decide whether to do a Vilnius-only final project or a Portable Portfolio. Methinks the former.

Printed up two test pictures today larger than the rest. All of a sudden my Nokia pictures look like gallery work. Extraordinary. So moved I was by the event that I'm finally going to get off my backside and take the same files I printed to the Kodak Pro shop and see what they can do with them.

Post-Panevėžys post

I like what Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, something along the lines of ‘If you want to make a little bit of cheese you have to milk a lot of goats’. Put that together with his musings of Zen archery (Google it) and you’ve pretty much got good street photography in a nutshell. An idea that keeps going around in my head that sounds more like an excuse than anything else when I stop to think about it is that, as those brilliant old films of Edwardian street scenes show, the streets just aren’t as busy as they used to be. Not that I’m advocate of shooting fish in a barrel, but it can get a bit depressing sometimes. This weekend I took the bus 150km north to the Lithuanian city of Panevėžys, first mentioned 500 years ago and now boasting a population of around 115,000 people. It all sounds rather promising until you go out with a camera and try to find anybody. Some days Lithuania feels like and collection of ghost towns, making my job exasperating to say the least. The way things are going, I feel pretty pleased with myself if I come home from such a trip with one decent photograph. Heading back to my hotel yesterday at around 6pm after a dismal day of seeing almost nobody I was suddenly struck by the amusing situation of trying to cross the road and having to wait what seemed like forever to get across thanks to an endless procession of cars in both directions. It’s been mentioned a million times before, but it’s still amazing to think how people have become so completely addicted to their cars. Still, I like a challenge, and if ever there was a challenge, trying to produce quality street photography with a two-megapixel Nokia in an empty country is a challenge to be sure. Anyway, I got home this afternoon and sat on the sofa with my new Antanas Sutkus book in order to read what was written inside. Not only was it uninformed arty claptrap but the quality of the English was some of the worst I’ve seen in a long time. If there’s a reason why Sutkus doesn’t get the recognition he deserves in the West, this is surely a large part of the reason. Reading between the painful lines it’s clear that Antanas Sutkus has had an extraordinary life, one that deserves a better telling than it gets now. At least that’s one contribution I can make when I finally get to meet and interview him. An intelligent book on Sutkus by the right publisher would do a lot to help promote arguably the most influential and unique photographers of the post-war Soviet Union. More of this later. I did a little more printing today, still working on the small 10cm x 15cm prints, and today actually dodging and burning parts of the images, something that is much more necessary when working with prints that if just posting photographs online. I’ve got a nice fat wad of Nokia pictures now, and will soon need to make the decision as to whether my final project will stay with the Lithuanian theme or will embrace more publishing and turn out to be a sort of retrospective, or Portable Portfolio. I still haven’t found the time to get some pictures printed at the Kodak Pro shop, neither have I made any advances towards doing some test colour separation prints. I keep getting distracted and worrying that my pictures aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, but then remember that the most important thing is to follow my own instincts and to produce a body of work that represents who I really am, not who I sometimes think I should be. When I get a minute I’ll do some rough scans of everything I’ve printed so far and put everything on line so that what I keep going on about hopefully makes more sense than it does just in words. I also want to try and find some more time to develop my snapshot projects, especially the Snapshot Citizens project I really badly want to do. I don’t think I’ve written about that yet. Will have to do that another time.

Panevėžys

How ironic that the longer I spend on this internet-focused (no pun intended) course the more I move away from the internet, or rather the more I move away from concentrating on presenting photographs on a screen. I think I’ve also pretty much established the fact that I’m not in the least interested in where the future of photojournalism and documentary photography lies (it’s a valid debate certainly, but why get caught up in it when what I really want to do has little to do with it?), so here I am, spending what little spare time I have travelling somewhere for a day or two to continue my Nokia experiments and printing new and old Nokia pictures and generally getting more and more excited by print photography by the minute. Maybe living in the past isn’t the best way of moving forwards, but I have to follow my instincts and do what I like doing best after all. Although I feel worryingly distanced from the course at the moment (although maybe I shouldn’t be worried, it is distance learning isn’t it?) I’m far from slacking from the job at hand. Much is afoot at the moment, with an imminent interview with Antanas Sutkus on the horizon and the idea of developing what I write from it into something much bigger, ambitious plans for future photographic projects that having nothing to do with me taking photographs and everything to do with my fascination with print publishing, photography and 20th-century Eastern European history (more of that in a later post) and the early planning stage of exhibiting my Nokia portfolio in a Lithuanian supermarket. Of the Sutkus project I was touched by the girls at work who turned up at my apartment last night to eat my food and get drunk with the large new book of Sutkus’ photography for me as a present. As I mentioned before, Sutkus needs more exposure in the West, something I think I can help achieve, plus if I do end up presenting my Lithuanian project as my final degree piece then it’ll be with more than a passing nod to Sutkus’ work (I think I’ve written here about Daily Lives Revisited already). So, babbling aside, all in all I’m more than busy developing work, albeit slightly out of the university loop. One thing I do know for sure is that you can’t work seriously with photography if you’ve got a day job. Not a lot I can do about that at the moment, but something that needs to be remedied sooner or later. What I really want to do is mess about with tutors and prints, something you can’t do with a website. What I really really want to do is produce a box set of my Nokia portfolio and throw the bloody thing away and get on with the next project. I feel I’ve invested a lot with my Nokia and would like to see it through to completion. It’s interesting that despite the proliferation of mobile phone photography in the world (see my previous post), I get the impression I’m one of a very small collection of photographers (who you could probably count on one hand) with a solid portfolio of serious mobile phone documentary photography work. I wanted to write here something about my reasons behind my choice of camera but the subject has once again escaped me. As the portfolio goes together, this will become easier to do. In a nutshell, I’ve yet to discover anything else that gives a photographer the freedom to work in the streets and produce portraits that go to the very soul of the subjects. Claptrap perhaps, but I really do see this with my pictures, and I really do feel it when I’ve got the space and am without the distractions. Tomorrow I take a two-hour bus trip to Panevėžys, Lithuania’s fifth city, to continue with the Daily Lives Revisited project. If you still haven’t had a look at the work of Antanas Sutkus, I really recommend that you do. I also hope that as of 2010, the course dedicates at least half a lesson during the first term of the new intake of students on the subject of documentary photography behind the Iron Curtain. I still can’t quite believe that such a hugely important social experiment is completely overlooked. Right then, back to the printing.

Ha

http://photojojo.com/uncut/2009/07/04/most-popular-camera-online/

Speechless