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Nine eyes

This is just a-ma-zing: 9-eyes.com.

Natura Naturans

I've been very quietly working on what may turn into a new project. It's called 'Natura Naturans' and is Latin for 'nature doing what nature is supposed to do'. So I'm focusing on 'wild', disorganised snippets of nature. Not necessarily aesthetically pleasing, but confusing and messy. These are pockets where the processes of breakdown and fermentation occur. I believe some of the images I took during the trips to Rome and Venice the last couple of years put me in this direction. I also have the 'landscape' work of Ray Metzker in mind (although I'm not particularly fond of it). Above a small collection of images I took already in the fall of last year.

Sune Jonsson

A discovery. I had never heard of this photographer before. But recently, whilst leafing through a Steidl catalogue I picked up at Paris Photo two years ago, I was struck by some of his pictures. Earlier this week I was in Lund, a sleepy university town in the south of Sweden, where I happened to bump into a catalogue of a 2009 exhibition of his work ("And time becomes a wondrous thing ...").

Jonsson (1930-2009) seems to have focused largely on the rural life of his native Västerbotten area in the north of Sweden. Most of the work shown in the book dates from the 1960s and 1970s. People lived extremely frugally. Life revolved around the work on the land, the family and faith. No television, hardly a radio. The stove, pets or musical instruments provided companionship and relaxation.

Jonsson mixes landscapes with very formal and at the same time very personal portraits of farmers and their families. The compositions are not fanciful, but strong and sturdy. Which does not mean they are not imaginative. There is a picture, for example of a farmer's wife sitting on a couch. Suddenly you realise her husband's face is reflected in the mirror above. Jonsson's restraint and classicism also betrays a certain grittiness, a tragic sense of fragility. Sometimes I had a flash of recognition and I could see a foreshadowing of Anders Petersen's extremely visceral style. There is also a connection with the equally personal Baltic approach of Vitas Luckus (my very first photo book, way back in the early 1980s), not that far away from Sweden after all.

In his work Jonsson manages to stay away from a saccharine rural romanticism and expose something very authentic, unadorned, tough and true about a simple life on the land. A great photographer.  

Salgado in Alaska

I picked up this slideshow by Salgado who is working on his next chapter of this Genesis project: Alaska. Quite marvelous. Pictures are accompanied by a quirky, but also personal interview. Réponses Photo dedicated an feature last year on Salgado's switch to digital. A Canon 1DsMk II. Likely he has moved onto the Leica S2 in the meantime.

Hans Bol's Paradise City

Two weeks ago we went to Scheveningen, to visit the 'finissage' and a book launch of Hans Bol at the Museum Beelden aan Zee. The portfolio on display was Paradise City, a project on the marble quarries of Carrara Hans had been working on for over 20 years (!).

The exhibition was small - altogether around 20-25 pictures - but very very well done. It is always an enormous pleasure to study these fantastically detailed and lively prints from 6x17 negs up to 20x25. I am fairly familiar with this body of work - spanning hundreds of pictures - as Hans allowed me to browse the portfolio numerous times during the workshops we had in the past. But I was happy to find several pictures I hadn't seen before.

The big event, however, was the launch of Hans' new book, the second published under his own RectoVerso imprint (after Het Formaat van Waterland, from 2004). I know Hans has been planning this publication for a long time, thinking about a suitable book concept, making dummies, toying with different selections of his images. I think one difficulty he saw was the absence of an overarching narrative. When you are working on a project for so long it is not unusual to 'forget' almost what the original impetus behind it was. Some photographers start with only a vague inkling of what a project is about and allow the sense to emerge as they go. Others have a well-defined story in mind and they stick to that script no matter what happens. It seems to me that in Hans' case he started out with a fairly precise idea of what he wanted to do but as time moved on this got buried under many other layers of experience and meaning. Finally, he settled on an ecologically inspired story about a landscape that has been mutilated by crass commercial opportunism. As he writes in the introduction: "Initially I was mesmerized by the fantastic light of the quarries and became fascinated by the material and traces the quarry workings had left behind. Before long, I began the view the quarry itself as a sculpture in which coincidence plays a significant role (...) Eventually, influenced by the photography of the New Topographics, I also saw the immense damage the quarries had caused to the impressive quarries had caused to the impressive nature of the westen part of the Central Appenines. A silent beauty seems to go hand in hand with destruction of the landscape."

The book is gem. It is sized 24x30cm, portrait format. There is no dustjacket. On the inside small hand-made silver gelatine print of the cover image has been included in every copy of the 700 copy print run. The paper is a delicate matte, reminding us of the texture of the marble that is at the centre of the work. There is a variety of negative formats, including 4x5, 8x10, 8x20 and 6x17. Usually I dislike a mixture of formats but here the images have been so intelligently sequenced that, from a purely layout point of view, it absolutely works. But the design (by Dutch book designer Els Kerremans) also helps to bring the whole portfolio at a higher plane. The richness of resonances between the images opens up a very fundamental conceptual and philosophical space to reflect upon our human predicament here on this planet. For me the book is ultimately about the human species carving out (literally) a niche for dwelling. We do that in many ways, not only by building houses but also by developing a spoken and written language. A Faustian bargain comes into play as we may well perish in the process, as a result of shortsightedness or hubris. This, for me, is a meta-narrative that spans the various stories that Hans might have want to tell with this work.

In spirit the book connects very much to the very best, epic work of Koudelka. As in Limestone and Black Triangle we are witnessing a mute, primeval world with sordid traces of humanity written all over it. In Paradise City Hans plays very clearly on this notion of 'writing' through his pictures of various, illegible paint traces or inscriptions that can be found on the blocks of marble strewn haphazardly through the landscape. Another photographer that comes to mind is Depardon. About his Errance I wrote earlier: "What Depardon has mapped are habitats, nothing more and nothing less. It is about places that are inhabited, sometimes barely so. One gets the impression of looking at our planet from a great distance: not the enchantingly poetic image of the great blue sphere swimming in space, but a place that is not particularly beautiful, not particularly loathsome. It is just a place. This is the purity of gaze that Depardon was after. It's a perspective that is profoundly unsentimental, but deeply compassionate." I think this applies very well to Hans' Paradise City too.

I am happy to see this work finally in print. Clearly a major piece of work that ranks with the best. I hope it will open up new opportunities for Hans, an intelligent, creative, hardworking, very conscientious and modest photographer.