Henry Cow - in Praise of Learning

Tamsin Hewitt - Passagen / Artcades

Maja Ratkje - Drowning Girl / Pirate Jenny

Al Gebra

Re-taking Iwo Jima and other picture stories

Re-taking Iwo Jima (Tehran, 1979)

Just inside the forecourt of the American Embassy, they now erected a painting five metres high, a symbolic work inspired by Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of US marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945; in this case, however, Muslim revolutionaries had replaced the marines and they were struggling to raise a green Islamic flag, one end of which had miraculously turned into a hand strangling the Stars and Stripes. The occupation had thus become theatre, complete with painted scenery. It was more than this. It was a carnival.

Light drawing (Baghdad, 1991)

On some parts of the walls, flesh adhered for years afterwards. Other concrete surfaces were found to be imprinted with the shapes of the human beings who were liquefied in a millisecond at the moment the American missiles exploded. Hiroshima-like, they would leave their memory as a shadow on the wall.

Photography Ban Lifted (Riyadh, 2006)

Saudi Arabia has lifted a ban on photography in public places, as the conservative kingdom strives to attract more visitors to the birthplace of Islam. “People can take pictures of tourist sites, architectural landmarks, shopping malls as well as government buildings where there is no sign banning photography,” an official said yesterday. Permission is still needed to photograph private property or individuals.

Re-taking Iwo Jima (Tehran, 1979)

Light drawing (Baghdad, 1991)

Photography Ban Lifted (Riyadh, 2006)

Saudi Arabia has lifted a ban on photography in public places, as the conservative kingdom strives to attract more visitors to the birthplace of Islam. "People can take pictures of tourist sites, architectural landmarks, shopping malls as well as government buildings where there is no sign banning photography," an official said yesterday. Permission is still needed to photograph private property or individuals.

WIND FROM THE EAST END:

Jean-Luc Godard in conversation with Poor Photographer

Are you trying to change the world?
Yes.

Is your life a movie?
No.

Are you searching for a new alphabet in the language of cinema?
Yes.

Is it good to steal?
Yes.

Is your entire career an assault on the notion of intellectual property?
Yes.

Do you just have two themes: death and the impossibility of love?
No.

Or Walt Disney plus blood?
Possibly. Maybe.

To show and to show yourself showing – is this a succinct formulation of your fundamental aesthetic?
Yes.

Are you an entymologist filmmaker?
Yes.

Are your films like a battleground – love, hate, action, violence, death. In a single word: emotion?
No.

Is a good film a matter of questions properly put?
Yes. Yes.

Would you say that you work like an amateur in a professional way?
No. No. No.

Do you make films on politics or political films?
Perhaps.

Are you looking for love through work?
Perhaps.

Do you offer a just image or just an image?
Perhaps.

Is ours the civilization of the ass?
Possibly.

Do you prefer Marx or Coca Cola?
Maybe.

Are your films truth 24 frames a second?
No.

Do you just need a girl and a gun to make a film?
No.

Why bother with an interview?
No.

Edgars Gluhovs / Poor BB

Big Bang
Burt Bacharach
Brigitte Bardot
Blixa Bargeld
Béla Bartók
Brigid Berlin
Bernardo Bertolucci
Bruno Bischofberger
Bill Brandt
Bertolt Brecht
Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Buchloh
Bugs Bunny

David Evans / 10 Recent Works

The Work of Art in the Age of Manual Reproduction (Muniz 2005)
Public Domain Art in the Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility (Hamma 2005)
The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction (Mitchell 2003)
The Work of Art in the Age of Curatorial Production (Anon 2002)
The Work of Art in the Age of Systematic Re-institutionalization (Anon 2001)
Art in the Age of its Electronic Production (Buck-Morss 1997)
The Digital Work of Art in the Age of Immaculate and Promiscuous Reproduction (Dietz 1997)
The Work of Art in an Age of Diversity and Globalization (Anon nd)
The Work of Art in the Age of Post-Mechanical Reproduction (Malina 1990)
The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems (Nicholls 1988)

As Brecht says...

David Evans

Seventy-five years ago, the German Marxist Bertolt Brecht wrote that a documentary image of a munitions factory didn’t reveal much about the actual conditions of production inside its walls. We would learn more, Brecht thought, from ‘something artificial, invented’, or ‘constructed’. Brecht’s incredibly perceptive point suggests that mere fidelity to appearance does not necessarily help in understanding complex modern reality; in fact, a montage construction may show us more than a picture of this kind. (Edwards, 2006)

Tillmans has said that in photographing gold ingots he indicates something meaningful about money and value. An old remark by Bertolt Brecht is useful here: a photograph of a factory tells you nothing about the relations between the people inside it. The title of his Tate show and book – If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters – gives the game away, as well as reflecting the recent art-world prejudice for the straightforward depiction of the ‘real’. What is really being granted here are various naturalistic glimpses of objects and people. Access to the real demands a higher price – in thought, knowledge, and the building of structures, and in the realization that some things do matter more than others. (Stallabrass, 2004)

Hine’s major photobook of the 1930s, his Men at Work (1932), was an example of appreciative acquiescence rather than reforming zeal. It was a celebration of the American worker, and included a number of images from his renowned series on the construction of the Empire State Building, one of capitalism’s last hurrahs before the Depression began to bite … As Bertolt Brecht pointed out, a photograph of the Krupp factory exterior (or the construction of the Empire State Building) – no matter how formally adroit – tells us nothing of the complex socio-political forces that brought it into being. (Parr and Badger, 2004)

when photographers such as Renger-Patzsch took industrial sites and landscapes as their subjects, Bertolt Brecht found these images wanting in terms of depicting the true conditions of labour and the greed of capitalism:

The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. Something must in fact be built up, something artificially posed.

For Brecht, the answer to this problem with photography was montage or collage, synthetic meta-reality that, ironically, could address the actual state of industrial relations more accurately. Despite Brecht’s qualms, ‘straight’ photography has continued to flourish, and Brecht’s anxiety is partly answered as a result of the prevalence of work in series or the photographic essay. (Campany, 2003)

Photography is the possibility of a reproduction that masks the context. The Marxist Sternberg, for whom you surely share my admiration, explains that from the (carefully taken) photograph of a Ford factory no opinion about this factory can be deduced. (Brecht, 1930)