Afgelopen zaterdag bezochten we de tentoonstelling The Roaring Twenties in museum Kranenburg in Bergen. Erg leuke tentoonstelling met mooi werk van Erik van Lieshout, Esiri Erheriene-Essi, Helen Verhoeven. Top voor zo’n relatief klein museum!
Gezien/gelezen
William Eggleston – The Democratic Forest. Geweldig boek dat het democratisch fotograferen van Eggleston geweldig samenvat.
Gelezen
Anansi Boys van Neil Gaiman. Fantastisch verhaal over twee broer, zonen van een god die verstrikt raken tussen de wereld van mensen en goden.
Hans Aarsman – Vroomm! Vroomm!. Fotoboek van Hans Aarsman over auto’s met mooie persoonlijke verhalen van Hans Aarsman.
A friend notified me of a reasonable offer of this book at De Slegte. Ancient and Modern is offers an overview of Eggleston’s work up to the late 1980s. The book was produced as part of a retrospective exhibition of Eggleston’s work at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The book includes photographs from Eggleston’s travels in Kenya and South Africa/Transvaal that were completely unknown to me. I was also largely unfamiliar with Kiss Me Kracow’s work, made in Germany.
So a nice discovery. Good introductory text by Mark Holborn.
Photographs, as Hans Aarsman prefers them, are not taken to make a nice picture but only because they attract the photographer’s attention and because he just feels like taking a picture of them. Photo Libretto van Eddy Posthuma de Boer is full of it.
Or as Winogrand said:
Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
I knew Eddy Posthuma de Boer was the photographer who had taken the pictures in Cees Nooteboom’s books.
Cees Nooteboom, photo Eddy Posthuma de Boer
Here and there, the images are shrewd like Elliot Erwitt: black-and-white dalmatians at a crosswalk, an Arab who appears to be trying to fix an overturned car, fiddling with the engine with one hand, but a few meters away lies the rear axle of the car—a huge pile of square blocks of metal from cars pressed together.
Photo Libretto is a calendar. A picture every day of the year. Arranged by themes, or rather collections of photos. Texts on signs on storefronts with spelling mistakes. Means of transportation. French cars are rotting and becoming part of the French landscape. People reading the newspaper. Companies and products with the name Victoria.
Ordinary and remarkable images. Marte Röling’s Star Fighter. A hotel reception in Marseille is unimaginably crowded with wallpaper and carpet with floral designs. The tower of Pisa straightened (and thus the surroundings askew). A hotel room with a bathtub set in the middle of the room with a shower curtain around it (only possible in Belgium, I think).
The most admirable pictures are still the everyday things rendered without further context, which produce insane images. A neat little plant table made of Pepsi crates. Eggleston, then, I think.
I Will Be Wolf is the first book by Bertien van Manen. It is from 1975. The book exudes a wonderful freshness. Van Manen has seen Robert Frank, and I think also Eggleston. The images in I Will Be Wolf are a sort of European version of Frank’s The Americans. Less critical than The Americans, more friendly. Van Manen seems as shy as Eggleston. Photographs of people’s backs, often taken from a distance with views obstructed by poles and window columns. For me, it all works.
