Creating Culture

March 5, 2011 | Filed Under Ideas | 1 Comment 

The other day I was thinking about how culture is created. A big picture topic for sure but I was thinking more about little movements, little movements that have big consequences.

The Beat movement for instance, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and crew. A fairly small group overall but the even now when almost all the originals are dead the work they created is still read and the culture around them emulated.

Vancouver is renowned in the art world right now but it started with a handful of photographers such as Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace and Rodney Graham.

My friend Ian Ferguson recently moved to Victoria with his wife Kirsten Van Ritzen. They are both writers, actors, directors etc. Ian has teamed up with local theatre guy Les Bland and formed a tv production company. Ian has also formed a comedy improv troupe Sin City and Kirsten has started up a series of standup comedy workshops. These three people in a few short months have set the stage for the emergence of a culture of acting and comedy. I said to Ian a few weeks ago that in five years we could be seeing a whole group of actors and comics and it will all come back to three people.

Two years ago photography was an afterthought at best in Victoria. There were (are) talented photographers of all stripes around but nothing to bring them together. One gallery, Dales, was showing photography on a regular basis but there was no single institution dedicated to photography.

That all changed a year and half ago with two people Quinton Gordon and Diana Millar and the opening of their gallery and workshop space Luz Gallery. Luz has shown a variety of photographers and styles, they’ve held workshops with both local and out of town photographers.

The results of all that have been a revitalized and energized local photo community. Victoria is now better known to other photographers and links have been forged with photo galleries and communities in other cities. Other local galleries are programming photography exhibitions. Local photographers are creating new work and booking shows.

Again that all comes back to two people. Two people creating a culture.

What can you create?

Thinking About Photographer Chris Schwarz

November 25, 2010 | Filed Under Ideas | 1 Comment 

Like most people when I notice my bookmarks page is getting out of control with far too many links I’ll go through and delete those links I’m not visiting any more, that no longer work, or that simply are not updated anymore. There is one site though that doesn’t get updated that I still leave on my list.

That site belongs to the British photographer Chris Schwarz.

I only met Schwarz once and it was such a different event that it continues to resonate with me.

It was the early 80′s and I was working in Edmonton. It was winter and I’d been assigned to cover a First Nations powwow on a small reserve at least an hour drive south of the city. It was cold and snowing and while I’d been promised a page for the images from the event I wasn’t expecting much from the event, indoors in small rural hall.

Once there I and working I noticed another photographer shooting away in the crowded room and eventually made my way over over to myself. We said hello and he introduced himself. I looked at him and said the British photographer (his accent being my first clue).  He answered in the affirmative looking a little puzzled and then even more so when I told him I knew his work. He shook his head and said that just wasn’t possible.

Now you have to remember this was pre-internet, pre-email etc. He was not a famous photographer just a documentary photographer in London who had snagged a gig from a  group of First Nation tribes who wanted an exhibition of images up in London before a delegation looking for help with treaty rights arrived in England, a way to generate publicity and interest in their cause. That assignment had resulted him being at that powow.

The chance that he’d run into another photographer in a tiny Alberta town on a freezing winter day was slim enough let alone one who knew who he was and knew some of his work.

A couple years earlier I’d been in London for several months and at some point had picked up copies of a tabloid photo magazine called Camera Works. In one issue that looked at the coverage of a (famous for the time) march and riot in Lewisham Schwarz’s work was featured which was where I remembered his name and work from. I believe he was in other issues I had but that one sticks in my brain for some reason.

He was quite overwhelmed and excited that I knew his images and some of the events he’d covered.  I was excited that I’d run into a photographer from London whose work I knew (which made him famous in my eyes)  I offered him a ride back to Edmonton after we’d finished shooting (he’d bused down) which he happily accepted and we talked photography all the way back and then through dinner and into the night.

That was the one and only time I met him. Later when I was working in Europe and was in London I’d ask photographers about him and he seemed to have dropped out of sight although one photographer told me that he’d heard Schwarz was helping start up a museum about the River Thames.

I don’t know if that story was true or not but he did end up starting a museum. It wasn’t in London though and it didn’t celebrate a river or even photography although it did feature a large number of his photographs.  In Krakow, Poland he opened the Galicia Jewish Museum, an outgrowth of his interest and photo project on Poland’s Jewish heritage.

Schwarz died in 2007 from cancer. His site is here. The site for the museum he founded is here. A New York Times obituary is here.

On Conscientious

November 10, 2009 | Filed Under Personal Project | Leave a Comment 

It was more than a pleasant surprise today during my daily check of photo sites to click on Joerg Colberg’s Conscientious site and see one of my photos from the Salt Water &Rain project.

It was especially heartening as this is one of the first projects where I’ve moved away (or at least I feel like I have)  from my newspaper photojournalism background.

The project is based on the idea that despite increasing globalization and commodification of culture we are all, no matter where we live, still strongly shaped and given identity by our landscape and weather. Those two factors work to keep us distinct. Living on the western edge, actually off the western edge, of Canada on islands, surrounded by the ocean and often, certainly in the fall and winter months, living in the rain and fog does affect how you live.

These photographs are an attempt to look at and understand that effect.

Learning Photography Online

July 24, 2009 | Filed Under Online Learning, Photography | Leave a Comment 

Students often ask where they can go to add to their knowledge when classes are done and many online sites are obvious recomendations. The past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to revisit some favourite sites as well as take a look at some new offerings.

Lens Culture hosts a great site but I’ve never checked out their collection of audio interviews before. I really enjoyed the talk by Stephen Mayes on the World Press Photo contest. I actually found myself scribbling notes on a nearby envelope as the lecture unfolded. At 49 minutes it’s a long but very useful, thought provoking talk.

Yesterday checked out the just posted interview with Danny Wilcox Frazier at Brian Storm’s MediaStorm and still have to go back for the rest of the presentation on Wilcox Frazier’s Driftless.

Over at the Lenswork site where I haven’t been in ages I found a whole series (400) of short podcasts from Brooks Jensen. These are all quite short and while you won’t want to listen to every one (well, maybe you will) there are lots to choose from . I’d actually gone there because I’d just read elsewhere about the death in May of Bill Jay, whose work especially his portraits of photographers I’d always found quite fascinating (I actually published a series of them in my short lived photo paper Deadline, back in the mid-nineties). Jay had been a long time contributor to Lenswork. Look at Jay’s images and/or read his essays at his site here.

Youtube offers up a number pf presentations on photography. I’ve paricularily enjoyed the videos on Magnum photographers, an amzing view of  Bruce Gilden, focusing on his street photography techniques, and a nice interview by Michael David Murphy with Alec Soth.

Magnum Photos offers up essays and podocasts on their agency site. I really like Trent Parke’s Minutes To Midnight presentation and have watched it a number of times. Parke and his wife, the equally accomplished photographer Narelle Autio, spent two years traveling around their native Australia.

If you want a look at how some photographer’s set up their workspaces take a look at Andrew Hetherington’s What’s The Jackanory site for video tours of photographers’s studios.