A life in pictures...

Nice stranger-than-fiction story on Richard Simpkin in the Guardian along with a video that are both worth checking out for their curiosity value alone.

It comes in advance of the gallery show "Richard & Famous" a collection of some 450 of Simpkin's self-portraits with celebrities he has taken since he popped his snapshot cherry with BROS as a teenager in Sydney in 1988.

Simpkin's archive is a strange and unique historical document that chronicles our celebrity saturated culture as well as one man, Simpkin himself, growing up awkwardly alongside some of the world's most famous faces.

Most interesting is that some of his most famous photos somehow take on a different meaning due to the death, divorce or disgrace of the picture's subjects, with Simpkin - his cheeky grin ever-present - seemingly innately understanding that if he just kept going, one day, someone might just ask if they could have their picture taken with him...

Them Bones...

BARE BONES WEBSITE

Legendary illustrator and loving father of the Bare Bones crew Harry Malt has gone and set up a website to represent his ever-loyal flock of miscreant creatives....

What's that Harry?

Take a drink of that Kool Aid??

No thanks mate...mine's a Stella.

Ssssshhhh! I'm Taking a Thoughtograph...

Fascinating article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about Ted Serios, a Chicago bellhop who, whether true or false, produced 'psychic' photographs or so called 'thoughtographs' during the 1960's and thereby, perhaps, taking photography to the next level.

The article states that Ted produced his images 'by holding a Polaroid camera and focusing on the lens very intently, producing dreamlike pictures of his thoughts on the film'.

Now that I'd like to see...









Images © Ted Serios

There's an exhibition entitled 'Psychic Projections/Photographic Impressions: Paranormal Photographs from the Jule Eisenbud Collection on Ted Serios' at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County for anyone who's nearby...

Coast to Coast: Shameless Self-Promotion

NEW YORK: AUGUST 13

Colony launches at the IFC Center. Come along and support the film!

LA: AUGUST 14

Scion Gallery

Retratos Pintados at Yossi Milo

Glad to see Yossi Milo getting on the vernacular photography bandwagon with their upcoming show Retratos Pintados.

I happened on a lovely young employee at the gallery a couple of weeks back carefully handling and cataloging over a hundred of these amazing hand painted prints, some printed on bits of cardboard, some curled over with time, all of them feeling like they were sliced from a sun-soaked and colorful but crumbling wall somewhere in Brazil. A really unique and amazing collection.

Needless to say I'm looking forward to the show, opening tomorrow night.



Reminiscent of the collection found by Thomas Dworzak in a Kandahar photo store and published as 'Taliban' there's something that really speaks to me with these hand painted images that's bordering on an obsession.

I first saw them on my travels in India and tried to buy a bunch from an old, beautiful wood fitted photography shop in Kashmir; pictures of Dal lake splashed with bold watercolour, blue skies for daytime and bright oranges for sunset. Painted portraits of young Indians with that same, timeless studio flash and painted faces; trapped in another age.

The owner, an old man surrounded by dusty old SLR's and a faded Kodak logo waved me away like I had indeed tried to steal his soul and I've continued my search for hand painted happiness ever since...

Here's the blurb for the show:

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Retratos Pintados, an exhibition of hand-painted vernacular photographs from Brazil. The exhibition will open on June 24 and close on September 18. This will be the premiere presentation of these one-of-a-kind photographs.

Since the late 19th century through the 1990s, hand-painted photographic portraits were a common feature in homes in the rural areas of the northeastern Brazilian states. At a time when black-and-white photographs were not considered dramatic enough, the retratos pintados (“painted portraits”) glamorized and idealized their subjects. Black-and-white family photos were enlarged and painted, conferring status on members of the family and portraying them as icons or saints. Using oil washes and other techniques specific to the region, local artisans embellished clothing with pattern and color, smoothed wrinkles, added jewelry or resurrected deceased relatives, illustrating the fantasies and desires of their customers.

Due to advances in technology over the past 25 years, hand-painted photographs have become a rarity in the region, and the tradition of analogue portrait-making is being lost. Most portraits are now computer-generated, eliminating the charm and distinctiveness of each artist’s individual style. The exhibition will include approximately 150 unique, vintage painted portraits ranging in size from 8” x 10” to 16” x 20”. The photographs were selected from those collected by Titus Riedl, a European who has lived in the region for 15 years. Fit into simple frames and hung together in clusters, the exhibition reflects the way family photos might be displayed in the home.

Online and About Town

Image Collection Albert Kahn

Long obsessed with hand-tinted color photographs I saw a documentary on the amazing and indeed 'Wonderful World of Albert Kahn' some years ago on the BBC and bought the subsequent book an amazing early catalog of global cultures and adventures rendered in weird dream like tones. Turns out Kahn's early color process was something called the Autochrome an ethereal and other-worldly technique involving potato starch and soot.

Not content with already having invented cinema, the Autochrome was pioneered by the Lumiere Brothers who switched to stills photography after their adventures in cinema, patenting this first color process. It must have wowed a public already amazed by the new technology of the photograph when it was pioneered in 1907.

The technique went on to be adopted by those good folks at the National Geographic society and was the main color photographic process available to those early and adventurous snappers. Excerpts of the Nat Geo collection go on show tonight at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, check it out if you're about town.

New York Times photographer Stephen Crowley has a blog post over at Lens with a nice slideshow of images.


Jacob Gayer, Washington Tourists, Washington DC, 1926

Miroslav Tichy

Since my post on G.P. Fieret I've been meaning to write up something about another favorite but eccentric photographer Miroslav Tichy. The retrospective currently on show at the International Center of Photography gives me the perfect excuse.

Much like Feiret's story, Tichy was a reclusive, hermetic man almost eighty years old when he was 'discovered' by the art world in 2004. His first exhibition was staged at the prestigous Kunsthaus in Zurich. As written by his friend and biographer Roman Buxbaum it was "one of those fairytales that shouldn't be possible in our globalized art world."



Tichy's story is the epitome of that cliched line between genius and madness and one that is in equal parts tragic, incredible and inspiring. Born in Moravia, Czechoslovakia in 1926, Tichy was a talented young artist, studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. When the Communist regime took over in 1948, Tichy's story began to twist and turn, first in defiance of the new political order that forced artists to paint what was dictated to them and then through a cycle of mental illness that saw Tichy withdraw from normal society and become an increasingly eccentric and erratic character.

Shunned by a regime that was based on oppressive conformity, Tichy spent much of his time in psychiatric institutions in the late 50's and early 60's and was treated by a friend, psychiatrist Harry Buxbaum, biographer Roman's Uncle.

Upon his release he returned to his hometown of Kyjov where he appears to have been a kind of bogeyman for local kids and the authorities alike, unshaven and ragged and living a feral existence. He maintained a studio (in the home of Roman's grandmother) where he painted and drew and associated with local artists.

By all accounts he seems to have reveled in his outsider status taking on all comers with an air of manic defiance...

"People ask me, What are you, Mr. Tichý? Are you a painter, a sculptor, or a writer? I reply: Do you know who I am? I am Tarzan in retirement."

Tichy was evicted from his studio in the early 70's, the state having nationalized the property and his work thrown into the street. It was a trauma for Tichy who had little else in the world but his paintings and drawings, however it was also the catalyst for Tichy to begin his journey into photography.

He recalled:

"The paintings were already painted, the drawings drawn. What was I supposed to do? I looked for new media. With the help of photography I saw everything in a new light. It was a new world."

A new world is an apt description and one that puts into context how special the work of Tichy is. He is a rare photographer that has existed outside the photography world and almost outside of the process of photography itself. Hand manufacturing cameras and lenses, enlargers and splicing film by hand to fit them, the unique beauty of Tichy's work seems all the more powerful.







"Tichý has photographed people in the park and on the balconies of the tower blocks all around. That requires a powerful telescopic lens with a focal length of between 300 and 500 mm. He made one himself out of materials he found lying around. He made a system of lenses out of old eyeglasses and Plexiglas. The way he works almost brings to mind the Stone Age, but he wouldn't have managed without an intimate knowledge of the laws of optics. As Tichý relates: With a knife I cut a lens out of Plexiglas and then I sand it with sandpaper. When I asked him in amazement whether it worked, he replied: Of course it worked. When I do something, it has to be precise. Of course it worked imprecisely. That was perhaps the art, he added, laughing. Then I grind the lens with various sandpapers: first, course sandpaper, then finer and finer, until you can see through it beautifully. And then what? It needs to be polished. That isn't a problem: you take toothpaste, mix it with cigarette ash, and then you polish it. And that's what I photographed with."

Pretty amazing stuff.

Tichy's pictures, almost exclusively of women, taken surreptitiously and shot from the hip or from under the safety of his jacket are an analysts wet dream. To delve into his years of primitive psychiatric treatment in a Communist state, his obsession with photographing women, the what's and the why's of the Tichy story are not for me to begin to pick apart but there's some excellent articles that I raided for this little piece by Roman Buxbaum on Tichy here and here. He also made this documentary which in it's final version is being shown at ICP as "Tarzan Retired"

Bare Bones Innit

If you happen to be in Laaaandan town today, the latest installment of mercurial scribbler Harry Malt's 'Bare Bones' magazine and gallery get down is opening at the Neu Gallery tonight at 6PM.

'S on Redchurch St. 'innit.

Be sure and bring your face so Harry can draw it. Live.

Already banned by the V+A, Bare Bones is a show and a limited edition magazine on newsprint, staged and published on a quarterly basis, each one drawing artists, photographers and hangers on from all over the globe to publish and exhibit.

Artists? Doin' it for themselves? Yes we can!

It's the kind of self-determination Obama himself would be proud of. Harry for President!

Big props to Niall O' the BB crew for selecting this print for the show.

Ross McDonnell, 2006