Horses Think

This morning I traded in my almost daily croissant intake of the past three weeks for an old fashioned plain donut from my local street vendor.

I’m back from a three week journey to France where I did some traveling and shooting, hitting both the German border on the east (Freiburg was a total treat) and two lovely smaller French towns on the west coast, La Rochelle and Pornic. I also spent a wonderful week in Paris where I checked out Paris Photo and many other exhibitions around town.

I had a few photographs up at Paris Photo and it was nice to be there amongst so many other photographers. If I had to take home one idea about this year’s fair in Paris it would definitely be the theme of books.

Books were everywhere to be found with new releases, special editions and book signings around every corner. A special Japanese exhibition with a focus on books was set in the center of the main entrance hall and that was just the beginning. The “celebs” were there with lines and chaos to be had all around. In just the first day you had Stephen Shore, Martin Parr, Alec Soth, William Klein, Elliot Erwitt and Masao Yamamoto (he gets the award for most intense book signing practice I’ve ever seen that included two different Japanese style pens/brushes and a stamp!) all signing books within quick walking distance. Unfortunately I didn’t buy any books or have anything signed as the idea of carrying anymore stuff back home would have been too difficult as I was already traveling with too much to begin with.

I did walk around quite a bit and took in the entire exhibition of galleries and in all honesty I wasn’t too impressed with what I found there. I actually found the whole thing quite depressing. Way too many photographs placed in such close proximity had the strange effect of canceling each other out, making it really hard to see or appreciate anything. Seeing so many photographs in one gulp just made photography seem kind of gimmicky, it’s really hard to put a finger on how I felt. In essence though, there really wasn’t much new work to see. No big discoveries or anything really memorable.

The two spaces I recall best at this moment were Martin Parr’s installation at Janet Borden called Parrworld (not sure if I remember that title correctly) and Alec Soth’s The Last Days of W at Weinstein Gallery.

The Parr installation was memorable if only as it served as a reminder of Parr’s great beginnings as a photographer as there was work on display from many periods of his work.

The Soth installation was memorable as it was new work seen for the first time and was obviously thought out almost like a solo show. I don’t love all the photographs in the series but it certainly gave me something to think about, especially having been in France during the election (I did vote though). I can say for certain that the French are as excited (and relieved) about Obama as we are. On the flight over I saw more Obama buttons worn by French natives than I ever saw worn in New York.

Back to Soth, I did actually buy one book at the fair as I picked up a couple of copies of Soth’s self-published newspaper like book The Last Days of W which was too light not to carry home. I like the idea of it conceptually and it only cost 10 Euros. Last thing I’ll say about the new Soth work is that it looks like he is officially done with c-prints and working with large format HP inkjet technology. I totally understand his predicament of living in Minneapolis and not having the access to large format digital c-print technology but I’m still not sure I like the way it looks. When you look real close to see the tiny details you begin to see the actual print dots and I find that a bit bothersome.

I’m being a total c-print snob but listen to what he has to say about it here and you might be convinced.

I’ll follow up with a few more posts in the next couple of days.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.