Solitude

photo: Owen O´Meara

invited guest: Tiberio Fanti (part two)

Gothic Town

The place we went to live
The world is strange, but our lives can be even more. These images are
from Saronno, the place where we opted to live or, as I should better
write, "to survive". My opinion about this small town some twenty miles
north of Milan has indeed slightly changed since we got off the train, for
our first time here, seven years ago. Soon after settling, a close friend
of my father warned me about the ugliness of this place. He had lived
here during a massive migration of the sixties, coming from a rural
village of central Italy. I stiffly answered I had to wait and see before
deciding. Now I'm pretty sure he was right.


Saronno is a post industrial town which lately converted itself into
a rather good and convenient place to live for those working and
operating in that big furnace of Milan downtown. The remains of
its past splendor are facing everyone and summarized in a cleverly
organized museum where I like to spend some of my spare time
together with my son. There are no historical witnesses, here.

Nothing comparable to the splendid roman and renaissance ages
sites of the small town where I grew up. Old barns and farmer
houses are slowly being converted into extraordinary and expensive
real estates, for the enjoyment of few lucky and well-off professionals.


The ghostly – but maybe I’d better write “gothic” – aspect of this place
comes out when I stop looking at the images I’ve always taken around,
trying to discover its intimacy, as well some signs left by past generations.
If only there was a collective soul, a connecting tissue, some fertile humus
for growing and improving ourselves, then it must be well hidden behind
the walls of these buildings absent-mindedly placed side-by-side.



There is, I feel, a sense of sadness and, at the same time,
disconsolate admiration for a place which has nothing else to
offer than the vestiges of its recent industrial past. All those huge,
grey, empty productive structures with their tall brick-chimneys and
rusted machineries, inevitably destined to demolition or to the natural
destructive effect of time; all those industrial-design cult objects, so
carefully collected and exposed in the halls of that local museum and
the disheartening and bare ugliness of the meadows surrounding the
town itself don’t let me trust there’s a single good reason for keep living
here and growing up our sons.


I know I’ll go away from here one day. I can’t say when but, today
more than ever before, I keep warm a sense of gratitude for that
friend of ours, who tried to open wide my eyes before coming here.
It’s never too late.








pictures and text by Tiberio Fanti

the old factory

Scharins was always my home since the first time I set my foot there.

The old factory that nobody would even care about, a area with a
contaminated ground that would cost so much to renovate. I spent
a lot of time there not really bothering the toxic ground and a lot
of other things. But the fact that the company that I was working at
was sacking personel and preparing to fire even more people
made me feel at home at the old industrial ground with its history.

I came to meet many different persons there, everything from young
people painting the walls unaware of the history there to old people that
had actually been there during the strikes in the 1930s. Still - to me it´s
a great mixture of people trying to find themselves no matter from what
generation. To me it meant a lot because deep inside history was still
alive within all the people I came to meet.

Pictures and text by Örjan Fredriksson

"M at Kim Weston' s Studio."

photo: Owen O´Meara

working with digital images - my recipy

We are introducing a new label called "tools and techniques" at The F Blog.
You are welcome to contribute with articles, short notes etc about the
process of making pictures. It´s an opportunity for those of you who
want to share something about cameras, dark room processing,
digital editing and so on. First article is by Tiberio Fanti, invited guest
February 17, 2007 (today). We are also placing articles published
earlier on at the blog under this label ( e.g. by Anders Blomqvist)

---
Working with digital images for almost one decade has made me settle
on a simplified “way of working” that characterizes at first glance, as
someone wrote me recently, the large majority of them. Today, most
of the images I’m publishing on the web are B&W but this doesn’t mean

I abhor colors. Indeed, I keep plenty of color images printed in my
drawers but, following the advices of many professionals I’ve been
able to put myself in touch - and, in some cases, in confidence -,
I opted to narrow the gamut of my offer. That’s why at present time
I’m described - and often introduce myself - as a B&W photographer.

photo: Tiberio Fanti

Beside this, I do believe that B&W still holds that special power on
influencing the beholder’s imagination that’s been almost lost in color
images after the advent of digital cameras. B&W to me better conveys
mood, volumes, space-time abstraction and some more I can’t explain.

My recipy

As I’ve written and said several times before, every starting image has
its own path to get to the final printed work. When I’m sitting in my
darkroom, i.e. with the hands on my PC, I don’t use a simple push-button
procedure. In my last ten years of work with the most spread image
manipulation tools I haven’t been able to find one that fits for the majority.

Rather, I have a recipy. Like my mother does in her kitchen, I know which
are the ingredients and the sequence of actions to perform but never make
the same cake. Usually, the first thing I do is to look for the image final cut.
It’s very important to do it early in the conversion process as we won’t be
influenced by those parts of the image that we deem unnecessary. Once
the image composition is adjusted, I make an attempt to balance the
brightness distribution curves, trying to enhance the chromatic contrast
of those parts which I deem valuable for the final result. This means that
sometimes I have to make several trials before getting a color image good
enough for B&W conversion. As a third step, I start evaluating the basic
three colors content and identify the zones requiring a specific B&W conversion.

Basic conversion is almost straightforward using the color channel mixing
features provided by almost every image processing tool. Once I have a
pure B&W image, I use to tone it, wishing to give it the right amount of
warmth a typical classic print conveys. To that purpose I use a simple
compound made of pure black and dark-brown tints, which are blended
according to my current taste and, obviously, mood.

At very last, I usually turn the image back in the RGB color space and add
a pinch of yellow before balancing the overall luminosity for the last time.
It’s not difficult,I guess. Like cooking, it’s only a matter of “being present”,
taking care of the process while it’s being applied. Never reduce everything
to pushing a procedure-button; never leave the turkey in the oven and go
out playing tennis. I’m from a large family holding some small hotels and
restaurants in southern Italy: I can witness I never saw good chefs cooking
their meals without tasting it!

---

unmasked

photo: Markus Jenemark

New York City at night, ca. 1935.

This is a magnificent picture. I have kept it a couple of months since I found
it at the National Archive´s site. But I have come back to it over and over
again. There is no information about the photographer. - urbano

Gloomy ;)

invited guest: Tiberio Fanti (part one)

I am glad to present pictures and texts on The F Blog from a truly devoted
photographer; Tiberio Fanti from Italy. I enjoy his work a lot. Let´s listen
to what he´s got to say:
(invited by ulf fågelhammar)

Résumé My name is Tiberio Fanti; I’ll be forty next May. I took consciousness
of the importance of photography some time after I met a fellow student,
at the University of Rome, who introduced me to the whole traditional
chemical process. Unfortunately I could not build my own darkroom for several
reasons - money and space above all -, that’s why I began taking photography
in serious consideration only after I could handle a digital camera, at the
beginning of year 2000. I must confess that my training period didn’t come
out really exciting: I was tempted several times to give it all up.

During my academic studies I had faced several times optics and digital
signal processing but this never gave me the opportunity to take better
photographs or achieve better images with accurate digital manipulations.
After the inevitable equipment upgrade to a digital reflex, I started considering
the setup of a tiny showcase of my preferred works.



So I started studying some basics of web design and opened my window
to the world. Few months after my website was up and running, during a job
travel in Norway, casting boringly my eyes on a newsstand at Oslo central
station, I discovered B&WP Magazine. Back in my office in Milan, I wrote a
message to the magazine director, wishing to get a feedback on my current
artwork. She answered me she would have given a look to it but I didn’t get
a feedback till March 2006, when I received an e-mail from an Italian B&WP
reader, who was complimenting with me for being featured “website of the
month”. What came after are just few more compliments and several nights
of rethinking and reassembling of my previously done work, including
the images presented here.
(Website: http://www.tiberiofanti.it/)

Please, enjoy.

Humble Arts Foundation

Gruppo F receives a growing number of emails concerning exhibitions
and various activities in the field of photography. If we like it, we will
publish it. This came in yesterday.



Two new shows currently on
display at http://humbleartsfoundation.org

group show no. 12
This month's group show, now narrowed to 18 (formerly 24) photographers,
largely explores the anomalies of man-made environments. Grant Willling
turns landscape into portrait with his vertical shot of a towering pine tree
while Jeremy Sheldon places a painted landscape before a "real" tree in
a twice-removed reference. This show also features Juliana Beasley,
Felix R. Cid, and Lucas Blalock, among others.

Introducing solo show
Each month, solo show exhibits 16-24 photographs from a photographer
previously featured in group show, departing from the one-image-per
-photographer format to showcase adeptly curated, long-term, focused
bodies of work. The premier show exhibits the work of New York
based photographer Rachelle Mozman, who examines the lives of young
children living in isolated “exurban” development communities in
New Jersey and Panama.

Staircase, Hotel de la Parra, Oaxaca Mexico

Photo: Owen O'Meara

Sense

Well I went to see Dr Tarkini, dressed in a yellow polka dot bikini...

...Two dead marines standing in a line
Drink to me! this heavenly body
Every inch of winning thing...

Okay Lina!

© Jeanne Wells

hard to beat Marcin's Bananna Man, but we'll try!

I dare you - happy picture for Lina

 

Something about happiness in february

(picture taken in august though...)

conversazione in sicilia...

Elio Vittorini - "Conversazione in Sicilia" (1939) - Conversations in Sicily. anyone have read it?
upload for Lina. i dare to put some sunny shot ;)

On his way to ville vessla

Invited guest: Brian Rose

Some time ago, I came across Brian Rose's photographs of the (landscape of the) Iron Curtain. I managed to find out that they had been published in a book. With some luck, I convinced the university library in Göteborg, Sweden, to purchase the book - The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004) - for their collection of photography monographs. Borrowing it, I spent a considerable amount of time studying the landscapes (historical, social, enomical, political) Brian had captured on film. I feel that Brian's photographs gave me new pieces for a puzzle - a puzzle about Cold War history and politics in Europe - that I had not managed to find before. Brian's photographs became, for me, a kind of visual history in its own right.

Looking at his own city of residence for many years, Amsterdam, Brian has brought with him the same acute sense of place and context as that shown in his work on the Iron Curtain. The F blog is proud to present new work by Brian Rose, work about a city on edge. Enjoy.

Joakim Sebring


AMSTERDAM ON EDGE

by Brian Brose

Nieuw Sloten © Brian Rose

For the last 15 years I have lived in Amsterdam, making frequent trips to New York where most of my professional photography work has been located. In January my family and I packed up and moved to New York. So, it seems a good time to take stock of my extended stay in the Netherlands. We lived primarily in the center of Amsterdam, the famous urban village of canals and bicycles. It was a great life style environment, but it didn’t interest me much as a subject for photography. What could I add or subtract from this idyll of urban seamlessness? Even the red light district appeared tame, and cozily contained. But I eventually found rougher edges of the city along stretches of the once bustling waterfront, and I discovered the new neighborhoods on the periphery, the playgrounds of Dutch planners and architects. This was clearly where the action was.

Czaar Peterstraat © Brian Rose

In the 19th century Amsterdam was a compact city ringed by a series of windmills, a few of which still exist. Beyond that lay the polder, the land reclaimed from the many lakes and marshes of the surrounding countryside. The city expanded into the polder in the early 20th century, creating new neighborhoods featuring the architecture of the so-called Amsterdam School. I photographed one of those neighborhoods, the blocks surrounding Mercatorplein, a square in the west of Amsterdam, and that project became a book entitled Mercatorplein, a Map of the World in Amsterdam. Mercator, of course, was the Flemish cartographer whose map projection opened up the navigation of the world’s oceans, and helped make Amsterdam the great mercantile center of the 17th century. At the time of my project, the area around Mercatorplein with its streets named after seafaring explorers had become populated predominately by Muslims from Morocco and Turkey, and it is here that I first became aware of the tensions that lay beneath the calm surface of Dutch society.

Mercatorplein © Brian Rose

After World War II, Dutch planners took up the huge task of rebuilding the country, and Amsterdam, though not devastated like Rotterdam, nevertheless, lay in tatters. To the south and west, neighborhoods of Corbusier-style flats and open parkland were laid out in the polder. The most utopian of these was the Bijlmermeer, an immense honeycomb of housing projects linked by a network of paths and highways designed to separate cars and pedestrians. Although intended for working class Dutch, it became, to a great extent, an ethnic enclave populated by Surinamese who had fled the Dutch colony at the time of its independence. By the late ‘90s, Dutch planners were performing drastic architectural surgery on this increasingly dysfunctional city within a city.

Bijlmermeer © Brian Rose

Zuidoost © Brian Rose

Some of my exploration of the outskirts of Amsterdam was done on assignment, but I also spent a lot of time wandering about, taking trams to their end points, or driving to obscure areas along the freeways. One unexpected discovery was a Jewish cemetery bisected by a train viaduct and hemmed in by a freeway and high-tension power lines. Many of the gravestones were marked Westerbork, the name of the camp that served as a way station en route to Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. Nearly 90,000 Jews, more than 10 percent of the population of Amsterdam at that time, were killed.

Jewish Cemetary © Brian Rose

Among the strangest sights on the periphery of Amsterdam was a fenced in drive surrounded by a sidewalk and a dozen bus shelters—also situated along a rail viaduct. During the day it was deserted. At night cars circled the drive as men ogled the women standing in the shelters. This was Amsterdam’s official prostitution zone (tippelzone), an attempt to regulate drug-addicted prostitutes and remove them from the center of town. The attempt failed for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was the admission by a prominent city councilman that he frequented the zone. The tippelzone closed in 2003, but the paved circuit and bus shelters remain.

Trippelzone © Brian Rose

Student Housing © Brian Rose

The Dutch believe that society can be made—that it is malleable and can be designed and constructed. They skillfully employ modest means to reach ambitious goals. When they fail they keep on trying. But sometimes I see them forever pushing on their pedals against the wind, the gleaming city in the distance a mirage rather than reality. What I once thought was tolerance and liberalism I now understand to be a compulsion to organize and manage. Each to ones own door, but keep the curtains open. Everything is permissible as long as it can be contained—and the dikes hold.

IJburg © Brian Rose

You will find more of Brian Rose's work here.

Brian Rose was invited to the F blog by Joakim Sebring.

innocent messages

Have you seen the latest Burger King commercial? -- "I am man..."

Folded

Photo: Owen O'Meara

Mod broder, mod

Heartbeats

Alla hjärtans dag/ Valentine's Day

"Jag och Du" / "Me and you"

Romance Tips for Imbeciles. Tip #1: Tape

image © Jeanne be my valentine Wells

gruppo F inbox - Viktor Gårdsäter

greetings from Portugal

 

invited guest: Gerry Johansson

Once again I am proud to present some of Gerry Johansson’s photographs on The F Blog. Below is four pictures from his book Sverige (Sweden, published 2005). Sverige is collection of photographs of Swedish cities and according to me a very fascinating photobook.

Please also look at Gerry Johansson’s other pictures on The F blog here and here and also at his own homepage. From April 21 to Juni 3 Gerry also have a large exhibition at Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg. Later on you can read more about that exhibition on the F blog.

Helsingborg © Gerry Johansson.

Jönköping © Gerry Johansson.

Nedre Soppero © Gerry Johansson.

Åseda © Gerry Johansson.

Invited by Fredrik Skott.