Invited guest: Mikołaj Grynberg

Mikołaj Grynberg:
I’m currently focused on this project.
I have some photo-cycles from the past.
I’ve made several exhibitions. I’m having
2-3 exhibitions in the year time. I’m photographing
people for 18 years now. All that you can name a portrait.

Two years ago Mikolaj Grynberg started working on his project Many Women.
It started with a series of pictures of various women form the artist’s closest
circles, titled Many Women-Warsaw. The photos were exhibited at a train
station in Rio de Janeiro. Next to them the artist set up an ad hoc photo
atelier, to which he would invite female passers-by. They thus became
subjects for the next photo-series. The brasilian even was a happening,
the spectators were random passers-by, journalists and invited guests.
The Central De Brasil show lead to creating another exhibit,
Many Women – Rio, very different form the Polish sequence as it was
a photo-record of random and unique encounters. Mikolaj Grynberg decided to continue and expand his project. In urban
spaces all around the world the artist repeats the scenario form
Rio de Janeiro: he shows the exhibit Many Women – Warsaw and
at the same time invites random local women to be photographed
on the spot. Within last four months Grynberg has finished a few
next, very successful parts of this project in Kiev /Ukraine/,
Mexico City /Mexico/ and Lima /Peru/. Many Women is a testimony of emotions that occur during a unique
20 minute encounter between the artist and each of the photographed
women. Time from being noticed in the crowd to exposing the last of
12 film frames. Teasing curiosity, fascination, shyness, joy, pride,
melancholy, even anger and desire captured in a black and white
frame. Universal emotions, where geographical and political borders
vanish. The photos are made in b&w and are the lith prints.

invited by Joanna Kinowska

up to you: we're looking for a strong support to realize this
project in Sweden. Any ideas? The media patron of the project
is "Wysokie obcasy" magazine and the main support is from
the Promotional Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.

media

gruppo F inbox: Walter, Shanghai, China

Close but far away

the loud silence

If you take a car.
Drive for ten hours to the north from Stockholm.
Then take on your cross country skies.
And ski for about one hour, mostly up hill.
Then cross some creeks,
pass some scooter trails,
some sleeping bears.

If you do that.
And you are still alive.
You might end up in this place.

Here where the silence is more present than anywhere else.
Loud even.

Here it is just traces of civilisation
It is almost like one of those diseases,
one of those where the body is repelling a part of the body.

This is the repelled part.
A lost limb.

The place where our civilisation said:
–Hey, no one could possibly want to live there anyway…
We outsource it to somewhere closer.
And call it Skansen or whatever.
Then we have it within reach.
Safe and packaged.
Served.

But just like the sandwiches wrapped in plastic.
It doesn’t taste quite as good.
Not quite the same.

So every year
I come here, by car and skies.
Visiting the repelled part.

And I listen to the loud silence.

Photos and thoughts: christofer grandin

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Invited Guest: Murat Harmanlikli

From the album "Birdy"

From the album "Every lonliness is a revolution"

From the album "Tales"

From the album "Dark men society"

From the album "Tales"

I am happy to present Murat Harmanlikli to you. He says: "I love to loose my self in the poem of Istanbul". His work is really like poems. You can see more of his photography here

Invited by: Jeanette Hägglund

Road songs

Road songs. This is Dianavision by GC.

about context and explanations

Sometimes it is necessary to add a text in order to understand
the context of a picture. This is however one of the mysteries
about photography - often you are better off without explanations.
This picture needs a text though.

As an experiment I will not submit the text that goes with the
picture at once - in order to give you a chance to share your
feelings about it.
-urbano
--------------------------------------------
Well, this is a quite well known picture at least to some of us.
I can´t help thinking about the photographer. What made him
or her point the camera in that direction away from the scene
in the street? Was it a deliberate choice? A brave photographer
by all means. There is no information to find other than the text:

"A Frenchman weeps as German soldiers march into the French
capital, Paris, on June 14, 1940, after the Allied armies had been
driven back across France."

Found at National Archives

Invited guest: Andréas Hagström

”Interpol und Deutsche Bank. FBI und Scotland Yard. Finanzamt und das BKA haben unsere daten da.”

Kraftwerks relation with the media has always been complicated. Though they are not as rarely interviewed as the myth says, the output and information the band distributes is highly controlled. After almost forty years as a band the members has become a symbol of integrity and little is known about their private life, the same goes with photos of the band. Since the band presented the robots back in 1978, they have often let photographers take pictures of them instead of the real band members of flesh and blood.

But of course, there are exceptions to this rule. One of these occasions happened in March 29, 1982 backstage in the hallways of the TV-channel ZDF. Kraftwerk was about to do a performance with the hit singel ”The Model” on the TV-program Na Sowas which was aired between 1982 and 1987. The photographer Didi Zill who had been working for the German pop magazine Bravo for many years was there as well, knowing that asking Kraftwerk for some photos wasn’t much of an idea. But he approached them anyway and to his surprise the band said yes. Suddenly they all grabbed cameras from Didi’s equipment and started posing in their puppet-like rigid manner. The outcome was a whole deck of photos. Didi was supposedly only working with one flash and was trying to make the best out of the situation.

In the photo above which was published as a poster in Bravo nr 5 in May the same year, the four members from the line-up which many consider the classic one, are posing in black outfits and makeup. From left to right we see Florian Schneider, Ralf Hütter, Wolfgang Flür and Karl Bartos. More than robots, the members have a creepy distant quality like a bunch of zombies and they are wearing the cameras as weapons in front of them. They become like an impenetrable mass filling up the image, slowly getting closer, resembling a clip from the horror film Dead & Buried by Gary Sherman from 1981 where zombies take pictures while brutally slaying people.

By turning the cameras towards the photographer Kraftwerk creates an image of control. In the age of papparazzis and surveillance cameras the camera itself becomes the machine that watch our every move. Photography that result in a paranoid society were integrity doesn’t exist and where everyone become aware of themselves as images, or in a term used by the band - showroom dummies. Kraftwerk said on the LP Computerwelt from 1981 ”Interpol und Deutsche Bank. FBI und Scotland Yard. Finanzamt und das BKA haben unsere daten da.” Maybe this is what the band is portraying, photography as an act of violence.

_

© Andréas Hagström

_______________________

Andréas Hagström is an artist living in Gothenburg, Sweden. Studying arts and photography, he has been involved in various projects in Sweden and worldwide. In addition he has also a great interest in Kraftwerk and has wrote a number of articled on his website:

• A model of 22 years & Condenced concert - Two sound pieces
• Neonlight - Signs of Düsseldorf - Analysis of the video Neonlights
• Bildmaterialet från Kraftwerks konserter 1975-76 - Kraftwerk concerts
• Kraftwerks estetik under turnén 1981 - "Mensch Machine" esthetics
• Picture analysis of the "Radioaktivität" album cover
• Picture analysis of the "Autobahn" album cover
• Picture analysis of the "Trans europe express" album cover

More on the F-blog about Kraftwerk, click here.

Invited by Anders Blomqvist

Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama

Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama.
Evans, Walker, 1903-1975, photographer.
CREATED/PUBLISHED
1936.

From the collections of Farm Security Administration

lost and found (3)

Some time ago my friend and me discovered, forgotten for over 20 years, negatives. More of the story here
There is another one of them - no author, no dates, no familiar faces, surounding looks like somewhere in Upper Silesia, 1970s? no name of negative, the camera, judging by the layout - old type of Pentacon Six.
Just familly pictures or something already more?

hippopotamus

well...I guess it's not a fish but...

"Ich bin der Fotograf mit Taschenrechner in der Hand"

When working with pictures, it's sometimes unavoidable to not think of some suitable music that create a synergy with the picture. Sometimes, the music itself may serve as the core inspiration for a series of pictures.

Quite often I've been thinking of Kraftwerk and how I would visualise their music. This is probably, one of the few examples I would go digital. After some consideration, I would even leave the real world in order to enter the virtual world. This would be in line of how Kraftwerk's music has evolved, a gradual evolution with roots in classical music history, reaching a functional, simplified, level of harmony. The technical solution is solved by the sole user and carried out by the simplest device that can be used to convey the desired effect. The tools needed are not more fancy than needed, a Pixar production would be a no-go, where as a freeware that could be used by everyone would fit in with the vision of gradual evolution.

To paraphrase Kraftwerk: "Ich bin der Fotograf mit Taschenrechner in der Hand"

Illustration carried out by using free IKEA kitchen planner software.

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Say hello to fishy Mr. Herring

Wouldn´t he be a real catch Ulf?! He´s a bit slippery though...

little fish. big fish. swimming in the water...

Ulf made me think about presenting a typical fish market in Italy.The best of course are in Sicily. And the best of all in Trapani, as the legend says.These two are from Palermo.

Fisherman´s cottage

I like the photography of Benny Persson. And it´s a pleasure
to show his pictures here. Benny is not a skåning. He is a
bleking. Now you have something more to ponder about,
Jeanne. These three pictures are from an abandoned cottage
where a fisherman used to stay over night. Perhaps dreaming
of catching big fish...or angels.

-urbano

the delicate balance

angel trap

© Jeanne Wells

A simple device you can make at home to catch all the angels you want.

invited guest: Hyun-Jin Kwak

According to me, Hyun-Jin Kwak is one of the most interesting contemporary photographers. She was born in South Korea and educated in Seoul, Stockholm and Helsinki. Nowadays she is living in Stockholm. Ever since I first discovered her photographs I have been fascinated by them and the many ways one can interpret them. I would like to quote Harri Laakso and Ronald Jones about her work:

High noon is the point of most intense visibility. It is the moment of “all for light”, when the sun has reached its peak, the moment that marks the beginning of its descent. One could speak of a momentary flash of ruthless lux, the light of truth, no longer the subtle lumen that allows the separate things of the world to shine forth. More than one of the images in Hyun-Jin Kwak’s series Girls in Uniform take us to these points in time – the decisive moments that are opportune for duels, when one stands ready to alter the course of the rest of one’s life. Harri Laakso

Courage is the portal into the sisterhood Hyun-Jin Kwak pictures. It is a special sort of courage that we only experience once in a lifetime when we pass from childhood to adulthood. This passage comes in many forms, but for Hyun-Jin Kwak it always involves secret rituals or death-defying games each initiate must suffer before she can be accepted as a sister who the community is bonded to; and who is bonded to the community. Hyun-Jin Kwak’s initiation rituals always involve risk , pain, physical brutality or psychological torture. Ronald Jones

High Noon © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2005.

Game #2 © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2006.

Game #3 © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2006.

Dig #1 © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2006.

Dig #2 © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2006.

Part 1-Prize/Dues © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2003-2004.

Part 1-Temporary/Collaboration © Hyun-Jin Kwak, 2003-2004.

Invited by Fredrik Skott.

Copenhagen fish market

I know this place. Been there many times. But I never saw
these ladies with "colorful language". Well the picture is from
around 1950. I wasn´t even born.

Found at National Archives along with this text:

Copenhagen, Denmark. Copenhagen's colorful fish market is on
Strandan Canal. The retail fish sellers, usually women, occupy
places which have belonged to their families from generation
to generation. Their vending stalls are simply spots on the
sidewalk alongside the canal. The language of these women
is said to be the most colorful in Copenhagen, ca. 1948 - ca. 1955

Gruppo F inbox: speaking of angels..here´s mine

©Markus Jenemark