It seems apt that the opening room of the
Klein + Moriyama show featured the screening of a film, as this was the first
official – in my mind anyway – day of my new OCA course on Digital Film
Production. I shall take it as a good
omen. And I am going to try to be more disciplined about writing up my notes
promptly, while I can still vaguely decipher my scribbles.
Having just landed at Gatwick from
a(nother) holiday in Havana, I was lucky enough to be offered a place on this
study tour due to a last minute cancellation.
My small disclaimer is that, as I had no idea I would be attending,
there was not time for research and I have not yet had chance to follow up on
the OCA recommended films or any reviews.
So here are my uninformed ramblings….
We began outside the Tate Modern, in the
chilly London air, by briefly discussing the link between these two
photographers. Tutor Rob Bloomfield and
various students pointed out some of the connections, such as their use of
photobooks, shooting mainly in black and white and their approach to street
photography, particularly in New York and Tokyo. Moriyama has also cited Klein as a major
influence on his own work.
The exhibition is brilliantly curated (by
Simon Baker) – very nicely paced with a mix of large-scale images, film, smaller
prints, paintings and books (mainly from Martin Parr’s private collection, it
seems) in vitrines. Room Three of each
retrospective is half open to the other, which emphasises the relationship. Klein was born in NYC in 1928 but has spent
much of his life in Paris. Moriyama was
born in Osaka in 1938 but moved to Tokyo in the early 60s. Both are still working.
Klein’s Broadway by Light film (1958) shows
New York, initially through abstract neon signage at night then panning out to
buildings in daytime, with an experimental jazz soundtrack. It is quite disorientating as the close-ups
of the signs don’t make much sense in isolation. The music is like that of a
Hitchcock thriller and the images seemed to mirror the sounds – pulsating
lights and tense human movements. There
is no obvious journey for the viewer – it is more just an experience of sight
and sound, which conveys some of the intensity of Manhattan. I was left with a sense of unease and I
noticed most people did not stay to watch the whole film. An interesting portrait of NYC though, and
presumably quite avant-garde at the time of making. I wondered how much Tom Waits was inspired by
Klein – this felt like it might have had some influence on the movie Big Time. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094743/
This exhibition was my first proper
exposure to Klein’s street photography and I was blown away. He is very provocative, deliberately getting
up close to his subjects. Someone is looking directly – and often suspiciously
- at him in almost all the shots with crowds.
These are messy wide-angle images, over-spilling the frame, powerful
depictions of the chaos and claustrophobia, the parade of humanity in New
York. Some images include fashion models
or dancers that the artist deliberately placed in urban settings but it is
difficult to see what has been staged and what not.
The four massive images on the right hand
side of Room Two are very commanding and set the tone well for the show –
blurry, grainy, heavy use of contrast, eccentric. The narrative is inexplicable, intriguing (the
man with two hats!) and each could be the still from a movie that I would really
like to watch. His lack of concern with
technical standards is liberating and works well, even on the larger
prints. Klein really seems to capture
the culture of the age and yet his work has a timeless quality, as he presents
so many fascinating human stories.
This kind of up-close street photography
always makes me wonder how much you can tell of the personality of the photographer
from the images. Is he charismatic,
funny, charming? Über-persuasive or just a ballsy chancer? There are a few pictures of kids pointing toy
guns at him, and many with extreme expressions, which again adds to the
in-your-face dynamism of the work. He
uses continuous shooting techniques and various abstractions/experiments such
as photograms and exploring different mediums.
Klein talks about his photobook sequencing
as being like editing a film. “I saw the
book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with
a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines. This
is what New York deserved and would get.”
I was very happy that the images did not
have descriptive titles (mostly just place names) and it was interesting to see
when they had been printed (although I don’t really have the technical know-how
to make any deductions from this). Klein
is clearly fascinated with signs and advertising, typography etc and the result
is almost collage-like images. Here is a
human figure or two, some glass reflections, a bit of a building and a
billboard, a street sign, the hint of a car – these could all have been pasted
together from different scenes. I found
the raw energy to be very appealing and inspiring.
The colour work (Contacts) was less interesting
to me, possibly as the style is over-used in our modern culture. I found it
hard to imagine how exactly it would have been received at the time of creation
as it seems so familiar to me.
I am definitely now a big fan of William
Klein. His edginess and multi-media profile
as a painter, film-maker and graphic artist alongside his photographic
instincts result in some extraordinary images.
For my own work, this part of the study
tour has encouraged me to ….
- Be more bold with the use of contrast
- Feel free to be a bit messier with my still photography compositions (lopped off heads, hands and feet are not always the end of the
world) – my erstwhile tutor Clive White has said this all along, of course!
- Be less worried about blur or blown-out
highlights (in fact I should experiment more with how little detail can be
included while still conveying a message)
- Think about grouping my images together
more (last night I discarded some images from Cuba which were blurry or where
the people had their back to me which may have worked well in a set with a B/W,
grainy treatment)
Moriyama says: “My approach is very simple
– there is no artistry, I just shoot freely. For me, photography is not about
an attempt to create a two-dimensional work of art, but by taking photo after
photo, I come closer to truth and reality at the very intersection of the
fragmentary nature of the world and my own personal sense of time.”
I actually felt that much of his work did not feel as if it had been shot freely
and I would have surmised that he was in fact obsessed with create
two-dimensional art, at the expense of telling stories in the way that Klein
does. I generally found Moriyama’s
images to be much more flat, lifeless, uninteresting – all about a 2D aesthetic
but individually unmemorable. I wonder
if it is because I have never visited Japan and have no real affinity with the
culture or maybe that he conveys too well a sense of isolation and anonymity, a
“nightmarish dislocation” as Clive suggested?
Maybe some of his abstractions/disassociations are just one step too far
for my taste. I was largely left cold.
It all lead to some interesting discussions
with fellow students and tutors though. We were intrigued (and a little
surprised) by the image of a foetus – I wondered how far Moriyama had directed
its positioning to create the right aesthetic? Clive talked about the
archeology of understanding, the layers of time and experience and how much of this
has been flattened by the Internet and our modern approaches to learning. Gareth brought up the point that photography
is not a universal language. I also
considered (silently) whether blurry images are a bit more acceptable when
shooting with film rather than digital?
I do not believe that Moriyama has really
captured the eroticism of Tokyo as he claims. I fact, I found his imagery to be
depressingly devoid in that respect – even the pictures of curvaceous body
parts. His approach is sensuous but I
found the results lacking. Perhaps with
the exception of the close up of the legs and crotch in fishnet stockings as
part of the series How to Create a Beautiful Picture (1987)… I have to confess
that I enjoyed watching people getting very close to the image to work out what
it was and then jumping back as they realised where they were putting their
face.
Room Five saved the day for me – this
featured a slideshow of stills taken on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1978
when Moriyama was going through some serious personal problems. He promised himself that he would go out and
take pictures everyday and the result is a powerful portrait of the ordinary,
the beautiful, the sad, the cold, the loneliness of that moment in his
world. This is where I could really see
just how freely he shoots. No artistry
is necessary as it all comes from his simple, wonderful vision. The Polaroid/Polaroid mosaic (1997) is superb
too – gorgeous textures and tricks of scale and perspective which create a new
symbiotic interior landscape.
Another highlight of the show was learning
that Moriyama has a signature photograph - a stray dog, photographed in
1971. According to the guide, “It is an
image of solitude, disengaged from society and living on the streets, abject,
wild and even threatening. But it may be
the intensity of the dog’s gaze, warily assessing its surroundings, that allies
it so closely with the photographer.” It
seems that Moriyama has reworked this image obsessively over the decades and
has also presented in other mediums such as silk screen prints. “It has also come to embody his own restless
creativity.”
So what have I learned…. ?
- I want to have a signature image!
- This part of the exhibition encouraged me,
like the Klein work, to think about how I can group my images together – how
they speak to each other and work as a set
- The scale and positioning/juxtaposing and
repro of prints can make a massive difference to how people respond to them
- Shoot ‘freely’, shoot a lot – get out into
ordinary places and find extraordinary things to photograph without worrying
all the time about the technical execution
All in all, I found the work of these two
incredible men to be very inspiring – a great exhibition experience and, as
always, a pleasure to get chance to speak with my student friends and tutors. It has been a great start to thinking creatively about digital film and using moving images and sounds to convey an artistic vision.