Mother: The Korean Blow Up?

I loved the Korean film, Mother by Joon-ho Bong,with its provocative sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. The film is about a mother and her hunt for the real killer of a girl whose murder the mother's son has been convicted of. 

Especially interesting from a photographic point of view is the role that mobile phone photography plays in the film. In the film (and South Korea in general), mobile phones that have been adapted so they don't bleep when pictures are taken are called 'pervert phones'. The murdered girl had one of these phones and on this phone the mother suspects she will find a picture of the real killer - but the mother is not the only one looking for the phone.

So the film is a contemporary Korean version of  Blow-Up, but with a few subplots and ambiguities besides. There is a separation angle to the film, there is gross injustice and an obsessive mother-and-son relationship that ties in with  the dangers of both remembering and forgetting - in that sense, the film mirrors  Hindi cinema themes of separation, loss and redemption through suffering. In all those Hindi separation films, the symbolic separation is from Pakistan. I wonder if in Mother, the separation, the lost soul of the film is a symbolic North Korea. I don't know, but watch Mother - the best film I've seen since A Prophet.

An interview with Joon-ho Bong, where you'll find out that people dance on buses in South Korea and they do in Turkey too.

Photo Eye books of the year

photo-eye have their books of the year lists up, including my own contribution. Find all the lists here.

The picture above is from Andrew Buurman's book, Allotments, one of the ten on my list. I like allotments and I like this book - that's why it's in my top ten.

Jock Sturges, the Third Floor Gallery and Portraiture with a capital p and a small p

Here are a few interesting posts from over the holidays. The first is from J.Wesley Brown at We can shoot too and he asks what is a portrait. Is it a head and shoulders shot, can those pictures of random figures in the background be a portrait and what of pictures of pictures or screens or posters...

Not sure I know the answer to any of that, but I suspect it is something where the elements of the picture contribute something to the subject being portrayed or vice versa.



The other interesting post was by Elizabeth Fleming guest-posting on A Photo Editor. In this post she asks whether photographers should be held responsible for the recontextualising of their images, on the internet in particular. She also said that the pictures struck her "...as distressingly sexualized and, frankly, unsettling. Jonathan puts it best in his piece when he says that: “even in a world of moral relativity, these images transgressed some basic taboo.”

There is a whole can of worms to get oneself into here (not least the twists of Sturges' own life) but I don't think the photographer (or the film-maker, writer or poet) should be held responsible for the recontextualisation of their work.  I'm not interested in Sturges' work but I would defend it from charges of criminality.  I also think that Sturges pictures are more de-sexualised than anything else - his models might be attractive, skinny Europeans, but barring the lack of clothing in his pictures, it seems to me that he goes out of his way to avoid the sexually suggestive. 

Finally, it's over to Blake Andrews for an interview with Joni Karanka about the Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff -  another example of people who are just getting on with it despite minimal funding and the immense time and effort involve.. 

The Artful Dodger and 38 Degrees

This ad appeared in some British newspapers earlier this week. It was made by 38 degrees,
an organisation that is also raising funds through the internet.  

This is what they believe in. I believe in that too.

WHAT WE BELIEVE IN

We believe that it's people who should have the power in our society. We help make this happen by making it easy for people to influence the institutions, like the government, who make decisions that affect us all.

We work together in our thousands to defend fairness, protect rights, promote peace, preserve the planet and deepen democracy. Some people might call those goals ‘liberal’, 'left-of-centre' or ‘progressive’. We call them common sense for a better world.

emphas.is

It's fascinating how new media is influencing protest, publicity and fundraising. The three combine in
emphas.is, a kind of horribly-named kickstarter for photography projects. I especially liked this contribution on the emphas.is blog, whereAaron Huey (of Pine Ridge fame) talks about possible funding for putting his Pine Ridge pictures on giant billboards. It seems that the real new deal about funding might be that explicitly political work and models of showing the work are going to be getting funding that they never got before. The killer line is at the end though.

“I definitely hope to go beyond the model of how we get funding, but also to go beyond the model for how we share our images. To come up with a distribution plan that makes the images impossible to ignore. Simple images with simple statistics 60 feet wide on your commute to work. That is real power in the hands of a potential funder. 

“The thing with the Pine Ridge project is, at a certain point, I thought, okay, I’ve made this incredible imagery. So does this all end with a photo show where everybody just drinks wine and pats me on the back?  F**k that. It’s totally inappropriate. I also don’t want someone to pay me to go make another body of work just so it can be another magazine story or a photo exhibition where everybody congratulates me about being great at showing misery. “Now I know that my billboards are not exactly a commercial proposition. I’m actually proposing to not make any money off of this; I’m proposing to put out incredible amounts of effort for the issue. I would have no chance of recouping any life expenses from this, except maybe if it is coupled with a magazine partner. That would be ideal, of course, if someone said: Oh, love the billboard concept, I’d also like to run this as a photo essay. The truth is I do still need magazines to help spread the message.

Sisters RIP: Isabelle Caro and Geraldine Doyle

Isabelle Caro and Geraldine Doyle, star of the Rosie the Riveter poster both died over the holidays. Follow the links above for the stories. I think the idea that the picture of Caro can be inspiring in a thinspirational way serves to show that pictures can be sometimes completely out of our control and that there are possibilities and perspectives that perhaps need to be disregarded.






Isabelle Caro, a French actress and model whose emaciated image appeared in an Italian ad campaign and whose anorexia was followed by other sufferers of eating disorders, has died aged 28. The picture above is by the Oliviero Toscani.


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Caro was featured in an ad campaign by the Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani in 2007 for an Italian fashion house. Under the headline "No Anorexia", images across newspapers and billboards showed Caro naked, vertebrae and facial bones protruding.


...


The ad campaign was launched at a time when the fashion industry was under scrutiny about anorexia, after a 21-year-old Brazilian model died from the eating disorder. Caro's agent, Sylvie Fabregon, said the image was intended "to show what it is like to be anorexic".


Some groups working with anorexics warned that it did a disservice to those afflicted. Images of Caro appeared on pro-anorexia websites; yesterday, one posted a notice about her death and a photo of her, with the caption "die young, stay pretty".

Happy New Year: the face of 2011

Happy New Year - the ghost of the year to come put an appearance in on New Year's Eve. Not sure if she's going to be better than 2010. You decide.

Happy New Year Everyone!