Isabelle Wenzel's Stand Up Sculptures

Isabelle Wenzel is another artist who (like Melinda Gibson in the previous post) participated in Brad Feuerhelm's call out for investigations into his archive.

Wenzel also investigates the female body and how it is represented in fashion and how dress, posture and function are used to distort and depersonalise in traditional female jobs and roles.

She used to be an acrobat/contortionist so all the pictures here are also self-portraits; and they are a check-list of various fashion tropes (starting with Guy Bourdin) which gives them a life and makes them both funny and subversive. They're performance, still life, sculpture, political commentary and stand-up all in one. And they look fantastic.

Add to that the low-tech way that she makes her pictures, using a self-release button on a Canon G12 (that might have changed by now). She sticks it on a tripod and then dashes into place to get the shot in the 10 seconds available. And if she doesn't get it she does it again... and again... and again...

More on that here.

And here's a video of her posing and if you go here (Just after 5 minutes in), there's a video of her actually making pictures - "Everything I did before was stupid. And this is also kind of stupid... but there is something interesting." Tremendous!

Miss Titus gets her Knickers in a Twist

Brad Feuerhelm has an archive of weird and wonderful pictures and he lets photographers use it. Last year he put out a call for photographers to make new work out of old; he let them mess with his archive.

One of the nine women to respond to his call was Melinda Gibson. Retina-scanned and with fingers inserted into white gloves, Gibson was given free reign in the climate-controlled bowels of Feurhelm's London Headquarters of the Weird and Wonderful.

She by-passed the medical curiosities room, gave a barely a glance at the war trophy-photography cabinet and cocked a snoot at the contemporary taxidermy section.

Instead Gibson headed to the pin-ups. She selected key images and made a book of them. But not just any book. It's a kind of annoying book that I'm still not too sure about, but then again for a book that I'm not too sure about, I sure spent  a lot of time looking at it. The book's called Miss Titus Becomes a Regular Army Mac and that title is the first annoying thing about it (and if you go through the book you'll find out why it has that title).

The next annoying thing about it is it's handmade, beautifully - so you know that Gibson spent an inordinate amount  of time on it. It's gorgeously made, tactile in a paper wrapping with a kind of glassine sleeve cover (to go with the archive picture theme). It feels lovely in the hands. Wait a minute, that's not annoying, that's good isn't it. Perhaps a bit of envy is creeping in here. If schadenfreude is taking pleasure is someone else's pain, then freudenschade is the word for taking pain in someone else's pleasure. It's just too darn smart!

Anyway, the cover is annoying. It has a text by Feuerhelm which is rather dense in the way that only photography texts can be dense - but it makes sense. It tells you what the book is about and how it was made.

Oooh, how was it made? Well, the pictures are from an archive, a lot of them are from old libraries so the backs of them have titles and dates and other marks. So Gibson only goes and incorporates that into the design and overall concept of the book.

How does she do that? By being triple annoying and making one of those books (see Ben Krewinkel or Brian Griffin) where the pages are 'French-folded' so that to see the pictures you have to cut the pages - you have to destroy the book to see the book.

Now that completely matches the origins of the images and adds a certain theatre to the book. It makes you work to see the images and because you've worked so hard you really want to see them. And because the pictures are all of women in various poses (mostly glamour poses but there are suffragettes in there as well), that cutting of the pages, that stripping away is rather symbolic.

So it's a book that makes you work to see the images, where the images connect to their origins, where multiple layers form multiple narratives (including the narrative of construction)! Fabulous.

Below is a review I wrote of the book for Emaho Magazine  - written as I cut the pages open.

Buy the Book here.

Melinda Gibson’s new book, Miss Titus Becomes a Regular Army Mac is a book about a collection of photographs, a response to a collection of photographs or an examination of how that collection has been used. Or perhaps it’s all those three things. It’s hard to tell.

The collection in question is Brad Feurhelm’s. Feurhelm’s collection is one of photographic curiosities, the marginal and offbeat.

So Miss Titus is an investigation in some way. The first thing I notice about it is the beautiful packaging. The first layer is loose tissue, the next is orange paper (with the title mirrored in white) and then more tissue stuck with orange stickers (like the ones you get to mark sold works at some exhibitions).

Then I get to the book. It’s a small book, which is bound by three brass staples at the spine. The title is written on card that appears beneath translucent paper that has been folded over and joined at the spine. Oh and look, slip your hand into the gap and the title is on a card insert that pulls out. There’s an explanatory text  but it is kind of dense and it’s too early in the morning for that  – so I put it to one side and move on to the book which is a far more transparent way of reading the text.

Inside the book I don’t see the pictures that I expect to see. Instead I see the backs of the pictures I expect to see, complete with titles, notes, addresses, bar codes and credits. There are pictures with traces of glue on them, showing they’ve been ripped from a scrapbook or album, pictures from digital printing sites, pictures or porn stars that are FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY NOT FOR PUBLICATION.

These draw me in, but still I can’t see the pictures because, with only a few exceptions, the pages are folded over and stapled at the spine. I bend the folds and sneak a peak but that’s kind of unsatisfactory. So what do I do? If I cut the pages, then I destroy the book, but if I don’t then I don’t see the pages but at least I preserve the book as the collected fetish it is supposed to be. And it is supposed to be that – the special edition is even for sale in the Louis Vuitton Maison Librairie in London, something which transforms the fetish into something even more vulgar than the collectible photobook and has me gagging to get my old puritan hairshirt and scratchy underpants out. LV? What does that packaging do to the book?

Anyway, back to the book. The folded over page format is one that has been used in a number of photobooks in the last few years, most notably by Ben Krewinkel’s A Possible Life. Here the visible pages show the official documentation and immigrant identity of Gualbert, a migrant to the Netherlands. Cut the pages open, and the friends, family and hopes of Gualbert are revealed in a series of personal artefacts. The  impoverished, depersonalised Gualbert become a real person, his Possible Life came alive.

And so it goes with Miss Titus. The visible pages show the hidden dynamics of the pictures; the notes and the traces of their lineage. They tease me into wanting to see the pictures underneath, they make me work for the pictures, make me invest my time in hypothesising about what lies beneath. They make me agonise about cutting the pages open and wrecking the book. Or am I wrecking the book? Perhaps I’m just modifying it in some way? Perhaps I should do what I did with A Possible Life and have two copies, the cut copy and the uncut copy.

So after an inordinate amount of time and consideration, far more time and consideration than I normally give to photobooks, I get cutting. I can see a shadow of the first image on the visible page and when I cut, I see the original. It’s a picture of a semi-nude woman (from Hawaii maybe) wearing a garland of leaves around her neck. Opposite there’s a picture from Chicago of a semi-nude woman with fairy wings. I go back to the caption. It’s Muriel Page and the visible caption says her ‘…wings are burned from her back many times a day on the stage of the Harding Theatre…’ What does that mean. Back to the picture and still I’m none the wiser. I’ll be puzzling over that for the rest of the day.

And so it goes on; glamour shots, nudes, Grace Slick and there’s the title picture of Miss Titus becoming a regular army mac. Miss Titus is Susie Titus and the picture shows her learning ‘military etiquette’ in basic training in World War Two. She’s shown in a line of women marching towards a mess hall. But which one is Miss Titus we do not know. The title does not tell it all and nor does the photographic composition. For all the guessing and the hypothesising and the close-reading, there is a shortfall in information.

More pictures come. Suffragettes, a kissing male couple and women in service are a counterpoint to repeated pictures of women posing for a male view. One titled Complete Man exemplifies the book. A woman comes off stage from some kind of nude review. She’s naked except for a heart shaped piece of material over her bottom. And as she leaves the stage a man looks at her and she looks at the man. His body is inclined towards hers, his left hand blurred in movement. But she looks right back at him as she walks past him. If he’s the Complete Man, then she’s the even more Complete Woman, almost as complete as the Hawaiian Hula girl who appears in the last picture of the book. This last picture might be produced for the male gaze but that’s not how she’s posing. Her legs are crossed, her arms are down and her hair is down. She is who she is, no matter what the photographer does.

Suite Francaise and Colloboration

Following on from the amazing Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo, I read Suite Francaise by  Irène Némirovsky . Némirovsky was a Jew who then wrote about the German invasion and the responses of different people to the occupation.

It's a compelling book in which one's sympathies are allied to those who preserve their humanity through their daily relationships with both the Germans and their French compatriots. It's deeply critical of bourgeoise France, of those who seek to preserve their privilege and power, culture and wealth using the rhetoric of patriotism and class.

Instead, the real dignity lies with those who live, love, and resist - with the occupying forces and against them. The astonishing thing is the manuscript  was written at the time of the German occupation. And that Nemirovsky was deported to Auschwitz where she died in 1942. As such, the book (which was unfinished with only two out of an intended five volumes completed) is incredibly human and stands in some ways against the post-war rhetoric of collaboration and in particular the scapegoating of women who slept with German soldiers. Maybe that would have changed in the later volumes but you get the feeling that Nemirovsky had priveleged insights into the institutional workings of wartime France (or any other country for that matter).

In Suite Francaise, the people who stay human are the novel's equivalents of the women who had their heads shaved in the picture above  by  Capa. And the ones who are guilty are those who spout the cultural and class rhetoric of the Republic and engage in deep collaboration with the Germans; these themes were to have been developed in further volumes which were outlined but never written.

But then isn't that the point of Capa's picture in the end - that the only people who have any dignity are those who stand in the foreground of the pictures, that however much ideology you spout, to be human you have to be human. And in the picture above, with her love for her child, the shaven-headed woman is the only human being human.

Auschwitz Before and After by Charlotte Delbo

I read Auschwitz Before  and After by Charlotte Delbo after I was sent it by Deborah Parkin. It was a battered old copy complete with annotations from when Deborah was doing Holocaust Studies. And it didn't exactly seem like cheery reading so I never quite got round to it.

But Deborah badgered me and so I started reading it. I've never read anything quite like it. As the title suggests, the book follows Delbo through different layers of suffering. At Auschwitz, Delbo (who was in the French Resistance) describes how survival is not something that happens but something you choose; and the longer time goes by and the more you suffer, the harder it is to choose - death is the easy choice, death is the human choice, the choice where comfort, release and all the soft emotions lie.

As Delbo says...

'They expect the worse, not the unthinkable.'

The more Delbo suffers, the more she becomes one with her surroundings; the land, the water, the mud, the cold, the sun. Her whole being seeps into the mud that she struggles to walk through when it's wet. Cold cuts through to the depths of her being in Winter, and when she gets a chance to wash herself in a stream, her feet and nails have merged with the socks she has not taken off for so many months. Even the salvation of spring sunshine comes at a cost with the realisation that it's much harder to die when it's hot. The Summer means a longer death with more suffering.

At the same time, Delbo also becomes one with those around her. She is both an individual who must reach into the deepest recesses of her mind to survive, but also part of an organic community identity. When the cold, fatigue, hunger, thirst, pain or despair get too much, it is the other women in the group that will save her, if save is the right word because the depersonalisation and pain ran so deep, the cruelty so all-encompassing as exemplified in this quote from the book.

"I was standing amid my comrades and I think to myself that if I ever return and will want to explain the inexplainable, I shall say: “I was saying to myself: you must stay standing through roll call. You must get through one more day. It is because you got through today that you will return one day, if you ever return.” This is not so. Actually I did not say anything to myself. I thought of nothing. The will to resist was doubtlessly buried in some deep, hidden spring which is now broken, I will never know. And if the women who died had required those who returned to account for what had taken place, they would be unable to do so. I thought of nothing. I felt nothing. I was a skeleton of cold, with cold blowing through all the crevices in between a skeleton’s ribs."

And then there is After Auschwitz when Delbo returns home to France and the suffering continues in psychological form. With the constant battle for survival gone, nothing is real anymore. The suffering she has experienced distances Delbo and her fellow concentration camp survivors from the remainder of society. Delbo visits her old comrades and they describe how they are surviving; in a half-life where questions are constantly asked of everyone they meet - what would this person have done in Auschwitz, how can this person possibly understand what I have been through, how can I laugh with my children when...

Strangely enough, the book wasn't depressing at all. It was horrific, compelling and illuminating but had overtones of life in it while still being brutally visceral. Anyway, if you are remotely interested in history, the holocaust, survival or landscape, or humanity in its broadest sense, Auschwitz Before and After is essential reading.

Best Interview of 2013: Stacy Kranitz

The very best thing about writing for the British Journal of Photography is that I get to interview (skype, email, phone and in person) a whole bunch of photographers from around the world. It's a real joy to get to talk to people who are so coherent and passionate about their work.

I don't know if it's my imagination, but it seems that the intelligence, insight and humour that people exhibit when communicating about their work is increasing. There is more engagement both with the history of different photographic media, with the broader world and with different areas of discourse.

I read a lot of doom and gloom  about photography and hear the limiting voices that says one should only photograph with film/instagram/large-format, the voices that cripple you by telling you what you can't photography, what you shouldn't photograph, what you mustn't photograph (and there are voices on the flip side of this that neuter photography and try to denude it of all its political and psychological power - thanks fashion).

Or there are voices that place photography into a little ghetto that isolates image-making from the broader world, that wants to keep it in the cosy pond where the big fish continues to eat the little fish and the little fish eats the prawn - and as long as you are the big fish then everyone (as long as that everyone is the big fish) is happy.

But the world view of photography is getting more open and with that openness comes more engagement. It's engagement that does not sit still or focus on just one area. It goes beyond journalistic, academic and aesthetic. It can be personal or political or aesthetic. When it matters, it's a combination of many things. It's eclectic which means the engagement is not unified or coherent, but why should it be. As Dr Frankenstein said when the monster walked, It's Alive! That's what matters. When it's something you care about, being Alive is better than being dead.

So next up in my Best of 2013, is Stacy Kranitz for the Best Interview for a story on youth cultures in October's BJP - though really I could have chosen so many here. Best as in most interesting, original, though-provoking and engaging. And done with a hangover from a bed in Appalachia (that's her, not me). Combining skateboarding, Leni Riefenstahl and anthropology, all wrapped up in wit and intelligence and self-depreciation, focussing on some of my favourite projects on the last few years - what more could a writer ask for.

So thank you Stacy and thank you to everyone who so graciously agreed to be interviewed by me over the last year.

Here's what I wrote for the BJP.

Sex and Drugs and the Frankfurt School

Stacy Kranitz has been photographing at Skatopia, an anarchist skate farm run by former professional skateboarder, Brewce Martin,  for over 5 years now. Skatopia is. The people who visit the Ohio farm go for the skating, the music and the drug-fuelled fun. Kranitz goes for the violence and the chaos, her pictures filled with sweat, blood and the bug-eyes of teenagers coming down off a night of tripping on whatever drugs they can get their hands on.  

Kranitz’s work on Skatopia, From the Study of Post-Pubescent Manhood, is more than your usual chaos-filled photo-essay though. It is tied down by solid photographic and anthropological theories and also has its roots in Kranitz’s difficult childhood in a Jewish Kentucky home.

The contradictions in Kranitz’s life were evident in her early inspirations in photography. “I had always wanted to be a documentary photographer or film maker since I heard about Leni Riefenstahl when I was 15 or 16,” says Kranitz (who is now 37). “She was incredible. She used her sexuality to make this incredible work but she was also a liar and used gypsy slaves as extras in her films then put them back in the concentration camp when she was done. I like my heroes flawed and she was flawed.”

Having Riefenstahl as a hero led Kranitz directly to the project that preceded and led to Skatopia, a project where she joined a group of 500 Second World War re-enactors dressed in Nazi uniform as they played out a Battle of the Bulge re-enactment. It’s a project where she confronted the darker parts of history and made it real by becoming part of it.

“I was feeling frustrated with the ethical constructs of the documentary tradition, a frustration that is related to how I navigate the situation. It’s really easy to make images that make fun of people. I wanted to come up with something gives some dignity,” says Kranitz.

“Leni Riefenstahl so that was my character when I was with the re-enactors. I am Jewish so it was very interesting to see how people related to me when they found out who I was.  Some were very protective of anything that was being said. For example, once we were in a French Resistance café and the Gestapo came and took people out for different reasons and shot them. I think I was in the role of a whore and they took me out to shoot me. But somebody complained and said “you can’t do that, she’s Jewish”. Which doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The project mixed elegant black and white portraits of men in Nazi uniform with pictures of Kranitz fully in role. The star picture is of Kranitz in the arms of a man wearing a Wehrmacht waffenrock, her head tilted as she leans in to kiss him. The desire is looks cinematically real as, in the foreground, two other men in Wehrmacht uniform look in and out of the frame, adding a further layer of conviction to the historically fabricated scene.

These layers of confusion between the real and the fantasy, between the genuine anti-semite and the imaginary anti-semite, became more convoluted as Kranitz immersed herself in the Riefenstahl role and a sexual element came to the fore. “I’d get hit on a lot and people would ask me what is your heritage and then I’d say I’m Jewish, then they’d look at me and have a drink then have a think and conclude that “you’re still a woman” even if you are Jewish and still hit on me. Hatred fluctuates, it ebbs and flows and sometimes one thing will outweigh another. I was pushed up against walls and yelled at and called an Israeli spy, but I liked the fact that it was difficult and I had to gain people’s trust.”

“By becoming Leni Riefenstahl I put myself into the project and it gave me the idea of fantasy and that representing reality is a fantasy,” says Kranitz. “So I’m being more performative in the work. I’m an experimental, performative photographer!”

Kranitz laughs when she says this but the self-deprecation doesn’t conceal her belief in this performative methodology, something she put into action when she first went to Skatopia 5 years ago. “There’s usually about 10-20 people living at Skatopia full time and when there are parties you get 100-500 people there.  The owner of the land, Brewce, has a house and people have built shacks. People live in a shack, stay a while, then abandon it and new people come and take it over. It’s open all year round. Some people don’t skateboard, they come because they’re down on their luck or on the run from the law. It’s anarchist but not in an organised way.”

“I had heard about Skatopia and how kids ritualised violence for catharsis; a lot go to party, they hold their hands out to do whatever drugs people put into them (there are lots of new synthetic drugs there) and of course skateboarding is very violent. It’s repeated falling off. People are throwing fireworks at each other, they burn cars up, there’s a mosh pit and people fight for pleasure, anger and catharsis.”

“It’s sort of tolerated and expected and that is really beautiful,” says Kranitz. “I grew up in a really violent house. There was a lot domestic violence from my father and later on my brother too because it’s all very much a learned behaviour.”

“I loved my father because he was trying to be a good father but he couldn’t control his anger. I grew up in an upper middle class house in an upper-middle class neighbourhood  so you wouldn’t expect it. The cops would come to our house every week, and it was very confusing and very insular. It became this dark thing we couldn’t get out of.”

“So I’m looking for these different levels of families where people create their own value system and sense of right and wrong and Skatopia is such a wonderful place for that. It is a very open place which is very accepting of people with cameras. I first went with a friend but later I had a boyfriend there for 3 years (every project I do I get a new boyfriend. I have a lot of projects on the go at the moment so I have a lot of boyfriends) and it infiltrated my life to the point where the personal and professional merged.”

 “But Skatopia has been well documented. It’s been on MTV and there was a film made about it called Skatopia: 88 Acres of Anarchy. It’s been featured in magazines like Rolling Stone but very much as a lifestyle thing. So I was trying to do something different with the place. For the first two years that didn’t happen. It took me a long time to develop my own visions. I’ve been working there for five years now and I’m still developing it.”

To help this development, Kranitz is bringing in new streams of thought into her photographic practice, especially from anthropology. “People dismiss anthropology for its dark history but I think they are doing the best job examining their own past to forge new ways of engaging with how to represent culture. Photojournalism is shamefully behind, there is so little self-reflexivity.”

Kranitz references Katherine Stewart as an influence on her work (which is also part of an MFA she is studying for). Stewart believes that over-intellectualising things gets in the way of understanding the incoherent and inexplicable elements in a society. “I see myself, like Stewart, making work that I hope destabilizes the very claim of knowing the meaning of things at all because culture isn’t something that can be gotten right,’ says Kranitz.

Another influence apparent in Kranitz’s approach is Michael Taussig, an anthropologist who said that that western anthropologists shouldn’t examine other cultures but should  examine and critique their own defective culture by going to the fringes of that culture, to the places where the joins show, something Kranitz is doing by joining the Skatopian community.  

“What’s new in my vision is this collection of violence being portrayed as a catharsis. It’s stylised and fetishized and I have an abnormal love of young guys with their shirts off but I wanted to show evidence that violence can be cathartic.”

So we see pictures of bloodied noses and bloodied knees, shins scraped raw by repeated skating falls, dirt filling in the places where the flesh used to be. People smoke and snort and go bug-eyed when the drugs go bad. One boy tries to pee into his mouth, a man stands in the midst of exploding fireworks, while other pictures show people crashed out the morning after the night before.

There is an adrenalin-edge to the pictures but also a sense of dysfunction and anxiety that is part of what attracted Kranitz to the place in the first place.

“I felt connected to this violence. It connected to my childhood and it’s part of my history so I can connect to that personally. I also shot all of this when drunk and high. My favourite time to photograph is at dawn when people are coming down and at that edge; either they stop partying and go to sleep or they take some more and carry on. But they always take more but so do I because I’m at that edge too.”

“A lot of this is trying to get to this lost youth I didn’t have. I was a very sad adolescent. I was depressed and didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t party like this, so Skatopia is a place I can do that. It’s a fantasy land.”

At the same time, Kranitz says, “I struggle to know what the fuck I’m doing”. There is a lack of control in her work, a de-intellectualisation that runs counter to the deep thought she invests in her working practice. In that sense, the instinctual, full-frontal photography that Kranitz is making is her own catharsis or healing, changing her way of thinking and her life through the way she photographs and communicates.

Kranitz continues to photograph at Skatopia but is also visiting the people that she meets to broaden the scope of the project. “The Skatopia pictures are very specific and hyper-focussed so I started to build relationships and visit these kids. I’m making films and thinking about intimacy because as I got to know these people I realised a lot were reconciling themselves to coming of age and how they want to exist in society; what job they want to do, what kind of women they want to date; that’s where the post-pubescent title comes from.”

To a large degree, Skatopia is a male-centred society where those ‘post-pubescent’ choices are actively sidelined in favour of an adrenalin-centred libertarianism; in which case, Kranitz’s work is a lot more nuanced than might appear to be the case on the surface. This is backed up by her studies and her linking of her practice to photographic (James Agee and Walter Benjamin are two major influences) and anthropological theory and the way in which she uses this to rationalise the way in which she works and lives; the two becoming inseparable so that she is all the better to immerse herself into whatever environment she finds herself in.

“I’m doing an MFA and I work with the anthropological department because I’m interested in the problematic nature of documentary.” From the Study of Post-Pubescent Youth is one side of this study into how documentary can work, but Kranitz is in the early stages of developing a more comprehensive showing of her work, one where she incorporates journals, sketches and other sources to enrich the visual narrative.

“I’m interested in creating a new methodology. That’s what keeps me going. That and challenging the boundaries of the history of documentary photography. But at the same time, by doing that I celebrate the history in every way I can.”

Freudian Slippers and Other Best Things

Continuing on the bringing in the old, Excerpt Magazine did a slightly different best of feature which I contributed to. Here are a few more Best ofs for 2013.

Best River: The River Avon!

Best Trig Point above a Beach: Rhossili

And Best Slippers: Freudian Slippers of course.

Top books of 2013 and Klaus Pichler's One Third

Happy New Year. Out with the old, in with the old. Here's my best book list from 2013 as it appeared in Photo Eye. 

Douglas Stockdale says that because he doesn't get to see everything that is around, his list isn't so much a best book list as a list of interesting books. I'd go along with that for my list which has some of the familiar big hitters mixed in with some more esoteric publications. There are some I would have had in but hadn't seen at the time and some that I thought were published in 2012 but that other people have in there (Max Pinckers' Fourth Wall).

Right in there is Klaus Pichler's One Third which is the book of one of my very favourite projects, one that resonates with people and will stand the test of a few year's of time.

Have a look inside the book here. 

Buy the book here.

I didn't really like One Third the first time I saw it because of the black but it has grown on me over the last year - a bit like the fungus that grows on the rotten food that features in Pichler's photographs. Decay is a common theme in photography - flowers, food, animals, people - but Pichler does it beautifully and with humour too.


The book is small but perfectly formed with a little receipt tagged onto it. It's quite subdued in a way which is makes the pictures stand out even more than if it was a full gloss coffee table number. One Third wasn't an easy project to make; it was very smelly over a long period of time and caused countless technical problems. And because the pictures are so spectacular, it's easy to forget that a lot of additional research went into the project; research that makes One Third about food waste and food miles rather than simply about the aesthetics of decaying food.

So it was a difficult project to make. Which makes me wonder if any photography worth its chemical salt was ever easy. Any suggestions? I thought of Krass Clement's Drum which was shot over a night in a pub on few rolls of film with a few pints of guiness to make the camera's click easier - but then I look at the pictures and wonder at the pictures in all their perfection and think that no it's not easy. Not everybody could have done that.

So there's a question. Can good photography ever be easy?

I interviewed Klaus about One Third for the BJP's Still Life edition back in May, 2013, so here's the text to provide some background to Pichler's project.

Unfresh Fruit and Rotting Vegetables

In Middle Class Utopia, Klaus Pichler showed how the people of Vienna transformed their allotments into private, protected areas. In is follow-up project, One Third, he takes a sideways look at how we treat our food and what we allow to happen to it, in particular that one third of food that goes to waste every year.

“It was a spontaneous decision to do One Third,” says Pichler. “It started after I read a newspaper article that showed the food waste in all the first, second and third world countries and I was shocked to read the results. They found that one third of all food was going to waste. I expected that in 1^st world countries, but that was true no matter what the economic status of the country. In the third world it was going to waste because of failures of harvesting and distribution and in the first world it was going to waste because of consumption and food waste.”

“I was really shocked and almost immediately decided to do a project on in. I stopped all my other projects and spent the next 2 months preparing to start the project. Then in April 2011, I started to experiment.” Central to this experimentation was the idea of showing food going to waste and for Pichler that meant he had to photograph rotten food. “At first I tried to experiment with Hipstamatic pictures because so many people photograph food with their cameras, but that didn’t work because a good blueberry muffin photographed with Hipstamatic looks very much like a rotten blueberry muffin photographed with Hipstamatic.”

“I didn’t want to do the traditional vanitas still life because too many people had done that already. Sam Taylor-Wood had made a time-lapse video of rotting food which was lit like Dutch old masters. It was wonderful but I needed something else that wasn’t so much vanitas but more showed food as a luxury item. So I decided to use a black backdrop to suggest this luxury.”

Once Pichler had settled on the black background, the project became more intense as his flat  became a veritable garden of vinegary, acrid and cloying aromas.  “I decided to coexist with this rotting food, to turn my flat into a rotting station. I put 12 plastic containers full of rotting food in the bathroom and than I made an improvised studio on the living room desk. But I was rarely happy with the shoot and had to rot the food again and again; sometimes it didn’t rot nicely or it changed its shape in a way I didn’t expect or changed its colour.” 

Pichler visualised the rotting food before shooting it on digital ( shooting on film was ruled out due to budgetary constraints). “Before it rotted I had a picture in my mind and as the project went on I knew how things would rot depending on the sugar or fibre content or whether it was a fruit or meat or dairy product. But sometimes things would happen that were entirely unexpected. One Friday I left this pile of Greek noodles and when I came back on the Sunday they had exploded into this overgrown mass of white mould.”

Pichler also added to the pictures through composition and the supporting crockery. “In the pictures I tried to put in links from the food based cultural industry – because food is so strongly linked to culture. That is why particular plates and forms of display are used. I also wanted to add humour which is why there is the Elvis plate and the Harold Edgerton reference in the shot of the apple. “

“I worked with masks and sprays when I was photographing. This helped me keep my concentration. The difficult period was the waiting period; in the case of the chicken and the octopus it was awful. The smell of the rotting chicken used to wake me up in the middle of the night it was so bad. So with the chicken I decided to shoot it on the Friday rather than wait till the Saturday.”

As well as the physical discomfort of the project, the research into where the food was grown or made and how the food was transported proved difficult, but grounds the picture in the over-riding message of sustainability and corporate and consumer responsibility.

One Third was widely publicised on the internet, but things really began happening for Pichler when he got a call from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, who had originally publicised the report that had inspired One Third. “The FAO called me and I thought, oh no, they are going to sue me but instead they said how happy they were that the pictures visualised the report so perfectly. They financed the show and now it’s touring around the world.”

This skewed perspective on something we take for granted is also apparent in Pichler’s earlier project, Dust. Quite simply it’s pictures of dust sweepings taken from a variety of sources, surprisingly colourful dust with accumulations of thread, bugs and plastic depending on the source.

“It’s real dust,” says Pichler. “If you go down on the floor and there is good light you will see all the different colours. But I chose the best places for it, places that gave an idea of the functions of society; places of education, factories and entertainment. I went to places that would have good dust; a coal distribution centre, a kindergarten, an army shop, a night club.”

“It was quite funny because I didn’t call them. I just turned up and asked for their dust, then took it home and photographed it. When I begin to think about a project I try to make myself as dumb and naïve as possible so I have to start from scratch. In the end it became more complex and I developed a system of the different kinds of dust and how these connected to the different functions of society. It was dustology. On one level it doesn’t have much meaning, but on another level it does; it is about what a room holds and how it is used. It is a kind of archaeology. But at the same time it is not.”