BlackLab: Adventures in Still Pictures

Paris Photo 2009: Special Report

Late last week, we sent our Cultural Attaché to the world’s largest photography fair. Today, we received the following report which contains some strong language.

John Baldessari, Tips for Artists Who Want To Sell 1966-68.

Car-Boot Sale

It’s difficult not to see Paris Photo as a glorified car-boot sale masquerading as a photography festival. “An ideal opportunity,” according to Reed International Exhibitions (the fair’s owners),  “for buyers, sellers and products to physically come together – to become a potent force for business.” So much is wrong with Paris Photo that the only way to truly appreciate its horror is to immerse yourself in it completely for one day before getting the hell out of there and never coming back (unless, that is, your own work is on sale for the price of a French civil servant’s annual salary).

The marriage between Paris and photography seems to be an ideal one at the moment, with both almost dead to the core. Don’t be fooled by this year’s record visitor numbers and sales. The city’s bourgeois facades point to a tired, lame grandeur while photography here is constantly looking back, soaking itself in nostalgia and incapable of shaking off the weight of history. We know that the photographers and artists are not to blame for this. The phrase “It is what it is” was heard in the brasseries and cafés all weekend, from people whose heads were bowed and confidence drained, resigned to defeat in the shadow of the dollar’s influence.

Never has this Attaché seen photography reduced to such crude, unimaginative depths. Images of poverty snapped up for tens of thousands of dollars; Black freaks trapped in frames for the entertainment of rich white overlords; Self-appointed ignoramus bombarding potential buyers with meaningless jargon about the works on display. It is as though in the face of cataclysm, the whole world is rushing to Paris to revel in the spectacle of its own worst instincts.

Van Leo, Sherihan actrice égyptienne, Le Caire, Egypte, 1976.

No-one manages to get away with contemporary Orientalism quite like the French. This year’s ‘theme’, Arab and Iranian photography was presented in a ’special’ exhibition and given a ’special’ annexe in which to showcase itself. The signature image of this year’s festival (shown above) seemed more than appropriate – a pretty, unthreatening cowgirl adorning the fair’s catalogue, posters and banners in an attempt to seduce the ruthless, wealthy cowboys of industry and aristocracy that can save her (and own her).

Arabs Dig UK Celebrity

This author’s most anticipated visit was to the Arab Image Foundation stall,which turned out to be a single table shoved to the side of an entrance to one of the main annexes. On it was displayed a portfolio box containing a selection of seductive prints from the Foundation’s archives selected not by Walid Raad but wait for it … by Martin Parr.

Sure, this was a beautiful, thought-provoking selection. But the AIF needs to think of itself as having a golden future and if Martin Parr is seen as symbolic of that future, they may as well give up now. Somewhere along the line, we seemed to forget that there is more to photography than Martin Parr Inc. He has contributed many things to the medium’s modern evolution. But do we really need the spectacle of photographic celebrity propping-up images strong enough to stand for themselves? The fusion of Middle-Eastern heritage with Western celebrity neither seems very tasteful nor sophisticated.

Martin Parr signs copies of his Guest portfolio presentation for AIF (Source)

NASA Prints by ASDA

A visit to the Daniel Blau stall revealed one of the bigger surprises of Paris Photo. The gallery showed vintage NASA photographs in honour of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The prints on display were so poor that students on degree courses would be crucified for thinking they could get away with them. And if price tags of tens of thousands of dollars were put beside each of these prints (as was the case here), the humour would be lost. Unbelievable that for all the billions NASA spent on the space programme, the Daniel Blau Gallery couldn’t source decent prints. Never mind. If you want to save yourself a small fortune, these very same images are available for free as hi-res, downloadable files at NASA’s own publicly accessible image archive. Alas, that would be too straightforward, too modern, too common. What a buyer gets after all is an original tirage (edition) that comes with provenance. If you pay $15,000 for it, well, it must be worth something.

A stunned visitor studies the poor quality of NASA’s prints (Source)

Bye Bye Photographer

Photographers at Paris Photo are an embarrassment, surplus to requirement. Only the product of their labours is to be seen for their presence threatens to contradict the myths salesmen create to sell their wares. On the Paris Photo website, the menu categories tell the story:

VISITOR | EXHIBITOR | COLLECTOR | PARTNER | PRESS | SHOP

Here, photographers are absent, dead, unnecessary. This is a playground for voyeurs, salesmen, hoarders and press gangs. One of the sadder sights at Paris Photo is the ageing superstars wheeled out to meet the fans. Like ghosts caught in headlights, they either shuffle uneasily or stride with chests puffed out to their place at book signings, giving their signature away to admirers. These mock, private audiences always seem to have a whiff of deceit about them. The photographer, master of tricks and devices that have resulted in the pictures they are famous for, sits behind a desk greeting middle-aged admirers who at any given moment, seem poised to erupt in a frenzy of teenage-like adoration. Whichever side of the table you’re looking at, it is not a pretty sight.

Hirst Nails It

In 2004, Damien Hirst had this to say about the art market:

“Art is about life and the art world is about money although the buyers and sellers, the movers and shakers, the money men will tell you anything to not have you realise their real motive is cash, because if you realise – that they would sell your granny to Nigerian sex slave traders for 50 pence and a packet of woodbines – then you’re not going to believe the other shit coming out of their mouths that’s trying to get you to buy the garish shit they’ve got hanging on the wall in their posh shops … Most of the time they are all selling shit to fools, and it’s getting worse.”

To the uninitiated, to those who’ve never been to Paris before, or to those who love the hustle and bustle of out-of-town illegal markets, Paris Photo is sure to be a seductive candy store filled with wonder and sweet things. But if you no longer roam the world with adolescent dreams of romance and anaesthesia, Paris Photo offers little more than the insides of a corporate beast’s desires sliced open for the world to see, with suited flies eager to feed on its rotting corpse.

Bullshit Talks, Money Walks

The best insight one might find at Paris Photo isn’t hanging on the walls, its taking place right before your eyes in the monologues and charades performed by gallerists, publishers and fat wallets on legs. Like all art fairs, Paris Photo is a playground for the rich. And here, like elsewhere, bullshit talks and money walks – not the other way round. The nostalgic, sentimental appeals of photography attracts the wealthy like natives to missionaries. If your intention is to learn more about the world than the cynical methods of selling useless interior decoration, don’t go to Paris Photo. It’s not for you.

Is there a sadder sight in the world than that of a photographer photographing a photograph on a gallery wall? How about this same photographer being chased out of a stall by a gallerist not wanting the photographer to photograph a scene photographed by another photographer? Paris Photo is filled with such scenes and if proof were needed that photography is tired, exhausted, done for even, then one need go no further than a visit to the world’s largest fair.

Some Respite

Without wanting to invest too much currency in the idea that galleries are in any way the saviour of photography’s future, the stand-out show for this writer was to be found outside Paris Photo at the Marian Goodman gallery. Here, in the work of John Baldessari, we are offered a vision of photography as an innovative, playful three-dimensional form able to plunge in the past and gleefuly emerge in a radiant future.

John Baldessari, Hands and/or Feet (Part One): Snake / Hanging Person, 2009

What Baldesseri’s images can’t convey on the computer screen is their layered quality, produced on three separate levels with a carved precision that draws the viewer into its colourful canyons and black & white plains. What is also absent in this gallery space is any notion of price. Unlike the stock exchange of Paris Photo, what matters here is the communicative value of each work, not its crude reduction to a commodity. Among the enlightened, the acquisition of these objects is secondary to their significance. Unfortunately, this is a notion entirely absent from the Fair down the road.

John Baldessari, Hands and/or Feet (Part One): Skateboards / Tiger, 2009