Quand il a commencé à traîner au comptoir du Café Lehmitz à Hambourg Anders Petersen avait 23 ans. Trois années durant, il a capturé l’incroyable galerie de personnages nocturnes qui y faisaient leur vie : anciens taulards, escrocs ou marins qui n’avaient jamais navigué, rencontres amoureuses et rixes alcoolisées. Célébrée, cette série a fait de lui un photographe, passager des marges, dont les ouvrages sont feuilletés religieusement par quiconque prétend se frotter à l’image en noir et blanc. Nous avons croisé sa route cet été lors d’un workshop accueillant une vingtaine de personnes venues des quatre coins du monde. Derrière ses épaisses lunettes, le portraitiste suédois toujours aux aguets délivrait des attentions simples, en apparence : « Shoot from the gut, edit with the brain. » C’est en substance ce que lui avait transmis son mentor, Christer Strömholm. Un leitmotiv, beaucoup de discipline et du plaisir, aussi : «Si la photographie ne devait se résumer qu’à un simple but, ce serait de se faire plaisir. Un photographe ne devrait pas trop se prendre au sérieux. »
L’entretien est à découvrir dans le n°92 de la revue MOUVEMENT.
The true expression of a photographer is to have his or her work in a photo book. It is the most difficult and the most frustrating, and it is probably dunned to failure. In a sense, it can never be right and there will always be regards, so there is a great deal of anxiousness attached to it.
Michal Grochowiak: What exactly is 1000 Words Magazine? How did it start for you and how does it work now?
Michael Grieve: 1000 Words is designed like a magazine, an online magazine. You can't separate pages. You have to go through the magazine, just like you would with a printed one. We are now revamping the website. It is already 6 years old, so we want it to be put together in some different way, to make also small changes in it. Now we are also looking to do a magazine in print. It would be an annual magazine and it will have an entirely new content. Online presence is the main thing. Whatever happens, we will always have an online presence, but we want to diversify into other areas.
1000 Words is more of a concept. A part of it was to do workshops, so we had workshops with Roger Ballen, Antoine d'Agata, Anders Petersen, Erik Kassels. We organize talks in London with people like Simon Baker, Chris Shaw. We also curate exhibitions. In September we opened a group exhibition Rebecoming in Flowers Gallery at East London, comprising newly commissioned works from Virgílio Ferreira, Henrik Malmström, Tereza Zelenkova and Lucy Levene. They are four fantastic winners of the inaugural 1000 Words Award, which we launched back in 2012 having received a substantial grant from the EU Culture Programme.
Writing for me started with writing book reviews for the British photography magazine – Hot Shoe. At that time I wanted to diversify myself from being just a photographer coupled with my obsession for photo books. My girlfriend used to complain that I was spending too much money on books and so writing about them allowed me to acquire free books and also to analyse my appreciation of the work to a deeper level.
When it comes to editorial content with 1000 Words we sometimes have very specific ideas about the photographers who we want to be featured and sometimes we accept the proposals of the writers with whom we have built a very good relationship with, and, as you can imagine, writers are extremely important. They can suggest a photographer or a book, which inspires them, and that they would like to write about. In the first issues we used to work on thematic bases. Then we felt that it perhaps was a little bit too constricted, so we decide to make it more open. It was mostly the theme that evolved, as we were beginning to find the photographers for particular issues.
I don’t think that we necessarily deal with just contemporary art photography. We are not specific or pedantic to that. What we are looking for, is what we would qualify as just good work, which is intelligent, which is not fashionable, which is not necessarily innovative but has integrity in itself. You should believe in the person who is making the work. They really mean to do it. They really need to do it. It is important for us to find works which we feel would last beyond the moment.
www.1000wordsmag.com
What does it give you and what do you lose as a photographer and a deputy editor of a photography magazine at the same time?
What it doesn't give me, is the responsibility that Tim Clark has. Tim is really the work horse behind the whole thing. Tim is not essentially a photographer and I am a photographer, and what I can give to it is my own personal experience through other people, through other photographers. When I joined 1000 Words Magazine I introduced more subjective artists like JH Engström and Anders Petersen, who were not necessarily conceptual photographers, but rather people, who were dealing with lived experience, which was articulated through the medium of photography. For me, they could be writers, but they just happened to be photographers.
What it gives me on the personal level, is that it reinforces my own creative expression. It validates the way that I'm working on a very personal level. It also gives me diverse approaches to things. Photography is my medium, but then it also allows me to write, to edit, to curate, to teach, to think in different ways. It opened me up to other forms of creative and intellectual expression and educated me much more to appreciate works of other people.
There was an issue for me at the beginning that, as photographer, you can't become a writer or a critic. How critical can you be to others without being embarrassing or conflicting in some way? But then looking at Walkers Evans as an example of someone who had full control over his writing, curating and editorial work proves to me that it is more interesting to branch out and see the whole process as one thing rather than compartmentalising. In other words I am not interested in the supposed rules of the game. At the moment I am working on photobooks and also writing and doing portraits for the British Journal of Photography on those individuals I am interested in and I see these as one and the same thing which is to express myself but in different contexts.
As editors we give responsibility to writers, who write about works, but it doesn’t necessarily express our point of view. Occasionally you have writers who write something, which is very critical, and that is fine. When I write about photographers I tend to write about photographers who I identify with. I don’t feel like a writer. I am just somebody who tries to understand other people's work. I also choose photographers who I enjoy, so I am not hard or too critical.
www.1000wordsmag.com
You spent a year in Poland. Is there anything specific in Polish scene of photography? Have you found any attitudes which are unique to this region?
A year is not enough, so unfortunately I know very little. I came here in total ignorance. I not been to Krakow or Lodz photo festivals this year, although I have in the past.. I don't know if there is any particular Polish scene of photography, but what I do know, is that there is a very strong tradition of photography in Poland. For example, if you like contemporary music, in order to understand it, you got to know what happened before with that particular culture. Polish photography is very strong and very unknown outside of Poland. I got quite interested in works, which were done during the Soviet period. Although complex it has been interesting to be introduced to particular photographers who were able to transgress and produce ideas which were against Soviet ideology, and how the work was particularly unique with minimal outer influence. I think the history of Polish photography is endlessly fascinating. This is an ingredient which is now missing in British and American photography, its as if we know and we know and from this works are derivative . In the East, the work and its history is a treasure, which has yet to be truly realised.
I was going to make an exhibition of Roger Ballen at a gallery in Warsaw. I saw interesting parallels between his work and the work of Polish artists from the 60's and the 70's, who were doing their work well before Ballen. I thought it will be an interesting way to show similarity through difference, and the fact that, however culture divides, the psychology of human beings is still kind of the same in terms of aesthetics and surreal ideas.
Michael Grieve "The Foriegner [sic]"
It has been ten years already since Flickr and other image shearing platforms appeared in our lives. We know that it completely changed society's perception of photography. Is it a good moment to ask what exactly has changed after a decade?
Now, there are more people calling themselves artists. In some way it is shameful to say that you are an artist these days. It's so easy to apply this label to yourself. That's what we were aware of with 1000 Words. We wanted people not just to flick through. We wanted them to consider what they are looking at and to have patience. We live in a society, in which people watch television but, in fact, they don’t watch anything. They are flicking to the next channel. And people just flick a switch thats says they 'like', we live in a 'like' culture and so there is not critical engagement. I suppose this is a consequence of a consumer mentality and I think it is this banal acceptance of things that is the real challenge.
I just read “Slowness” by Milan Kundera. This book talks about the virtues of being slow in the world and I really believe in that. A photo book is something that you have on your lap and you slowly go through the experience. There has to be depth to understand the work. You have to be able to contemplate and understand the relationship and nuances between how that images work next to each other. The narrative process is very important as well. A narrative is something which is beginning to be lost. Even when you subvert a narrative as an artist, it is still a narrative and there is a reason to it.
It is not enough to simply display images. We have too much of it. As a teacher of photography I can say that students now are not really aware of a narrative process. The golden rule to understand a narrative is to delve into complexities of a photographic process, as writers and filmmakers do. Photography is too easy. Everyone can take a great photograph and put it on Instagram, for instance. It can be an amazing picture but it's not the point. It is about the process, contemplation. It is about considering an approach to things. The platforms, in a way, don't really matter. It is how you employ the platform and what it means. In some way, you have to do something, which is slightly against the trend. Sometimes a more conservative approach is also the right approach, being radical for the the sake of being radical is disingenuous.
"Rebecoming" Flowers Gallery, London
On the other hand, it became quite popular to use not your own, but someone else's images and found pictures.
The appropriation of existing work is not new. From Dada, Pop Art and post modernist photography it has a strong history. How do you organize that work and conceptualize it in a way, that has something to say? It is a lot of intervention with work to reshape it, to put it in a different context. For example, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, as working photographers, they've been through a documentary and editorial process. They arrived with this conclusion that those pictures already exist, so they had to reexamine themselves. They had to reexamine their own photography. Essentially, they are dealing with the wrongness of photography. For example, for them to be a documentary photographer today is not to make a new work but to, sort of, turn it upside down and to reexamine the work they've already done. The work, which was rejected from what they've already done. They are deconstructing the romanticism of being a photographer; deconstructing the context of how photographs are seen. They are looking at the issues of fiction and fact, of what reality is, and of what truth is. They are dealing with it in an intelligent way. The work is often playful and employs techniques that can be considered as gimmicks but it is substantiated by their own personal development as a duo and the innate knowingness of the absurdity of photography through experience. They are not a product of a trend. The point is to be consistent with the work that you do and to understand the history, not just of photography, but political, idealogical, economic, scientific, cultural etc, to place work in a context. I see too much work that is floating in space with no real understanding of historical context. And therefore it is weak and diluted. I am also seeing a recourse to gimmicks that is often seen as experimental but actually looks decorative and ridiculous.
"Rebecoming" Flowers Gallery, London
Don't you think that we are now participating in a golden era of photo books? Have photo books become the equivalent of exhibitions in galleries?
Photography changes it's meaning throughout many different contexts. The true expression, I think, of a photographer is to have his or her work in a photo book. It is the most difficult and the most frustrating, and it is probably dunned to failure. In a sense, it can never be right and there will always be regards, so there is a great deal of anxiousness attached to it. The very great problem of a photo book, is that it is permanent. When you put it out to the audience, it is like a confession. You are putting your soul out there and you are naked. It demands a lot of courage, if you really mean what you are doing.
There's a lot of photo books now which are very trendy and fashionable. People are really self-satisfied, but this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about good stuff, good work, whatever that means. I don't even want to talk about it in terms of platforms. You put your heart and soul into producing this very simplistic form, which is an old medium. You are limited to pages, and all limitations of the book. It without recourse to tricks it can create wonderful possibilities.
Gallery is another thing. The problem with it, is that it is like the white space of Protestant Church and exhibitions can be a bit banal and sterile unlike an abattoir that has more life! And so photographers are now trying to make more three dimensional exhibitions. More interactive or whatever that often looks like shop window displays. Forcing a square peg into a round hole. For me, a gallery is secondary to a photo book, for sure. I like to sit by my own. I like to have a book in front of me. I like to feel the texture of it, smell it and look at every detail of it. For me that comes from my experience with music records. When I was a kid buying vinyl records, I would lock the door of my bedroom, look at the cover, at the graphics, the photography of it. Then I would take out the record and enjoy the static and the entire ritual of placing it on the record deck. It's a kind of a fetish. I feel that art needs to be a fetish, it has to upset the balance of our minds and stir the body.
As humans we distance ourselves from the nature of life. And in the autonomy we try to make sense of the chaos. What I enjoy about photography is its inherent contradiction, that it frames and makes sense of the chaos. To perfect this organisation is produce a very banal view on life. The work I enjoy understands this contradiction and this is implied in the work rather than explained. Life is not about knowing, it is about not knowing and the more you try to perfect it the more removed you are from life's essence and one's relationship to it. I would rather swim in this contradiction and see where the current takes me.
Michael Grieve "The Foriegner [sic]"
In one of your book reviews you used suggestive terms “poetics of ugliness, poetics of brutality.” Looking at your personal work and at the books you choose for reviews, it seems to me that the aesthetic of ugliness is very important for you.
At this point of my life, and on a general level, I make no differentiation between different mediums. Painting, film, cookery, architecture or music. I'm just looking for a good expression in it, a certain kind of taste. Something that relates to a lived experience, to the essential aspects of life, and how that is translated through the particular medium. Subtlety is what I'm looking for, but I'm also looking for something which is grounded, that is in the dirt but that is also sensual. I do not like idealism but revel much more in the pleasures of chance and find that understanding ugliness actually brings you closer to the sublime intensity of beauty. In other words I am less interested in clever ideas but more interested in emotion and the connection to life.
There are many other elements of life and I think that the body of work should touch upon many different elements of live. There are photographers who produce works that have just one idea and are very generic. I like and I try to do photography that incorporates the richness and the complexity of living. For me, nothing is certain, so I can only make works which can only be done through the spontaneity of my life. I am not producing works which are conceptual and I dislike these professional art photographers, I mean really, if you want to have this mentality it is better to be part of an industry. I am dealing really with what I do not know and somehow in photographing certain encounters a narrative that reflects my life and that of others begins to emerge. It deals with certain kinds of impossibilities and failures, because those are my motivations as a human being and a creative, its a search in my limited mortality that never arrives. But I find this very intense, it gives my life greater meaning and pleasure. In terms of a project, I think it should evolve and it should has a natural end. Then I start to think what I have done and what exactly it means. Of course, I have a general feeling as I'm doing it, a sense of the narrative enfolding, to be in control and not in control.
Ugliness is also a device that I use in a teaching process. It is a device that gets students to question what beauty is, if they want to transgress this notion of beauty and to rethink it. The middle ground between beauty and ugliness is the sublime, and most of the artists are dealing with the sublime. Ugliness, coupled with sensuality and death are the fundamental human issues and photography is like a filter between ourselves and the ugliness of the world. In cultural terms beauty is something which is forced on us to give us a sense of wholeness, but as intelligent people, who examine our lives, we really have to deal with ugliness in order to attain the true experience of existence.
