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Next week, Source will be launching an archive season that will continue until May. Putting this season together I have come across a number of online archives, some well known, some obscure, that contain a wealth of material I had never seen before. Although the emphasis of the season is on the physical collections that we have visited, in some ways the most significant recent development in photography archives is their increased availability via the web. In an ideal world we would be able both to visit archives and see them digitally (and we will be running a competition that connects finding archives online with visiting them in person, watch this space for details) but, to start us off, here are a few of the pictures I have seen and some reflections on how they are changed by appearing on the web.
One day in July 1853, three men boating in the Niagara River were caught by the current. When their boat overturned two of the men were immediately swept over the Falls to their deaths. The third man, Joseph Avery was stranded on a log which had jammed between two rocks. Avery clung on but all attempts made to reach him were frustrated and after eighteen hours he succumbed to the river. A daguerreotypist Platt D. Babbitt had a pitch by the Falls and recorded Avery's predicament. This image can now be seen on the Library of Congress website as part of their huge Prints & Photographs Online Catalogue alongside such collections as Roger Fenton's Crimean War Photographs and the negatives of the Farm Security Administration.
Anyone interested in photography, starting with a traditional telling of its history, can find a vast number of images online, hosted by some of the major photography institutions. This includes George Eastman House, The Center for Creative Photography and many others. There are, of course, companies whose business it is to make their archives available, starting with Getty images and Corbis but including all types of specialism. And this is before we get to the mammoth image collections on Flickr and other photo sharing sites. To say nothing of Google images.
This is another way of saying ‘There are a lot of photographs on the internet’ which you probably knew already. More intriguing is what has happened to these pictures because they are on the internet. Archives are a way of organising information so it is useful and meaningful. What is a picture of a statue embedded in a courtyard for? Or, how did it come about in the first place? It might qualify as ‘news’ by being unusual, but then why no people? It makes more sense as part of a collection of photographs of earthquakes (in this case the San Francisco Earthquake 1906) which is what you would expect the U.S. Geological Survey to record.
 
There must be thousands of these smaller archives of photographs with a specific function that becomes enigmatic when they are floated free in the wider internet, like the wonderful Public Monument and Sculpture Association database of – often amateurish – photographs of public sculpture. This is also typical of council archives which include many pictures whose original purpose is now inscrutable like this man in an overgrown field (The original photograph of which can be examined at Buckinghamshire County Hall). There is a kind of logic being played out here that, once a picture has entered the archive, it submits to the larger purpose of the collection it inhabits. This larger purpose is amorphous and unpredictable because who can say what pictures will mean to us in the future? So the archive is obliged to preserve itself and, as time passes, the photographs become further removed from the reason for which they were first made.
One of the surprising consequences of this is that public archives not only keep but even digitize photographs that would have been considered mistakes by the people that made them. Double exposures, scratched and obscured images can all be found in the digital collections of English Heritage and the National Library of Ireland. Ironically, archives, which were formed to tie down the meaning of pictures, can now be explored for the utterly arbitrary and accidental beauty they preserve.
Art Data is a specialist art book distributor. It takes up a small warehouse in West London (with another warehouse in Norfolk). When you go inside, the ground floor is full of bookshelves with a mezzanine floor of office space. There were five people there when I visited, sitting at desks or packing boxes. Tim Borton, whom I had come to talk to, started the company in 1978 and is still running it, so I was interested to know what he thought of the current state of the art book market.
 Tim Borton at Art Data My general perception of photography book publishing is that, while there are more books published than ever before, there is a crisis in the business of publishing, apparent in the problems for booksellers (Borders and Waterstones) and the new competition from digital formats. The rise in self-published photography books, in this light, is another symptom of the crisis.
Borton has a slightly different view. Although he does see some cause for concern, it's not clear to him that the market has got smaller. He identifies the single biggest change, not as the crisis in large booksellers, but in the disappearance of the independent bookshops that the book chains killed off. In other words, something that happened more than 20 years ago.
I often find books in specialist bookshops (like those at the Tate or Photographers' Gallery) that I don't find anywhere else or via the web. This is because of companies like Art Data who distribute titles published by international museums (take this Stan Douglas book for example). So, specialist bookshops with well-chosen stock can still provide something you won't find on the web. Borton also says that the web has brought some old titles back into circulation that were otherwise sitting ‘dead’ in a warehouse.
He also explained to me how the art book market is not like the general book market. He identifies a large area of growth in the number of books produced by commercial galleries. These may be nicely produced books but it hardly matters, in a conventional publishing sense, if the print run sells well to the public. The purpose of these books is to sell the artworks or artists they represent.
This is just one example of the many ways in which the art book market is subsidised. Which is also why it can continue even when relatively small numbers of books are sold. Borton says that only maybe four or five of his titles sell more than 3,000 copies. ‘I've got a book I want you to distribute, I'd be amazed if you sell one!’ That, for Borton, would be an encouraging proposition from a prospective publisher: it would at least be realistic.
Posted in Publishing
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Tagged art books, Art Data, bookshops, catalogue, commercial galleries, Distribution, distributors, monograph, photo books, Photobooks, Photographers' Gallery, publishers, subsidized, subsidy, Tate, Tim Borton, vanity publishing
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I was at London Art Fair recently at the Source stand to sell and promote the magazine. It was also an opportunity for me to catch up with a number of photographers, curators and Source readers. In my coffee breaks I was able to take a look round at what the galleries had on show in their spaces.
 Tom Lovelace's work at Beers Lambert We were located in the Arts Projection section for ‘solo shows and curated exhibitions’, upstairs from the main floor of the Fair. The first work I spotted was Tom Lovelace’s new work at Beers Lambert Contemporary Art alongside a print from the series that had appeared in Issue 57 of Source. The new work uses frames from a Gilbert and George photo-piece decommissioned by the Tate which Tom had managed to get hold of. I bumped into Tom at the stand and he told me about his recent show Gouge at Galleri Image in Denmark which specializes in up and coming photographers, they are currently showing work by Irish Photographer Miriam O’Connor.
 In Preparation no.4, 2011, Tom Lovelace Across the way in our section were Hoxton Art Gallery showing work by Turkish photographer Guler Ates. The gallery works with a number of young artists, many of who have studied at London colleges. Their next group show includes photographic work by Chelsea College graduate James Bacchi-Andreoli. Nearby were Rise Art who where showing work by Ting Ting Cheng a graduate of the MA Photographic studies at Westminster. I had seen earlier work by Cheng at the Rhubarb festival and it was interesting to see the new work and to find out it had also recently been shown at Kiállítás Elott Galéria, Budapest. Rise Art is slightly unusual in that it uses a board of curators to select work from submissions by artists.
 I judge a book by its cover, Ching Ching Teng
Galleries on the main floor showing photography included Purdy Hicks with work by Tom Hunter, Jorma Puranen, Anni Leppala and Bettina Von Zwehl. While at The Ricard Saltoun Gallery you could purchase work by Alexis Hunter, Keith Arnatt, Victor Burgin and Jo Spence (a film about the Jo Spence archive will feature in the new Source Archive Season in March). Over at GBS Fine Art there was photographic work by Veronica Bailey former Jerwood photography prize winner, Emily Allchurch, Susannah Baker-Smith and Helen Sear’s new work Sightlines. A book of Sear's work is being published by Ffotogallery with the launch on the 25th February.
 Sightlines, Helen Sear Among those calling by the Source stand were Andy Fallon, one part of a recently formed collective of music photographers who have just opened their new gallery Rock City Art in Bedford. Their aim is to protect their image rights, offer mentoring to younger photographers, run workshops and program exhibitions of music photography related exhibitions.
Peter Ainsworth, who I had met at the Rhubarb and Format festivals, had just finished packing his new prints for participation in State of the Art Photography at NRW-Forum Duesseldorf. Peter is one of the movers and shakers proposed for the show by a panel of photoworld Illuminati that included Andreas Gursky, Thomas Weski, Klaus Biesenbach, Udo Kittelmann, FC Gundlach, Thomas Seelig, Andrea Holzherr, and Werner Lippert.
Like so many gallery photographers Peter balances making his own work with teaching. From his Nottingham campus he reported a new focus amongst students on what they could expect for their increased fees in terms of technical resources, along with an overall decline in applications.
 Zone of Transit, Peter Ainsworth Irish artist Emer Gillespie who I'd met at Arles had been busy in 2011 exhibiting at RUA Red in Dublin alongside Irish artist Simon Burch and her work had been included in the international group show Altered States at the Foley Gallery in New York. Also moving beyond the UK, Gina Glover was looking forward to taking part in the Sense of Place exhibition in Beaux de Arts in Brussels curated by Liz Wells.
 Picture me, Picture you, Emer Gillespie Photo 50 the dedicated photography exhibition within the Fair was curated this year by Sue Steward, writer and regular contributor to Radio 2’s Arts Show. The exhibition included work by Esther Teichmann who featured in issue 55 of Source and Michael Wolf whose book Real Fake Art by is reviewed in the current issue. Steward was on hand to discuss the work with visitors to the Fair and speaking to her briefly she revealed she hopes to curate an exhibition at a gallery in Northern Ireland in the near future.
 Photo 50 exhibition In the quiet moments I managed to speed read Elizabeth Edwards excellent new book The Camera as Historian, published by Duke University Press which is out in March. Her exploration of Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885 -1918, provided a perfect counterpoint to the contemporary photography at the Fair.
Posted in Curators, Exhibitions, Festivals, Galleries, Photographers
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Tagged Andy Fallon, Elizabeth Edwards, Emer Gillespie, Guler Ates, London Art Fair, Miriam O'Connor, Peter Ainsworth, Sue Steward, Ting Ting Cheng, Tom Lovelace
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On Wednesday night I attended the opening of Propeller, the Irish graduate photography award. This was at the Copper House Gallery which is a new space located at the premises of the printers Fire in Dublin. The award is a collaboration between Fire and Source which includes an in-kind award of print-production costs, studio space at the lab and mentoring by staff at Fire and Source. The initial idea for the award came from Les Wolnik one of the directors at Fire who saw how difficult his own daughter, a recent photography graduate, was finding it post University.
 Opening night, Copper House Gallery at Fire, Dublin Darek Fortas was the winner of the award in 2011 and it was his work that was on show. The six months available to produce new work was a challenge and it seemed appropriate that Darek had chosen to develop his graduate project from Dublin Institute of Technology. It was work that I had also selected as part of Graduate Photography Online so it was interesting to see what a little bit more time had contributed to the project.
The work was introduced on the night by Darek’s old tutor Anthony Haughey. Anthony’s own work, which was featured in issue 65 of Source, had been on show at the gallery in October.
 Anthony Haughey, providing the inside information The evening was also the launch of Propeller 2012 which will continue the collaboration between Fire and Source. This year the award is open to any student based in Ireland or Northern Ireland as well as Irish students studying abroad. Full details of the competition are online.
The deadline for submissions is the 5th June 2012 and its something that’s well worth considering if you are soon to be an Irish graduate.
  
I was planning to do a roundup of the photobooks published in 2011. We have started to review self published books this year and the job of finding out what has been published, and deciding what to review, has become even more challenging. Larissa Leclair's list of her favourite self published books of the year (most of which I hadn't seen before) is a particularly fine selection - drawing together a wide variety of high-quality books.
Can we draw any conclusions from this and other lists? One Year of Books – another consistently interesting list, made up of books added to a private collection – suggests compiling a list of lists, which is exactly what Eyecurious has done. In first place, curiously, are two books about crimes, Redheaded Peckerwood and A Criminal Investigation. Lots of people seemed to like Ricardo Cases' Paloma al aire (which we have just reviewed) but it's not all small or self published books: Prestel, Aperture, Steidl, Dewi Lewis all feature as well.
Going back over the books we have reviewed over the last 12 months and comparing it with these ‘books of the year’ lists it is noticeable they are all picture books; there are no books about photography. Yet, there are ever more photography books with words in published, and not only for an academic readership. Reaktion continue to put out new titles in their excellent Exposures series. We have just reviewed Photography and Ireland and previously reviewed Photography and Death and Photography and Japan but Chris Pinney's Photography and Anthropology is the one I am most looking forward to reading. These often provide the first general introduction to a photography related subject and are well illustrated, yet not mentioned in anyone's best photography book lists.
Other ongoing trends in books about photography include the steady trickle of philosophically inclined books – including James Elkin's What Photography Is and Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature – that have continued to appear from large and small publishers. Another interesting trend has been reprints. Steidl (who republished Lewis Baltz's Candlestick Point this year and a Baltz boxed set last year) and Errata Editions continue to republish classic and less well known photobooks. However, the most striking example this year was the lavish reprint of The Pencil of Nature, which seemed to pass without notice (Geoffrey Batchen gave it it a mixed review in issue 67). This is surely a book anyone seriously interested in photography would want to look at, but which has not been available in a good recent edition (even if this new edition is not exactly cheap).
So I will pick five books, perhaps not the best photobooks of the year, but books that are likely to change the way I think about the medium.
In no particular order:
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, with an introduction by Colin Harding, KWS
Chris Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, Reaktion
Errol Morris, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography), Penguin Press
Janina Struk, Private Pictures. Soldiers' Inside View of War, I. B. Tauris
Robert Crawford, The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal, and the Birth of Photography. Birlinn
Posted in Lists, Prizes, Publishing
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Tagged 2011, Academic books, alternative Best of, Books, Books of the Year, criticism, Lists, Pencil of Nature, Philosophy, Photography, Picture Books, Review, Survey
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Forming an artist's collective has been a traditional way to nurture support and critique from fellow artists. For some it can mean the sharing of resources such as equipment and studio space, for others it can be an umbrella name to give more clout for showing and publishing work. As a curator or editor, it can be more rewarding to keep tabs on a collective, as their output is likely to exceed that of an individual artist, given that at least one is bound to be producing work at any given time.
As part of a new series of interviews on collectives, Source asked Rory O'Toole from the Cork Analogue Photographers, ten questions:
1. Can you fill us in on your background?
Cork Analogue Photographers left Crawford College in 2008 and we set up the group after a meeting in a pub. Within a year we were part of 3 exhibitions and generated more than 100 web posts about our work and the photography we like. We continue to host group shows all have very active portfolio websites.
 Some members have an outdoor lunch after spending the morning in the darkroom 2. What are your ambitions as a group?
Our ambition is to continue working as a group of artistic photographers using the medium of film. Film has become ever more difficult to find and expensive to buy, while lab facilities and darkroom facilities are becoming rarer. There is a beautiful craft to shooting film and printing from film, particularly in black and white, that we feel should not be lost. Although film has died out in the mainstream, we do feel that it is a medium that artists will continue to use, and we want to be part of that.
We would like to become well known in Ireland as an artistic group expressing their vision via film-based photography. We would also like to be known locally in Cork as a community-based group, and work within own local community
3. What resources do you share?
Film, paper, chemicals - purchased via members subs. Cameras are all owned by individual members, but a bit of sharing goes on there occasionally!
4. How regularly do you meet as a whole group and as smaller groups?
Some members based in Cork city might meet a few times a week, otherwise the regular monthly meetings and any planned projects
5. How do you fund your group?
Currently self funding via subscription. We have had some arts council funding in the past to help fund a project and exhibition in Gallerie Nautique in Cork.
6. Where have you exhibited most recently?
We have exhibited collaboratively in Dublin with the Guerilla Exhibition group as a part of PhotoIreland festival.
 Cork Analogue Photographers collaborated with Guerilla Exhibition for a calculated attack on the streets of Dublin as part of PhotoIreland Festival 2011
7. What are your common interests?
Art, photography. We're not 'gear heads', and don't generally bring cameras to meetings, but if somebody has acquired some interesting old camera, we're always happy to take a look!
8. How do you join the Cork Analogue Photographers group?
Just contact us, come to a meeting. We're a small friendly group, and happy to meet fellow photographers!
9. What advice would you give someone about to start a collective?
Think about why you are setting up the collective, and what you want to get out of it. Lay out your plans or goals in a structured way, and on paper. You probably won't follow this as it's originally conceived, but it helps to guide your vision. Meet regularly and define roles for core members. Most importantly, if there is money involved or funding is needed, get this straight.
10. What problems might a new collective face?
Money is the most likely cause of all serious rows in a group or collective! Define how much members will need to contribute, keep records of money coming in and money spent.
Posted in Exhibitions, Photographers
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Tagged analogue, art, artist, black and white, collective, contemporary, Cork, Corky Photography, film processing, Gallery, Ireland, Irish Photographers, photographers, Photography, practice, resources, together, unti
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 Stills Gallery in Edinburgh Two weeks ago I spoke to photography students in Falmouth and one of the questions I asked them was if they felt part of a photography community. Some did, some saw the university as their community, but most explored the photography world online. There's lots of stuff online but there is also a lot missing. If the experience doesn't translate online, if there is no easy way to link to it and if there are no advocates, then bits of the world remain invisible to the web.
There are many examples of this in photography such as old photo magazines (here's an exception - these recollections of Creative Camera, but try to find out about Ffotoview or the Open Eye Gallery magazine and you won't get far) but the most striking lacuna is photography galleries. In Ireland and the UK the photography galleries first grew up in the 1970s. To see their importance you only need to look at the CVs of now famous photographers like Martin Parr (who had his early shows at Impressions Gallery) or Paul Graham. These galleries each have 40-year exhibition histories that are invisible online (here's the exhibitions for the Gallery of Photography back to 1999, but what about 1978 - 1999?). This might give the impression that no one is visiting these galleries any more but in 2009/10 the Photographers' Gallery received 381,615 visitors and even the quietest regional galleries get more than 1,000 people a show, which is probably more than would see any publication of the same work.
So, we have a network of well-established galleries, with long and varied histories and eager contemporary audiences, how are they represented online? Let's try the web's reference book of choice, Wikipedia. Of the 11 photo galleries that have existed for more than 20 years: the Gallery of Photography, Belfast Exposed, Focal Point, Ffotogallery, Stills, Open Eye, Street Level, Impressions, Side Gallery, Photofusion and the Photographers Gallery only three have entries on Wikipedia, the Photographers' Gallery, Ffotogallery and Belfast Exposed (and they are pretty scant). Given that Wikipedia can record all the villages in Lincolnshire (where more of the residents are sheep than people) this seems a peculiar blindness to me.
At the beginning of this year the Director of Impressions Gallery, Anne McNeill, called a meeting of the people who run photography organisations to discuss ‘collaborations and networks’. If a new generation of people interested in photography are learning about the medium via the web it would appear there is still plenty for this network to talk about, perhaps starting with a request for volunteers to dash off a few Wikipedia entries...
Posted in Exhibitions, Galleries
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Tagged Belfast Exposed, Creative Camera, Ffotogallery, Focal Point, Gallery of Photography, Impressions Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Photofusion, Photographers' Gallery, Side Gallery, Stills, Street Level, University of Falmouth
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 Impressions Gallery I was at Impressions Gallery in Bradford on Saturday, as part of the Ways of Looking Festival, to meet photographers and try to find new work for Source to publish in our portfolio pages. We had received over 120 initial submissions by email, which I had whittled down to a shortlist of seven photographers to meet on the day.
Davide Maione is the photographer in the picture. He is a recent graduate from the MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster. He was one of the photographers I had selected as part of the MA Graduate Photography section of the Source website. So, although I had some sense of his work, it was useful to be able to discuss it in person and to see what he had been working on before and after his final graduate show.
It proved an exciting day in terms of all the work I got to see (and a welcome break from the office). I asked some of the photographers to send a tighter edit of the pictures they showed me, tailored to the eight pages of the portfolio section. This will feed into a wider editorial discussion. If any of them survive that they will end up in the pages of the magazine.
 Davide Maione (left) shows John Duncan his work I was also able to meet up with Anne McNeill and Pippa Oldfield from Impressions Gallery to find out who is on their radar. And, being a festival, there were other photographers about, including Alex Currie of the Human Endeavour Collective and Red Saunders who is showing at Impressions. Stuart Griffiths was also there to launch his new book The Myth of the Airborne Warrior along with editor Gordon MacDonald.
 The Hungarian Social Club Bradford  Diane Bielik installation, inside the Hungarian Social Club Walking around the festival’s carefully curated shows – on the theme of ‘evidence’ – it was interesting to see Diane Bielik’s work which had been published in issue 66 of Source. The prints were pasted up at the old Hungarian Social Club where the original images had been made. Downtown, the hoardings around the temporary urban garden were being put to good to use, to exhibit Bradford Grid’s ongoing photographic survey of the city. And, at the National Media Museum it was good to have my lapsed faith in documentary photography renewed by the Daniel Meadows retrospective. His book and a number of exhibitions at the festival will be reviewed in the next issue of Source.
I will be at Street Level in Glasgow on the 12th November to look at more work from photographers. The submission deadline for this is Friday 28th October and full details are in the submissions section of the Source web site. After that I hope to be in Cardiff at Ffotogallery in February.
 Bradford Grid Collective, installation on hoardings City Centre
This gallery contains 1 photo.
Starting a photography degree is exciting and daunting, there will be new people to get to know, equipment to get your head around, ideas to mull over, lengthy reading lists, and all this whilst working out how to pay rent … Continue reading →
The latest issue of Source contains a new section dedicated to reviewing self published books. Part of the challenge for this section will be finding out what has been published. Blurb, to name only the best known print on demand company, say they now have 11,907 books in the category ‘Fine Art Photography’ and many books will only appear on photographers websites or at photography festivals. We will welcome notice of new books (through an email photobooks [at] source.ie) and any recommendations.
To see if I could find any new photo books I went along to the London Art Books Fair. There I met Daniel Jewesbury (our self published book reviewer) and we compared notes on what we had seen. We also met a number of publishers, some artists, including, once again, the Artists' Books Cooperative. We had just reviewed a book by member of the Cooperative Mishka Henner (positively, fortunately, although he hadn't seen the review) so I asked him how the group had been set up and what his experience of self publishing had been so far.
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