Low at Manchester Club Academy, 19th May 2011

Low, Manchester Club Academy, 19^th May 2011

Review by Simon Bowcock

Words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011

Although many of Low’s songs are among the most beautiful you’ll ever hear, their dark musical overtones and unsettling lyrics mean they can also be disturbing.  While many other acts try a similar approach, Low’s idiosyncratic work often has that ineffable feel and moving quality which set great music apart from the rest.  And if husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, the band’s core members, have a relationship anywhere near as harmonious as their vocals, they probably have the perfect marriage.

 

Low: pretty and sinister

The range of tonight’s audience, from indie kids to middle-aged folksters, is testament to the band’s quality.  The early part of the set is devoted to new album C’mon: its opener Try to Sleep could be either a simple lullaby or a paranoid meditation on a dystopian surveillance society; the controlled cacophony of Oh Majesty/ Magic is a masterclass in the art of noise making; the musically smooth Nightingale is lyrically heartbreaking (and dedicated by Sparhawk to DJ Marc Riley, clearly a genuine fan, who hot foots it from work to catch the last part of the show); the power riffs and compelling, harmonic mantra of Nothing but Heart reach for stadium rock nirvana; and $20 is the lilting centrepiece of the show, if not the tour (it’s refrain,“my love is for free” both hypnotizes the crowd and adorns the t-shirts for sale at the back of the room).

Alan Sparhawk: power scuzz

The latter half of the show alights at various points in the band’s back catalogue, including the sweet, sweet Sunflower, the ominous Murderer, the simply beautiful Laser Beam, the majestic, soaring Two Step, and the violent scuzz of Violent Past (if something’s too pretty, Sparhawk tends to want to mess it up).

Before tonight, I had been confident that 1999’s Secret Name (most of which is, of course, not played tonight) is the band’s best album by some distance: the dark trip hop of I Remember; the steep uplift of Starfire; the grace and majesty of Two Step; the religious mystery of Weight of Water; the dissonant frustration of Don’t Understand; the sweet relief of Soon….surely unbeatable.  However, seeing them select career highlights here has unexpectedly forced me to reconsider.  Is 2001's Things we Lost in the Fire a better album?  Or 2007's Drums and Guns?  Could the new, not yet fully digested offering C’mon be a contender?  Perhaps for the first time, this criminally underrated band with their pretty, sinister songs has made me re-evaluate my opinion of them, revisit my relationship with them, and made be realize more than ever that they are a band to be treasured.

Low: ineffable feel

Words and pictures ©Simon Bowcock 2011

Nadav Kander Portraits 1999 – 2011

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Nadav Kander is a photographic powerhouse who moves quickly and consummately between styles and genres, from Prix Pictet-winning Chinese landscapes to New York Times Magazine-filling portraits of the entire Obama administration.  Having long been at the top of the corporate/ advertising tree, Kander is nowadays garnering a solid reputation in the art world, which this exhibition of recent portraiture aims to cement. 

The portraits themselves reveal Kander to be an inventive risk-taker, constantly pushing the boundaries of technique.  There might be a lesson here for other successful but less illustrious commercial photographers who play things much safer, but I suspect Kander only manages to pull this off through an extremely rare combination of talent, inquisitiveness, market savvy, courage and hard work.

Highlights of the show include a wonderfully dark and dreamy Sofia Loren, an ethereally dead-looking Morrissey, and a brooding and dynamic Michael Stipe (which says more about his band REM’s music than many a magazine article).  In each of these and many other apparently simple portraits, Kander eschews sharp and static exposures in favour of a much looser approach using subject movement or long shutter speeds, which is refreshing and brave in the normally risk-averse field of celebrity portraiture.  The work in this style probably reaches its climax with the recent “phoenix” portraits of the now grown-up boy band Take That, which are a good example of Kander’s ability to produce much more daring and interesting results than the conservative output such a mainstream commission would generate in lesser hands.

The more static pictures yield only slightly patchier results: Richard Ashcroft stirring tea may come across as a little forced in a slightly generic broadsheet supplement style, but many of the images do deliver something out of the ordinary.  For example, the much-photographed and perennially fearsome Nick Cave looks astonishingly vulnerable in perhaps the best portrait of the musician since Anton Corbijn’s cover for Cave’s 1997 heartbreak album The Boatman’s Call.

Over a decade ago I bought one of those sweeping histories of photography which surveys several dozen of the medium's greatest ever practitioners.  Kander was already of sufficient stature to warrant inclusion, but none of his portraits were to be seen, underlining this undeniably mercurial photographer’s ability to amaze across a wide gamut of styles and subject types.  While even the pickiest critic will find it difficult to dislike the work on show here, there is a risk that the exhibition could aggravate Kander’s artistic Achilles' heel: the sheer variety of his virtuoso output is a problem for the art market, which likes artists to have an easily identifiable, if not instantly recognizable style.

Venue: The Lowry Centre, Salford

When: until 4th September 2011

Links:

http://www.thelowry.com/event/nadav-kander-selected-portraits-1999-2011

http://www.nadavkander.com/ (a photographic tour de force where you’ll even find some ambitious and compelling portraits of Richard Ashcroft)

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize 2011 Exhibition

©Simon Bowcock 2011

As is customary, the predominantly post-modern Deutsche Börse Photographic Prize has four nominees on show.  Thomas Demand’s exhibit consists of a single photograph of what looks like a bizarre store room for church organ spares (it turns out he makes paper sets and photographs them, and that this particular work is about comradeship and memory).  Roe Ethridge’s oeuvre is to some extent photography about photography, and he seems to be making a point about our perceptions of art and commerce with his series of seemingly disconnected objects (a wood lattice, a ballerina’s feet, a painterly bowl of mouldy fruit, etc.)  The double-exposed eyes of Elad Lassry’s Man 071 2007 is an interesting update of Man Ray’s Marquise Casati 1922, but otherwise his pictures (e.g. a bloke on a beach, a lipstick) are highly unremarkable, which actually turns out to be the point.

The work of the final nominee, Jim Goldberg, is imaginative, collaborative, wide ranging and (at times) beautifully executed.  Its simplicity and directness makes the other nominees’ work look feeble and contrived.  Seemingly the most traditional, Goldberg is in reality the most daring of the four.

Goldberg could be described as a concerned photographer working in the documentary mode, although his style favours the poetic over the prosaic and factual.  His subject here is the migration of people, often in the direst of circumstances.  Formally, the photographs are a mish-mash, from large format to tiny polaroid, monochrome to colour, even colour negatives to black-and-white contact prints, with production values ranging from the highest to the very lowest.  Some (mostly polaroids) have writing on or around them, sometimes with a translation, sometimes without, ranging from simple messages (such as I am a whore, or We have only seen father once in life) to a complex scrawled map of a long, multi-country journey.  On a few images, faces have been obscured or even obliterated.  You can make presumptions, but it is often not explicitly clear who wielded the pen, or even who took the photograph.

Many photographers claim their work involves a deep collaboration with their subjects, but in reality this seldom comes across at all to the impartial viewer.  Goldberg's dynamic photographic approach, and use of text, means many of his photographs are truly collaborative.  Even the title of the project, Open See, is a collaboration (ostensibly written by one of his subjects on a photograph), with meaning on many levels: a simple exhortation of “open and see” the photographs in the 2009 book of the same name; “hope and see” how things turn out; “open sea” without borders (which is what the subject intended); etc.

However, there is a cost to Goldberg's mercurial style.  Firstly, the formal incoherence of the photographs is consistent with an overall lack of clarity of information.  We learn that the world is a terribly brutal place, but the scale of Goldberg's subject is so vast and complex (and the information in the images inevitably so relatively scant) we do not really learn that much about how or why things are this way.  While some of the images work extremely well artistically and emotionally, the work is much less strong if viewed as documentary photography in the conventional sense – perhaps surprising for a member of Magnum.  Secondly, even acknowledging the gargantuan scale of Goldberg's project, the sheer mass of the material presented dilutes its effect, and a tighter edit may actually prove significantly more powerful.

But perhaps these criticisms don't matter so much.  I have to admit to being stubbornly agnostic when it comes to concerned photography, mainly because it often just doesn’t work for me: still images seldom convey social issues well, especially compared with other media such as the written word or moving pictures.  Goldberg’s collaborative approach overcomes some of photography’s usual shortcomings in this sphere, and occasionally cuts straight to the very heart of the human stories. Here and there, the hand annotation adds so much weight to a photograph, it elevates it from the particular to the universal, revealing Goldberg as a much greater artist than many of his more precious and more famous peers.  For me, the most affecting photograph is hardly a photograph at all: a small scrap of near total pitch darkness, save for a barely perceptible, haunting face and the translated words: My life is sick because of what they do to me.

Like all great ideas and much great art, Goldberg’s work is occasionally so simple and effective it seems obvious.  Of course it has its problems, but it is nonetheless original, brave and at times moving, and wins the 2011 Prize by a country mile.

©Simon Bowcock 2011

Link:

http://deutsche-boerse.com/dbag/dispatch/en/kir/gdb_navigation/about_us/30_Art_Collection/25_photography_prize

Venues:

Ambika P3 London 5^th April to 1^st May

C/O Berlin 13^th May to 19^th June 2011

The Cube, Eschborn, Frankfurt am Main 2011 dates to be confirmed