Blog

I am at HJ airport in Atlanta ……….

When I was up in NYC I went to the Met to take in this show ……… Ink Art – The past and the present in contemporary China ……….. It was amazing ……… something completely awesome about the amazing calligraphy taking up whole rooms floor and ceiling as well as walls with amazingly precise small characters drawn in what appears to be in their hundreds of thousands …………

But I also loved this thing above with its giant less formed characters ……. this put me in mind of the markings of Simon Guttman on my contact sheets ………. very bold circles indicating yes print ……… and crosses ….. no do not print …… on my shots.

The image above by the artist Gu Wenda has him judging the letters of 6 of his students ……. he then grades them good with a circle ……. or no good with a cross ……… a traditional system of marking for a chinese teacher grading the work of students learning their alphabets and characters ………. but this has the resonance of the cultural revolution where individual people’s character was, marked good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable with drastic consequences.

The link to Simon Guttman is just in my head …….. but his markings had a very similar striking quality of red ……. approval or rejection ……… Simon ran the first photo agency I ever worked for ……. in fact he gave me my first job in photography ………. He is a legendary figure in reportage photography ……. He is said to have invented the whole concept of the photo agency (in Germany before the second World War) ……. he is said to have given Robert Capa his first job in photography ……… he was very eldery by the time I worked with him ………. but still totally driven ………. still completely motivated by photography and radical politics …….. he is dead now. has been dead a while …….. but some of the things I learned back working with him still influence my work today …………

Better run for the flight ………….. its about to be wheels up in the big ATL.

Cheers Jez XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX