CIRCULATION(S)

Only in its second year, CIRCULATION(S) is a festival dedicated to emerging European photography, held in the rather idyllic setting of the Jardins de Bagatelle in Paris. On opening day, a throng of photography professionals and amateurs alike milled around the two lovely buildings, taking notes and munching Haribo sweets, which was all very jolly. However, what remains from this festival is not just a celebration of contemporary photography (and more on this later), but a true investment in the photo community, with a programme of events spanning the duration of the event, from 25 February until 25 March: free portfolio reviews for young photographers (held on 10 and 11 March), a sale of the works in the exhibition, a game sponsored by Tamron to win some kit, and many other fun and interactive set-ups… In short, even though this festival is a recent addition to the ever-growing festival scene, it’s a dynamic and thoroughly professional one, with some particularly accomplished work on show, selected by various photography organisations such as Fetart (the non-profit set up by Marion Hislen, initiator of the festival itself), SFR Jeunes Talents, curators and special guests.

So, with all this background information securely in place, back to the highlights of my Parisian Haribo-sweetened flânerie… I discovered the work of Alexandra Serrano with great pleasure – a Franco-Mexican artist whose series “Between Finger and Thumb” is a photographic reconstruction of the artist’s most vivid memories. Delicately poised between autobiography and dream-work, the images staged in the artist’s growing-up home are both intimate and immediate, cleanly finished, with fragmented detailed shots of eggshells and bite marks somewhat reminiscent of the work of Rinko Kawauchi interspersed with anodyne home scenes seen through a child-like prism.

Steeped in a more documentary tradition, the work of German photographer Lia Darjes bears a similar attention to detail and lighting. In her project “Converting”, she investigates Muslim converts in Germany: why do German people convert to Islam? How is Islam represented in the West? The series is composed of portraits, still lives, and location scenes, all infused with a painterly light that, strangely, harks back to the Great Masters’ use of holy light in sacred paintings. Calmly, gently, the images draw us in to invite us to ponder the role of religion in Western society.

Equally beguiling, Kurt Tong‘s project, “In Case it Rains in Heaven” is a photographic index of the paper objects burnt by the Chinese at the tombs of their deceased relatives, in order to “send” them the objects they will need in the afterlife: from an umbrella to a pair of servants, from a McDonald’s meal to a scuba-diving kit, everything that can be found in real life is replicated in paper for the afterlife. Tong’s work, as always, manages to bridge the real and the poetic with conceptual elegance.

Finally, young British photographer Matt Wilson showed a series of small images from his travels in the US. Received wisdom might have inclined the artist to display these images as large as possible, but the small format used here gave these desolate yet enchanting vistas a personal and intimate feel rarely seen in this kind of landscape work. In fact it’s both difficult and brave to make American landscape work these days, with artists from Ansel Adams to Joel Sternfeld, and from Edward Weston to Stephen Shore, casting a strong shadow that informs our reading of the images. A horse standing by a broken-down barn, a cigarette lit in twilight flare, overexposed canyons: the scenes are unmistakably American, playing with the trope of the Far West’s deserted melancholy. Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy comes to mind, violence and tenderness, a premature wisdom and truthfulness, erupting to the surface of these images as they do in McCarthy’s words: “The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody’s mouth.”

And upon these wise words, so my visit concludes, with only too little time and space to mention some of the other great work on show, notably, by: David De Beyter, Michel Bousquet, Tony Kristensson, Augustin Rebetez, and Gilles Roudiere. I leave you to discover them in your own time!

Details of the festival are here: http://www.festival-circulations.com/

This article was originally published in Notes from the Undergroud.

Akiko Takizawa - Over the Parched Field

Hidden behind the anonymous stucco facade of a Regents Park Inner Circle villa, Akiko Takizawa’s first solo show, held at the Daiwa Foundation in London, is anything but anonymous. In fact, Takizawa’s images are highly personal compositions, emotionally charged yet containing within them a strange distance and a darkness, which may not be altogether surprising given that their main subject, and the inspiration for her work, is death.

Indeed, Takizawa suffered a near-death experience aged 12, and she takes a documentarian’s inspiration in a series of tragic fait divers that all relate to death. Her latest series, made especially for the show, all double exposures and fragmented scenes, is shot at Osorezan in the North Japanese region of Aomori: with a name that translates as “fear mountain”, it is a place where relatives go to speak to their lost family members via a medium. It is shown next to “Headland” (2007), an earlier series that is perhaps the most readily understood of the show, with dark-edged landscapes that reveal Takizawa’s formal compositional talent and give the viewer an entry-point into her carefully balanced, more complex compositions.

Back in 2005, hearing in the news of parents abandoning their children in a snowy mountaintop, Takizawa made a pilgrimage of sorts to the place. Re-enacting a particularly tragic detail of the story, that the parents had watched their children die in the car headlights, “Where We Belong” is a filmic posthumous homage to these dead children, capturing scared adults lit by a sodium halo of light, small and lonely at the bottom edge of the frame, the rest of which is taken up by a flurry of swirling snowflakes, whitely lit against the black background. It’s an ominous yet compelling piece, managing to walk a thin line between tenderness and violence. It guides the viewing for the rest of the room, where, on the opposite wall, the large format abstract composition of multiple exposures, “Senbazyru-Sakuran” (2004), is redolent of shattered glass and explosive emotions. It is displayed in between two colour double exposures, “Magnolia” (2004) and “Father – Sakura no.1” (2006), calmer pieces, steeped in the colour blue, where the dominance of the sky somehow seems to remind us to be mindful, and to care for our elders.

But in this exhibition, it is the elders who continue to care for their children: in the series “Wedding up in Heaven” (2011), Takizawa photographs the ghostly arranged weddings bereaved parents organise for their dead children. Framing shrines and fragmented portraits of young adults dead before their time, Takizawa seems to identify with lost children and inconsolable parents alike, hovering around the edges of this deeply intimate space between life and death with her camera. Indeed, Takizawa’s work circles death like a moth circles light, dancing close to it yet distancing herself from it -the camera is both shield and medium, a sheltered means of engagement with the world. She deals in large abstractions, but also in figurative scenes that beckon to us, such as in “Tereso”, an early series from 2003, where the small dancing naked figures of the double exposure are somehow reminiscent of the Cottingley fairies, and the country landscape reminds us of some long-lost magical land. These are playful images, yet mournful, also.

Takizawa writes, “I feel that my camera acts as an antenna –to receive signals carrying urgent messages from the lost lives and objects that fill the air around us. I believe that it is this frantic whispering of death that pushes me to take photographs, and enables me to continue living.” Light and dark, ghostly bodies at the edges of frames, shadowy fragments dancing across the frame, burnt out lights, the exposures are almost always multiple in Takizawa’s work. It’s a belief in reincarnation that sends lightness though her work, and as she takes us on a journey through death, dancing on the edges of life, it’s difficult not to love this graceful show, full of meaning and poetry, tucked away behind its anonymous facade.

Akiko Takizawa, “Over the Parched Field”, ran at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation until March 1, 2011.

This article was first published in La Lettre de la Photographie on 1 March 2012.