As Mr Newton goes, the focus was on naked women. Once the OMG, boobs! enthusiasm had worn off, I had to conclude that I just don’t like Mr Newton’s photos too much. They just have too much of that fashion photo stink for my taste.

Not that I were interested enough in fashion to be qualified to speak about it. But my impression of fashion photos is that they have to have hot models because the clothes look crap and they want you to spend a lot on cash on the clothes so you can look like the models. Which obviously won’t work because you’re neither pretty nor have an eating disorder. To achieve that, people in the photos always look have to look lifeless and artificial, so you can’t really identify with them but rather just remember the brand or whatever. And the whole scenery is highly artificial as well, from the surroundings to the lights. All right, odd ‘theory’ but I do think most fashion photos just look boring and dead, which is why I didn’t like those photos too much.

The photos I really liked in the exhibition were one with Jeff Koons and his wife posing like a classical statue, one of a girl flashing her boobs in a venice gondola (with the stares of the background onlookers being close to priceless). Not surprisingly those photos didn’t have what I’d consider the fashion shoot look.

There were a number of other exhibitions on in the museum. One with video art which I always find hard to enjoy simply because it’s so impractical as you often have to wait for things to start over again and because it’s frequently hard to tell what the artists wanted to do and whether I’d be interested in it in the first place. At least many of the exhibits seemed to have a decent technical quality – I frequently find video art to be of such poor quality that the people doing it should be embarrassed. Coming to think about it, what exactly is the reason to have video art outside the YouTubes?

Another exhibition ‘Art on Air’ dealt with radio art, detailing and documenting a few radio performances. I found it hard to be excited about that. Probably because I lost contact with radio years ago.

The exhibition Go for it! was rather good though. It features a range of contemporary art which the brochure said were arranged to form a coherent exhibition alongside older works. Usually reading such PR copy makes me choke, but I read that copy after seeing the exhibition and thinking that it seemed rather well-balanced. I was rather amused by some collages by Richard Prince which mixed cheap nurse novel covers with cheeky pornographic reference. Not excessively high-brow but done with just the right lightness and humour. And then they had a enormous (3 by 4 metres or so) drawing by Ralf Ziervogel which detailed a huge amount of pain and perversion in the names of Puma and adidas. Admittedly I didn’t quite understand why but the huge sheet of paper with the tiny and crisp drawings in it was overwhelming. You didn’t really know where to look and how to make sense of it.

Mrs Levitt is big in street photography and her photos are more documenting places, people and moments than aiming to be beautiful. Generally her photos look a bit rougher than those of Cartier-Bresson (with whom she also worked), say, as they lack that aesthetic of beauty and ‘magic’ and look more natural. She’s particularly good taking photos of kids in the street. Which, with photos from the thirties, forties and fifties highlights many differences to the way kids in the streets look these days. Quite a few of the photos shown were ‘vintage’ silver-gelatin prints and looked great.

Which isn’t to say that the modern black and white prints looked bad. What did look bad, however, were many of the new ‘C-Print’ prints of her colour photos they had. To me those looked like poorly done inkjet prints – more pixelish than grainy, as if some bit of bad digital technology stood in the path of their creation. Just a few of the colour prints were done using a more artistic printing technique (NAME????) and looked much better. That said, many of the colour prints were from the 1980s. And OMG! the 1980s were ugly as hell anyway – particularly in colour –, so the look of a poor inkjet print can’t ruin things much.

To top things off, they also screened Mrs Levitt’s short film In the Street from the 1940s with many scenes from the streets of New York back then. Again, this has many kids in it who are playing, teasing and running around. The whole film is made with a great sense of humour which had us laugh a number of times be it for containing little evil deeds by the kids filmed or a woman picking her nose while walking down the street. Despite being that cheeky at times, the film never seemed to expose the people in it and showed more respect for them than you expect when coming from today’s reality-TV and YouTube world.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

And I ran into a totally new aspect of this yesterday. Having been invited to a barbecque at some friends’ in a small village a few kilometres out of town I made my way there in the late afternoon. If it hadn’t been for the hills and my bike being not too good for that, it was a lovely ride there, following the road to the end of town and then going on on a path through the fields. Unfortunately I hadn’t thought this through properly as it was dark when I returned home. And that path across the fields wasn’t just hilly but not exactly in good shape or lit either. I didn’t want to use it in the dark for fear of falling over.

My friends recommended to just go on the usual road which is in good shape and reasonably straight. That sounded perfectly reasonable. Until I realised that unlike in town they just turn the street lights off in the countryside at ten or so. Leaving me on a pitch dark road on which my bike’s (not tremendously strong) front light didn’t shine particularly far. That wasn’t the biggest problem, though as following a road isn’t all that difficult. But I was absolutely scared of the cars going on the road. They went fast, this was the countryside so I would have to assume they might be drunk, and many of the morons just kept their lights switched to full beam when passing me. When that happened I was essentially blinded and it’s really hard to keep going straight when that happens. I was very happy when a separate cycle lane appeared after half the way and when the small town’s ‘bright lights’ surrounded me again.

Nice photo opportunities, though.

More dramatically:

[I sense a slight inefficiency in the JPEG format here. Both images contain the same information and their size differs by a factor of four.]

…

[Also seen in cinema]

Artificial, unhealthy and pretty addictive.

Bright, simple and useful for sitting in the sun.

As this was the first time I handled the larger film, things were a bit tricky. It’s amazing how hard things become as soon as you can’t see what you are doing and have your hands stuck in a dark bag. The fact that one of the films was taken with my ancient box camera which decided to tear and crumple the film while transporting didn’t make things easier.

Eventually I did manage to process everything. And while the processing was alright, the results weren’t impressive with many of the images being ruined. With the Box camera I blame the friend who accidentally opened the camera while checking it out. With the new medium format camera I blame myself for not knowing how to operate it properly yet, particularly together with a flash (which amazingly does work but requires a bit of care).