Photography has never been about money, it had always been about photography. Now that the Haute Kunsters have deemed it art, it's all about money and not about photography.
Foxy photographers who call themselves "artists" who take photographs and not photographers, are moron oxys. If a photograph is labeled a mere photograph it is only worth $3,000; if a photograph is labeled a conceptual piece, it fetches $300,000 - semantic sleight of hand.
Never trust any photograph so large that it can only fit inside a museum.
Color is the new black and white.
HOW CRITICS FLUFF THEIR FEATHERS AND PREEN WITH IRONIC AND ICONIC JARGON: One intuits that one has experienced highfalutin cultural hyperbole when one has read one or more of the following brand philosopher's names bandied about in one or more sentences of an art speak critique review: Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logicics-Philosophicus, Nietzsche's Ubermensch, Darrida's deconstructivist construct, Cartesian logic, Lacan's lexicon, and the epigrammatic phenomenology of Husserl and Marceau-Ponty.
The announced demise of the decisive moment is premature.
Bill Brandt's nudes give me an art-on.
"Kitsch Ray The Wonder Weimaraner Bites William Wegman's Ass" - headline from The Onion.
Photographers whose next three books will look like their last three-books should quit.
The Bechers are the godfathers of the Dusseldorfer Avant-Garde Photo Kunst Academie of Derriere-Garde Photography mafia.
GEORGE W. BUSH IS ASS-HOLIER THAN THOU.
Art is never boring. Andy Warhol was boring.
Gary Winogrand was a snapshooter. A snapshooter is a voyeur who loves the act of taking pictures but doesn't necessarily care about the photographs. He left seven thousand rolls of undeveloped films.
This is the era of foto fast food. Too many Tillmans will give you heartburn, high cholesterol and a fat ass.
Diane Arbus is authentic; Cindy Sherman is inauthentic.
Museums should never exhibit photographs of visitors looking as art in museums to visitors who are looking at art in museums.
The Menage-a-trois of the symbiotic relationship between dealers, critics and museum defines contemporary art. The imprimatur of this art-industrial complex informs the hedge fund arrivistes how to decorate their walls with trendy conspicuous consumption.
Mapplethorpe was not a poete maudit. He was an old fashion fairy who unwittingly legitimized Leviticus by describing homosexuals as terminally hedonistic queers. Jerry Falwell would agree.
“Sidney paints his fingernails shocking pink, a brilliantly audacious gesture that exposes the discorroborative bias of Revlon’s vacuity, while trenchantly confirming lipstick as a phallic ploy of alpha males vis-à-vis Derrida’s strategies of discorroboration.”
Synopsis
Of this satirical look at contemporary photography, Duane Michals has said, "The more serious you are, the sillier you have to be. I have a great capacity for foolishness. It's essential." Whether parodying Wolfgang Tillmans or Andres Serrano, Sherrie Levine (A Duane Michals Photograph of a Sherrie Levine Photograph of a Walker Evans Photograph) or Cindy Sherman (Who is Sydney Sherman?), Michals uses his ferocious wit and keen eye to create images at once humorous and penetrating. As The New York Times described Gursky's Gherkin, the work "explores as never before the sense of picklehood, or what it means to be a pickle." The Times also testified that "this high-humored sendup of arty photography should be required viewing for all art-world heavies, particularly critics, curators and collectors." Michals takes aim at pretensions that are often perceived as deliberately obscuring contemporary art, and in doing so he exemplifies his mastery of both the visual world and the written word, while providing the elemental pleasure of a good laugh.
Born 1972 in Jerusalem, Israel; lives in Berlin, Germany
Omer Fast works with film, video, and television footage to examine how individuals and histories interact with each other in narrative. He mixes sound and image into stories that often veer between the personal and the media’s account of current events and history.
For Spielberg’s List (2003), a 65-minute, twochannel color video installation, the artist visited Cracow, the Polish city that served as the setting for Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), and interviewed Poles who worked as extras in the film. Their memories are presented as the dry, authentic accounts of a historical event—in most cases, the 1990s Hollywood production, but in some cases the 1940s German occupation. The artist juxtaposes these accounts with shots of the surviving film set, built near the remains of the actual German labor camp and never fully dismantled. Much like the two sites, which appear increasingly indistinguishable with the passage of time, the work reveals the production of history through the merger of recreation and relic.
In Godville (2005), a 51-minute, two-channel color video, historical reenactors at the Colonial Williamsburg living-history museum in Virginia describe their eighteenth-century characters’ lives and their personal lives in ways that seem interchangeable. Fast splices the reenacted and real biographies together, often word-byword, into a rambling narrative that is as aurally fluent as it is temporally dissonant. The work tells the story of a town in America whose residents are unmoored, floating somewhere between the past and the present, between revolution and reenactment, between fiction and life.
Fast’s recent work The Casting (2007), a shorter four-channel video projection, addresses current events. A U.S. Army sergeant recounts two incidents: a romantic liaison with a young German woman who mutilates herself and the accidental shooting of an Iraqi. The two tales are seamlessly woven together into a script that was given to actors to perform in silent tableaux. While the actors try hard to keep still, the narrator’s recollections slip between setting and story, trying to find relief if not redemption in the act of recalling. JASON EDWARD KAUFMAN
When Henry Hudson first looked on Manhattan in 1609, what did he see?
By Peter Miller
Computer Generated Image (top) by Markley Boyer, Photograph by Robert Clark
Of all the visitors to New York City in recent years, one of the most surprising was a beaver named José. No one knows exactly where he came from. Speculation is he swam down the Bronx River from suburban Westchester County to the north. He just showed up one wintry morning in 2007 on a riverbank in the Bronx Zoo, where he gnawed down a few willow trees and built a lodge.
"If you'd asked me at the time what the chances were that there was a beaver in the Bronx, I'd have said zero," said Eric Sanderson, an ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), headquartered at the Bronx Zoo. "There hasn't been a beaver in New York City in more than 200 years."
A huge wildfire has knocked out a popular webcam at the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory above Los Angeles. Here is the last image transmitted by the Mt. Wilson Observatory Towercam before operators lost contact with the camera yesterday afternoon:
A message on the Towercam site, which is operated by UCLA, explains: "The Mount Wilson webserver has gone down, most likely due to a backfire infiltration of a pull box containing telephone lines that bring us our T1 internet service." An update today says the mountain is in good shape and the situation is stable. However, the Los Angeles Timesreports that the observatory may still be in danger.
Mt. Wilson is at the southern edge of what's known as the Station fire in Los Angeles County. The fire has grown to over 140,000 acres in size, according to CAL FIRE.
This lattice-shaped image is the first ever close-up view of a single molecule. Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule. 'This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,' lead researcher Leo Gross said.
The researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms. In the image above the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen. To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.
'If you think about how a doctor uses an X-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules,' said IBM researcher Gerhard Meyer.
The team from IBM Research Zurich said the results could have a huge impact of the field of nanotechnology, which seeks to understand and control some of the smallest objects known to mankind.
Video Killed the Photography Star, CBS is Putting Video Ads into Magazines by dansaelinger
Photographers playing with video has become the rage lately and maybe these guys really are onto something because video has officially is made its way into print. September 18th will mark the day a moving image officially entered the world of print as CBS and Pepsi have teamed up to place an advertisement in Entertainment Weekly featuring a relatively small digital screen that displays video. The screen has a 320×240 resolution, can hold up to 40 minutes of video, and has about an hour battery life. I figured it wouldn’t be until magazines figured out a way to put their content out digitally that video would start factoring in. Looks like advertisers didn’t want to wait any longer. I’m very interested to see where this goes. This is the opening of a rather large can of worms. More on this at WSJ. There is a rough image of the ad on page at CNET.
10 Photography Pet Peeves We’d Throw Down a Black Hole
After scientists created an “acoustic black hole” using Bose-Einstein condensates, our good friends over at Underwire pounded out a list of atrocious albums to throw into the sonic sucker.
As photographers — who rely on light — we’re usually terrified of black holes. But we enjoyed Underwire’s black-hole list so much that we and everybody at Wired.com decided to get in on the action. Gadget Lab tossed annoying gear, Autopia banished bad cars, and Wired Science ousted hideous scientific clichés.
Now it’s our turn. Here are our top photography pet peeves that we would like to throw into the abyss.
In case you’ve been wondering what Sofia Coppola has been up to since she decamped to Paris, here’s one of her minor projects – a sweet and catchy commercial released in France last month for Miss Dior Chérie perfume.The ad stars 21-year-old Maryna Linchuk and features Brigitte Bardot singing “Moi Je Joue”, the kind of novelty song that still gets on the charts in Europe but somehow never seems to make it stateside where whimsy is just not a quality in great demand.
The winners of the Hearst 8×10 Photography Biennial were recently announced (here). I was struck by how novel it seemed for a company like Hearst who publishes magazines like; Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper’s BAZAAR, Marie Claire, O, Popular Mechanics and Town & Country to hold a contest that “is an international competition to identify and promote new and emerging photographers” where they think the winners are “rising stars who will play an important role in the future of magazines, media, the Web and the worlds of design and photography.”
The new Life.com just launched and it’s worth a visit to go peruse some great old photography. I think they’re planning on simply using it as a portal to sell Getty images, but it’s nice that they put a decent user interface on it and created edited material to check out.
This is from the press release: “More than 7 million photos from the Life and Getty Images photo collections are now available to consumers in the largest online photography site. The curated site features both rarely seen and iconic photos from the 1850s through today. More than 3,000 new photos from Getty Images award-winning photographers will be added to the site daily.”
Based upon a poll of film makers, organized by Channel 4 in the UK, the 50 best documentaries of all time were chosen. Despite the unpromising screenshot image of Jimmy Saville at the beginning, this is great. Of course, I would differ with the selection, but that’s part of the game.
Each time I discuss how artists can best go about getting a gallery, this issue comes up. In response to yesterday's post, Zipthwung wrote:
This whole discussion makes me want to vomit. Artists grovelling for shows? Where is their pride? Gallerists baiting artists into groveling for shows? The opportunity for abuse is obvious, and happens.
There are two baseline points I'd like to make about this before I address the abuse issue.
1. Not every artist needs or should even be affiliated with a commercial art gallery. The system works really well for some and not at all for others. Because many commercial art galleries are good at generating press for their artists and exist to place work in prominent collections, though, I think there is a somewhat misguided view among younger artists in particular about how essential getting into a gallery is for their careers. It can be, but there are plenty of artists with galleries (even very high-profile galleries) whose careers are no better off (in fact sometimes worse) than many artists without galleries that I know. The key is to find a gallery that's a good match for your art and aspirations, NOT to find any gallery at any cost to your pride or goals. If no gallery is well suited for you to work with, then find other means of pursuing your dreams.
2. The notion that dealers (or anyone in the industry with power) expects or wants artists to grovel is a misinterpretation of the harsh realities that a) what they really want from artists is for them to make the most compelling, important artwork of their generation. They want artists to awe them, inspire them, teach them, and uplift them. Believe me. When it's well understood that an artist is doing that, the industry is all too happy to grovel at their feet. For the legions of artists not yet doing that, well, the other harsh reality is that b) you have a phenomenal amount of competition.
The advice I offer, which directs artists to consider what they can do on an interpersonal level to get a leg up on their competition for the limited slots in the gallery system, is not at all meant to recommend "groveling." It is meant to suggest, though, that artists approach this with the same formal courtesies they would a job application/interview. If you were applying for a position on the faculty at an art school, I don't think calling up the dean who has never heard of you and insisting that she call you back when she has an opening would endear you to her.
So to recap: Galleries are not the magic ticket to stardom and riches...they are but one option in the spectrum of venues by which artists can exhibit their work and hopefully advance their careers. If that venue seems a good match for your goals, though, the single easiest way to get a gallery is to make artwork so compelling that dealers beat a path to your door. Full stop. When that's not working out for you, though, don't take it personally that you're only one of dozens, if not hundreds, of artists approaching the dealer who said he wasn't looking at the moment. He's trying to make things happen for the artists he's already representing, trying to pay the bills, trying to get that review, trying to get that curator to stop by, and in this current climate just trying to survive himself....
About the potential for abuse. It's real of course. To help arm artists against it though, I'll refer back to baseline issue #1. A gallery is not Valhalla. It's not as if, to realize your dreams, you simply must do whatever it takes to get into one.
At the positively packed Town Meeting at the X-Initiative last night (hat tip to Elizabeth Dee and Lindsay Pollock for providing that opportunity for the art world to air some of its anxieties about the current state of things), Superdealer Jeffrey Deitch mentioned the legendary Times Square Show and pointed to all the empty store fronts in Soho and encouraged the artists in the audience to produce exhibitions in them. He garnered the most enthusiastic applause of the evening.
My point is there are other options out there, many of which are totally in the hands of artists themselves. No one needs to submit to abuse. When it's clearly uncomfortable to pursue the opportunity to work with a gallery, stop and look elsewhere.
In the winter of 1976-77, I was drawn into a feverish sequence of gatherings in artists’ lofts in downtown New York City. The focus was the structure of an organization that would support the creation and sharing of art, defining purpose and forms for group activity. The group included a mix of about 26 artists; painters, writers, photographers, filmmakers and many who wanted to make everything.
It was a volatile and exciting mix. People had identified each other in schools, jobs, bars, the Whitney Program, Australia, and elsewhere. The earliest name of the group was the Green Corporation. The second name was Collaborative Projects, Inc. also known as COLAB, reflecting a shift in intention. Within two years, consensus replaced “executive decision.” COLAB was chaotic and fundamentally democratic. I found it highly compelling.
Projects included the “All Color News,” a cable TV show. There were exhibitions and stores in storefronts and lofts, international slow scan video, publications, and a pre-fax, pre-internet, communication transmission activity utilizing QWIP machines, procured from the Exxon Corporation by Liza Bear. Through a juicy and conflicted multi-year period of identity and structural definition, there was experimentation in and rich discussion of accessible content, political forces, technology, equity, corporate versus union models, and material resources.
During 1978-80, Coleen Fitzgibbons, Tom Otterness, Ulli Rimkus and I were the COLAB officers. We raised money for the group from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and private sources. In June 1980, COLAB produced the wild and historic Times Square Show that included 250 artists. My archive of this period includes thorough and unique documentation including, photographs, Otterness’s hand drawn floor map, and meeting notes.
Making multiples was an important aspect of COLAB and they were sold in several versions of the A. More Store, named for Allan Moore. “Collaborative Projects” is now a generic term, midstream mainstream instead of the name of a provocative artists’ collective. Some of the artists have been famous and several have made valuable contributions as leaders and cultural activists.
The founding of Avocet with Jolie Stahl who had also been active in COLAB was my next foray into production and creative community building. We took great pleasure in group work, imagery linked to joy, the exploration of a new medium, and contributing to the development new non-toxic printmaking materials.
The Blue Room Eugene Richards Phaidon Press 168 pages / 78 color photographs Hardcover $100.00
This has got to be one of my favorite books (top 5) of last year and if it hadn't already been out for so long I would have given a thorough review on it.
"Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston. After graduating from Northeastern University with a degree in English and journalism, he studied photography with Minor White at MIT. In 1968 he became a health care advocate in eastern Arkansas. Two years later, he helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices, that reported on black political action and the Ku Klux Klan. After publication of his first two books, Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta (1973) and Dorchester Days (self-published in 1978), Richards was invited to become a nominee at Magnum. He was a member until he departed in 1995, returned to the cooperative in 2002, and departed for a second time in 2005.
Despite his success in other fields, Richards remains best known for his books and photo essays on cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, the mentally disabled, aging, and death in America. His intense vision and unswerving commitment have led him to become what many believe is America's greatest living social documentary photographer. This new body of work, entitled The Blue Room, is one of Richards' most personal works to date. It his is first-ever color project, and it brings together the overarching themes of all his work ''the transient nature of things'' in a beautiful and moving series of pictures of the landscape and abandoned houses of the American West, covering the states of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, and the Dakotas. This is the area where settlers came around the turn of the twentieth century, pursuing the promise of homesteads where they could build successful communities. However, in the wake of the Great Depression and the dust storms of the 1930s, the farms in this isolated, semi-arid region faltered and failed, leaving the land littered with forgotten homes.
Richards' photographs are a statement on the vulnerability of man in the face of the shifting economic opportunities and the climate; a commentary on the inevability of change. In these contemplative pictures we are inspired to imagine the lives of the homes' former occupants. Richards enigmatic pictures make The Blue Room a thought-provoking meditation on memory; a quiet yet incredibly powerful body of work."
I've had an Annie Lennox song in my head for two days.. the lyrics "desire, despair, desire, despair, so many monsters" are circling in my brain. And lest you think I'm about to throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge, this is actually a good sign.
Horvitz isn't just good at naming her projects; the images fit the titles perfectly. These are washed-out, haunting, film-still worthy pictures. Take a look:
Way back in 2000, SHOWstudio was a pioneering presence in the world of online 'zines. I remember Craig McDean's 2001 short film of supermodel Karen Elson (former bassist with The Smashin Pumpkins) and Hole, Melissa Auf der Maur, performing the song 'Devil's Plaything', shot at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, as an inspiration - showing what you could do with a hand-held camera, a good eye, cool friends, and access to some streaming video.
Ten years later, SHOWstudio are still at it. So just a simple appreciation.
"American Youth" is a cross-section of today's 18-24 year olds done by Redux Pictures
They set up a "American Youth" website with a blog updated with out-takes and photographer's recollection. And they even twitter ! (Okay, I'm over twitter already)
Photographers with images in the book are: Marc Asnin, Ben Baker, Nina Berman, David Butow, Peter Frank Edwards, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Eros Hoagland, John Keatley, Andy Kropa, Erika Larsen, Gina LeVey, Joshua Lutz, Preston Mack, Kevin J. Miyazaki, Darcy Padilla, Mark Peterson, Michael Rubenstein, Greg Ruffing, Q. Sakamaki, Erin Siegal, Angie Smith, Ben Stechschulte, Brad Swonetz, Nathaniel Welch, and David Yellen.
photographers over a course of a year. This book's theme reminds me of Greenfield's "Fast Forward" (1997) and Nathaniel Welch's "Spring Broke" (2004) so I'm curious to take a look when it comes out in May 2009. (Interesting enough, Steve Appleford wrote the preface to "Spring Broke" and "American Youth")
The 240-page “American Youth” book examines the newest generation of 18-24 year olds in detail, observing young couples and Mormon missionaries, debutante balls and drunken tailgate stupors, war widows and B-boys, street kids and lobstermen. How are they different, and how are they exactly the same as the generations that came before? On these pages are Christian rock fans, lesbian gangstas and Obama volunteers. There are would-be pop stars waiting for a shot on American Idol, organic farmers living the hippie dream and tattooed Cobra gang members brooding in the Window Rock jail, Navajo Reservation. Another series of photographs asks young New Yorkers to think big: If you had the chance, what question would you ask God?
In yesterdays New York Times, there is an article about a couple of businesses that are basically pawn brokers for Art World.
They basically name names while at the same time saying they are confidential. One of the biggest names to use one of these brokers is Annie Leibovitz, who borrowed over $15 million dollars, and gave up her negatives and "future work" as collateral. You are in deep when you have to give up "future work".
Buddy and fellow member of the PWFIPDTBETROITFOHTFT Club (People Who Find Themselves Increasingly Pessimistic Despite Their Best Efforts to Remain Optimistic In The Face of Humanity’s Terrible Fucking Terribleness), Brian Ulrich, has finally unleashed his new work to the public, Dark Stores, Ghostboxes and Dead Malls via a Time.com slideshow.Check it out. Seriously! Relevant Work!
An artist friend's advice to me on statements once was "Write it as if you were telling a good friend about the work for the first time"
From an article by Dan Fox titled "Serious Business: What does it mean to be a professional artist" over at Frieze:
Working for a contemporary art magazine, I get sent a vast amount of press material each day, almost all of which employs a strikingly similar tone of voice. Most common is the one of academic solemnity infused with a barely veiled aggression, as though art were engaged in some cultural ‘war on terror’. Words such as ‘forcing’, ‘interrogating’ or ‘subverting’ occur with incredible frequency. Boundaries are ‘broken down’ and ‘preconceptions challenged’ so often as to make subversion and radicality seem like a mandatory daily chore rather than a blow to the status quo. They perpetuate old-fashioned notions, such as that of the artist visionary liberating the masses from mental enslavement by bourgeois values. Overuse has made these words sound strangely toothless, for what’s at stake in the art is often less important (but not necessarily without value) than the language suggests.
This may seem like nit-picking when global capital is collapsing around our ears. Sure, the follies of art-speak are easy to laugh at, but often criticism of it begins and ends with a dismissive chuckle – which ignores profounder problems. Why should academic terminology be the default vehicle for discussing art? Why is there such an emphasis on newness, schism and radicality? Even when the art itself may be enjoyably throwaway, language pins it to deathlessly auratic registers of exchange. This suggests a subliminal fear that, if the subject in question is not talked up as Big and Culturally Significant, then the point of fussing over it in the first place might be called into question, bringing the whole house of cards tumbling down.
Fritz Fabert's Archäologie der Arbeit [Archeology of Work] presents "relics" from closed down businesses and hospitals. It's such a simple idea, it works so well, and it's such a fine alternative to giving the world yet another series of abandoned buildings (seriously, we've had more than enough of those!).
PDN just published their annual list of 30 photographers to watch. See it here or go get a copy on the newsstand. This annual list has always been something worth checking out for photo editors looking for new talent and new approaches to old ideas. What makes this list great is there’s no entry fee. Someone with influence nominates you and then from the pool of nominees the editors pick 30. Some years the list is stronger than others but it really depends on the pool of people they are pulling from.
The only gripe I have with this and all the other contests out there as far as this goes is with the way they present the work online. Photo editors have been using the internets for quite awhile now so why don’t they take the lists of photographers and present it in an easy to use format. Getting published in the magazine is all well and good but the real value is in the potential to land jobs from it.
I’ve decided to do it for them this one time so you can see how useful it might be. I added my own keyword descriptions just to help people quickly find what they’re looking for although I need to find a better way to parse the term “Fine Art” and documentary or photojournalism because those terms cover too much ground. I would add reference photos but I think PDN might not like that.
To many artists, being an artist isn't "real" unless you have a gallery to exhibit your work. Although there are several other options available to artists in terms of showing and selling their work, it seems, for some, there is just no substitute for getting gallery representation. To this end, many artists are willing to bend over backwards, do insane things, make ridiculous claims, and, in short, embarrass themselves. The truth of matter is, not all artists are ready for galleries, nor are galleries, necessarily, the best choice for many artists. Especially in these hard economic times, the last thing on most gallerists minds, is acquiring new artists. Much of my time is spent helping artists develop a realistic set a goals, and then a game plan to achieve those goals. Nevertheless, there is always that rogue artist, wanting to strike out on their own, thinking this time it will be different. They muster up the courage to start approaching galleries before they are ready, and without regard to common sense gallery protocol. If you recognize yourself as that rogue, or you know another artist that is, please forward this article to them.
"Petters' Polaroid gets the OK to be put up for sale
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Gregory Kishel has given go-ahead approval for the sale of Polaroid Group, one of the few assets of Petters Group Worldwide with tangible value, with bids to open at $42 million."
from Liz Kuball Photography | Blog by Liz "I’m on a Tierney Gearon kick lately, so I made sure to be at the opening of her solo show, Explosure, last night at ACE Gallery in Beverly Hills. The photographs are double exposures, and everything is done within the camera, no retouching or external manipulation involved. I listened to Tierney explain her process—art comes out of accidents, she said."
It was simply the most amazing show I’ve ever seen—her work is beautiful and dreamy, and it made me want to move into the gallery and just surround myself with her photographs day and night. There’s no way the images online can even begin to show you what they’re like in person, so you owe it to yourself, if you’re anywhere near Los Angeles between now and April, to see it. And if you have no chance of getting here, you can buy a book of the images through the gallery (72 pages, 36 color illustrations, 12 x 9½ inches, $40)."
In February 2008, Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems discussed the work from Bey’s acclaimed book and exhibition, Class Pictures, on view at the time at Aperture Gallery.
Class Pictures features Bey’s striking, large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Depicting teenagers from a wide economic, social, and ethnic spectrum—and intensely attentive to their poses and gestures—he has created a highly diverse group portrait of a generation that challenges teenage stereotypes. After several stops including New York, Houston, Indianapolis, and Baltimore, this successful exhibition will open at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, April 16, 2009.
In this excerpt from the talk, Dawoud Bey explains how he decided to become a photographer, speaks about his first significant picture as well as his approach to portraiture through his Harlem series.
"Remember that photographer who got arrested for photographing Amtrak trains for their photo contest ? The day after he popped up on Colbert Report, Duane Kerzic got a five-figure settlement. "
*Warning* Graphic and Emotionally Disturbing Content Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape
"During the 1994 genocide, hundreds of thousands of Rwandan women were subjected to massive sexual violence by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups, known as the Interhamwe. Among the most isolated survivors are women who have borne children as a result of those rapes. The number of children born from these atrocities is estimated around 20,000. Due to the stigma of rape and “having a child of the militia,” the women’s communities and few surviving relatives have largely shunned them. Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape brings together Jonathan Torgovnik’s remarkable portraits of these women and children, and their harrowing first-hand testimonies.
The exhibition on view at Aperture Gallery is comprised of thirty-one stunning individual portraits of these women with their children, accompanied by their testimonies—intensely personal accounts of what they have gone through, the daily challenges they continue to face, and their conflicted feelings about raising a child who is a reminder of horrors endured. The testimonies are presented in text panels and multimedia interviews projected in the center of the installation, produced by MediaStorm. The exhibition also features a video interview with Torgovnik.
Come see this powerful exhibition on view starting tomorrow, Friday, February 20, at Aperture Gallery.
Aperture’s accompanying book, Intended Consequenceswill be published worldwide on April 7, 2009, coinciding with the fifteenth anniversary of the genocide and the opening of a satellite exhibition in the lobby of the United Nations."
"Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia has reclaimed its position among the superpowers of the world in the past eight years, the economic recession and the tumultuous nineties seemingly all but forgotten. Thanks to the country’s huge abundance of raw materials such oil and natural gas, the Russian economy is flourishing as never before. After a mere 18 years of capitalism, the January 2008 issue of Finans Magazine reported that there are currently 101 billionaires in Russia. It is difficult to detect much prosperity in the book “101 Billionaires”, which portrays an entirely different segment of the Russian population. Far away from the glitter and glamour of Moscow, the world’s most expensive city, we find the impoverished Russians, victims of the ‘tough-as-nails’ capitalism with which Russia made its name immediately after the fall of Communism. "
With nearly a decade of public exhibitions behind him, renowned undercover photographer JR this week launched his newest public exhibit in one of Africa’s largest and poorest slums, Kibera, Kenya. Famous for transforming his photos into posters and using them to make “open space galleries out of our streets,” JR’s latest exhibit is not only his most ambitious to date, but also has no set end-date scheduled.
Covering 2,000 square feet of rooftops and train cars with the eyes and faces of Kibera women, JR’s latest action is visible from space and can be seen on Google Earth. The posters were printed on waterproof material, so in addition to beautifying the rooftops they will also protect inhabitants from the brutal downpours expected in the upcoming rainy season.
The exhibit is part of a multi-action project called Women Are Heros, which aims to highlight the dignity, courage and noble struggle of women around the world.
So far, Women has exhibited in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya and Belgium, and plans for installations in various other Western countries are underway. In the coming year, JR also plans to develop Women Are Heros in India, Cambodia and Laos. He is currently in Brazil putting together another action for the project.
"Stranded in Canton" had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14, 2005 in a paired screening with Michael Almereyda's new documentary "William Eggleston in the Real World". There may have been several other previous screenings but the only other one that I easily found on the internet was when it opened the 6th annual Memphis International Film Festival on April 21, 2005.
Eggleston filmed about 30 hours of footage in the years 1973-74 and this has been recently edited down to 76 minutes for this final production which Eggleston said was now finished. Director Robert Gordon and film editor John Olivio assisted Eggleston with this final distillation and Eggleston himself provides an occasional commentary right in the film itself as shown. Perhaps the eventual DVD release will have a more complete commentary, but with the laconic Eggleston, this might very well be it. The little that Eggleston said was usually humorous and gave some comic relief.
The film left me feeling nostalgic for various hell-raising drunken friends from my own youth because the vibe here was as if William Eggleston had traveled back in time to secretly film these people in the early seventies. Most of them seem quite oblivious to the camera and with the infra-red lens some of this may have been filmed almost in pitch darkness so people were even more likely to act uninhibited. The video technology itself was so new that many may not have even understood that a movie camera was in fact being used. Eggleston films various colorful family friends and sometimes strangers in bars and on the streets. One interesting historical note is the informal performance footage of Memphis based blues guitarist/musician Furry Lewis (1899-1981) performing at a private house party (Lewis is the musician name-checked in the Joni Mitchell song "Furry Sings The Blues" on the 1976 Hejira album).
A word of warning for those with modern day PETA sympathies: one scene here captures the old-time carnival act of geeking chickens, although it is filmed at a night time street scene. In the days before such TV shows as Fear Factor, you could go to carnivals/circuses where a low-ranked performer would perform acts such as biting the heads of chickens or snakes or eating worms whole etc. for the entertainment of the paying crowds. The low-brow level of this "entertainment" caused the other carnies to disassociate themselves from the "geeks" or "geek men" which has gradually led to the word's modern day connotation of socially inept individuals."
"As with most of Warhol’s work you can see how influential the screen tests have become. It would be hard to count how many music videos and ads have taken off from these. For more than four decades it’s been difficult to see the films, but next month, Plexifilm are releasing "13 Most Beautiful...Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests" a 60 minute film featuring 13 of the tests (including Nico, Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, and Dennis Hopper) along with a newly commissioned soundtrack by Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips. The musicians were picked by The Warhol Museum’s curators, one would imagine for their Velvet Underground style cool, but it’s an inspired choice that creates a timeless continuum for the first authorized DVD of Warhol’s seminal short films."
"In the United States during the mid-1950s, two photographers were each making the works that would eventually form two of the most renowned photobooks of the twentieth century – William Klein’s New York (1955) and Robert Frank’s Les Americains (1958). Both were expatriates of a kind, one returning for a brief period to his homeland after living in Europe, the other an immigrant to the United States from Switzerland. Though very different from each other, these two books introduced a new kind of attitude into photography. The work was rough, raw, and gestural. It was spontaneous and immediate, highly personal, echoing both the uncertain mood of the era and the characteristics that marked much of the art – especially the American art – of the 1950s."
"There is an excellent group show currently up at Andrew Kreps which deserves some attention. The exhibition, titled To Be Determined, is described by the press release as being “centered around a generation of artists whose work stretch the limits of photography. Portraiture and self-portraiture, archiving, and typology, as well as free-form fiction are at the core of their exploration of the medium.” It goes on,
The selection of artists, some of whom would not consider themselves to be solely photographers, have interrogated the medium, and expanded its conventional definition. When looking at the group, one may question whether there is indeed a circumscribed, or unified practice of photography. But while utilizing strategies that diffuse its understanding, this group of artists can be unified by their focused engagement with their subject matter.
"I've just found a new blog I like called A Collection of Self Portraits. I've added it to my "Blogs I Like" section so you can click on it to find the site. I really enjoy these themed, photo based blogs I stumble on now and then. I may even convince myself to start one or two myself. All themes are not created equal, and I think this blog shows what a durable, malleable, and ever-fresh theme the self -portrait is. Take a look.....http://selfportraitgallery.blogspot.com/"
Holly Andres - Sparrow Lane (Till Feb 14, 2009) LINK Julie Blackmon - Domestic Vacations (Till March 7, 2009) LINK Jeremy Kidd - Fictional Realities (Till March 7. 2009) LINK Joseph Rodríguez - Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City (Feb 14-March 15, 2009) LINK Todd Walker - A Legacy of Images (Till Feb 21,2009) LINK John Divola – Dark Star (Till Mar 7, 2009) LINK Lucien Clergue – the Intimate Picasso (Till March 21, 2009) LINK Group f/64 (Till March 21, 2009) LINK Kim Weston - Painted Photographs (Till April 10, 2009) LINK Carlos and Jason Sanchez (Feb 21 - April 18, 2009) LINK David Fokos - New Work (March 14 - April 18, 2009) LINK George Tice - American Photographer (Feb 21 - April 30, 2009) LINK Erwan Frotin - Strangers (Mar 21 - May 30, 2009) LINK Balthasar Burkhard (Mar 10 - May 31, 2009) LINK Joseph Sterling - Age of Adolescence (June 6 - July 11, 2009) LINK
Wolkoff
Bryan Graf
What are They Doing At Yale? from nina corvallo by nina
