April 26 through June 17, the Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia hosts two compelling exhibitions: The Suffering of Light, Photographs by Alex Webb, as well as Magnum Contact Sheets.
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Alex Webb’s latest monograph The Suffering of Light, published by Aperture in spring of 2011, is a retrospective of his 30-year “photographic dialogue with the streets.” This Spring’s exhibition of his body of work at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan brings together this same thirty years of photography and journalism, further celebrating Webb’s use of dense, vivid colors to tell stories about places and situations in some of the most unusual corners of the world.

The self-termed “street photographer” describes the practice of assembling three decades of his works in color as an exercise in exploring “the dominant obsession of [his] photographic life… a particular way of seeing in color.” A trip to Haiti in 1975 incited change in his way of seeing, since driving the photographer toward localities where “light and color are essential to understanding and describing the territory.” Color emerged as a language closer to his own sensibilities, since becoming an essential choice in his visual storytelling.

“Three years after my first trip to Haiti, I realized there was another emotional note that had to be reckoned with: the intense, vibrant color of these worlds. Searing light and intense color seemed somehow embedded in the cultures that I had begun working in, so utterly different from the gray-brown reticence of my New England background. Since then, I have worked predominantly in color.” – Alex Webb

Curated by Alessandra Mauro, The Suffering of Light: Photographs by Alex Webb is on view April 26 through June 17 at Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia in Milan, accompanied by a weekend workshop on May 5th and 6th, entitled “Milan: Finding Your Vision.”

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In simultaneity, Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia will host Magnum Contact Sheets, an exhibition that presents forty of the most important, and most valuable, contact sheets by great artists of Magnum Photos, alongside their respective final images. The selected contact sheets, shown with notes by the artists themselves, construct a revealing narrative, retracing the artist’s creative process of shooting and choosing. In a The Telegraph UK review of the 2011 publication, it is noted that Henri Cartier-Bresson, cooperative founder of Magnum, speaks of the contact sheet as “a little like a psychoanalyst’s casebook.” Also on the subject of the contact sheet as an intimate document of the artist, Belgian photographer Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, confesses:

“I feel that by allowing myself to be violated [sic], and by publishing that which is most intimate, I am taking the very real risk of breaking the spell, of destroying a certain mystery.”

At a time when digital photography has dramatically changed the way photographers work, the exhibition recalls an entirely different way of approaching photography; contact sheets allowed photographers to look back through the lens of time across visual memories of an event, a time, and a particular state of being.

The Suffering of the Light: Photographs by Alex Webb and
Magnum Contact Sheets
April 26 through June 17

Milan: Finding Your Vision
A Weekend Workshop with Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb
Friday, May 4th, 6:30PM
Saturday, May 5th and Sunday, May 6th, 10AM – 6PM

Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia
Milan, Italy

Over the course of twelve years the Affordable Art Fair has transformed the model of the traditional art fair, driving the notion that fine art is within everyone’s reach, showcasing new and emerging artists, galleries, and must-see installations in 11 locations around the world. To date, the roster includes editions in Amsterdam, Bristol, Brussels, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York, North London, Singapore, and Sydney.

Will Ramsay founded the fair in 1999 as an extension of the ‘accessible’ marketing drive evolved from Will’s Art Warehouse, the UK gallery that he has maintained since 1996, and today specializes in selling a wide range of contemporary art priced between £40 and £4,000. In an interview with Table Talk, Ramsay notes, “My aim, when founding the Affordable Art Fair was to break down the barriers of the sometimes stuffy and intimidating art world — giving ‘the terrified’ the opportunity to enjoy and collect art in a fun and informal atmosphere.” He often relays an experience of entering galleries and being met with “frosty reception”, a fear factor that he sought to eliminate in launching the first Affordable Art Fair in London, 1999. This first fair, an instant hit, attracted 87 galleries, 10,000 visitors, and grossed £1 million in sales. Now, a bit more than a decade since its founding, the Affordable Art Fair is an internationally-recognized and leading showcase for contemporary art, having welcomed more than one million visitors as of 2011, and sold over $270 million worth of art.

NEXT WEEK, the UK-based fair makes a return to the art capital of the US for its third annual spring edition, hosting more than seventy unique exhibitors over five days at 7W in New York City. Browse the full list of exhibitors here.

Wednesday through Sunday, join Aperture at the Affordable Art Fair to browse and buy a selection of just-published books, bestsellers, and new limited-edition prints, plus take advantage of a special offer on Aperture-magazine subscriptions.

Thursday, April 19, Aperture will present a talk and walk-through with W. M. HUNT, curator, collector, consultant, teacher, fundraiser, and author of the new Aperture book The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious ($52.50, available here). Join Bill, who is known for his wit and larger-than-life personality, for an entertaining presentation on the art of collecting.

Aperture Booth and The Insider’s Eye:
A Talk and Walk-through with W. M. Hunt
Wednesday, April 18, 2012–Sunday, April 22, 2012

Admission Required

The Affordable Art Fair
7 West 34th Street
New York, New York
(212) 255-2003

Penelope Umbrico on her piece For Sale/TVs From Craigslist at Aperture (May, 2009).

Consumer culture can be an ugly reality to face. Despite what might seem to be an oxymoronic concept, the contemporary sense of self is increasingly predicated on possessive individualism, a self-definition by way of consumption, or more simply put, the thought: ‘I am what I buy.’ Not only has shopping long become a pastime, so too has the proclamation of these purchases across social media.

This consumer culture is what we the audience are confronted with in the work of Penelope Umbrico and Brian Ulrich. On Tuesday, April 17, 2012, two of the most exciting photographers working today, come together for a conversation about how their use of images address this facet of our society. The event will take place at Julie Saul Gallery, where Ulrich currently has his exhibition Is This Place Great or What: Artifacts and Photographs on view through May 5, 2012.

Umbrico’s work over the past few decades offers a radical doubletake on the consumer and vernacular images with which we are bombarded. She aggregates photographs that follow a kind of “script,” compiling thousands of somehow related images found on social media websites like Craigslist and Flickr. Some are selling used products, others are sharing personal but generic vacation moments. All, however, have hints of privacy or intimacy in them. As she explains in the clip above, the used TVs people sell on Craigslist often bear reflections of themselves or their apartments. Her most recognized work Suns From Flickr, which made the cover of her conceptual first monograph from Aperture in Fall, 2011 Penelope Umbrico (photographs), is made up of thousands of found snapshots, generic vacation photos tagged with term “sunset,” cropped down to sun alone, sometimes 5% of the original photograph, and installed on a mural-sized grid.  The monumental result is meant to explore ”what [these images] can tell us about our relationship to photography, technology and each other.”

Ulrich’s work on view at Julie Saul is part of a decade-long exploration of the American consumer landscape for a series called Copia. The project, he explains for Time’s Lightbox, is something he embarked on as a response to the president’s call for the nation to bolster the economy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by way of shopping. The series, comprised in three parts tracking the degradation of this consumer cycle–”Retail,” “Thrift,” and “Dark Stores,”–was also published by Aperture in Fall, 2011 as Ulrich’s first monograph, Is This Place Great or What.

“Retail” features often vibrant candy-colored, mostly medium-format images taken in big box stores. He captured candid moments with the help of a waist-high viewfinder. The nameless shoppers within his frame carry hollow expressions that convey a kind of alienated stupor during the precise moment, Ulrich says, “the Germans call Konsumieren Rausch or Consumer Intoxication.” “Thrift” features more cluttered images of consignment stores and second-hand shops where the original goods are discarded, while “Dark Stores,” features images of derelict, hollowed out, abandoned malls and shopping centers across the country that have shut their doors.

Penelope Umbrico and Brian Ulrich In Conversation
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 6:30 pm
FREE

Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, #6F
New York, New York
(212) 627-2410

Courtesy Market Street Productions

“While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent,” Chuck Close says in the clip above for the “Artists & Alchemists” documentary feature, “I think it is the hardest medium in which to have a distinctive personal vision.”

Known for his unparalleled attention to detail in hyperrealist portraiture, Close explains in conveying that vision his predilection for using immensely revealing daguerreotypes, plates that capture just about the widest possible range of highlights and shadows with the use of strobe lights that capture quite literately the power of the sun.

This clip offers a bit of background on the labor intensive process that went into his series A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, on view at the Wichita Art Museum through this Sunday, April 15, 2012. The series features fifteen massive prints of the artist’s world-renowned friends (Cindy Sherman, Philip Glass, James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, to name a few) presented with microscopic intimacy, each alongside a poem by Bob Holman. The work was inspired in part by a collaborative series of lithographs done by poet/curator Frank O’Hara and artist Larry Rivers in the late 50s, as Close explains briefly in the accompanying interview from the 2006 Aperture monograph A Couple of Ways of Doing Something with Lyle Rexer, author of the Edge of Vision.

As photography moves forward becoming more widespread and accessible, in an era when the premium put on absolute originality is largely in question, sometimes reaching back for precedent can be as fruitful as rediscovering archaic technology. Or as Close puts it, “In 1840 virtually everything I love about photography was already there.”

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
Through Sunday, April 15, 2012
$7 adults, $5 seniors, and FREE for children

Wichita Art Museum
1400 West Museum Boulevard
Wichita, Kansas
(316) 268-4980

The ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors), earlier this week, announced the National Magazine Awards 2012 finalists, a list representing fifty-two national magazine titles nominated in twenty categories. Leading the pack in 2012 are New York and The New Yorker, both with six nominations overall, as well as the New York Times Magazine, with three nominations in the categories of news and documentary photography, feature photography, and feature writing.

Aperture is please to announce that our own Aperture magazine has again been nominated as an ASME finalist, in the General Excellence category of Though-Leader Magazines, honoring literary, scholarly and professional publications, as well as general interest magazines. View the full list of 2012 finalist and honorees here.

The 2012 National Magazine Awards will be presented on May 3rd, at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City. The 2012 judges include 345 magazine editors, art directors and photography editors as well as journalism educators.

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››The ASME and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism announced the winners of the 2012 National Magazine Awards for Digital Media on March 20, 2012. More than 300 editors, publishers and guests attended a lunch at the Grand Hyatt New York to honor the fifty-five finalists and eleven winners. View the winners’ gallery for the Digital Media honorees here.

››The latest issue of Aperture (#206) is now available.

››Buy The New York Times Magazine Photographs, edited by Kathy Ryan, award-winning editor of the New York Times Magazine, for 30% off, here.

All photography is a kind of step away from reality. Few photographers within the documentary genre have gone further to embrace this notion than Richard Mosse, whose current photo project exploring armed conflict in the eastern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Richard Mosse: Infra, opens today at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

“Documentary photography is now at the moment where it has to change,” says Mosse. “It is behind the times – the forms of modern conflict are profoundly complex; their narratives are impossibly difficult to convey.”

Investigating a fresh form to represent the continued hostilities surrounding the deadliest war in human history—a very old and ongoing conflict that had gone stale in popular consciousness—Mosse toured eastern Congo between 2010-11, armed with two cameras and a supply of Kodachrome film, rendering the characters of this war in vivid hues of lavender, crimson and hot pink. The tension between the hot pink-tinted worlds rendered on film and the devastating subject of the photography is what makes Mosse’s work so compelling. In taking a step away from the standard visual language of photojournalism, Mosse is producing unimaginable images that effectively underscore the truly unimaginable reality of the conflict they capture, a modern conflict too opaque for standard methods of representation.

»Read Richard Mosse’s interview with Liverpool Daily Post on his Infra series and exhibition
»Watch Richard Mosse discuss the stories behind Infra, and preview the Open Eye Gallery installation

Richard Mosse: Infra will be on view March 30 through June 10, 2012

Open Eye Gallery
Liverpool, United Kingdom
+44 (0) 151 236 6768

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Also consider Richard Mosse’s first book, Infra: Photographs by Richard Mosse (Aperture 2012), or a limited edition print from the Infra series, “Debris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011″

Richard Mosse is also featured in Aperture Magazine # 203, “Richard Mosse: Sublime Proximity interview with Aaron Schuman”

When Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore staged one of their first moving sculptures at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1969, they began a performance that has never ended. The duo met while studying at St. Martin’s School of Art and embarked on what is now a 45-year collaboration, an eccentric, independent perpetual ‘happening,’ exploring what art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum called, “the singularity of their duality.”

On Tuesday, April 3, 2012, dawning customary deadpan expressions, the duo will bring what the UK’s Independent calls “their seamless double-act, walking in step and talking in antiphon, all clothes, habits and opinions synchronised, [sic] all sentences prefixed by a regal ‘we’,” to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for a conversation with novelist and cultural historian Michael Bracewell.

Together known as one Gilbert & George, they’ve produced an enormous body of visceral, often provocative photography-based work—art independent of any school or movement, art of everyday modern urban life, as they deem with their slogan, “Art for All.” Contrary to the work of many contemporary blockbuster artists, their aim is “to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to the people about their life and not about the knowledge of art.”

They manipulate images of architecture, lurid graffiti, shop windows and most often themselves on exceptionally powerful computers in their home studio and print on massive, mural-sized panels, 200 of which made up their monumental 2007 retrospective occupying the entire forth floor at Tate Modern, the largest exhibition by a living artist there yet. In collaboration with Aperture Foundation, Tate Publishing also released a unique, two-volume retrospective monograph joined in one carrying case designed and produced by the artists, Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures, 1971–2005.

In their time together, Gilbert & George have taken tens of thousands of photographs virtually all within walking distance of their East London flat for their art of everyday life. As they often claim, “Nothing happens in the world that doesn’t happen in the East End.” With subject matter covering what the Guardian coupled as “nudity,  bondage, bad language and turds,” and series titles such as Cunt Scum, Naked Shit, New Horny Pictures and Drunk with God, their work has attracted alternatively the outrage and adoration of the media.

Some question it as pure shock value, though Gilbert & George refute this claim, suggesting to the Independent, “We want to un-shock people, and bringing these subjects into the open, allowing them to live and breathe, should un-shock.”

In a four-part video tour of their studio, they say furthermore:

Each of our pictures is a kind of visual love letter from us to the viewer and it is the space between the picture and the viewer that makes art, the thoughts and feelings that go through the person when examining the picture.

Their aim is to confront the viewer with some kind of morality, ambiguous or otherwise, but never to impose. Rather, they explore it together with the viewer.

“We are not sending them to heaven or hell,” says Gilbert in another video interview. “We are sending them,” laughs George, “to the bar instead.”

Second Annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture:
Gilbert & George in Conversation with Michael Bracewell
Tuesday, April 3, 2012 at 6:30 PM
SOLD OUT

Standby tickets may be available if space allows. Please call the Box Office at (212) 423-3587 for more information. $10, $7 members, free for students with a valid ID.

Solomon T. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10128

To call the AIPAD Photography Show just another art fair would be a tremendous understatement. The annual photography exhibition, now in its thirty-second year, is famously regarded as one of the most important international photography events occurring today. Fittingly so – this year’s event draws seventy-five of the world’s leading fine art photography galleries, presenting a wide range of museum-quality work, including contemporary, modern, and 19th-century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media.

Join Aperture at the Stephen Daiter Gallery booth, #107, at the AIPAD Photography Show for two very special book signings. On Friday, March 30, John Gossage will be signing copies of his classic monograph, The Pond, reissued by Aperture in 2010, and on March 31, Alex Webb will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, The Suffering of Light (Aperture, 2011).

Beyond Aperture’s happenings at the Stephen Daiter Gallery booth, the show boasts a ticketed Opening Night Gala benefiting inMotion (tickets will be available at the door), and a strong schedule of panel events, featuring conversations with internationally recognized Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra—in advance of her June 2012 Guggenheim Museum retrospective—as well as a panel titled “How to Collect Photographs: What Collectors Need to Know Now,” moderated by Steven Kasher of Steven Kasher Gallery.

AIPAD Photography Show
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Show Hours and Admission

Thursday, March 29 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday, March 30 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday, March 31 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Sunday, April 1 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Show tickets are available for purchase at the Park Avenue Armory during Show hours.

AIPAD Opening Night Gala
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Wednesday, March 28 from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Tickets will be available for purchase at the Gala.
You may purchase tickets at the Park Avenue Armory by credit card or cash only.

“Sisyphus with Leica,” Alex Webb termed himself in three words for a Q&A with the UK Telegraph last year. The renowned Magnum photographer known for his evocative color street photos—work that he’s repeatedly called 99%, “if not more, about failure,”—will be at Aperture on Friday signing books and presenting a co-lecture with his wife and creative partner, Rebbecca Norris Webb, or “maker of books,” as she described herself for that same Q&A. The free event will take place on the first night of their SOLD OUT weekend photography workshop.

His latest monograph The Suffering of Light, published by Aperture in spring of 2011, is a retrospective of his 30-year “photographic dialogue with the streets,” he tells the Times.  Making the book, he realized, “could be a way to explore the dominant obsession of my photographic life,” he writes, “a particular way of seeing in color… inexplicable, intuitive.”  This obsession, along with his acute sense for the rhythm of the streets has manifested itself through a tremendous body of work.

Webb recalls being originally inspired to engage with the life in public spaces as a teenager seeing for the first time the Chicago series by Ray Metzker titled “My Camera and I in the Loop” in an issue of Aperture magazine–something he paid homage to in color late last year. As he matured, however, he increasingly became drawn to places that have more evident “sociopolitical tensions,” borders and boundaries of societies, and began wandering extensively through the streets of Haiti, Mexico, Istanbul and the like. Still, he wouldn’t approach these places as a “traditional photojournalist.” Instead, his ramblings have resulted in a stunning blend of art photography and documentation.

“I’m looking for photos that have a greater level of ambiguity,” he tells the Times. “It’s more a matter of questioning or enigma than we usually associate with photojournalism, whatever that is. I’m looking for photos that ask questions. I’m not sure I’m able to provide an answer, but you ask a lot of good questions.”

Lately, he’s expressed interest in returning to the United States to photograph and produce a body of work that’s closer to home. “Though it is at this point very much in a state of infancy,” he told Leica Camera blog, he and his wife “are exploring the notion of creating another joint project.”

Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb Artist Talk and Book Signing
Friday, March 23, 2012 at 7:00 PM

Aperture Gallery & Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Last October, upon the launch of The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture 2011), author/collector W.M. Hunt—known for his wit and (truly) larger-than-life personality—debuted A Life in Photographs and Other Digressions… A live monologue accompanied by images from his collection and video from his past, this event was a wry, uproarious rumination on Hunt’s many years of collecting, on his life in photographs.

Not necessarily by popular demand, but at his own insistence, Hunt will recreate this unique performance piece at Aperture Gallery on Tuesday, March 27. This evening with Hunt promises to be one of information and digression, bringing to light many of the names and stories left out of the book.

The book, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture 2011), presents a wonderfully idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: magical, heart-stopping images of people in which the eyes are obscured, veiled, or otherwise hidden. The pictures are characterized by what, at first glance, the subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Tuesday night however, Hunt’s revelations are at the core of the program.

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The Unseen Eye: A Life in Photographs and Other Digressions…
A Multimedia Performance Piece with W. M. Hunt
Tuesday, March 27, 7:00 pm
FREE

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture 2011) by W.M. Hunt will be available for purchase at the Aperture Bookstore the night of the event ($52.50, available for online purchase here).