Brian Ulrich’s photographic investigation of the American consumer psyche has for the past decade examined the complex relationships consumers form with the industries that seek their consumption (Copia, 2002-2006), the trickle-down movement of consumer goods (Thrift, 2005-2007), and the end remains of dead malls and big box stores, stripped of product and identity (Dark Stores, 2008-2011).

Ulrich’s upcoming exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery looks at this decade-spanning body of work, juxtaposing photographs with artifacts from the past (a vintage sign in florescent italics announcing Fast Food), objects culled from an expansive archive, amassed by the photographer in simultaneity with the development of his images.

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Is This Place Great Or What: Artifacts and Photographs opens Thursday, March 22^nd at Julie Saul Gallery, New York City.

This exhibition coincides with Ulrich’s first published monograph, Is This Place Great or What, published by Aperture Foundation, with an essay by Juliet B. Schorr and 95 plates ($35, available here).

Also consider Ulrich’s limited-edition, “Chicago, Illinois, 2005,” from the series Thrift ($600, available here).

Rinko Kawauchi in Conversation with Martin Parr, Courtesy of Photoworks

Rinko Kawauchi‘s photographs are set apart by their remarkable consistency. Nuanced but never repetitive, each 6×6 frame seems to capture the same frail, effervescent color palette, each, in her typical manner, flooded with light. It’s her attitude toward the photograph and the subject, however, not necessarily the technique that stays the same.

In the clip above, Kawauchi in conversation with Magnum photojournalist Martin Parr, who wrote on the work of Rimaldas Vikšraitis in Aperture issue 204, discusses the first transition she made from her usual Rolleiflex film camera to digital during the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010 when a certain subject called for it. The results were stunning, though not unexpected. She says she hopes in the future to use both formats together using a consistency of approach–not necessarily a conscious one, though as she suggested in an interview for Kopenhagen. “Whenever I’m taking pictures,” she says in the video, “I need to discover something. I want an impression from the object.”

Kawauichi, who was just nominated for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, first came to prominence in 2001 when she published three photobooks–Utatane, Hanabi, and Hanako–simultaneously during a time when she was still pursuing commercial work. Her acclaim rose rapidly as she went on to put together over a dozen monographs, most recently Illuminance, published by Aperture in Spring, 2011, of which several signed copies are still available for purchase in our bookstore. Also available is the Illuminance Limited-Edition Box Set featuring two untitled 8×10 prints from the series and a signed copy of the text presented in a beautiful clothbound clamshell box. A larger, dizzying 20×20 untitled C-print (pictured left) is also now available for purchase at Aperture.

The SPE National Conference in San Francisco is officially sold out, but if you are among the early registration crowd gaining access to 2012′s programming—this year, exploring “Intimacy and Voyeurism: The Public/Private Divide in Photography—be sure to join Aperture Foundation in exhibition Booth #31 beginning this Thursday.

Keynote speaker Sally Mann, known for her evocative work with portraiture and landscapes, will give a presentation with a selected reading from her forthcoming memoir, If Memory Serves. Following the presentation, Mann will be signing copies of her books, The Flesh and the Spirit (Aperture 2010), Immediate Family (Aperture 2005), Proud Flesh (Aperture 2009) and Still Time (Aperture 2008).

Other speakers include: Sharon Olds, Trevor Paglen, Sandra S. Phillips, Hasan Elahi, Bill Adams, and many more.

The Society for Photographic Education is a nonprofit membership organization that provides a forum for the discussion of photography-related media as a means of creative expression and cultural insight. Through its interdisciplinary programs, services, and publications, the society seeks to promote a broader understanding of the medium in all its forms, and to foster the development of its practice, teaching, scholarship, and criticism.

Thursday, March 22, 2012–Saturday, March 24, 2012

Hyatt Regency
Booth #31
San Francisco, California
(415) 788-1234

Friday Hours: 9:00 am–4:00 pm
Saturday Hours: 9:30 am–4:30 pm
Exhibition Hall is FREE

Thursday, March 22, 7:00–8:30 pm
Keynote Presentation and Book Signing: Sally Mann
Grand Ballroom

Friday, March 23, 5:30–7:00 pm
Featured speaker: Trevor Paglen, author of Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (Aperture 2010)
Grand Ballroom

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The Flesh and the Spirit (Aperture 2010), Immediate Family (Aperture 2005), Proud Flesh (Aperture 2009) and Still Time (Aperture 2008) by Sally Mann are available for purchase here. Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (Aperture 2010) by Trevor Paglen is available for purchase here.

The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan is on a project to support young photographers, buying up work for their permanent collection. They are now calling for entries to the Young Portfolio 2012, a seach for exceptionally original work that pushes the boundaries of photographic expression or methods of production.

Qualifications for submitting to the seventeenth annual event are very inclusive. Basically, curator Yuko Yamaji writes:

As long as a photographer is under thirty-five years of age, he or she can participate as many times as they like, with the result that there are people who have taken part for over ten years and who have as many as one hundred works in our collection. Whether it is their first work or they have been published before is quite irrelevant.

Submissions will be accepted Sunday, April 15, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2012. For an idea of the kind of work they tend to go for, the 178 images by 26 photographers that were selected last year with be on view at the museum Saturday, March 24, 2012 – Sunday, June 24, 2012.

This year’s selection committee is made up of Kikuji Kawada, Hiroh Kikai, and Eikoh Hosoe, Director of the Museum and photographer of the groundbreaking, classic Japanese photobooks Barakei and Kamaitachi. His 1963 collaboration with controversial author Yukio Mishima Barakei, part photographic performance, part surreal portrait of Mishima as both iconoclast and self-mythologist, was faithfully reproduced by Aperture as a facsimile in 2009, limited to 500 signed copies. Kamaitachi, another collaborative work produced with Tatsui Hijikata, founder of ankoku butoh dance, in 1969 was reproduced in close consultation with Hosoe by Aperture in 2005 as a limited addition facsimile, and again reprinted with an updated text in 2009. The work is a “magnificent and seductive combination of performance and photography,” a “subjective documentary” chronicling Hijikata’s spontaneous interactions with the landscape and people of the Japanese countryside.

Young Portfolio 2012
Submissions accepted:
Sunday, April 15, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Young Portfolio Acquisitions 2011
Exhibition on View:
Saturday, March 24, 2012 – Sunday, June 24, 2012

Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts
3545 Kiyosato, Takane-cho, Hokuto-shi, Yamanashi 407-0301 Japan

The irony is not lost on me—as a photo-editor who has devoted many years to a medium known for stilling, or capturing, time, decisive or otherwise—that I should be equally consumed by another medium, one that defies any notion of “capture,” that I am seduced by dance’s very impermanence, especially in the case of Merce Cunningham. Cunningham’s choreography never leaves even a storyline to hang onto in its wake, but rather evinces a kind of isness, as if each dance has an ineffable essence that might somehow be touched, experienced, and that remains vital and resonant long after the curtain falls, so that endings are somehow intangible.

Cunningham’s sensibility was as much about time as about space—or, better, it was about the coexistence of the two and, unlike what transpires in much photography, time is liberated from illustration in a Cunningham dance. Things don’t have to happen in any narrative sense. Time is more about duration—which is in part why John Cage, and the other composers with whom Cunningham collaborated, had such freedom. In photography, conversely, the precise moment at which a picture is created may make all the difference—from evidentiary images to sports coverage to street shots to dance photography.

Which gets me thinking about the ephemeral—an idea that rarely pertains to the photographic object. (more…)

“Invented worlds” or “ir-realities” are what Paolo Ventura calls the elaborately constructed dioramas that fill the frame of his brooding, dream-like photographs. The Italian-born artist, of the Aperture monograph Winter Stories (Fall 2009), has a new exhibition The Future of the Anarchist opening Saturday, February 25, 2012 at Obsolete Gallery in Venice, CA showcasing his fantastical, moody and meticulously staged images.

In the clip above from 2009, Ventura explains the origin of his project as well as his various inspirations. He also shows the different steps of his work leading to the final photograph–from sketching, to crafting the characters and sets, to setting the lights and taking the polaroids.

A deluxe, limited edition book and print set of Winter Stories is still available for purchase at Aperture. The clothbound collection features 65 four-color images and one unique drawing tipped in, signed and numbered by the artist, alongside an 11 1/2 x 14 in. signed Digital C-print of The Show.

Opening reception:
Saturday, February 25, 2012
6:00-9:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
Saturday, February 25-Saturday, March 24,2012

Obsolete Gallery
222 Main Street
Venice, CA 90291
(310) 399-0024

Ventura has also been featured in Aperture magazine issues 203 and 180.

Opening reception:
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
6:00–8:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
Friday, March 2, 2012–Saturday, April 21, 2012

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

Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, two individuals that Art News ranks among the top ten photo collectors in the world, have amassed hundreds of the most iconic images reflecting the diverse nature of the past century of photography. Aperture Foundation pleased to announce the opening of Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography, featuring over two hundred of those photographs that form one of the world’s best private collections. An exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Jacksonville, a cultural resource of the University of North Florida, curated by Ben Thompson, MOCA’s curator, and Paul Karabinis, assistant professor of photography at UNF.

Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla’s collaboration hinges on a few underlying principles— mainly, to acquire works of major importance by leading photographers of their generation, and to focus on vintage prints. Although each of the collectors brings a different point of view to the photography—Gonzalez-Falla analyzes color and form, while Gilman responds to images on a more visceral level—these distinct approaches merge into a single, shared vision and emanate from the same goal: to collect photographs that move and inspire them.

Prominet photographers in the collection include Ansel Adams, Eugène Atget, Margaret Bourke-White,Walker Evans, Loretta Lux, Sally Mann, Richard Misrach, Doug and Mike Starn, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Alfred Stieglitz.

The exhibition, organized by MOCA, a cultural resource of the University of North Florida, curated by Ben Thompson, MOCA’s curator, and Paul Karabinis, assistant professor of photography at UNF, is supported by Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, The Haskell Company, Marilyn and Charles Gilman III, and Joan and Preston Haskell. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by MOCA and produced by Aperture Foundation. This catalog features selected photographs from the exhibition, with historical context about each image and the photographer, curatorial remarks from Ben Thompson and Paul Karabinis, and an exclusive interview with the collectors.

Related Items: 

Join us on Monday, March 5, 2012 at 6:30 pm at Aperture Gallery for an artist talk with photographer Richard Mosse , followed by a book signing and reception for his new book Infra.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York
(212) 505-5555

Over the course of two years, Mosse documented the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo using a discontinued type of color infrared surveillance film called Kodak Aerochrome to offer a stunning and radical rethinking of how to depict a complex and intractable conflict.  With film that is extra sensitive to green light, he renders the rich typography of the country as well as the camouflage of the Congolese army and combative rebel groups in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink.

This is Mosse’s first monograph, co-published by Aperture and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.  These improbably colored images underline the growing tension between art, fiction, and traditional photojournalism as a way of portraying and communicating the impact of war. Mosse states that the collection works “through shocks to the imagination,” using photography’s unique ability “to make visible what cannot be perceived.”

Select large format prints from the collection are currently on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC through April 15, organized by Xandra Eden, Curator of Exhibitions.

Weatherspoon Art Museum
500 Tate St
Greensboro, NC 27412
336-334-5770

Mosse’s limited edition print “Débris, North Kivu, Eastern Congo,” is also now available for purchase at Aperture. Mosse calls the ethereal shot a “surprising” double-exposure that came about by accident in March 2011. “‘Débris ‘pushed me to embrace failure and let go of certain ways of seeing.”

Photographs by Richard Mosse have been featured on the cover of Aperture magazine #203.

In conjunction with their 2012 Small Works National Competition, Soho Photo Gallery will present a guest exhibition curated by Aperture Foundation on the art of making small books. The opening reception is this Thurday, February 9 to celebrate  The Art of Small Books, in which we explore the intimacy gained from a journal-sized format.

Like novels or short-story collections, these books are meant for the reader to interact with, not simply to be viewed or put on display. Several included in this show take their form as a result of the artist coming to the table with a concept that hinges on the ability of the finished work to “pass” as—or at least refer to—something other than your typical coffee-table book: Christian Marclay’s Shuffle, which takes on the guise of a deck of cards; Takashi Homma’s Tokyo, the form of which gives a nod to the Penguin Classic pocket-size novel; Stanley Greene’s Black Passport, with its rounded corners and reference to the classic travel document. Even Martin and Munoz’s Travelers is kept within the confines of typical snow-globe scale.

The traditional publishing logic about smaller-size books has tended to revolve around practicality and affordability. So while there is much to be gained from trading the larger reproduction size of an over-sized book for a smaller-scale presentation, photographers who are accustomed to working with large-sized prints can be especially loathe to give up on scale as a way of presenting their work. What this exhibitions aims to show is that small can be beautiful, too.