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Marvin Heiferman, Photography Changes Everything at ARTBOOK | D.A.P., L.A.

Monday, June 25th, 2012
Spread from Photography Changes Everything by Marvin Heiferman

Join Aperture and ARTBOOK | D.A.P. for a conversation with Marvin Heiferman, leading photography curator and editor of Photography Changes Everything, and special guests Lois Banner, historian and author of numerous biographies, including MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe and the forthcoming Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox; Leo Braudy, author of many books of cultural history, including The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, and most recently The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon; and Charlotte Cotton, writer and curator.

The panelists will explore photography’s central role in shaping our lives, both public and private, rational and fantastic.

A reception and book signing will follow.

 Special thanks to Arcana Books on the Arts for being the evening’s bookseller.

 This event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are required and will be accepted until venue capacity is reached at rsvp@dapinc.com.

Heiferman (editor, Photography Changes Everything, Aperture 2012), has focused on the influence of photographic images on culture and history in projects such as Fame After Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and Image World: Art and Media Culture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989). A contributing editor to Art in America, he serves on the faculty of both the International Center of Photography/Bard College and the School of Visual Art’s MFA programs in photography. He was creative consultant to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2005 to 2011, during which time he conceptualized and curated click! photography changes everything.


Photography Changes Everything: A Conversation with Marvin Heiferman, with special guests Lois Banner, Leo Braudy, and Charlotte Cotton
Thursday, June 28, 2012, 7:00 pm
FREE, RSVP required (rsvp@dapinc.com)

ARTBOOK | Paper Chase showroom
Hollywood, California

Special thanks to the evening’s bookseller, Arcana Books on the Arts.

 

Kristoffer Axén at ICP, Photoville

Thursday, June 21st, 2012
The Rabbit Hole, At Sea At Night by Kristoffer Axén

Congratulations to Kristoffer Axén, whose images Day Three and The Conversation will join the Photography Collection at the ICP next month. The photographs are part of a new, on-going, series called ‘Events in Nature’ (from which a selection can be viewed at this year’s Tierney Fellowship Exhibition at Photoville, the new Brooklyn-based photo destination).

The Tierney Fellowship was created in 2003 by The Tierney Family Foundation to support emerging artists in the field of photography. Axén will be exhibited among a promising roster of artist, which includes Nicholas Calcott, Luo Dan, Ishaan Dixit, Gabrielle Goliath, Emily Kinni, Bryan Krueger, Carlos Licon, Mack Michael Magagane, Bruno Ruiz, Rubi Rose Siblo-Landsman, Roberto Tondopó, Aubrey Tseleng, and Terttu Uibopuu.

The Tierney Fellowship Exhibition
Opening | Friday June 22, 7 to 10PM, on view through July 1
Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York City

 


›› The successful Fotojatka festival that traveled to cinemas around the Czech Republic – screening specially produced photographic slideshow – is now over. But, you can still view Kristoffer Axén’s contribution online, featured alongside slideshows by more than a dozen contemporary photographers, amongst them Erwin Olaf, Nikos Economopoulos and Reiner Riedler.
›› For those interested in introducing prints from Kristoffer Axén into their personal collection of photography, we recommend The Rabbit Hole from the series At Sea At Night, available via Aperture

AHAE, Bespoke Pavilion at Louvre Museum

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012
Clouds with Bird (2010) / © Ahae Press / AHAE.com

“It’ll be as if slices of Korea have somehow dropped into the Jardin des Tuileries,” says Charles Matz, architect and designer of the De Ma Fenêtre mini-museum.

For visitors to Paris’s Louvre Museum a singular temporary structure and exquisite body of work intersect at an unexpected site. From June 27th through July 23rd, the Louvre hosts an unprecedented installation of photographs by South Korean artist Ahae, presented in the southwestern corner of the museum’s adjacent Jardin des Tuileries. The exhibition, De Ma Fenetre (Through My Window), features several hundred photographs selected from nearly two million, taken from a single window in the artist’s South Korea atelier over a three-year period.

Iterations of  Through My Window have been exhibited in venues throughout the world, including Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal, New York City and The National Gallery, Prague.  This month’s groundbeaking Louvre exhibition is however set apart, installed within a bespoke exhibition pavilion—the first that the museum has allowed for a solo artist’s exhibition— designed by the planning and creative direction firm Charles Matz. Matz had been the creative force behind previous installations of  Through My Window, as well as the The Official City of New York – 911 Memorial Exhibition at Ground Zero.

Reflection (2011) / © Ahae Press / AHAE.com

In Paris, Charles Matz’s demountable structure will take the form of what is essentially a long, elegant rectangle, a tented pavilion with a wood base mimicking the look of a solid, classical grey granite building:

“After entering the formalist façade at the structure’s north end and passing through a foyer with informational displays about the artist and the exhibition, the visitor is drawn through a series of serene exhibition spaces. Among these spaces are two large, skylit oval galleries (echoing those in the actual Orangerie) that house collections of prints on specific themes. One is devoted to Ahae’s photographs of the sky in all its captivating moods and hues. The other, the Reflection Room, gathers Ahae’s lyrical photographic musings on light and water.

In contrast to the digital C prints in the rest of the exhibition, all of the photographs in these two oval galleries are “watercolor prints”, i.e. printed on watercolor paper that absorbs the inks, giving them a heightened richness and painterly depth of color.

The long central gallery or grand hall that connects the two oval rooms is the site of a pair of De Ma Fenêtre’s most spectacular pieces: two 10 meter x 5 meter lightboxed landscapes: the close-up Maple Trees in Spring and a wide-angle view of the pond directly outside Ahae’s window, the wintry Through My Window.”

 

›› Take a sharper look at Through My Window via The Prague Post and NYC Loves NYC


Through My Window: Photography By Ahae
June 27 through July 23, 2012
Musée du Louvre / Jardin Des Tuileries
Paris, France

Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie en Gaspésie

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

Over 900 photos | 30 photographers from Québec and elsewhere, recognized or emerging | 20 activities in the presence of photographers | 14 host municipalities in the Gaspé

On the theme of “Shaping the Course,” the third edition of Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie en Gaspésie, being held in the summer of 2012, is an invitation to travel the Gaspé Peninsula and follow the artistic trajectory of over 30 photographers from the region and elsewhere.

The holding of Rencontres here means that a tour of the Gaspé amounts to a trip around the world. “Our objective is to inhabit the huge Gaspé territory, and to use all the means placed at our disposal to present and champion artists’ work,” emphasizes Rencontres executive and artistic director Claude Goulet.

The focus of Rencontres this year is the role of the artist in society, the idea being to provide experiences for the eye and food for thought while addressing different esthetics, different probings of the landscape, the environment, the region and the representation of day-to-day life.

From August 18 to 25, professional week is taking place, which will bring together all the photographers participating in Rencontres around the subject of creation. That week constitutes a unique opportunity for the public to meet – at projections, workshops and lectures – the more than 30 professional and emerging photographers from the Gaspé, elsewhere in Québec, and from Canada, the United States and Europe.

The public can visit the photographic installations and exhibits from July 6 to September 10 in the 14 host municipalities: Cap-Chat, Marsoui, Rivière-à-Claude, Grande-Vallée, Gaspé, Percé, Chandler, Paspébiac, Bonaventure, New Richmond, Maria, Carleton-sur-Mer, Nouvelle and Matapedia.

Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie is an invitation to come and meet these artists in a region where photographs and landscapes unite around an artistic project. For further details: photogaspesie.ca.

RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE EN GASPÉSIE
3rd Edition: Shaping The Course
Exhibitions : July 6 through September 12, 2012
Professional Week : August 18 through 25, 2012

›› View video interviews featuring guest photographers here.
›› View a full schedule of the summer’s events here.


© Anja Neidringhaus, At War
© Vanessa Winship,
Georgia
© Jocelyne Alloucherie,
Sirènes, 511 Gallery, New York

Aperture Announces its Fall 2012 Releases

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

For Fall 2012 Aperture presents a list of new and re-issued publications, from the startling and fresh, to new editions and long-awaited anthologies. Read more about our upcoming releases, and view a slideshow of Fall 2012 cover art below.

Upcoming titles include:

A New American Picture by Doug Rickard
101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides
Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin
Life’s a Beach by Martin Parr
Labyrinth: Daido Moriyama
Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976
The Garden at Orgeval by Paul Strand
• Unbuilt: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island, Photographs by Barney Kulok, Essay by Steven Holl

September 2012

A New American Picture by Doug Rickard


Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. While on first glance the work looks reassuringly familiar and well within the traditional bounds of the genre, his methodology is anything but conventional. All of the images are appropriated from Google Street View; over a period of two years, Rickard took advantage of the technology platform’s comprehensive image archive to virtually drive the unseen and overlooked roads of America, bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned. With an informed and deliberate eye, Rickard finds and decodes these previously photographed scenes of urban and rural decay. He rephotographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins.

12 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. (31.8 x 24.8 cm); 
144 pages, 90 four-color images; 
Hardcover with jacket; 
ISBN 978-1-59711-219-2
; $60.00; 
September 2012; 
Rights: North America


101 Tragedies of Enrique
 Metinides


101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides is Enrique Metinides’ choice of the 101 key images from his life photographing crime scenes and accidents in Mexico for local newspapers and the nota roja (or “red pages,” for their bloody content) crime press. Accompanying each image, extended captions give his account of the situation depicted, describing the characters and life of the streets, the sadness of families, the criminals, and the heroism of emergency workers—revealing much about himself in the process. Having received his first camera at the age of ten, Metinides became a capable street photographer by the time he was twelve, already working with police and firefighters to get his best shots. Now also found in museum collections around the world, his images are compelling, immediate, sometimes shocking, and always authentic. Selected photographs are also paired with their original newsprint tearsheets, collected by Metinides, the typography of which have inspired the design of this book. The photographs have been compiled by Trisha Ziff, a filmmaker and curator who knows Metinides well, and who also contributes an essay about his life, work, and personality.

8 1/2 x 10 3/8 in. (21.6 x 26.4 cm); 
192 pages, 
150 four-color images; 
Hardcover with jacket; 
ISBN 978-1-59711-211-6
; $50.00/£35.00
; September 2012; 
Rights: World


Petrochemical America
by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff


Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region.

This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the way in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life.

 An exhibition coinciding with the release of the book will take place at Aperture Gallery in fall 2012.

13 1/2 x 10 1/2 in. (34.3 x 26.7 cm); 216 pages (plus 24-page insert), 
150 four-color images; Hardcover; ISBN 978-1-59711-191-1; $80.00/£50.00; September 2012; 
Rights: World


The Ballad of Sexual 
Dependency
by Nan Goldin


The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers—collectively described by Nan Goldin as her “tribe.” Her work describes a world that is visceral, charged, and seething with life. First published in 1986, this reissue recognizes the persistent relevance and freshness of Nan Goldin’s cutting-edge photography.

Over the past twenty-five years, the influence of Ballad on photography and other aesthetic realms has continually grown, making the work a contemporary classic. Nan Goldin’s story of urban life on the fringe was the swan song of an era that reached its peak in the early eighties. Yet it has captured an important element of humanity that is transcendent: a need to connect.

This new edition of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency has been printed using new scans and separations created by master-separator Robert Hennessey from Goldin’s original slides and transparencies, rendering them with unparalleled sumptuousness and impact.

10 x 9 in. (25.4 x 22.9 cm); 
148 pages, 
126 four-color images; 
Clothbound with jacket
; ISBN 978-1-59711-208-6; 
$50.00/£35.00; 
September 2012; 
Rights: World (excluding France)


Life’s a Beach
by Martin Parr


In the United Kingdom, one is never more than seventy-five miles away from the coast. With this much shoreline, it’s not surprising that there is a strong British tradition of photography by the seaside. American photographers may have given birth to street photography, but according to photographer Martin Parr, “in the UK, we have the beach!” Here, he asserts, people can relax, be themselves, and show off all those traces of mildly eccentric British behavior.

First released in a signed and numbered limited-edition run, Life’s a Beach shows Parr at its best, startling us with the moments of captured absurdity and immersing us in the rituals and traditions associated with beach life all over the world. A trade edition will follow in spring 2013.

11 x 9 in. (27.9 x 22.9 cm); 
98 four-color images;
 Slipcased hardcover; 
Signed and numbered limited-edition;
 ISBN 978-1-59711-224-6; 
$150.00/£95.00;
 September 2012;
 Rights: World (excluding France)


October 2012

Labyrinth: Daido Moriyama


Throughout Daido Moriyama’s extensive career, he has continually sought new ways of presenting and recontextualizing his work, frequently recasting his images through the use of different printing techniques, installation, or re-editing and re-formatting. In each iteration, images both old and new take on changed and newly charged significance. This volume, created during preparations for several international survey exhibitions, offers both the photographer and the viewer the opportunity to consider the photographer’s life work in a fresh light.

Moriyama has always sought meaning in the raw accumulation and gestalt of sequences of images. Labyrinth makes public an exercise in reconsideration that the photographer has assigned to himself. In opening up this private process of re-examination to a wider public, Moriyama continues to challenge the viewer and his own practice, as well as the larger mechanisms by which photography functions and creates meaning.

11 3/4 x 13 3/4 in. (30 x 35 cm); 
304 pages, 
300 duotone images; 
Paperback with flaps; 
ISBN 978-1-59711-217-8
; $80.00/£50.00; 
October 2012
 Rights: World (excluding Japan)


Aperture Magazine
 Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976


Published on the occasion of Aperture magazine’s sixtieth anniversary, this is the first anthology of Aperture magazine ever published. This long-awaited volume will provide a selection of the best critical writing from the first twenty-five years of the magazine—the period spanning the tenure of cofounder and editor Minor White.

The texts and visuals in this anthology were selected by Peter C. Bunnell, White’s protégé and an early member of the Aperture staff, who went on to become a major force in photography as an influential writer, curator, and professor. Several documents from Aperture’s founders and individual articles are reproduced in facsimile, and the book is enlivened by other distinctive elements, including a portfolio of each cover, and a selection of epigrams and editorials that appeared at the front of each issue. An extensive index of every contributor to the first twenty-five years of the magazine makes this an indispensible resource.

6 1/2 x 9 3/8 in. (16.5 x 23.8 cm); 
448 pages
, 150 four-color images;
 Hardcover with jacket; 
ISBN 978-1-59711-196-6;
$39.95/£25.00;
 October 2012
 Rights: World


The Garden at Orgeval
by Paul Strand


After a lifetime of working on a series of “collective portraits” in far-flung places such as Mexico; Ghana; Italy; Tir a’Mhurain, Scotland; and his adoptive country, France, an aging Paul Strand decided to concentrate on still lifes and the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France, as a site in which to distill his discoveries as a photographer. The work that constitutes The Garden at Orgeval is marked by close and careful study of the forms and patterns within nature—of tiny button-shaped flowers, cascading winter branches, and fierce snarls of twigs. While the images bear the same directness and precise vision that is quintessentially Strand, the work also reflects a growing metaphorical turn.

Renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz—whose own affinity toward Strand’s Orgeval series stems from a lifetime of photographing in different genres and ultimately returning to nature as an enduring subject—has selected the photographs in the book, and he responds to them in an accompanying personal essay, reflecting on issues, including the contemplation of one’s garden, and growing old. Beautifully produced in a modest size, in the manner of a volume of poems, this book’s task is to do credit to Strand’s final work, both as an individual and as a key figure in Modernist photography.

8 x 10 3/8 in. (20.3 x 26.4 cm); 
96 pages, 
42 duotone images 
Clothbound; 
ISBN 978-1-59711-124-9; 
$45.00/£30.00; 
October 2012, Rights: World


Unbuilt: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island
(Photographs by Barney Kulok, Essay by Steven Holl)


In October 2012, Four Freedoms Park—the last design Louis I. Kahn completed before his untimely death in 1974—will open on Roosevelt Island in New York City, over forty years after its commission as a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Barney Kulok’s black-and-white photographs of the building site function as a meditation on the materiality and formal underpinnings of Kahn’s architectural thinking. Unbuilt is at once a historical record and a multilayered visual investigation of form and the subtleties of texture—elements of fundamental importance to Kahn’s philosophies. As architect Steven Holl writes, “Kulok’s photographs free the subject matter from a literal interpretation of the site. They stand as ‘Equivalents’ to the words about material, light, and shadow that Louis Kahn often spoke.”

11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.5 cm); 80 pages, 40 duotone images; Hardcover with jacket; Signed and numbered limited edition of 1,000 copies; 987-1-59711-TKT-K; $TK.TK/£TK.TK; October 2012, Rights: World

For all press inquiries please contact:

Barbara Escobar
Publicity and Events Manager
212.946.7123
bescobar(at)aperture.org
publicity(at)aperture.org

 

Penelope Umbrico Photography @ FoMu, Antwerp

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012
Photo (c) Penelope Umbrico

The photography of Penelope Umbrico is often described as offering a sort of “radical reinterpretation” of photographic practice, or shedding “a radical new light” on the medium, conceptually, formally, and in several ways between. The artist produces by means of “aesthetic and conceptual chops,” famously appropriating images found using search engines and picture sharing websites, translating the digital realm’s relentless flow of images into conceptual works of photography.

FoMu’s upcoming exhibition of this particularly new course of photographic practice places Umbrico’s work in good company. From Here On, on view June 6 through September 30 2012, features an international roster of artists who create their work with the overload of digital images they find on the internet.

“They recycle, clip and cut pictures from Google Earth, Google Street View, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Does this mean that traditional photography is dead? With this exhibition, FoMu opens the debate on issues such as copyright, authorship, privacy and the future of photography.”

From Here On
June 22 through September 30, 2012
FoMu – Photo Museum
Antwerp, Belgium

From Here On shows the work of artists such as Hans Aarsman (NL, °1951), art collective Leo Gabin (BE), Constant Dullaart (NL, °1979), Mishka Henner (UK, °1976), Thomas Mailaender (FR, °1979), Willem Popelier (NL, °1982), Doug Rickard (US, °1968), Andreas Schmidt (DE, °1967), Pavel MariaSmejkal (CZ, °1957), Penelope Umbrico (US, °1957), Corinne Vionnet (SH, °1969) and HermanZschiegner (DE, °1971).

Curators: Clément Cheroux (FR, curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), Joan Fontcuberta (ES, explores the conflict between nature, technology, photography and truth), Erik Kessels (NL, Creative Director communications agency KesselsKramer, Amsterdam and London), Martin Parr (UK, Magnum photographer) and Joachim Schmid (DE, has been working with found photography since 1980).
———

›› Refer to our previous Penelope Umbrico-centric stories for more information and media surrounding this artist’s body of digital work.
›› View From Here On curator and Magnum photojournalist Martin Parr in conversation with Rinko Kawauchi.
›› Buy Penelope Umbrico (Photographs) for 20% off.

apertureWEEK: Online Photography Reading Shortlist

Friday, June 1st, 2012

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

  • The National Press Photographers Association announce “The Best of Photojournalism 2012,” this week. For aspiring hopefuls, the Photo Brigade posts “10 Tips for Photojournalism Students,” and Phototuts+ shares an article on “Building a Narrative Through Photojournalism.” The British Journal of Photography reports that the Carmignac Gestion Foundation is currently calling for entries for its annual Photojournalism Award, which comes with a €50,000 grant.
  • New York Times‘ LENS blog profiles Binh Danh who works with a fascinating chemical-free alternative process known as chlorophyl printing–using sunlight to burn in monochrome images onto leaves, grass and other vegetation. His series “Immortality, The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War” features a decade of work printing images of “suffering civilians, soldiers on patrol and the dead,” in an attempt to recapture the experience of that war.
  • A wide-ranging conversation about the ethics of conflict photography and how images are sold commercially has sprung up around the use of an image licensed to Lockheed Martin. Read Ron Haviv and VII responses to the initial criticism raised by Benjamin Chesterton of Duckrabbit, who takes issue with the use of a Haviv image commercially licensed by the arms manufacturer. Further commentary and assessment on the thorny issues of how to make, sell, and use — or not — images created during conflict are added by Michael ShawColin Pantall, and Stella Kramer
  • Photo District News posts “Favorite Sources of New Photography” Part 1 and Part 2, a feature in which they ask photo editors from publications like The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, New York, Time, The New Yorker, and many more including our own publisher Lesley A. Martin, where they find inspiration for new work.
  • What effect might increased scrutiny or transparency over digital image manipulation have on our visual culture? Poytner reports that a new software suite is in development by the former Adobe product manager for Photoshop that would detect the alteration of digital images. AdWeek explores what effect these attitudes might have on commercial photography in the wake of the pivotal ruling by the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus that a certain fashion ad was not “truthful and accurate” and thus a “public health hazard.”
  • More on Richard Misrach this week, whose monograph Golden Gate is soon to be reissued by Aperture on the occasion of the anniversary of the bridge, which turned 75 last Sunday. Time’s LightBox profiles “Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley,” on view at the High Museum from June 2, 2012, as does CNN Photos with a slightly different slideshow edit. The series features images from his other upcoming collaborative photobook with Kate Off, Petrochemical America, profiled by the Huffington Post in “Beautiful Ambivalence: The World Through the Lens of Richard Misrach.”
  • In exploring the future of photography, Hilde Van Gelder looks at its past in “What Has Photography Done?” on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching. She outlines two dominant tracks–the “autonomous pictorial art,” that gets absorbed into the museum and the canon, and that which “comments on the social and economic reality in which we live and thus actively take[s] part in transformative social processes,”–and opens up a conversation on the public funding of institutions.

The London Photographers’ Gallery Reopens with Edward Burtynsky and Animated GIFs

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

© Kate Elliott, Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery

Likely few would consider animated GIF images–those primitive computer animations often just a few pixels wide–fit enough for a photography exhibition. Perhaps that’s because there has yet to be a space fit enough to exhibit them. Now, London’s Photographers’ Gallery, which finally reopened this May with double the exhibition space after an 18-month, £9.2m renovation, offers digital facilities to support a rapidly evolving medium.

One of the main reasons behind the renovation which began in 2010, Gallery Director Brett Rogers says in a video interview with the Guardian, was to develop ”facilities that are fit for purpose in the 21st century, to show works of a larger scale, but also to reflect the conditions in which most people experience photography.”

The Soho gallery was the first independent public space in Britain devoted to photography when it was founded in the 1970s. Today, in addition to three floors of gallery space, room enough for the commanding, large-scale prints in their inaugural exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s oil photographs (on view through July 1, 2012), they’ve also built what they call a “digital wall.”

This display, located near the gallery entrance, is made up of eight large screens presenting a running program of digital images visible from the outside street. Wendy McMurdo, one of 40 artists that includes Penelope Umbrico, was asked to produce a moving image GIF for the wall by Katrina Sluis, the galley’s new curator of digital programing. McMurdo writes on the FOAM blog on the “joy” of contributing to their inaugural digital exhibition Born in 1987: the animated GIF (on view through July 1, 2012). This initiative, McMurdo says, demonstrates the gallery’s “recognition that it is in the digital and social domain that photography must, ultimately, discover its new purposes and new meaning.”

On the other hand, the Photographers’ Gallery is also offering opportunity to counterbalance what Edwin Heathcote for the Financial Times calls the “culture of browsing and glancing”–when people end up scanning thousands of images a day–that has come to prominence with such development. One room in the space is dedicated to exhibiting a single image that will change four times a year.

Moreover, their new education center doubles as a camera obscura, which in conjunction with the digital wall, Rogers says, should “enable people to reflect on the history of optics,” in its entirety.

Burtynsky: Oil
Exhibition on view:
May 19 – July 1, 2012

Born in 1987: the animated GIF
Exhibition on view:
May 19 – July 1, 2012

This Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 3:00 pm, join Katrina Sluis for a FREE discussion on “Curating the Digital Image.”

The Photographers’ Gallery
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
London, UK W1F 7LW
+44(0)20 7087 9300

Support for The Alice Austen House & Documents from the American Housing Crisis

Monday, May 21st, 2012
Foreclosure Alley by Guillaume Zuili – Vu

The Alice Austen House, a fantastic and under-acknowledged resource for photography in New York City, is an exhibition space and museum dedicated to the ground-breaking, absolutely independent and unique photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952). One of America’s earliest and most prolific female photographers, Alice Austen broke away from the constraints of the Victorian era to create her own independent life.

Help the Alice Austen House take some much needed steps toward its own preservation and restoration via the 2012 New York initiative Partners in Preservation.  All you need to do is go to http://www.PartnersinPreservation.com and VOTE – a vote for this site will help direct national funding to keep the Alice Austen House vital and able to continue its programming of exhibitions and education in a beautiful, unique historic space. Voting ends tonight, 11:59PM EST on Monday, May 21.

——

Through June 14, 2012 the Alice Austen House Museum is pleased to present Foreclosed: Documents from the American Housing Crisis. The exhibition includes works by: Bruce Gilden, Lauren Greenfield, Todd Hido, Imara Moore, John Moore, John Francis Peters, T.J. Proechel, Brian Shumway, Brian Ulrich and Guillaume Zuili, examining how artists are using photography to record the aftermath of the housing bubble; from its’ beginning in 2006 to the dramatic effects it still has on the American Landscape today. The artists and photographers in the exhibition depict the ruins of rich and poor neighborhoods, as well as the families affected by the economic downturn. As a result, the exhibition aims to explore the disintegration of the American dream and how it effects a culture where home ownership is no longer a reality.

Foreclosed: Documents from the American Housing Crisis
On view through June 14, 2012

The Alice Austen House Museum
2 Hylan Boulevard
Staten Island, NY 10305

apertureWEEK: Online Photography Reading Shortlist

Friday, May 18th, 2012

Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.

  • “It is almost impossible for me to shoot a photo where someone is NOT taking a picture or posing for one,” writes Martin Parr on his blog in a post titled, “Too Much Photography.” Prime examples of this can be found in his series Tourism Inc. which is being published by Reporters Without Borders for the 20th anniversary of their “100 Photos for Press Freedom” collection, accompanied by an exhibition at Galerie Photo Fnac Forum des Halles in Paris, La Lettre de la Photographie reports. His photographs of Atlanta for the High Museum’s “Picturing the South” series are also featured in the upcoming summer issue of Aperture 207.
  • In further commentary on CNN’s controversial edit of Stacy Kranitz’ series on Appalachia, Joerg Colberg writes, “If we wanted to know what a place looked like we would need an infinity of photographs, taken from all possible angles excluding nothing, seeing everything at the same time,” a notion he thinks antithetical to the practice of photography, but increasingly possible, not only as Parr points out through the proliferations of cameras, but with the help of the Google Street View car, profiled by the Times here. Check out art made with photos pulled from the Street View service by Aaron Hobson, Jon Rafman, and Michael Wolf of the monograph Transparent City (Aperture 2008). And stay tuned for the upcoming re-issue and expanded edition of A New American Picture by Doug Rickard coming from Aperture in fall 2012.
  • Perpetual shooting brings us to the post on APhotoEditor asking, “Is It Time To Eliminate Stills From Your Shoot?” due to the ease and success with which quality still images may be pulled from video footage as a result of the recent proliferation of HDSLR cameras on the market. Now with no need to pick the decisive moment, soon no need to pick where to focus, who’ll need photographers? Have a look through SFMOMA’s page “Is Photography Over?” and read about the dialectical relationship of aesthetics and distribution/media on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching.
  • On a different note, watch this great video from Feature Shoot, “Inside the World’s Only Tintype Photography Studio,” a photo gallery and walk-in commercial tintype portrait studio. Owner/photographer Michael Shindler says, ”I think what people seem to be looking for now is a kind of photography where the process itself is going to impart its own flavor to the finished image, a little bit of uncertainty.”
  • American Suburb X  shares Kelly Dennis’ 2005 essay, “Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography,” which explores the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Art Sinsabaugh and more. After reading, check out new-New Topographic photography in Camps & Cabins at G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle, the third solo show by Eirik Johnson, author of the monograph Sawdust Mountain (Aperture 2009), on view through May 26, 2012.
  • LENS blog profiles the opening of “Gordon Parks: 100 Years” at the International Center of Photography, celebrating the centennial of the legendary photographer’s birth with an exhibition of his work presented not inside the center, but in their windows, on view to the street. Parks was featured in an essay by David Campany on “Precedented Photography” in Aperture issue 206. His writing also appears in the requisite volume, Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on Their Art.
  • Fototazo posts Part II of their three-part interview with Oregon-based photographer Blake Andrews of the popular blog B. During this exchange, they invite him to create a competition for photographers to rank and sequence famous photographs, and predict the most popular sequence. The results of the contest will be published on Fototazo and Andrews’ blog. Part III of the interview will be published on Fototazo May 24, 2012.