“Showcasing new artists alongside historical material, artMRKT will create an ideal context for the discovery, discussion and placement of artwork.”

The San Francisco iteration of artMRKT marks the start of the brand’s 2012 modern and contemporary fair season. Currently in it’s second year, the San Francisco fair will combine the work of seventy leading galleries with a thoughtful program of art events and exhibitions at the fair venue and throughout the city. Aperture will be on site in 2012 with limited-edition prints, books, and the latest from Aperture magazine in tow, including our latest prints “Model Dining Room,” from the series Occupied Territory by Lynne Cohen, and “Animal (127)” by Elliot Ross.

The 2012 re-issue of Lynne Cohen’s first monograph, Occupied Territory, is also forthcoming from Aperture, “an exploration of domestic and institutional interior spaces—sometimes idealized, sometimes standardized, humorous, and disquieting.” “Model Dining Room” is a piece of this larger puzzle, representing Cohen’s visual exploration of interior space as simulated experience.

We also recommend joining acclaimed artist Richard Misrach, whose lauded Golden Gate is being reissued in a new oversized edition for the iconic bridge’s 75th anniversary, for the weekend’s keynote address plus a book signing on Saturday, May 19th.

Aperture at artMRKT San Francisco
Thursday, May 17, 2012–Sunday, May 20, 2012

Admission Required

Concourse Exhibition Center
Booth 209
San Francisco, California

›› Buy Lynne Cohen’s limited-edition print, “Model Dining Room”
›› Buy the limited-edition print “Animal (127)” by Elliot Ross
›› Sign up to be notified when Lynne Cohen’s re-issued monograph, Occupied Territory, is available.

Aperture Gallery was abuzz Wednesday evening, hosting the much-anticipated New York City launch of Delpire & Co., the citywide, multi-venue retrospective of the life and work of legendary editor, curator and publisher, Robert Delpire. Following presentations in Arles and Paris, Delpire & Co. arrives to New York City with representation at six venues throughout Manhattan.

Aperture’s Wednesday opening was the first of the week (followed by Thursday night openings at the French Embassy, and Gallery at Hermes), welcoming a strong roster of photography legends and pillars of the photographic community. Sarah Moon, Mary Ellen Mark, and Josef Koudelka were in attendance, standing alongside their own seminal works on view, as well as celebrated photographers Bruce Davidson and Susan Meiselas. Multiple films by filmmaker/photographer Sarah Moon were on screen, including 1970’s TV spots directed by Moon for Cacharel (7 min), as well as “Le Montreur d’images (The Go-Between)” (2009), her feature length documentary on husband Robert Delpire.

Peter Barberie, Curator of Photographs for the Philadelphia Art Museum was in attendance Wednesday evening, as well as Jeff Hirsch of FotoCare, and Wendy Byrne, former designer for Aperture Foundation. Special thanks to exhibition producer Mike Derez, and Project Coordinator Agnès Gagnès of Idéodis.

Delpire & Co. runs through June at venues throughout the city. Like us on Facebook to view a full album of photos from the opening.

›› Click here for details on all the exhibitions and events.
›› Join the conversation on Instagram and Twitter using #Delpire
›› The New Yorker presents a stunning and concise slideshow summary of books and photographs from among the displays at Aperture, Hermès, Pace/MacGill, and Howard Greenberg.

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

• NPR’s The Picture Show publishes a five-part series called “The Visual South,” profiling five photographers from Oxford American magazine’s “100 Under 100” list of “the most talented and thrilling up-and-coming artists in the South.” Christopher Sims shoots Guantanamo Bay, Frank Hamrick shoots, develops, prints, and book-binds by hand, Tammy Mercure finds “wryly humorous scenes” in the Great Smokey Mountains, Brandon Thibodeaux wanders around documenting Mound Bayou. Stay tuned for the fifth.
• Time‘s LightBox sits down with Matthias Fiegl, “one of the original founders of the 20-year-old, pinhole- and fisheye-loving, Vienna-based company,” Lomography, to talk about their “prophecies of the analogue future,” countering much of the incessant Instagram talk over the last few weeks. In somewhat related news, Leica Camera announced the launch of the first-ever monochrome digital camera with a black-and-white sensor and no color filter. Hands-on previews from PDN and Digital Photography Review, commentary from The Online Photographer, The Travel Photographer, Steve Huff Photo, Luminous Landscape, and many more, probably.
• Photos from the 67th anniversary of Victory Day in Europe from Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Belarus and more at Boston’s Big Picture, LA Times’ Framework, and WSJ’s Photo Journal. Jonathan Alpeyrie‘s exhibition World War II Veterans is currently on view at Anastasia Photo in New York (through May 31, 2012).
• LPV Magazine shares some thoughts on “Narrative and the Serialization of Photography Online,” on “plotting” your Tumblr, and what he thinks might have gone wrong with Magnum’s Postcards From America feed.
• In copyright news, David Hoffman writes extensively on the “unprecedented exploitation of photographs” in the digital age, David Walker explores the “Liability-Proof World of Pinterest” on PDN, and Tumblr lands a lawsuit from publisher Perfect 10 alleging infringement, according to Econsultancy.
• Major controversy this week over CNN’s edit of Stacy Kranitz series on Appalachia, “Regression to the Mean,” which was intended by the photographer to complicate and debunk common stereotypes of the region, Conscientious’ Joerg Colberg points out. Roger May, along with several hundred disgruntled commenters on the CNN page found that the edit–a set of 16 images which claimed to be the “everyday lives of people in Appalachia” and featured two of KKK-related content (culled from Kranitz series totaling 77 images, only 3 of which were KKK-related)–perpetuated and reinforced that visual myth. In response, photographer Kranitz is quoted as feeling shocked, ashamed, humiliated, stunned, and disgusted. Read about her thought on the matter in a interview conducted with The Revivalist.
• No reviews out just yet, but New Yorker’s PhotoBooth, Time’s LightBox, and La Lettre de la Photographie all profile Delpire & Co., a five-venue retrospective celebrating the career of visionary French publisher Robert Delpire all across New York, on view now at Aperture Gallery, The Gallery at Hermès/Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, La Maison Française of New York University, Howard Greenberg Gallery, and Pace/MacGill Gallery. Join the conversation on Instagram and Twitter with #Delpire.

Delpire season is upon us.

Tonight Aperture Gallery launches the New York City run of Delpire & Co., opening their W27th street space to the public, showcasing a rich, multimedia exhibition celebrating the revered curator, editor, publisher, and overall champion of photography, Robert Delpire.
In the next several weeks, a comprehensive retrospective of Delpire’s career will be exhibited across four venues in New York City: Aperture Gallery, The Gallery at Hermès, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and La Maison Française. Concurrent with Delpire & Co., Pace/MacGill and Howard Greenberg will have exhibitions on view in celebration of Robert Delpire’s life and work.

Here’s what you can expect to see throughout New York City:

Aperture Gallery

On view: May 9 through July 19

Highlights: Classical and seminal publications by now-iconic photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Robert Frank (see: “The Americans”), Josef Koudelka, and Sarah Moon. Delpire’s work with magazines will also be featured, including the very first issue of Neuf (founded by Robert Delpire at the ripe age of 23), and Nouvel Observateur Spécial Photo, as well as advertising projects for diverse clients from Cacharel, Citroën, L’Oréal, and the French Ministry of Culture.

Cultural Services of the French Embassy

On view: May 11 through June 6

Highlights: The embassy will be exhibiting the original French editions of beloved illustrator Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Crocodile Tears.

The Gallery at Hermès/Fondation d’entreprise Hermès

On view: May 11 through July 19

Highlights: Robert Delpire’s famed Photo Poche series is on view, as well as prints from contemporary photographers such as Harry Gruyaert, Jehsong Baak, Michel Vanden Eeckhout, Michael Ackerman, Francesco Zizola, Raymond Depardon, Robert Doisneau, Paolo Pellegrin, Marc Riboud.

La Maison Française of New York University

On view: May 18 through July 19

Highlights: This exhibition focuses on the Poche Illustrateur series, celebrating notable illustrators such as Roman Cieślewicz, Honoré Daumier, Etienne Delessert, Guy Peellaert, and Saul Steinberg.

› In addition, two supporting exhibitions will be on view; Sarah Moon at Howard Greenberg Gallery, featuring new work, and Pace/MacGill Gallery will exhibit works by prominent photographers such as Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, Duane Michals, Paolo Roversi, and Alfred Stieglitz.

› Visual Supplement: This week in the magazine The New Yorker ran photographs by Sarah Moon and Lee Freidlander, both of which are part of exhibitions celebrating the work of Delpire. Online, The New Yorker presents a stunning and concise slideshow summary of books and photographs from among the displays at Aperture, Hermès, Pace/MacGill, and Howard Greenberg.

———

Delpire & Co. is coproduced by Rencontres d’Arles, la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Delpire Editeur, and Aperture Foundation.Delpire & Co. has been made possible with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Etant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, the E.T. Harmax Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

“Vogue was honored for overall excellence in magazine photography, although its spooky Steven Klein-lensed “Lady Be Good” portfolio, singled out as a finalist for best feature photography, was bested by those “Vamps, Crooks, and Killers” at The New York Times Magazine.”

— via mediabistro

Exhibition Photos by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The first comprehensive survey of work from the extremely brief but prolific career of American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) to be shown in North America is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum (through June 13, 2012).

More than thirty years after Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22–often one of the first things people recall about the artist–the exhibition offers an occasion for the “historical reconsideration of her work and its reception.”

Over 120 vintage photographs on view were culled from her estate of 800 prints and over 10,000 negatives, which is managed by her parents. They span her early experimental responses to class assignments completed while she was still enrolled at RISD in the mid-seventies, to the large-scale blueprint studies of her Temple project from 1980. The exhibition also includes six of her recently discovered and rarely seen short videos, as well as two of her artist books.

Her black-and-white images, dark, ethereal and moody, softened and blurred through the use of a long exposure time, are remarkably coherent explorations of herself, and sometimes other women, in very particular environments.

The Times‘ Ken Johnson calls it a “borderline kitschy style, a heady mix of Victorian Gothic, Surrealism and 19th-century spirit photography,” exploring the non-documentary realm of photography in a manner reminiscent of some of her contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman.

They were taken mostly with a medium format 6×6 camera and printed at 8×10″ or smaller, adding a timeless or antique quality, and necessitating a physically intimate viewing experience.

So “strong, particular, personal and tragic,” is her work, British art dealer Anthony d’Offay, who acquired 18 of her prints from the artist’s boyfriend, says in a video interview, “that you have to confront elements of yourself which perhaps sometimes you’ve avoided.”

—–

On Friday, May 18, 2012, the Guggenheim is hosting a symposium on “Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman,” examining the relationship between the still and moving image in Woodman’s and other artists’ production during the 1970s, particularly as associated with Post-Minimalism, performance, and video, organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography.

Francesca Woodman is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was on view earlier this year. You can find a video walkthrough of that show shot on January 2, 2012 on YouTube.

Read more about Woodman’s “deeply personal photographic revelations” in critic David Levi Strauss’ Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture 2003).

View a slideshow of images from the exhibition at Guggenheim on The New York Times website, after which you can read Ken Johnson’s review of the show.

Exhibition on view:
March 13 – June 13, 2012

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
(at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173

It wasn’t until sometime around 1970 that Sarah Moon, the award-winning artist, photographer and filmmaker, first picked up a camera. Her first photographs were portraits of friends – who also happened to be models. She at the time was working as a model as well, (in London and Paris, 1960-1966) working among some of fashion photography’s most legendary names, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn and Guy Bourdin included. “Somebody lent me a camera,” she says, “and while we waited between shots, I took pictures.”

More than forty years later, her ethereal and enigmatic images are those of a living legend, whose uniquely individual vision informed publications like Nova and the Sunday Times Magazine, later that of the fashion house Maison Cacharel. Her work has appeared everywhere from French Elle to British Vogue, in collaboration with designer names from Chanel to Comme des Garcons. Moon’s body of work, which includes commercial photography, as well as celebrated works in video and film, has exhibited worldwide since 1982. These films—many based upon fairy tales—are a testament to her grande dame status, the years-earned luxury of creative autonomy.

Aperture, in conjunction with Howard Greenberg Gallery, is pleased to present an evening of film and videos by the award-winning artist. Sarah Moon will be present at Aperture Gallery to screen The Red Thread, Black Riding Hood, and Le Montreur D’Images (The Go-Between), a documentary on her husband, the celebrated publisher Robert Delpire, whose own legacy is the subject of the concurrent multi-venue exhibition, Delpire & Co.

———

Sarah Moon: Film Screenings
Friday, May 11, 2012
6:00 pm

FREE

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
New York, New York

6:00: The Red Thread and Black Riding Hood
6:30: Intermission
7:00: Le Montreur D’Images (The Go-Between)

›› Le Montreur D’Images will also be continuously screened as part of the exhibition Delpire & Co. at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, on view May 10–July 19, 2012.

›› Sarah Moon: Now and Then will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery,  May 11–June 16, 2012.

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

• Find May Day photos from around the world at Boston’s The Big Picture Show, New York Times‘ LensBlog, and LA Times‘ Framework. Time‘s LightBox also offers “Resources for Photographers Covering Protests,” a bit of a distillation of what the ACLU has up on their website. In addition this week, the National Press Photographers Association and other press groups “call on Justice Department to protect right to record,” pointing out that more than 70 people have been arrested documenting Occupy protests since last September.
• The New Yorker‘s PhotoBooth shares brilliant photos from the eight night performance run of electronic music and Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk at MoMA last week– those shows that sold out in a blink of an eye, crashing ticket servers. The featured photos were taken not by concert photographers, but audience members with their cell phones who shared on Instagram, Facebook and Flickr, including one by their pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who wrote for the magazine this week on the band’s legacy.
• Daidō Moriyama, who is interviewed by Ivan Vartanian in Aperture issue 203, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award during ICP’s Infinity Award 2012 ceremony this past Wednesday, La Lettre De La Photographie reports, posting a gallery of his images. Be sure to check out the Daidō Moriyama pop-up library, on display at the ICP Library until May 23, 2012, and watch videos from Moriyama’s 2011 PRINTING SHOW–TKY at Aperture, a recreation of his 1974 ad hoc photobook-making performance of the same title. Moriyama also has his first solo museum exhibition, Fracture: Daido Moriyama, on view at LACMA through July 31, 2012, LA Times‘ Framework reports.
• Ben Lowy, the “Hipstamatic Journalist,” an ardent defender of cell phone photography according to a New York Times profile and Q&A on LensBlog, also won an Infinity Award this week for his work in photojournalism. Soon, the Times reports, Hipstamatic will release a Ben Lowy Lens filter. This week, software developer jag.gr also released the 645 Pro camera app for the iPhone, Rob Galbraith reports, which appeals to advanced photographers and can capture TIFF images, features real-time shutter speed and aperture readouts, a live histogram, a choice of spot or multi-zone metering, as well as focus, exposure, and white balance lock. PhotoShelter Blog shares a lengthy post on “Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers, and Why You Should Use It,” while APhotoEditor explores some of the many licensing issues with the social media sites through which these images are shared.
• Read about the long strange saga of student photojournalist Andy Duann’s ‘bear falling out of a tree‘ photo which was went viral last week according to Poytner, eventually being picked up by the Associated Press (we first noticed it on WSJ‘s Photo Journal).  Duann had been considering legal action against his school, the University of Colorado, for distributing the photo without compensating him, until they acknowledged that he retained the copyright and announced they would no longer demand copyright from their students in the future.
• MediaStorm share two videos this week that live up to their column titled, “Worth Watching.” First, watch Ian Ruhter’s SILVER & LIGHT clip about his–literally–truck-sized traveling camera. Then watch Jeff Harris’ sometimes-heart-wrenching video on his project collecting 4,748 daily self-portraits–and counting. MediaStorm also draws our attention to Aday, “a unique photographic event,” scheduled for May 15, 2012, in which countless people from all different backgrounds use any camera they can get access to and submit photos to create a massive historical document–”A Day in the World,” which will be published as a book in October 2012. Sign up today.
• Andy Adam’s Flak Photo is teaming up with Tom Griggs’ fototazo next week to host an online community conversation focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published The Pleasures of Good Photographs (Aperture 2010). We’re looking forward to Monday, May 7, 2012, which is when the discussion kicks off with the essay, “Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans’s American Photographs.”

The photographic process is often credited in part with displacing representation from painting, pushing it over the course of the first half of the last century further into the domain of abstraction. The camera was commonly thought to capture and document a supposed objective reality in a way the human hand never could. However, photography itself has also been variously employed for nonrepresentational abstraction since its inception.

From the very first photograms to Aaron Siskind‘s ab-ex alluding macrophotography, to Penelope Umbrico‘s digitally-manipulated found images of “Suns From Flickr,” The Edge of Vision: Abstractions in Contemporary Photography (on view at Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon through June 16, 2012) examines the history of nonrepresentational photographic image-making and its role in contemporary art.

In a two part video interview, independent writer and critic Lyle Rexer, who curated the exhibition and authored the 2009 Aperture-published book by the same title, says he was drawn to artists that “were making pictures that moved away from from an easily identifiable subject, or that complicated the picture or the response that we normal have to pictures, in what is essentially thought of as a denotative medium.”

The traveling exhibition, which has been on view in a number of places around the world, each time in a slightly different iteration, features work by a diverse group of contemporary artists including Bill Armstrong, Carel Balth, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Ellen Carey, Roland Fischer, Michael Flomen, Manuel Geerinck, Edward Mapplethorpe, Penelope Umbrico, Silvio Wolf, and more listed here. For Rexer, he says, bringing this group together and seeing what they have in common is meant to address the following question:

What is it about photography now that makes it possible for us to have artists that  on the one hand do very documentary work, and other artists at the same time, sometimes the same artists, who are also doing work that would qualify as abstract?

For more information on the work on view, be sure to check out the Edge of Vision Video Interview Series, conducted during the installation at Aperture Gallery in 2009, on vimeo:

• Penelope Umbrico persents her work “For Sale/TV’s From Craigslist,” and explains why she considers herself a documentary photographer, “a traveler through media.”
• Ellen Carey discusses her large-scale work “Pulls with Lifts and Drops,” film pulled through the rollers of a Polaroid large-format camera, and her color photogram, “PushPins,” exploring how each challenges the viewer to rethink the medium.
• Barbara Kasten explains her work based on physical constructions that play with light and are created only for the purpose of being photographed. By this approach, the photograph itself becomes the object and is removed from being representative or documentary.
• Silvio Wolf presents his work which combines straight photography and the unexposed ends of film rolls as negatives exposed to light. The end results are mesmerizing and meditative colorful images about light and absence of light.
• Bill Armstrong puts in context his “Mandala #450″ piece, explains why he uses blurring as a process and explores his “painterly approach to photography.”
• Charles Lindsay speaks about how he started working with his unique carbon emulsion process, his inspirations and the combination of his photographic, video and sound works.
• Seth Lambert contextualizes his work in the show “Nothing on the Bed of an Epson Expression 10000XL” within his Failures series of grids mapping out anything from beard hair, mirror pieces to nothing with a blank scan.
• Carel Balth explains the process behind his works “Moving IV” and “Madrid V,” and how his appropriation of images through a digital format functions as a new medium.
• Jack Sal speaks about his piece “Sale/Sala (Salt/Room)” while you watch him installing it.
• Manuel Geerinck, who started his career as a painter, speaks about his unique process combining his drawings that he then photographs in motion.

Also, watch a panel discussion on Abstraction in Photography from 2009 at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, moderated by Rexer, and read a review of the exhibition when it was on view at Lewis & Clark College in Portland earlier this year, from the Oregonian.

Exhibition on view:
Thursday, May 10 – Saturday, June 16, 2012

$5 Suggested Donation

Schneider Museum of Art
1250 Siskiyou Blvd
Ashland, Oregon
(541) 552-6245

Image courtesy of VII

Join Phaidon at VII Gallery on Thursday, May 3rd during the exhibition of Questions Without Answers to celebrate the launch of the long-awaited book of the same name, published in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary of the founding of VII agency.

This major work presents a remarkable sequence of photo-stories from pioneering photo agency VII, documenting world history as we have experienced it since the end of the Cold War. The 11 extraordinarily talented photographers who are part of this agency work at the cutting edge of digital photojournalism, committed to recording social and cultural change as it happens around the world. Each brings an individual vision to the agency – some choosing to tackle dramatic events head-on, others pursuing more idiosyncratic, personal projects – but all share a commitment to their individual subjects and to their belief that the act of communication provides hope even in the most extreme situations.

Questions Without Answers is an ambitious book featuring a strikingly broad selection of photo stories. Photos documenting Barack Obama giving a speech on Afghanistan to American troops sit alongside a collection of portraits featuring famous cultural figures such as David Bowie and Bernardo Bertolucci. We move from an exploration of the spread and impact of AIDS in Asia to dispatches from the current economic crisis and its effect on those working in finance. The crucial work done by VII in documenting conflict – environmental, social and political, both violent and non-violent – is also represented, including stories from the war in Iraq, the crisis in Darfur and the terrible events of 9/11.

With an introduction by the eminent David Friend, the former director of photography at Life magazine, this book is an important, moving and compelling record of the world we live in.

The book includes work by Stephanie Sinclair, and Lynsey Addario, both of whom have been featured in Aperture Magazine and The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011).

Questions Without Answers
Book Launch and Reception
Thursday, May 3, 2012, 7-9pm

VII Gallery
Brooklyn, New York

›› Buy The New York Times Magazine Photographs for 30% off.