Modern Day Halo #3, 2011, © Brea Souders

Exhibition on view:
January 20–March 3, 2012

The Camera Club of New York
The Arts Building
336 West 37th Street, Suite 206
New York, NY
(212) 260-9927

The Camera Club of New York presents Celestial, an exhibition arranged by guest curator Mark Alice Durant. Five photographic artists extend their views of our universe and the supernatural. The endless splendor of earth and space is researched and resolved through different sentiments and media: black and white photography, collage, charcoal drawings on negatives, film and performance.

The artists embrace imagination to represent the simplest and the most dramatic of celestial events. Intermediary substances are used, sprinkled across photographic paper, mimicking stars and constellations. Photograms and pinhole cameras are also utilized, representative of the capable nature of the photographic process, even through the most rudimentary of means.

Mark Alice Durant is an artist, writer, and curator. Durant’s photography has appeared in Aperture issue 199 and has contributed writing for issues 203, 196, and 195.

“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.

Aperture Issue 206 features:

Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen’s vibrant African dreamscapes.

Lieko Shiga’s visual diary of the days after the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

An intimate look at photography’s patron saint, Eugène Atget.

Arthur Ou plays with representation, dimensionality, and meaning through the manipulation of the negative.

A discussion with Richard Farris Thompson of how Afro-Cuban rhythms stirred the lives of the Beat artists.

Survivor of one of Argentina’s clandestine prisons, Paula Luttringer, finds the courage to look back through objects left behind.

Click here to subscribe now and get a FREE book!

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.

© Sam Falls

Opening reception:
Saturday, February 18, 2012
6:00–8:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
February 18–March 31, 2012

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, California
(310) 550-0050

China Art Objects
6086 Comey Ave
Los Angeles, California
(323) 965-2264

New work by Sam Falls is featured in a two-part exhibition with M+B and China Art Objects in Los Angeles. Falls’ painted photographs, works on paper, and sculpture are constantly changing, aging, and embody the persistence of time.

Falls uses the photographic process combined with sculptural and painterly materials to exaggerate constant variables such as light and weather. He photographed fabric-draped houses in Joshua Tree, California. The fabric, exposed to the sun, fades with imprints of light. After documenting, he digitally manipulates these images, prints, and paints over them. Falls is able to pause, re-start, and mimic reality. He produces not only an image but a new object, formed over time.

His painted works on linen and colored aluminum and steel sculptures are also intensely representative of signs of life present in inanimate objects. Their responses to the exposure of heat and weathering generate decay and development. Colors and materials tie Falls’ pieces together which serve as an affirmation of time and the life and death of his own artworks.

Falls is featured in Aperture issue 205.

Untitled, 1986, © Boris Mikhailov / Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery

Exhibition on view:
January 20–March 11, 2012

La Criée Centre D’art Contemporain
Place Honoré Commeurec
35000 Rennes
France
+33 (0)2 23 62 25 10

Murky waters, polluted landscapes, and heavyset ladies in bikinis illustrate Salt Lake, a series of 50 photographs taken by Boris Mikhailov. Traveling the south shores of Ukraine, he documented the happenings in and around a lake surrounded by factory chimneys, warehouses, and industrial-sized pipes which discharged waste into the water. Seemingly indifferent to the unkempt setting, locals sunbathe in the polluted terrain in this Soviet version of a German spa town.

Salt Lake depicts a clandestine Soviet Union, where life’s simplest amusements are uninterrupted by a lake divulged in industrial pollution, characterizing the transient freedom of its inhabitants.

Concurrent with Salt Lake, two additional series from Mikhailov; Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino and I Am Not I, are on view at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve in Paris through March 10, 2012.

Mikhailov has appeared in Aperture issues 190 and 158.

Looking for a Valentine’s day gift for your sweetie?  Why not the beautiful limited edition photograph by Bruce Davidson from his 1980 series Subway, reissued last fall. Untitled, (couple on platform) depicts a public display of personal affection in stunning Kodachrome color–one of his rare forays outside of black and white film.

In this video clip for Aperture, Davidson explains that for the longest time he “found that mostly color is gratuitous, because we have it.”  When he began the project, for about half the time he was shooting in black and white. At one point, he says, “something came over me,” and he loaded that legendary, now-discontinued color film.

To capture the cultural fabric of New York City at that particular time, he needed the extremes of color. “The people in the subway,” he says, “their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other.”

Buy the print here for your sweetheart!

© Gianni Motti

Opening reception:
Friday, February 10, 2012
6:00–8:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
February 11–May 6, 2012

Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst
Albisriederstrasse 199A
CH-8047 Zürich
Switzerland
+41 44 277 20 50

Started in 1957, works from the collection of the Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst will be featured in an exhibition titled Tour D’Horizon. The show is divided into four sections and addresses specific aspects and intentions concerning the development of the collection. The display offers insight into the different directions and thematic standpoints that guided the acquisitions, in addition to a chronology. The exhibition is accompanied by events, lectures, and tours that examine a questions about collecting and the history of these pieces.

Tour D’Horizon features Lothar Baumgarten, Georg Baselitz, Jan Dibbets, Martin Disler, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Mangold, A. R. Penck, Giuseppe Penone, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, Klaudia Schifferle, Atelier van Lieshout, Carlos Amorales, and Gianni Motti.
Sol LeWitt has appeared in Aperture issue 204 and 182.

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.