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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1929 © August Sander / 2008 © Boris Mikhailov

Exhibition on view:
March 22–May 5, 2012

Pace/MacGill Gallery
32 E 57th Street
New York City, NY
(212) 759-7999

Two seminal practitioners of the camera are side-by-side in Pace/MacGill’s current exhibition, German Portraits.

From 1910 through 1956, documentary photographer August Sander, strove to make a visual index of the population classifying Germany’s most conventional groups: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artist, The City, and The Last People. This monumental project turned into the masterpiece, People of the 20th Century, featuring over 600 images. Twenty portraits by Sander will be shown in this exhibition, each striking a rare symmetry of the individual and an illustration of the archetype, forming a sincere social portrait of the time.

Ukrainian-born Boris Mikhailov has photographed Germany’s middle class. Nearly a century after August Sander, Mikhailov focuses on the distinct appearance of the individual and the transmission of physical traits from parents to offspring. He captures his subjects against a dark backdrop, taken in profile, inviting us to contemplate line and form and what it means to be German in a literal and physical sense.

Mikhailov is featured in Aperture issues 190 and 158. Aperture also published August Sander: Masters of Photography.

 

 

This month of March brought the passing of the one-year anniversary of the devastating tsunami which hit the coast of Japan in 2011, laying waste much of the region, in some cases washing away entire villages and causing upwards of 20,000 deaths. Since the disaster, relief efforts came in a variety of forms, but one which humanizes the numerical abstraction of the death toll stuck out in particular.

In the current Aperture magazine issue 206, photography critic and independent curator Mariko Takeuchi writes:

In the cities, towns, and village affected by the disaster, a vast number of personal photographs were salvaged, pulled from underneath rubble and mud by all sorts of people. They were discolored by saltwater and covered with dirt; some were misshapen or even emitted foul odors. With very few exceptions, it was impossible to identify the people who had made the photographs, their subjects, or their owners—if indeed they were still alive.

What began as a small community effort has turned into the Memory Salvage Project, a volunteer organization that has to date recovered and begun restoring 750,000 lost family photographs.

“Restoration is not just a matter of infrastructure,” Professor Kuniomi Shibata, head of the Memory Salvage Project, says in a video for Discovery Channel, “There are other important things.”

Snapshots were cleaned, numbered and digitized one by one with the help of volunteers who came from all over Japan. At least 20,000 photographs, and 13,000 photo albums have been returned to their owners. Several thousand other images abstracted by natural disaster have been assembled into an evocative and visually stunning traveling exhibition which has been on view in Tokyo and Los Angeles, and is now coming to New York.

Photographer Munemasa Takahashi, one of the leaders of the project tells New Yorker’s Photobooth why the images on view are so powerful:

After the disaster occurred, the first thing the people who lost their loved ones and houses came to look for was their photographs… Only humans take moments to look back at their pasts, and I believe photographs play a big part in that. This exhibit makes us think of what we have lost, and what we still have to remember about our past.

Lost & Found: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku will be on view at Aperture Monday, April 2, 2012 – Friday, April 27, 2012.

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 W. 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001
(212) 505-5555

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

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

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

AIPAD Photography Show
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York

Show Hours and Admission

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

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

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

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

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

 

In the clip above, Alex Prager, in conversation with gallerist Yancey Richardson (September 30, 2010 at Aperture as part of the Parsons Lecture Series), talks about wandering through the Getty Center one day, never before having considered photography, stumbling upon William Eggleston’s print of old shoes under a bed and being completely moved and inspired to pick up a camera for the first time.

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Out of 100 nominees from around the world, an international jury has selected photographer Alex Prager, who was showcased at MoMA’s New Photography 2010 exhibition, as winner of the Foam Paul Huf Award 2012. Simon Baker, chairman of the jury, said:

Prager’s work is original, intelligent and seductive. She thoroughly deserves her place in the company of former Foam Paul Huf winners, which is fast becoming a who’s who of contemporary photographic practice.

The annual € 20,000 prize is awarded to a photographer under 35 years of age, who then goes on to present their work in a solo exhibition at the Foam Museum. Prager’s saturated, cinematic, stylized and glamourously surreal photographs will be on view in Amsterdam August 31, 2012 – October 14, 2012.

Foam Amsterdam
Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS
Binnenstad, Netherlands
+31 20 551 6500

Prager will also have a multi-city solo exhibition, Compulsion, on view simultaneously at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, M+B Gallery in LA, and Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, April 5, 2012 – May 19, 2012.  Huffington Post has a behind-the-scenes photo exclusive of the show and Q&A with the photographer.

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
(646) 230-9610

M+B Gallery
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, California 90069
(310) 550-0050

Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place,
London SW3 3TD
+44 (0)20 7352 3649

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

• Art Nouveau magazine interviews artist Hank Willis Thomas, of the monograph Pitch Blackness (Aperture 2008) whose transmedia installation Question Bridge: Black Males is still on view at three different locations around the country, on his latest body of work Strange Fruit which makes ”vivid comparisons of black perception between the pre-slavery era and post-Civil Rights Movement.”
• Joerg Colberg posts on Conscientious Extended about “How To Make a Photobook,” though he admits early on, “My headline is slightly disingenuous: There actually is no simple recipe for photobook making.”
• New York Times‘ Lens blog does a Q&A with Mexico City-based photographer Dominic Bracco II about one of his images “showing death with humanity and dignity,” as well as the Eugene Richards’ photograph from the series “Below the Line: Living Poor in America,” which inspired him.
• Jess Dudley, Wonderful Machine Producer, posts a very informative piece on APhotoEditor, “Pricing and Negotiating – Non-Fiction Book Cover,” in an attempt to elucidate the often murky realm of reproduction rights through a real-life annecdote.
• New Yorker‘s Photobooth profiles “Lost & Found: Salvaging Snapshots in Japan,” with a slideshow of the recovered family photographs from the Japanese town of Yamamoto devastated by the tsunami one year ago, featured in Aperture issue 206, and on view at Aperture Gallery April 2, 2012 – April 27, 2012.
• Time’s Lightbox profiles the independent photo project on Afghanistan (Danger and Aftermath, on view at Museum London in Southwestern Ontario through April 1, 2012),  by Magnum photographer Larry Towell, who’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) and Access to Life (Aperture/Magnum Photos/The Global Fund 2009).
• NPR’s The Picture Show takes “A Peak Inside the Copy Cat Building: Where Baltimore Artists Work – And Live.” Alex Wein and Rob Brulinski’s photographs portray the living spaces of over 100 eclectic new tenants of a building which once housed Copy Cat printing, and was the birthplace of the Crown Cork bottle cap, “a worldwide standard for the beer and soda industries.”

The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation has revealed the 2012 Shortlists for the Best Photography Book Award and the Best Moving Image Book Award of 2012.

Founded by the prolific Hungarian publisher and founder of Focal Press, Andor Kraszna-Krausz, the foundation has, since 1985, identified and celebrated works that make a significant contribution to photographic and moving image scholarship, history, research, criticism, science and conservation. The complete shortlists for the 2012 awards are live, among which you’ll find nods to the exquisite Blind by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (Aperture 191, 142).

An exhibition of the most highly recommended books from each award, curated by the judging panels, will also be on display at Somerset House for the duration of the World Photography Festival and Exhibition from 27 April to 20 May 2012. On view in this juried exhibition will be the Verna Posever Curtis edited Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography (Aperture 2011), a comprehensive, insightful illustrated history of the handmade photo album format—a form of presentation that would become an art form in itself.

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The 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award winners will be announced during the Sony World Photography Awards at the London Hilton, Park Lane, London, on Thursday 26 April.

For more information, visit the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation website.

Purchase Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography ($60, available here).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Room of the Ninja Turtles, 2003, © Roger Ballen

Exhibition on view:
March 22–May 11, 2012

North-West University Gallery
Potchefstroom Campus
548 West 28 St
018 299 4341

Playpen by Roger Ballen is a compilation of over thirty years of documentation of children, the environments they inhabit, their toys, and drawings. These images, a new body of work, Asylum, and an installation constructed specifically for the gallery will be exhibited at North-West University. Ballen’s Playpen explores photography as an art form as it takes on painterly yet sculptural roles and interacts with the viewers own childhood memories and adolescent dreams.

Children’s faces hidden by masks and crude wall drawings eerily linger throughout the black and white images by the South African photographer.

Ballen is featured in Aperture issues 201 and 173. His work also appears in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture, 2011).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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