Last October, upon the launch of The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture 2011), author/collector W.M. Hunt—known for his wit and (truly) larger-than-life personality—debuted A Life in Photographs and Other Digressions… A live monologue accompanied by images from his collection and video from his past, this event was a wry, uproarious rumination on Hunt’s many years of collecting, on his life in photographs.

Not necessarily by popular demand, but at his own insistence, Hunt will recreate this unique performance piece at Aperture Gallery on Tuesday, March 27. This evening with Hunt promises to be one of information and digression, bringing to light many of the names and stories left out of the book.

The book, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture 2011), presents a wonderfully idiosyncratic and compelling collection of photographs assembled around a particular theme: magical, heart-stopping images of people in which the eyes are obscured, veiled, or otherwise hidden. The pictures are characterized by what, at first glance, the subjects conceal, not by what the camera reveals. Tuesday night however, Hunt’s revelations are at the core of the program.

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The Unseen Eye: A Life in Photographs and Other Digressions…
A Multimedia Performance Piece with W. M. Hunt
Tuesday, March 27, 7:00 pm
FREE

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

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious (Aperture 2011) by W.M. Hunt will be available for purchase at the Aperture Bookstore the night of the event ($52.50, available for online purchase here).

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

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

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

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

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

Rinko Kawauchi in Conversation with Martin Parr, Courtesy of Photoworks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• LensBlog explores why Rodrigo Abd‘s photograph of a young Syrian boy expressing grief over the death of his father landed on the front page of three of the most prominent national papers in the United States.

• Time magazine’s photo blog Lightbox celebrated it’s one year anniversary, revisiting their first post and the continuing saga of War is Personal by legendary photojournalist Eugene Richards, of the controversial 1994 Aperture monograph Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.

• Conscientious, GalleristNY and LVP Magazine weigh in on Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MOMA and on the “unanimity” among critics in New York reviewing it.

• One year after a devastating tsunami hit the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, The New York Times does a “Side-by-Side look at Distruction and Renewal.” The Big Picture at Boston.com, Huffington Post, National Geographic, and The New Yorker ran similar posts, as did Time’s Lightbox, featuring a slideshow of photos by James Nachtwey, whose work is in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) edited by Kathy Ryan.

• NPR prompts the question: “You know Ansel, But Who is Robert Adams (And Why Should You Care)?” Bob Adams, of the recently reissued Aperture monographs The New West and Summer Nights, Walking, has a traveling retrospective The Place We Live now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Sarah Palmer was just announced winner of the Aperture 2011 Portfolio Prize for her series As a Real House. Read her 2009 review of Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain, Robert Adam’s Summer Nights and Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy, from when she was editor at Metropolis Magazine.

• Finally, Jonathan Blaustein‘s intensely personal column on APhotoEditor.com reviewing Donald Weber‘s beautifully put together photobook Interrogations is one of the best-written posts we’ve read all week. Interrogations will also be reviewed in the upcoming second issue of The Photobook Review.

Aperture is delighted to honor 2011 Portfolio Prize winner—Sarah Palmer—as well as four runners up: Thibault Brunet, Lisa Lindvay, Andrew McConnell, and Louie Palu. The work of these exceptional photographers has been chosen from nearly one thousand portfolio entries from around the world.

The 2011 Portfolio Prize site is now live, featuring five full slideshow galleries featuring the work of this year’s finalists, biographical notes, and elucidatory statements written by members of the judging panel—including Publisher, Lesley A. Martin, and Editor, Denise Wolff—casting an editorial eye on the work of each 2011 finalist.

We are also pleased to offer new limited-edition prints by winner Sarah Palmer, and finalist Andrew McConnell in our online shop.

Featured at top: The Bomb (Also) is a Flower by Sarah Palmer, $600, available here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tautira, Tahiti (4510702), 2010, © Guy Tillim

Exhibition on view:
Through March 17, 2012

James Harris Gallery
312 2nd Ave. S.
Seattle, WA
(206) 903-6220

South African photographer Guy Tillim is appearing in his first solo exhibition in the United States at the James Harris Gallery in Seattle, WA. Second Nature synthesizes the beauty of the French Polynesian landscape and discerning art historical references such as Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian ‘primitive’ paintings.

Tillim has deviated from his background documenting the effects of South Africa’s apartheid, child soldiers, famine, death, and decay. He now provides us with idealistic, romantic views of sprawling landscapes bestrewn with a contemporary human presence contradictory to the environment. Panoramic views and day-to-day minutiae make up this exhibition of six, large-scale photographs.

A book of these photographs titled Second Nature will be published by Prestel.

Tillim was featured in Aperture issue 193.

A1-29 (A1-The Great North Road), 1982, © Paul Graham

Photographer Paul Graham has been named the 2012 recipient of the Hasselblad Award, the first British photographer to win the prominent international prize.

Graham, hailing from Buckinghamshire, is a pioneer of color documentary photography in 1980’s Britain, influencing successive generations of young photographers. Self-taught, he grew up studying the works of American pioneers, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Paul Strand. A-1 The Great Road North, a color series shot along the British motorway and Beyond Caring, a string of photographs shot in unemployment offices, were projects that brought Graham to critical and international acclaim in the early 80’s.

More recently, Graham’s work has become purposely abstruse as he challenges preconceived notions of the ‘style’ of documentary photography. The most exaggerated example is American Night. The series, shot in 2003, explores social and racial issues of the United States through over-exposed images that appear almost invisible. “The photography I most respect pulls something out of the ether of nothingness,” Graham states. American Night is featured in Graham’s body of work that is a part of the exhibition trilogy, The Present, now being exhibited at the Pace/MacGill gallery in New York City.

With the acceptance of this award, Graham joins the ranks of noted past winners and Aperture published photographers, Robert Adams, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin.

Graham discusses his career and fresh photography in Aperture issue 199.

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Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla’s collection of iconic photography drew a crowd to Aperture Gallery Tuesday night for the opening reception of Shared Vision presented by MOCA, on view through Saturday, April 21, 2012.

The exhibition, featuring work by Robert Adams, Eugène Atget, Minor White, Walker Evans, Loretta Lux, Sally Mann, Richard Misrach and more, was culled from one of the world’s best private collections of photography 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. It’s also accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by MOCA and produced by Aperture Foundation, featuring a selection of images from the collection, historical context and curatorial remarks.

Of course, the show wouldn’t be complete without the help of our many  indispensable Work Scholars.  Regan Hillman shares what her experience behind the scenes was like.

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As the Exhibitions Work Scholar, I had the great opportunity to handle and hang this amazing selection of photographs from Sondra and Celso’s collection.

The process of getting the exhibition on the wall included many steps.  First, paper cut-outs of the works, scaled to one-seventh of the original size (including the frame) were organized into their respective sections and arranged on paper walls also scaled to one-seventh of those at our gallery in Chelsea.  Because we could move our paper replicas into different orders and arrangement, this mock-up version helped us to get a visual of how the photographs would look when installed.  After a paper layout was completed, I made a virtual rendering of the space in a computer program that allows you to build a space using the measurements of the gallery and import the pictures onto the walls.  While the paper mock-up could be moved around easily, the virtual rendering from the computer program gave us a sense of how the space would look in three dimensions.

To prepare the text for the exhibition we worked closely with the Design and Copy Editing departments to produce captions and an extensive gallery guide.  Then the many, many crates and boxes containing the exhibition arrived.  The hanging process, though tedious, went smoothly with the help of our installation team.  I loved walking into the gallery each morning and seeing another section hanging on the wall.

It was extraordinarily rewarding to see the process through from beginning to end.  What had started out as multitude of one-inch square images on a checklist, eventually—with much work and deliberation—became an exhibition: visually engaging, full of information, and with a wealth of original examples from the history of photography.

Regan Hillman is a pursuing a Master’s degree in Art History at CUNY Hunter College.  She received her B.A. in Painting and Art History at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.  She plans to write her M.A. thesis this summer on modern and contemporary painters who have made stained glass windows for Gothic cathedrals. When not busy at Aperture or school, Regan enjoys exploring her Brooklyn neighborhood and the green expanses of Prospect Park.