Photographer Munemasa Takahashi from the Memory Salvage Project stopped by Aperture during the installation of an exhibition showcasing several hundred family snapshots recovered from the rubble of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami nearly one year ago. In this clip, he introduces Lost & Found: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku on view at the Aperture Gallery Project Room through next Friday, April 27, 2012.

Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Bruce Davidson, Harry Callahan, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Beat Streuli explore the comedy and drama of life in public spaces in I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938-2010 on view in the West Building at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC April 22 – August 5, 2012. Nearly 90 works by masters of the genre, many culled from the gallery’s collection, showcase everyday urban life as subject and source of inspiration.

Walker Evans’ grainy black and white images from Subway Portraits, 1938-1941, feature prominently in the exhibition and provide a compelling counterpoint to Bruce Davidson’s multitude of rich kodachromes from the monograph Subway (Aperture 2011). [A very different project from Davidson's current and exciting endeavor documenting the "Nature of Los Angeles."]

Work by Robert Frank, one of the pioneers of the genre with photos “snapped seemingly mid-stride,” some have said, has also been featured in a similar retrospective exhibition and accompanying photobook, co-published by Aperture and The Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2008, Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950′s to Now.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s work is also featured in The New York Times Magazine Photographs, edited by Kathy Ryan (Aperture 2011).

I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Streets
Exhibition on view:
April 22 – August 5, 2012

National Gallery of Art
Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC
(202) 737-4215

You don’t have to travel to Miami or New York to start collecting. This month, photography enthusiasts in Western Pennsylvania will have access to the PGH Photo Fair, the first annual art fair in Pittsburgh promoting the discussion of photography within the contemporary and fine art market, Saturday, April 21–Sunday, April 22, 2012.

Organized by photography collector Evan Mirapaul, the PGH Photo Fair will play host to selection of internationally known dealers, showcasing museum-quality prints and photo-based art spanning the history of the medium, from 20th Century vintage prints to contemporary photography and photographic book art. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to browse and learn about photography from some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts, while shopping works that range from affordable delights to unique rarities.

“I invited the highest quality dealers I knew,” Mirapaul says. “That was the primary criterion … I wanted to invite dealers that could bring a lot of knowledge and expertise to any conversation with a new audience, but without any high-art attitude.”

Aperture is among the six internationally known dealers that the PGH Photography fair will host throughout the weekend. Join us at the former YMCA building in East Liberty to browse and buy limited-edition prints from Graham Nash, Michelle DuBois, Alfred Steichen, Mark Lyon, 2011 portfolio prize winner Sarah Palmer, and Sophie T. Lvoff, among other notable photographers from the Aperture stable.

Aperture at PGH Photo Fair
Saturday, April 21–Sunday, April 22, 2012
Saturday, April 21: 12:00 – 6:00 pm
Sunday, April 22: 11:00 am– 5:00 pm

FREE

Former YMCA building in East Liberty
120 South Whitfield Street
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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

• Time’s Lightbox profiles ‘Act’: Meditations on the Disabled Body by Denis Darzacq, a two-year project of photographing “people who have had trouble finding a place in society from the beginning of their lives,” he says. The Paris-based photographer known for his high-energy images and dynamic subjects will be giving an artist talk at Aperture this Monday, April 16, 2012 at 6:30 pm, FREE.
• Kathy Ryan, editor of The New York Times Magazine Photographs, shares the fascinating backstory of a photograph of Mohammad Ali with his future wife Lonnie that ran in the Sunday Magazine, taken at “the moment Cassius and I met,”  Lonnie wrote in an email to the photographer, Steve Schapiro.
• The New Yorker‘s photo department shares a collection of reader-submitted, “Hand-Picked Instagrams,” (as Wall Street Journal did last week, and more publications probably will in the future) alongside a thought-provoking essay by Ian Crouch, “Instagram’s Instant Nostalgia.” This, in the same week New York Times’ Bits Blog reports Facebook will buy Instagram for $1 billion.
• The British Journal of Photography reports on a controversial ad campaign for photographers’ rights launched by the French organization Union des Photographes Professionnels – Auteurs. In related news this week, the American Society of Media Photographers has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, PetaPixel reports, for “scanning, indexing, and storing copyright work without permission of the copyright holders” for their ambitions Google Books project.
• DIY gallerists take note: Phototuts+ shares “An Expert Guide to Matting and Framing a Photo,” which should be useful after you’ve watched their video lecture on Ansel Adams–delivered by Allan Ross who was Adams’ darkroom assistant for many years–and printed a bunch of restrained, expertly metered black-and-white landscape photographs of your own.
• American Suburb X shares a number of Nan Goldin readings this week, including an essay by Nan on actress and close friend Cookie Mueller who died of AIDS in 1989, as well as a fascinating in-depth paper by Mihaela Precup, “The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning.” All great reads; our only quibble is: where did they come from? [UPDATE: ASX has appended the source of one of the pieces, created originally by Dirck Halstead at the once-pioneering web journal digitaljournalist.org]
• The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announce their 2012 Fellowships in photography, PDN Pulse reports. Ten photographers, including Doug Dubois of the monograph All the Days and Nights, and John Gossage, whose exhibition The Pond and a Little Romance opens today in Chicago, join the ranks of past recipients Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Richard Mosse, Brian Ulrich, and Penelope Umbrico.

Over the course of twelve years the Affordable Art Fair has transformed the model of the traditional art fair, driving the notion that fine art is within everyone’s reach, showcasing new and emerging artists, galleries, and must-see installations in 11 locations around the world. To date, the roster includes editions in Amsterdam, Bristol, Brussels, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York, North London, Singapore, and Sydney.

Will Ramsay founded the fair in 1999 as an extension of the ‘accessible’ marketing drive evolved from Will’s Art Warehouse, the UK gallery that he has maintained since 1996, and today specializes in selling a wide range of contemporary art priced between £40 and £4,000. In an interview with Table Talk, Ramsay notes, “My aim, when founding the Affordable Art Fair was to break down the barriers of the sometimes stuffy and intimidating art world — giving ‘the terrified’ the opportunity to enjoy and collect art in a fun and informal atmosphere.” He often relays an experience of entering galleries and being met with “frosty reception”, a fear factor that he sought to eliminate in launching the first Affordable Art Fair in London, 1999. This first fair, an instant hit, attracted 87 galleries, 10,000 visitors, and grossed £1 million in sales. Now, a bit more than a decade since its founding, the Affordable Art Fair is an internationally-recognized and leading showcase for contemporary art, having welcomed more than one million visitors as of 2011, and sold over $270 million worth of art.

NEXT WEEK, the UK-based fair makes a return to the art capital of the US for its third annual spring edition, hosting more than seventy unique exhibitors over five days at 7W in New York City. Browse the full list of exhibitors here.

Wednesday through Sunday, join Aperture at the Affordable Art Fair to browse and buy a selection of just-published books, bestsellers, and new limited-edition prints, plus take advantage of a special offer on Aperture-magazine subscriptions.

Thursday, April 19, Aperture will present a talk and walk-through with W. M. HUNT, curator, collector, consultant, teacher, fundraiser, and author of the new Aperture book The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious ($52.50, available here). Join Bill, who is known for his wit and larger-than-life personality, for an entertaining presentation on the art of collecting.

Aperture Booth and The Insider’s Eye:
A Talk and Walk-through with W. M. Hunt
Wednesday, April 18, 2012–Sunday, April 22, 2012

Admission Required

The Affordable Art Fair
7 West 34th Street
New York, New York
(212) 255-2003

Penelope Umbrico on her piece For Sale/TVs From Craigslist at Aperture (May, 2009).

Consumer culture can be an ugly reality to face. Despite what might seem to be an oxymoronic concept, the contemporary sense of self is increasingly predicated on possessive individualism, a self-definition by way of consumption, or more simply put, the thought: ‘I am what I buy.’ Not only has shopping long become a pastime, so too has the proclamation of these purchases across social media.

This consumer culture is what we the audience are confronted with in the work of Penelope Umbrico and Brian Ulrich. On Tuesday, April 17, 2012, two of the most exciting photographers working today, come together for a conversation about how their use of images address this facet of our society. The event will take place at Julie Saul Gallery, where Ulrich currently has his exhibition Is This Place Great or What: Artifacts and Photographs on view through May 5, 2012.

Umbrico’s work over the past few decades offers a radical doubletake on the consumer and vernacular images with which we are bombarded. She aggregates photographs that follow a kind of “script,” compiling thousands of somehow related images found on social media websites like Craigslist and Flickr. Some are selling used products, others are sharing personal but generic vacation moments. All, however, have hints of privacy or intimacy in them. As she explains in the clip above, the used TVs people sell on Craigslist often bear reflections of themselves or their apartments. Her most recognized work Suns From Flickr, which made the cover of her conceptual first monograph from Aperture in Fall, 2011 Penelope Umbrico (photographs), is made up of thousands of found snapshots, generic vacation photos tagged with term “sunset,” cropped down to sun alone, sometimes 5% of the original photograph, and installed on a mural-sized grid.  The monumental result is meant to explore ”what [these images] can tell us about our relationship to photography, technology and each other.”

Ulrich’s work on view at Julie Saul is part of a decade-long exploration of the American consumer landscape for a series called Copia. The project, he explains for Time’s Lightbox, is something he embarked on as a response to the president’s call for the nation to bolster the economy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by way of shopping. The series, comprised in three parts tracking the degradation of this consumer cycle–”Retail,” “Thrift,” and “Dark Stores,”–was also published by Aperture in Fall, 2011 as Ulrich’s first monograph, Is This Place Great or What.

“Retail” features often vibrant candy-colored, mostly medium-format images taken in big box stores. He captured candid moments with the help of a waist-high viewfinder. The nameless shoppers within his frame carry hollow expressions that convey a kind of alienated stupor during the precise moment, Ulrich says, “the Germans call Konsumieren Rausch or Consumer Intoxication.” “Thrift” features more cluttered images of consignment stores and second-hand shops where the original goods are discarded, while “Dark Stores,” features images of derelict, hollowed out, abandoned malls and shopping centers across the country that have shut their doors.

Penelope Umbrico and Brian Ulrich In Conversation
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 6:30 pm
FREE

Julie Saul Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, #6F
New York, New York
(212) 627-2410

Israeli Soldiers Playing Cards, 1997 © Collier Schorr

Exhibition on view:
December 22–June 30, 2012

The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd St
New York, NY
(212) 423-3200

The politics of desire, in public and private, and the search for national, ethnic, and sexual identities are investigated throughout Composed, a permanent exhibition at The Jewish Museum. The show features seven photo-based contemporary artists. Using conventional forms of photography including, portraiture, photojournalism, and online profile pictures, the artists illuminate the complex identities of a wide range of characters, emphasizing stereotypes, in order to obscure individual differences.

Artists featured: Marc Adelman, Gloria Bornstein, AA Bronson, Debbie Grossman, Adi Nes, Collier Schorr, and Rona Yefman.

Collier Schorr appeared in Aperture issue 202 and The New York Times Magazine Photographs.

Courtesy Market Street Productions

“While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent,” Chuck Close says in the clip above for the “Artists & Alchemists” documentary feature, “I think it is the hardest medium in which to have a distinctive personal vision.”

Known for his unparalleled attention to detail in hyperrealist portraiture, Close explains in conveying that vision his predilection for using immensely revealing daguerreotypes, plates that capture just about the widest possible range of highlights and shadows with the use of strobe lights that capture quite literately the power of the sun.

This clip offers a bit of background on the labor intensive process that went into his series A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, on view at the Wichita Art Museum through this Sunday, April 15, 2012. The series features fifteen massive prints of the artist’s world-renowned friends (Cindy Sherman, Philip Glass, James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, to name a few) presented with microscopic intimacy, each alongside a poem by Bob Holman. The work was inspired in part by a collaborative series of lithographs done by poet/curator Frank O’Hara and artist Larry Rivers in the late 50s, as Close explains briefly in the accompanying interview from the 2006 Aperture monograph A Couple of Ways of Doing Something with Lyle Rexer, author of the Edge of Vision.

As photography moves forward becoming more widespread and accessible, in an era when the premium put on absolute originality is largely in question, sometimes reaching back for precedent can be as fruitful as rediscovering archaic technology. Or as Close puts it, “In 1840 virtually everything I love about photography was already there.”

Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something
Through Sunday, April 15, 2012
$7 adults, $5 seniors, and FREE for children

Wichita Art Museum
1400 West Museum Boulevard
Wichita, Kansas
(316) 268-4980

Nan as a dominatrix, 1973 © Nan Goldin / Matthew Marks Gallery

Exhibition on view:
March 29–June 4, 2012

Malba – Fundación Costantini
Avda. Figueroa Alcorta 3415
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzner, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy, and Cady Noland. Seven controversial American artists are featured in Bye Bye American Pie, an exhibition exploring the ever-evolving facets of American culture: economics, politics, and America as an ideal.

Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the work resonates and critiques the changing state of U.S. culture from the 1970s to the present. With these world-renowned artists together in a single exhibition, a provocative survey of American cultural history is offered, celebrated, and gives way to analyze the deconstruction of multiple subcultures reinforced by television and Hollywood.

Nan Goldin’s Aperture published book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is available here and was most recently featured in Aperture issue 197. Barbara Kruger was featured in issue 138.

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

• The New York Times covers Mary Ellen Mark’s series Prom, first featured in Aperture issue 187, now a monograph by Getty Publications, and shares a trailer from Martin Bell’s accompanying documentary. The Sunday Review publishes an essay by Mark, “Prom Night,” and posts a slideshow of images from the series. LensBlog follows up with a Q&A with the photographer on shooting with one of five existing, finicky, but rewarding 20×24 Polaroid Land Cameras for this series and her earlier monograph Twins (Aperture 2005).
• In their weekly Modern Art Notes Podcast, ArtInfo‘s Tyler Green talks to Mitch Epstein, who he calls “one of America’s most prominent and most honored photographers,” about shifting focus from American Power to trees in New York City, now on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea. Epstein will be in conversation with Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla of the Shared Vision collection at Aperture on Wednesday, April 11, 2012.
• “Is your phone’s camera the only camera you need?” asks the Wall Street Journal, profiling new apps and accessories that make that possible. They also share cell phone snapshots by professional photojournalists, and invite readers to do the same.
• “In an environment where seconds count, there are glorious triumphs and heartbreaking defeats,” writes Michael M. Grynbaum for LensBlog on staff photographer Richard Perry‘s hectic images from the New York City subway. Can’t help but think back to Bruce Davidson’s series from the 1980s and resulting monograph Subway (Aperture 2011), save for the striking dissimilarities between now vastly different transit systems.
• Simon Bray shares a few key points on Phototuts+ on “Why Returning To A Photographic Location Is Such A Good Idea,” whether it’s months, weeks, days, or hours apart. It’s something Richard Misrach did when he began a three year project photographing the same scene from his from porch at all hours of the day for the monograph Golden Gate, which is soon to be released by Aperture as a stunning 16×20″ oversized edition.
• Fototazo interviews Luca Desienna, Chief Editor of Gomma Magazine, on the occasion of the announcement of the eight winners of the call for entries for their exciting new publication of black and white photography MONO, Volume 1 (November 2012). Lightbox at Time shares a slideshow of images by the winners and explains briefly what entailed Gomma’s “search for the best  new black-and-white photographers.”
• The National Press Photographers Association launched a new blog, Ethics Matters, opening up the often circular discussion on how much image manipulation is too much, focusing specifically on new HDR technology which allows cameras to combine multiple frames into a single image, often for a more saturated color effect. This, as Aperture is in the process of acquiring a HDR camera for our own digital media reporting purposes. Stay tuned!