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

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.

As part of our sixtieth anniversary celebration, Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with our partners, presents the exhibition Delpire & Co. featuring a half century of achievement in the life and career of visionary French publisher, editor, and curator Robert Delpire.

Over the past sixty years, the eyes and instincts of Robert Delpire have shaped much of the world’s understanding of photography. A prolific publisher and exhibition organizer, with a razor-sharp comprehension of the graphic arts, Delpire has had a defining hand in the careers of many of the master photographers of recent history.

Delpire & Co. (Delpire et Cie in the original French) was one of the highlights of the Rencontres d’Arles in summer 2009, and was subsequently given a major presentation at la Maison Européenne de la Photographie (related video) in Paris from October 2009 to January 2010—to which Vingt Paris Magazine said, “Savor it”—with the continued support of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

The exhibition showcases Delpire’s rise to prominence in the world of photography through his pioneering and seminal work in magazine (see: Neuf, Le Nouvel Observateur, Photo Poche) and book publishing—titles including Gypsies (Aperture 2011) and Koudelka (Aperture 2007)— films, curatorship, and advertising for the past fifty years.

Delpire & Co. will be divided among four different venues, creating altogether a comprehensive exhibition on Delpire’s many initiatives. Howard Greenberg Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery will also have exhibitions concurrently on view in celebration of Robert Delpire’s life and work.

–––

Delpire & Co. Exhibition
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
6:00–8:00 pm
Exhibition on view: Thursday, May 10, 2012–Thursday, July 19, 2012

FREE

Aperture Gallery
New York, New York

›› Click here for details on all the exhibitions and events.
›› Join the conversation on Instagram and Twitter using #Delpire
›› Buy Gypsies, Photographs by Josef Koudelka w/ essay by Will Guy for 30% off.

With many noteworthy projects on the horizon, this May Aperture Foundation has the pleasure of announcing the exciting addition of three members to staff, David Yu, Barbara Escobar, and Katie Clifford.

David Yu / Development Director

David Yu joins Aperture with more than sixteen years of experience in partnership-building and fundraising, playing a pivotal role in reshaping the corporate sponsorship program at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, also managing the conception, creative development, and implementation of ground-breaking special events for the foundation, including projects based in New York City, Paris, and Dubai, as well as the celebrated TWO x TWO for AIDS Art Gala and Auction.

Prior to his tenure at amfAR, David managed the significant growth of special events at inMotion, Inc., including its popular Annual Photography Auction and Benefit. David successfully increased fundraising revenue by nearly 70% over three years, generating millions of dollars in support of inMotion’s missions and programs.

Aperture Foundation Executive Director, Chris Boot notes:

“This is a key role in the organization, at a time of rapid development and change, and I am thrilled that David will be joining us. He will help build good relationships for Aperture in many directions, and will bring a lot of energy to the planning of our 60th Anniversary gala and auction this October – an important moment for us. He has the ambition, skills, personality, and contacts, to really make something of the opportunities at Aperture, and I am very much looking forward to working with him. Please join me in welcoming David to Aperture”.

David holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University

Barbara Escobar / Publicity and Events Manager

We also welcome Barbara Escobar to the post of Publicity and Events Manager at Aperture Foundation.  Prior to working in marketing at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York, Ms. Escobar worked as Gallery Manager at Transformer in Washington, DC, where she led public relations for the contemporary art non-profit’s exhibitions and programs.

Barbara holds an MA in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Art History and Philosophy from Catholic University.

Katie Clifford / Executive Assistant

Lastly, Katie Clifford will be joining Aperture Foundation as Executive Assistant to Chris Boot. Katie has several years experience in photography, having worked as assistant to Elliott Erwitt, Eric Franck and, at Hotshoe Magazine, to Melissa DeWitt.

Please contact Barbara Escobar at bescobar(at)aperture.org or 212.946.7123 for further information.

2011 © Simon Norfolk

The Crawford Art Gallery presents Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk. Burke was the first photographer to make pictures in Afghanistan while accompanying British forces in the late 1880’s. Fast forward to present day, Norfolk’s work follows the footsteps of Burke. His images are a contemporary response to Burke’s war scenes, presented alongside one another, modern parallels and similar vantage points included.

Accompanying the exhibition is a short film by Simon Norfolk, which discusses John Burke’s photography and both of their relationships with Afghanistan.

Simon Norfolk has appeared in Aperture issue 188 and is featured in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011).

Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk
April 20–June 30, 2012

Crawford Art Gallery
Emmet Place
Cork City, Ireland
+353 (0)21 480 5042

———

›› Buy The New York Times Magazine Photographs ($52.50, available here)
›› Order Aperture 188 ($14.80, available here)