The highly anticipated, so-called “Google Glasses” were demoed at the I/O conference this week, PetaPixel reports. These camera-equiped goggles, which are set to ship sometime next year, could one day allow point-of-view shooting and instant sharing online. The relatively discreet $1500 device has the potential to bring about the most radical change to street photography since the development of the 35mm film camera.
Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey blogs about packing up and heading off to Les Rencontres d’Arles, ”arguably one of the most important international photography assemblages,” where he’ll be doing free portfolio reviews along with the rest of the staff of Burn Magazine. Additionally at Arles, sixty exhibitions by photographers including Sam Falls, Regine Petersen, and Jonathan Torgovnik, author of the monograph Intended Consequences, are on view through September 23.
Boston‘s The Big Picture shares photos from LGBT pride events taken around the world, some of which were met with violence and intimidation. The New Yorker‘s Photobooth shares a selection of black-and-white images from the 70s and 80s, “Forty-Three Years After Stonewall,” when a riot at a popular Manhattan gay bar in response to a routine police raid ignited the LGBT rights movement.
Feature Shoot shares a terrific hour-long streaming documentary on Magnum Photo founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Just Plain Love,” which features backstories from many famous photographs, directed by Raphaël O’Byrne in 2001.
Photoshop, the Game, otherwise known as LevelUp for Photoshop, which offers the opportunity for users of the software to improve their skills, learn new features, and win prizes, is free online until July 15, 2012, reports John Nack. Maybe by then, you too can be as good as Kelli Connell, whose exhibition Double Life is on view through this Saturday, June 30.
This summer, catch exhibitions by Sam Falls, Regine Petersen, and Jonathan Torgovnik at Recontres d’ Arles (on view through September 23, 2012). Now in it’s 43rd year, Arles, one of the world’s largest photography festivals, is hosting 60 exhibitions, favoring mostly unpublished work, presented by its founders, teachers and photographers as well as curators who have emerged from their influential school at 20 heritage sites in the South of France.
Sam Falls, who’s work was profiled in Aperture #205, is exhibiting a series of images “investigating the medium’s potential as an art form,” he writes, “but [that] also continue exploring photography’s capacity for representation and challenging its veracity.” The exhibition, which is curated by Philip S. Block, showcases photographs that Falls has manipulated with Photoshop, then hand-painted as well. “The question this raises,” Falls states, “beyond specific medium’s ability to represent an object or idea, is the question of perception itself and how we relate today to photography and painting.”
Regine Petersen, one of the photographers featured in Aperture’s Regenerations 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, is exhibiting a series of photographs about meteorites, what she calls “thought images,” that mark her so-called map from the location of the falls and finds, to the personal lives of eye witnesses and descendants. ”Rather than a reconstruction of the events,” she writes, Finding a Falling Star, presented by Olivier Richon, ”is a collection of traces, an investigation into the workings of time, memory and history and an attempt to create a link between the ordinary and the sublime.” Petersen’s limited edition print Ladybug, 2006, a work from an earlier series, is considered typical of her style of “thought image.”
Jonathan Torgovnik‘s Intended Consequences, which is a series of environmental portraits made in Rwanda of women that were brutally raped during the Rwandan genocide and the children they bore from those encounters, was published as a monograph by Aperture in 2009 alongside a DVD produced by MediaStorm of interviews with the subjects. The exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles, presented by Tadashi Ono, is intended to spread these stories to a wider public, in hopes, Torgovnik writes, that “people will be inspired to act and work toward ensuring that similar acts of violence never happen again, and that those families can have a brighter future.”
Gypsies is without a doubt one of the most important works of photography of the 20th century.
Last Thursday, Fondazione FORMA per la fotografia opened the much-anticipated “Gypsies by Josef Koudelka”, a world premier exhibition of the work of Josef Koudelka based on his seminal 20th century monograph, Gypsies, the artist’s 9-year photographic survey of the gypsy communities of Eastern Europe. The exhibition revisits the artist’s original intention for the work, based on the original sequencing and maquette prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris and leaving the book long unpublished. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture, and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of sixty photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia. Robert Delpire is currently the subject of a multi-venue career retrospective exhibition in New York City.
FORMA‘s exhibition of this work calls upon Aperture’s expanded edition, featuring 109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971. Printed under close supervision of the artist, expressly for Forma, the images on view recount the everyday life of gypsy communities in the sixties in Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and occasionally France and Spain.
This exhibit is presented in collaboration with Magnum Photos.
Upwards of 150 photobooks published since 1920 from 11 Latin American countries are on view to the public in Revelaciones. Historia del fotolibro en Latinoaméricaat the Ivorypress Space in Madrid (through July 14, 2012).
While publication of the photobook has been prolific in Latin America across these years, its history has gone largely undocumented. This exhibition, which is curated by Horacio Fernández, author of Aperture’s second so-called “book on books,” The Latin American Photobook(2011), the result of a four-year, cross-continental committee effort, offers visitors a hands-on opportunity to examine a unique and comprehensive survey of rich visual publishing. Books are arranged by the following themes: America before America, History and Propaganda, Urban Photography, Photo Essays, Artist’s Book, Photography and Literature and Contemporary Photography.
Spread from Photography Changes Everything by Marvin Heiferman
Join Aperture and ARTBOOK | D.A.P. for a conversation with Marvin Heiferman, leading photography curator and editor of Photography Changes Everything, and special guests Lois Banner, historian and author of numerous biographies, including MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe and the forthcoming Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox; Leo Braudy, author of many books of cultural history, including The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, and most recently The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon; and Charlotte Cotton, writer and curator.
The panelists will explore photography’s central role in shaping our lives, both public and private, rational and fantastic.
A reception and book signing will follow. Special thanks to Arcana Books on the Arts for being the evening’s bookseller. This event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are required and will be accepted until venue capacity is reached at rsvp@dapinc.com.
Heiferman (editor, Photography Changes Everything, Aperture 2012), has focused on the influence of photographic images on culture and history in projects such as Fame After Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and Image World: Art and Media Culture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989). A contributing editor to Art in America, he serves on the faculty of both the International Center of Photography/Bard College and the School of Visual Art’s MFA programs in photography. He was creative consultant to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative from 2005 to 2011, during which time he conceptualized and curated click! photography changes everything.
Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.
Forty years after AP photographer Nick Ut took the iconic ‘napalm girl‘ photograph in Vietnam, photographer David Burnett writing for the Washington Post reflects on an exposure that could have been his. He was standing mere feet away from the scene, surrounded by journalists, re-loading film into his Leica when he missed what became a most emblematic moment. The entry seems like it might have been a good fit for Will Steacy’s collection Photographs Not Taken, which features similar essays from photographers on moments that never became their pictures.
“Radical change in the photography industry during the past five years has ignited an explosion of photo collectives,” writes James Estrin for the New York Times’ LENS Blog. He explores this recent trend after witnessing an impressive presentation by the newly formed Grain collective at the Look3 Festival in Charlottesville, VA last month. The post offers a good bit of context for this May, 2012 Wired piece: “7 Budding Photo Collectives You Need To Know.”
New Yorker’s PhotoBooth profilesUnderage, an exhibition of work from six emerging photographers in their late teens and early twenties on view at Photoville, an exciting, week-and-a-half-long photography happening which kicks off in Brooklyn this Friday, June 22, and features 60,000 square feet of exhibitions, hands-on workshops, nighttime projections, a “photo dog run,” and a “camera garden.” Find daily programming here.
Time‘s LightBox goes “Behind the Cover: Capturing the American Dream,” exploring the process of the photo shoot for the birds-eye-view cover image by Jeff Minton that illustrates Jon Meacham’s article, “The History of the American Dream,” for this week’s magazine. They also profile Mike Sinclair, whose photographs accompany the same article inside the magazine. His current exhibition, Public Assembly, is on view at Jen Bekman Projects in New York City until June 23, 2012.
Fototazo does another Book Discussion Group Recap on Gerry Badger’s collection of essays, The Pleasure of Good Photographs, this time focusing on “Without Author or Art: The Quiet Photograph,” exploring the restrained work of Stephen Shore, among others.
The Fotojatka festival that traveled to cinemas around the Czech Republic last week screening audiovisual photography slideshows is now offering them free on their website featuring work by Kristoffer Axén, Nikos Economopoulos, Erwin Olaf, and Reiner Riedler.
The Rabbit Hole, At Sea At Night by Kristoffer Axén
Congratulations to Kristoffer Axén, whose images Day Three and The Conversation will join the Photography Collection at the ICP next month. The photographs are part of a new, on-going, series called ‘Events in Nature’ (from which a selection can be viewed at this year’s Tierney Fellowship Exhibition at Photoville, the new Brooklyn-based photo destination).
The Tierney Fellowship was created in 2003 by The Tierney Family Foundation to support emerging artists in the field of photography. Axén will be exhibited among a promising roster of artist, which includes Nicholas Calcott, Luo Dan, Ishaan Dixit, Gabrielle Goliath, Emily Kinni, Bryan Krueger, Carlos Licon, Mack Michael Magagane, Bruno Ruiz, Rubi Rose Siblo-Landsman, Roberto Tondopó, Aubrey Tseleng, and Terttu Uibopuu.
›› The successful Fotojatka festival that traveled to cinemas around the Czech Republic – screening specially produced photographic slideshow – is now over. But, you can still view Kristoffer Axén’s contribution online, featured alongside slideshows by more than a dozen contemporary photographers, amongst them Erwin Olaf, Nikos Economopoulos and Reiner Riedler.
›› For those interested in introducing prints from Kristoffer Axén into their personal collection of photography, we recommend The Rabbit Holefrom the series At Sea At Night, available via Aperture
While many might consider Barbara Kasten, whose portfolio was featured in Aperture136, one of the foremost artists pushing the limits of the photography, she herself considers her work pushing the limits of painting, drawing, and sculpture more through a particular use of photography.
Kasten was one of the artist’s covered in Lyle Rexer’s 2009 volume The Edge of Vision, a history of abstraction in photography that traces the roots of what might be a contemporary revival of the mode to early ‘modernist’ photographers like Aaron Siskind and László Maholy-Nagy. However, as she explains in an interview with The Photography Post, she prefers to distance herself from terms like ‘abstract’ or ‘modernist.’ “What I do,” she says, “is neither a continuation nor a departure from their work but a conceptual event of my own.”
Most non-representational art is an abstraction of some originally recognizable form. Kasten considers her work, on the other hand, “as a process that transforms itself into something else. Beginning with a simple, transparent, non-representational form, I create the image as I work through the possibilities of sculptural and lighting combinations to a new point of perception.”
She photographs assemblages that are built with mirrors, plexiglass, paper, and highly specific lighting situations, not to last, but for the sole purpose of the photograph. She distances her work from the discourse of engaging with the ‘real,’ and levels instead a strict focus on the sheer phenomenon of light.
Her latest exhibition, Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers with sculptor Justin Beal, opening Thursday, June 21, 2012 at Bortolami Gallery in New York (on view through August 3, 2012), is an attempt to explore the ways the artist tends to “mis”-lead the audience’s first reading of the work.
Find more about Kasten’s “approach to photography and what it means to ‘think like a painter’,” in another interview with Anthony Pearson of Frieze Magazine.
“It’ll be as if slices of Korea have somehow dropped into the Jardin des Tuileries,” says Charles Matz, architect and designer of the De Ma Fenêtre mini-museum.
For visitors to Paris’s Louvre Museum a singular temporary structure and exquisite body of work intersect at an unexpected site. From June 27th through July 23rd, the Louvre hosts an unprecedented installation of photographs by South Korean artist Ahae, presented in the southwestern corner of the museum’s adjacent Jardin des Tuileries. The exhibition, De Ma Fenetre (Through My Window), features several hundred photographs selected from nearly two million, taken from a single window in the artist’s South Korea atelier over a three-year period.
In Paris, Charles Matz’s demountable structure will take the form of what is essentially a long, elegant rectangle, a tented pavilion with a wood base mimicking the look of a solid, classical grey granite building:
“After entering the formalist façade at the structure’s north end and passing through a foyer with informational displays about the artist and the exhibition, the visitor is drawn through a series of serene exhibition spaces. Among these spaces are two large, skylit oval galleries (echoing those in the actual Orangerie) that house collections of prints on specific themes. One is devoted to Ahae’s photographs of the sky in all its captivating moods and hues. The other, the Reflection Room, gathers Ahae’s lyrical photographic musings on light and water.
In contrast to the digital C prints in the rest of the exhibition, all of the photographs in these two oval galleries are “watercolor prints”, i.e. printed on watercolor paper that absorbs the inks, giving them a heightened richness and painterly depth of color.
The long central gallery or grand hall that connects the two oval rooms is the site of a pair of De Ma Fenêtre’s most spectacular pieces: two 10 meter x 5 meter lightboxed landscapes: the close-up Maple Trees in Spring and a wide-angle view of the pond directly outside Ahae’s window, the wintry Through My Window.”
“Through the Lens of Candida Höfer,”interview profilecourtesy AsiaAlter
In Lost Places: Sites of photography at Hamberger Kunsthalle in Germany (through September 23, 2012), 20 innovative contemporary photographers respond to the question: ”What happens to real places if a space loses its usual significance and can be experienced on a virtual plane?”
These artists, many who came out of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s renowned Dusseldorf School of Photography, which championed the de-emphasis of the perspective of the photographer and focus on the object’s command over the frame, present the documentation of landscape at a time when traditional notions of “space” and “place,” for better or worse, are rapidly changing.
Artist included in the exhibition are: Thomas Demand (b. 1964), Omer Fast (b. 1972), Beate Gütschow (b. 1970), Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Candida Höfer (b. 1944), Sabine Hornig (b. 1964), Jan Köchermann (b. 1967), Barbara Probst (b. 1964), Alexandra Ranner (b. 1967), Ben Rivers (b. 1972), Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), Gregor Schneider (b. 1969), Sarah Schönfeld (b. 1979), Joel Sternfeld (b. 1944), Thomas Struth (b. 1954), Guy Tillim (b. 1962), Jörn Vanhöfen (b. 1961), Jeff Wall (b. 1946) and Tobias Zielony (b. 1973).
Gursky, Höfer, Ruff, Struth, and Wall were all featured in Stefan Gronert’s large-format volume The Dusseldorf School of Photography(Aperture 2010). In the fascinating video series “Contacts: The Renewal of Contemporary Photography,” Gursky and Wall describe the methodology behind their work.
In 2005, Aperture also published Höfer’s monograph Architecture of Absence, which features her meticulously composed images of public spaces marked with the richness of human activity, yet largely devoid of human presence.
Gütschow, “who constructs cityscapes and landscapers that are reminiscent of well-known places, but that do not allow any true reference” for her photographs in this exhibition, did a monograph with Aperture as well in 2007 called LS/S.
Work by Joel Sternfeld was featured in Aperture issue 192 and 180. Guy Tillim appears in Aperture issue 193.
