The photography of Penelope Umbrico is often described as offering a sort of “radical reinterpretation” of photographic practice, or shedding “a radical new light” on the medium, conceptually, formally, and in several ways between. The artist produces by means of “aesthetic and conceptual chops,” famously appropriating images found using search engines and picture sharing websites, translating the digital realm’s relentless flow of images into conceptual works of photography.

FoMu’s upcoming exhibition of this particularly new course of photographic practice places Umbrico’s work in good company. From Here On, on view June 6 through September 30 2012, features an international roster of artists who create their work with the overload of digital images they find on the internet.

“They recycle, clip and cut pictures from Google Earth, Google Street View, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Does this mean that traditional photography is dead? With this exhibition, FoMu opens the debate on issues such as copyright, authorship, privacy and the future of photography.”

From Here On
June 22 through September 30, 2012
FoMu – Photo Museum
Antwerp, Belgium

From Here On shows the work of artists such as Hans Aarsman (NL, °1951), art collective Leo Gabin (BE), Constant Dullaart (NL, °1979), Mishka Henner (UK, °1976), Thomas Mailaender (FR, °1979), Willem Popelier (NL, °1982), Doug Rickard (US, °1968), Andreas Schmidt (DE, °1967), Pavel MariaSmejkal (CZ, °1957), Penelope Umbrico (US, °1957), Corinne Vionnet (SH, °1969) and HermanZschiegner (DE, °1971).

Curators: Clément Cheroux (FR, curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), Joan Fontcuberta (ES, explores the conflict between nature, technology, photography and truth), Erik Kessels (NL, Creative Director communications agency KesselsKramer, Amsterdam and London), Martin Parr (UK, Magnum photographer) and Joachim Schmid (DE, has been working with found photography since 1980).
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›› Refer to our previous Penelope Umbrico-centric stories for more information and media surrounding this artist’s body of digital work.
›› View From Here On curator and Magnum photojournalist Martin Parr in conversation with Rinko Kawauchi.
›› Buy Penelope Umbrico (Photographs) for 20% off.

Footage from the opening reception at Von Lintel Gallery. Courtesy NYC Gallery Openings.

Marco Breuer, otherwise known as the “photographer without a camera,” has built a strong reputation over the course of the last 20 years exploring lens-less “photogenic” art. While many photographers today are employing more and more complex technology in their work, the German conceptual artist and 2006 Guggenheim fellow says his is an “ongoing attempt to strip down the photographic process, to remove the distractions of equipment, and to force imagery out of photographic paper itself.”

His latest solo exhibition Condition (on view at Von Lintel Gallery through June 23, 2012) presents work he made in and out of the darkroom, stressing photographic paper by exposing it to heat, light, and physical abrasion with “coal, sandpaper, heat guns, burning swaths of cotton, electric frying pans, and other unexpected objects,” as one interviewer catalogues.

Ranging from small photographic sketches, to larger 30 by 40-inch prints, “every individual piece constitutes a search, a move away from the given, a test of the materials’ limits,” the press release states. He fuses image and medium, “rendering them inseparable, one and the same.”

In 2007, Aperture published his monograph Early Recordings, the first comprehensive look at his boldly experimental work, alongside a limited edition slip-cased book which comes with a unique-to-each-edition Polaroid print. His work is also featured in Lyle Rexer’s sold out book, The Edge of Vision (Aperture 2009).

Read John Yau’s review of Breuer’s solo exhibition on HyperAllergic. View installation shots and photos from the opening reception on May 10, 2012 on the Von Lintel Gallery blog. And read interviews with the artist about his work on ARTLOG and on MPR.

Marco Breuer: Condition
Exhibition on view:
May 10 – June 23, 2012

Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23 Street
New York, New York 10011
(212) 242-0599

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

• The National Press Photographers Association announce “The Best of Photojournalism 2012,” this week. For aspiring hopefuls, the Photo Brigade posts “10 Tips for Photojournalism Students,” and Phototuts+ shares an article on “Building a Narrative Through Photojournalism.” The British Journal of Photography reports that the Carmignac Gestion Foundation is currently calling for entries for its annual Photojournalism Award, which comes with a €50,000 grant.
• New York Times‘ LENS blog profiles Binh Danh who works with a fascinating chemical-free alternative process known as chlorophyl printing–using sunlight to burn in monochrome images onto leaves, grass and other vegetation. His series “Immortality, The Remnants of the Vietnam and American War” features a decade of work printing images of “suffering civilians, soldiers on patrol and the dead,” in an attempt to recapture the experience of that war.
• A wide-ranging conversation about the ethics of conflict photography and how images are sold commercially has sprung up around the use of an image licensed to Lockheed Martin. Read Ron Haviv and VII responses to the initial criticism raised by Benjamin Chesterton of Duckrabbit, who takes issue with the use of a Haviv image commercially licensed by the arms manufacturer. Further commentary and assessment on the thorny issues of how to make, sell, and use — or not — images created during conflict are added by Michael Shaw, Colin Pantall, and Stella Kramer…
• Photo District News posts “Favorite Sources of New Photography” Part 1 and Part 2, a feature in which they ask photo editors from publications like The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, New York, Time, The New Yorker, and many more including our own publisher Lesley A. Martin, where they find inspiration for new work.
• What effect might increased scrutiny or transparency over digital image manipulation have on our visual culture? Poytner reports that a new software suite is in development by the former Adobe product manager for Photoshop that would detect the alteration of digital images. AdWeek explores what effect these attitudes might have on commercial photography in the wake of the pivotal ruling by the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus that a certain fashion ad was not “truthful and accurate” and thus a “public health hazard.”
• More on Richard Misrach this week, whose monograph Golden Gate is soon to be reissued by Aperture on the occasion of the anniversary of the bridge, which turned 75 last Sunday. Time’s LightBox profiles “Revisiting the South: Richard Misrach’s Cancer Alley,” on view at the High Museum from June 2, 2012, as does CNN Photos with a slightly different slideshow edit. The series features images from his other upcoming collaborative photobook with Kate Off, Petrochemical America, profiled by the Huffington Post in “Beautiful Ambivalence: The World Through the Lens of Richard Misrach.”
• In exploring the future of photography, Hilde Van Gelder looks at its past in “What Has Photography Done?” on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching. She outlines two dominant tracks–the “autonomous pictorial art,” that gets absorbed into the museum and the canon, and that which “comments on the social and economic reality in which we live and thus actively take[s] part in transformative social processes,”–and opens up a conversation on the public funding of institutions.