Upwards of 150 photobooks published since 1920 from 11 Latin American countries are on view to the public in Revelaciones. Historia del fotolibro en Latinoamérica at 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.

The publication of The Latin American Photobook, which followed the success of Aperture’s 2009 Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s, is part of an ongoing effort to support the growing appreciation and connoisseurship of the photobook as an artistic form in it of itself. The text is reviewed by Photo-eye Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, and Memory in Latin America.

Spanish-speakers can find reviews of the exhibition in Madrid on El País.

Revelaciones. Historia del fotolibro en Latinoamérica
Exhibition on view:
Through July 14, 2012

Ivorypress Space
C/Comandante Zorita 48 – 46 28020
Madrid, Spain
+34-91-4490961

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.

Photography Changes Everything: A Conversation with Marvin Heiferman, with special guests Lois Banner, Leo Braudy, and Charlotte Cotton
Thursday, June 28, 2012, 7:00 pm
FREE, RSVP required (rsvp@dapinc.com)

ARTBOOK | Paper Chase showroom
Hollywood, California

Special thanks to the evening’s bookseller, Arcana Books on the Arts.

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 profiles Underage, 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.
• A few things on street photography this week. Blogger and photographer Blake Andrews, who is interviewed by LPV Magazine here, reviews Cedar Pasori’s recently published “50 Greatest Street Photographers Right Now,” with an extensive selection of images. PetaPixel posts the highly informative video by Portland-based photographer Jimmy Hickey, “How to Photograph Complete Strangers” and the free 31-day “program” and e-book by street photographer Eric Kim, “Overcoming Your Fear of Street Photography in 31 Days.” This fall, we’re very excited to be publishing a monograph by Doug Rickard, “A New American Picture,” which offers a radical rethinking of street photography–photographs re-taken in Google’s Street View.
• 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.

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 Tierney Fellowship Exhibition
Opening | Friday June 22, 7 to 10PM, on view through July 1
Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York City

›› 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 Hole from the series At Sea At Night, available via Aperture

Barbara Kasten on her work Studio Construct 17 in The Edge of Vision Interview Series by Aperture Foundation.

While many might consider Barbara Kasten, whose portfolio was featured in Aperture 136, 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.

Constructs, Abrasions, Melons and Cucumbers
Opening reception:
Thursday June 21, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Exhibition on view:
Through August 3, 2012

Bartolami Gallery
520 West 20 St
New York, NY
(212) 727-2050

“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.

Iterations of  Through My Window have been exhibited in venues throughout the world, including Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal, New York City and The National Gallery, Prague.  This month’s groundbeaking Louvre exhibition is however set apart, installed within a bespoke exhibition pavilion—the first that the museum has allowed for a solo artist’s exhibition— designed by the planning and creative direction firm Charles Matz. Matz had been the creative force behind previous installations of  Through My Window, as well as the The Official City of New York – 911 Memorial Exhibition at Ground Zero.

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.”

 

›› Take a sharper look at Through My Window via The Prague Post and NYC Loves NYC

Through My Window: Photography By Ahae
June 27 through July 23, 2012
Musée du Louvre / Jardin Des Tuileries
Paris, France

“Through the Lens of Candida Höfer,” interview profile courtesy 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.

Lost Places: Sites of Photography
Exhibition on view:
June 8 – September 23, 2012

Hamberger Kunsthalle
GlockengieBerwall 20095
Hamburg, Germany
+49 (0) 40-428-131-200

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

• “MediaStorm broke new ground in digital publishing on Tuesday,” writes Jonathan D. Woods for Time‘s Lightbox, “with the launch of a pay-per-story video player, one of the industry’s most exciting attempts to capitalize on the strength of multimedia productions.” The company’s founder Brian Storm explains the decision to start charging viewers $1.99 for their latest premium multimedia content.  Maggie Steber, whose piece “Rite of Passage,” is one of the first offered under this arrangement, responds to early critics of the new publishing model.
• Kathy Ryan, for The New York Times‘ 6th Floor blog, covers the Alex Webb interview with Geoff Dyer at last weekend’s Look3 Festival, offers some choice quotes and a selection of images that appeared in the photographer’s retrospective monograph The Suffering of Light (Aperture 2011). PhotoShelter Blog offers a more extensive “Look3 Festival Round-Up,” in journal format with images of some of the exhibition spaces.
• Joerg Colberg publishes a piece on Conscientious called “Photography After Photography (A Provocation)” which addresses the question, “Now that we’ve done all that stuff that you can see in history-of-photography books, now that we’ve become obsessed with re-creating that past over and over again – how can we turn around, to look at and move into the future?” It garnered a bit of attention and a response from Fototazo titled “What Is Progress in Photography Today?“
• PetaPixel posts this video of a talk that Lytro founder Ren Ng gave at TEDxSanJoseCA last month on the future of photography, exploring how his company’s revolutionary camera which allows users to “shoot now, focus later,” will change the art form.  They also shared a nice info-graphic this week, “A Shapshot of the Photography Industry” which illustrates just how rapidly technology has revolutionized the field. In 2000, 99% of photography was analog. Today, that number is more like 1%.
• LIFE publishes “Father’s Day Special: Life with Famous Dads,” featuring a slideshow of images from their archive, NYTimes’ LENS Blog takes a look at work by Zun Lee, “Exploring African American Fatherhood,” and NPR’s The Picture Show profiles the highly compelling photographs by Timothy Archibald–”Frustrated By Autism, A Father Turns To Photos“–which explore not his son’s diagnosis, but their ensuing relationship.

Boxer’s Hands, 1933 © Willard Van Dyke

Exhibition on view:
June 16–September 30, 2012

Monterey Museum of Art
559 Pacific Street
Monterey, CA
(831) 372-5477

Group f/64 was a pioneer photography crew of seven residing in northern California. They abandoned the soft-focus, pictorial style of photography popularized in the early twentieth century and instead promoted “straight” photography, communicating by means of realism, high contrast, and extreme detail. Monterey Museum of Art presents In Sharp Focus: The Legacy of Monterey Photography, which examines Group f/64 and their successors. Legendary artists Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Alma Lavenson, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston are included in the exhibition. These photographers transformed American photography by relinquishing interpretive manipulation by progressing towards pure, sharp images with a maximum depth of field. Joining these legendary artists will be works by: Henry Gilpin, Rod Dresser, John Sexton, and Michael Kenna.

One of the founding members of Aperture and Group f/64 Ansel Adams is featured in Aperture issues 169 and 168. Cunningham’s work can be seen in the Aperture published, The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious. Weston is featured in Aperture issues 188 and 140, appears in Aperture published The Edge of Vision as well as Edward Weston: Nudes.

Over 900 photos | 30 photographers from Québec and elsewhere, recognized or emerging | 20 activities in the presence of photographers | 14 host municipalities in the Gaspé

On the theme of “Shaping the Course,” the third edition of Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie en Gaspésie, being held in the summer of 2012, is an invitation to travel the Gaspé Peninsula and follow the artistic trajectory of over 30 photographers from the region and elsewhere.

The holding of Rencontres here means that a tour of the Gaspé amounts to a trip around the world. “Our objective is to inhabit the huge Gaspé territory, and to use all the means placed at our disposal to present and champion artists’ work,” emphasizes Rencontres executive and artistic director Claude Goulet.

The focus of Rencontres this year is the role of the artist in society, the idea being to provide experiences for the eye and food for thought while addressing different esthetics, different probings of the landscape, the environment, the region and the representation of day-to-day life.

From August 18 to 25, professional week is taking place, which will bring together all the photographers participating in Rencontres around the subject of creation. That week constitutes a unique opportunity for the public to meet – at projections, workshops and lectures – the more than 30 professional and emerging photographers from the Gaspé, elsewhere in Québec, and from Canada, the United States and Europe.

The public can visit the photographic installations and exhibits from July 6 to September 10 in the 14 host municipalities: Cap-Chat, Marsoui, Rivière-à-Claude, Grande-Vallée, Gaspé, Percé, Chandler, Paspébiac, Bonaventure, New Richmond, Maria, Carleton-sur-Mer, Nouvelle and Matapedia.

Rencontres internationales de la photographie en Gaspésie is an invitation to come and meet these artists in a region where photographs and landscapes unite around an artistic project. For further details: photogaspesie.ca.

RENCONTRES INTERNATIONALES DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE EN GASPÉSIE
3rd Edition: Shaping The Course
Exhibitions : July 6 through September 12, 2012
Professional Week : August 18 through 25, 2012

›› View video interviews featuring guest photographers here.
›› View a full schedule of the summer’s events here.

© Anja Neidringhaus, At War
© Vanessa Winship, Georgia
© Jocelyne Alloucherie, Sirènes, 511 Gallery, New York