Watch live streaming video from lesrencontresdarles at livestream.com.

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in it’s 43rd year, Arles, one of the world’s largest photography festivals, is hosting 60 exhibitions, favoring mostly unpublished work, presented by its founders, teachers and photographers as well as curators who have emerged from their influential school at 20 heritage sites in the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.”

Rencontres d’ Arles
Festival runs:
July 2 – September 23, 2012

Contact
34 rue du docteur Fanton
13200 Arles
33 (0) 4 90 96 76 06

This past weekend Aperture work-scholar’s made the trip up to Woodstock, New York to visit The Center for Photography at Woodstock as well as to see the Slideluck Potshow (a traveling photography slide show and potluck celebration) which was hosted at the Center that evening. CPW Executive director Ariel Shanberg gave work-scholars a tour of the center and discussed the different kinds of resources the Center provides for the international photography community, including residencies, juried publications and exhibitions, workshops with master photographers and darkroom and digital labs.

The Center for Photography at Woodstock’s gallery space is open to the public and this Saturday the second part of a two part exhibition curated by Aperture’s Lesley A. Martin goes on view. The show is called Either/And and it considers our contemporary moment in photography in two installments: The New Skew (June 12 – July 18) and The New Docugraphics (July 26 – August 29).

The New Docugraphics
Opening reception 5:00 – 7:00 PM Saturday, July 24
On view July 26 – August 29

The Center for Photography at Woodstock
59 Tinker Street,
Woodstock, NY, 12498
(845)-679-9957

Click here to learn more about Aperture’s work-scholar program

Click here to read more about the exhibition Either/And at CPW

Submit to Hey, Hot Shot! A Jen Bekman Project, Photography Competition by Thursday, June 17th and win a collection of Aperture Books. This year’s guest curator, Aperture’s own Lesley A. Martin, Publisher of Aperture’s Book Program, and a HHS! panelist will be reviewing all entries submitted and will select one photographer to receive an incredible selection of books. View more information here!

Featured books included are: Words Without Pictures by Charlotte Cotton, Sawdust Mountain by Eirik Johnson, Winter Stories by Paolo Ventura, Photography After Frank by Philip Gefter, Legacy by Joel Meyerowitz, Explosions, Fires, and Public Order by Sarah Pickering and the trade edition of  Kamaitachi by Eikoh Hosoe

Since its inception in 2005, Hey, Hot Shot!, an international photography competition, has provided one hundred and twenty-nine photographers from all over the world with unrivaled exposure, support and recognition. This year marks the 5th anniversary of the competition and the 7th anniversary of Jen Bekman Gallery. Prizes include a $5,000 honorarium, inclusion in a two-week exhibition and five Curator’s Choice Awards.

See past winners here including Nina Berman, Aperture Portfolio Prize runner-up Alejandro Cartagena, and Cara Philips, to name a few.

Apply Here. Good Luck!

Pinacate by Sarah Palmer

The Center for Photography at Woodstock’s 2010 Photography Now exhibit Either/And, curated by Aperture’s Lesley A. Martin, is currently on view. Culling from submissions of artist’s work, the exhibit considers “What defines contemporary practice?” in two parts.

The first part of the exhibit entitled The New Skew opened this weekend and highlights conceptual works that challenge photographic traditions by artists Erica Allen, Gabriel Garcia Roman, Matthew Gamber, Sarah Palmer, Jordan Tate, Rachel Bee Porter, Charles Shotwell, Amy Stevens, Sam Falls and Laura Wulf.

Part two of the exhibit, which opens July 26th, is entitled The New Docugraphics and brings together artist’s Cynthia Bittenfield, Jennifer Wilkey, Brook Reynolds, Natan Dvir, Eric White, Heather O’Brien, Thomas Gardiner, Tony Chirinos, Mike Mergen, whom explore personal and timely issues and events within a documentary framework.

On view during both shows will be a digital slideshow of images from their counterparts.

Photography Now: Either/And

The New Skew
June 12 – July 18
The New Docugraphics
July 26 – August 29
Opening reception Saturday, July 24th from 5:00-7:00 pm

The Center for Photography at Woodstock
59 Tinker Street
Woodstock, New York
845-679-9957

The following contribution is offered as part of the unfolding conversation about the future of photobooks, a crowd-sourced blog initiated by Miki Johnson from RESOLVE and Andy Adams from Flak Photo.

When Adams invited me to partake, I’d just finished writing the usual letter prefacing the Spring 2010 Aperture booklist, which I mention only because I begin the piece by marveling over the extent to which photobooks have been a primary topic of conversation everywhere I’ve been over the the past year — from the Netherlands to Madrid, Frankfurt to Paris, Beijing, and other less exotic places in between. It’s not that this is unexpected in my line of work (publishing, photography, etc.), but the fact that I haven’t been the one to force the topic on other people, and that others have been eager to speak to me about it on their own—that I have been invited to more book awards, shows on books than ever before—is proof to me that the conversation on photobooks is reaching a point of super-saturation. To my knowledge, there are at least four major Books about Books in development (Latin American Photobooks, German Photobooks, Dutch Photobooks, among other general interest) and several related exhibitions underway for release sometime in 2010-11. (In fact, I’m a little bit worried about whether or not the backlash is going to set in before too long). Of course, this newfound attention must be viewed conversley within the larger context of the implosion of the publishing industry at large. This is one of those moments of reconsideration that history loves to give us: the book is dead, long live the book!

From this vantage point, it seems pretty apparent that the photobook market is bifurcating and then some, dividing things into at least two identifiable camps—not to be seen simply as a split between the luxury collectible v. the mainstream affordable, or, as it is more commonly interpreted, between analog and digital. My preferred view of this is of a matrix in which along one axis, you have publications in which the transmission of the idea is tantamount to its material form; and along the other, publications in which the objectness and conceptual rightness of the material form are of utmost importance. In the ideal world, a multiplicity of points plotted between these two axes would be acceptable and supportable; the key factor being a commitment to finding the right form for the material—be it traditional offset printing, hand-pulled gravure, Indigo digital printing, halftone on newsprint, eBook, or online presentation. In other words, even if one sticks to the traditional definition of the book as the word and image brought together in a physical form, there is no single future of the photobook—there are multiple futures.

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On Monday, April 20, Hugo Gajus Scheltema, Consul General of the Netherlands, hosted an exclusive salon event with Jacqueline Hassink, a Dutch artist whose works deal with issues of power and social relations. Along with Aperture Book Publisher Lesley A. Martin, Ms. Hassink presented her project and Aperture’s Spring 2009 publication, Car Girls—a culmination of a five-year journey to car shows in seven different cities on three continents—to an intimate group of thirty Aperture patrons, art and photography enthusiasts, and select members of the Dutch community.

View The New York Times review of Car Girls.

Click here to preview the limited-edition book Car Girls through Aperture.

Click here to purchase the limited-edition porfolio from Car Girls through Aperture.

The Ubiquitous Image: Before and After

Before…

Christy Wiles installing Suns from Flickr

Artist and Chair of Bard MFA Photo Penelope Umbrico installing Tvs

Artist Curtis Mann installing his Modification Series

Fellow New York Photo Festival Curator Tim Barber

Views from the Internet, Penelope Umbrico

Artist Harrell Fletcher

Tvs, Penelople Umbrico

Aperture is pleased to participate in the first international level festival of photography to be based in New York, NYPH08, a joint initiative of powerHouse books and Vll Photo Agency.

Highlights include The Ubiquitous Image an exhibition curated by Lesley A. Martin (Publisher, Aperture Books) and Aperture Presents, a daily panel series with artists and curators.

Visit the Aperture booth in the powerHouse Arena!

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