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%.
Aperture aggregates the best posts from this past week in the photography blogosphere.
“It is almost impossible for me to shoot a photo where someone is NOT taking a picture or posing for one,” writes Martin Parr on his blog in a post titled, “Too Much Photography.” Prime examples of this can be found in his series Tourism Inc. which is being published by Reporters Without Borders for the 20th anniversary of their “100 Photos for Press Freedom” collection, accompanied by an exhibition at Galerie Photo Fnac Forum des Halles in Paris, La Lettre de la Photographie reports. His photographs of Atlanta for the High Museum’s “Picturing the South” series are also featured in the upcoming summer issue of Aperture 207.
In further commentary on CNN’s controversial edit of Stacy Kranitz’ series on Appalachia, Joerg Colberg writes, “If we wanted to know what a place looked like we would need an infinity of photographs, taken from all possible angles excluding nothing, seeing everything at the same time,” a notion he thinks antithetical to the practice of photography, but increasingly possible, not only as Parr points out through the proliferations of cameras, but with the help of the Google Street View car, profiled by the Times here. Check out art made with photos pulled from the Street View service by Aaron Hobson, Jon Rafman, and Michael Wolf of the monograph Transparent City (Aperture 2008). And stay tuned for the upcoming re-issue and expanded edition of A New American Picture by Doug Rickard coming from Aperture in fall 2012.
Perpetual shooting brings us to the post on APhotoEditor asking, “Is It Time To Eliminate Stills From Your Shoot?” due to the ease and success with which quality still images may be pulled from video footage as a result of the recent proliferation of HDSLR cameras on the market. Now with no need to pick the decisive moment, soon no need to pick where to focus, who’ll need photographers? Have a look through SFMOMA’s page “Is Photography Over?” and read about the dialectical relationship of aesthetics and distribution/media on Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog Still Searching.
On a different note, watch this great video from Feature Shoot, “Inside the World’s Only Tintype Photography Studio,” a photo gallery and walk-in commercial tintype portrait studio. Owner/photographer Michael Shindler says, ”I think what people seem to be looking for now is a kind of photography where the process itself is going to impart its own flavor to the finished image, a little bit of uncertainty.”
LENS blog profiles the opening of “Gordon Parks: 100 Years” at the International Center of Photography, celebrating the centennial of the legendary photographer’s birth with an exhibition of his work presented not inside the center, but in their windows, on view to the street. Parks was featured in an essay by David Campany on “Precedented Photography” in Aperture issue 206. His writing also appears in the requisite volume, Photography Speaks: 150 Photographers on Their Art.
Fototazo posts Part II of their three-part interview with Oregon-based photographer Blake Andrews of the popular blog B. During this exchange, they invite him to create a competition for photographers to rank and sequence famous photographs, and predict the most popular sequence. The results of the contest will be published on Fototazo and Andrews’ blog. Part III of the interview will be published on Fototazo May 24, 2012.
The new exhibit at RWFA, Hail Traveler! The Photographer as Tourist, and the Tourist as Subject, focuses on the wandering spirit of photography. The exhibit features an eclectic group of photographers, including artists published by Aperture: Robert Adams has been featured in several issues of Aperture (most recently 180) and his Aperture books include Along Some Rivers, Summer Nights, and The New West; the work of Richard Avedon was featured in issue 188 and the upcoming book The Unseen Eye; Hiroshi Sugimoto’s was featured in issue 178 and he contributed an essay to the book Setting Sun; and Aperture offers Michael Wolf’s book The Transparent City and three of his limited-edition prints A039, TC Composite #1, and Nine Rooms.
Aperture Foundation, The Photography Department in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School will present an exciting panel discussion Contemporary Documentary Practices as part of the Confounding Expectations: Photography in Context. This talk will take place at the New School’s Tischman Auditorium and brings together photographers LaToya Ruby Frazier, Michael Wolf, Chris Verene and moderater Susan Bright. Revisiting Martha Rosler’s In, Around and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography), the panel will use this seminal text published by Rosler in 1981, as a launching point from which to discuss contemporary photographic practices and art strategies. The discussion will examine the medium of photography’s ability to foster social and political engagement today.
Today is the first day to bid online for items in Aperture’s largest auction ever. Browse Aperture’s Auction Catalog which features photographic works by a diverse range of artists including Jowhara AlSaud, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Graham Nash, Mickalene Thomas, Brian Ulrich, James Welling, Kehinde Wiley, Michael Wolf, and Hank Willis Thomas. For the first time ever Aperture is also presenting an Emerging Artists Auction with works by Timothy Briner, Jen Davis, Cig Harvey, Mark Lyon, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Will Steacy, among many others. Online bidding will remain open through Monday, November 1st at 12:00 noon EST.
Aperture’s 2010 Benefit and Auction will take place at The Lighthouse, Chelsea Piers on November 1st honoring Richard Misrach, Steven Ames, and Julie Saul. Immediately following the Benefit Dinner and Live Auction, the SNAP! Benefit Party co-chaired by Hank Willis Thomas, Carolyn Francis, and Giovanni Tomaselli of Polaroid, will feature special guest DJs, a raffle, an open bar, lite bites and treats.
Don’t miss your last chance to see these spectacular exhibitions on view, TODAY — closing at 6:00 pm!
While Michael Wolf’s large-scale color photographs of downtown Chicago’s buildings and their inhabitants examine public versus private space in the context of 21st-century urban life, Barbara Crane’s intimate Polaroids from the 1980s hone in on private human gestures performed in public at Chicago’s summer festivals. Both bodies of work reveal private moments that were intended to go unnoticed, each eliciting very different visceral responses from the viewer while evoking the voyeurism that permeates our culture today.
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
Between 10th and 11th Avenues
New York, New York
On the occasion of the exhibition, The Transparent City, currently on view at Aperture Gallery, photographer Michael Wolf gave a talk last November presenting his different bodies of work throughout his career starting with how he became a photographer.
This clip below is an excerpt from his talk where Wolf presents his aesthetic of photographing architecture in both Hong Kong and Chicago. Watch as Wolf explains how the images work both as a graphic abstract depiction of the buildings and an incredibly detailed portrait of them depending on the distance you view them from. Playing with the idea of scale, he also discusses his decision to digitally enlarge the detail images of the buildings, creating pixelated portraits of the inhabitants inside these buildings.
To watch the full version, click on these links below:
If you haven’t seen it yet, please come to visit Wolf’s exhibition at Aperture Gallery, on view until January 21st. The Transparent City features his large-scale color photographs of downtown Chicago’s buildings and their inhabitants examining public versus private space in the context of 21st-century urban life.
VERSUS a show curated by Ruben Natal-San Miguel of ArtMostFierce, will open at Hous Projects this Thursday, January 7, 6:30-10:30 pm featuring Brian Ulrich, Jen Davis, Eric Ogden, Hank Willis Thomas, Amy Elkins, and Michael Wolf among others.
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 7, 6:30-10:30 pm
The ninth edition of Paris Photo, the world’s largest photography fair, opened this Wednesday night and the Aperture booth made its debut in the main salon! Many Aperture photographers from around the world stopped by, including Josef Koudelka, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Michael Wolf and others below.
Celso Gonzalez-Falla, Aperture's Chairman of the Board, and Bill Hunt from Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery
Silvio Wolf and photo critic Gigliola Foschi
Michael Wolf and his son
Lesley Martin, Aperture Publisher, and Martin Parr
Visit the Aperture booth #A36 to see our stunning limited-edition print collection and newly released books. Don’t miss book signings every day with artists Lalla Essaydi, Michael Wolf, Bill Armstrong, Teun Hocks, Hank Willis Thomas, and Silvio Wolf and many more!
Now available for download, Aperture Gallery offers a FREE audio tour podcast of our current exhibitions The Transparent City and Private Views, given by the artists themselves. Listen as Michael Wolf explains his process and anecdotes from his work in Chicago creating The Transparent City and Barbara Crane speaks about her experiences at Chicago festivals where she took her polaroids for Private Views. Both are available by clicking the above image.
