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

• Find May Day photos from around the world at Boston’s The Big Picture Show, New York Times‘ LensBlog, and LA Times‘ Framework. Time‘s LightBox also offers “Resources for Photographers Covering Protests,” a bit of a distillation of what the ACLU has up on their website. In addition this week, the National Press Photographers Association and other press groups “call on Justice Department to protect right to record,” pointing out that more than 70 people have been arrested documenting Occupy protests since last September.
• The New Yorker‘s PhotoBooth shares brilliant photos from the eight night performance run of electronic music and Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk at MoMA last week– those shows that sold out in a blink of an eye, crashing ticket servers. The featured photos were taken not by concert photographers, but audience members with their cell phones who shared on Instagram, Facebook and Flickr, including one by their pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, who wrote for the magazine this week on the band’s legacy.
• Daidō Moriyama, who is interviewed by Ivan Vartanian in Aperture issue 203, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award during ICP’s Infinity Award 2012 ceremony this past Wednesday, La Lettre De La Photographie reports, posting a gallery of his images. Be sure to check out the Daidō Moriyama pop-up library, on display at the ICP Library until May 23, 2012, and watch videos from Moriyama’s 2011 PRINTING SHOW–TKY at Aperture, a recreation of his 1974 ad hoc photobook-making performance of the same title. Moriyama also has his first solo museum exhibition, Fracture: Daido Moriyama, on view at LACMA through July 31, 2012, LA Times‘ Framework reports.
• Ben Lowy, the “Hipstamatic Journalist,” an ardent defender of cell phone photography according to a New York Times profile and Q&A on LensBlog, also won an Infinity Award this week for his work in photojournalism. Soon, the Times reports, Hipstamatic will release a Ben Lowy Lens filter. This week, software developer jag.gr also released the 645 Pro camera app for the iPhone, Rob Galbraith reports, which appeals to advanced photographers and can capture TIFF images, features real-time shutter speed and aperture readouts, a live histogram, a choice of spot or multi-zone metering, as well as focus, exposure, and white balance lock. PhotoShelter Blog shares a lengthy post on “Why Instagram is Terrible for Photographers, and Why You Should Use It,” while APhotoEditor explores some of the many licensing issues with the social media sites through which these images are shared.
• Read about the long strange saga of student photojournalist Andy Duann’s ‘bear falling out of a tree‘ photo which was went viral last week according to Poytner, eventually being picked up by the Associated Press (we first noticed it on WSJ‘s Photo Journal).  Duann had been considering legal action against his school, the University of Colorado, for distributing the photo without compensating him, until they acknowledged that he retained the copyright and announced they would no longer demand copyright from their students in the future.
• MediaStorm share two videos this week that live up to their column titled, “Worth Watching.” First, watch Ian Ruhter’s SILVER & LIGHT clip about his–literally–truck-sized traveling camera. Then watch Jeff Harris’ sometimes-heart-wrenching video on his project collecting 4,748 daily self-portraits–and counting. MediaStorm also draws our attention to Aday, “a unique photographic event,” scheduled for May 15, 2012, in which countless people from all different backgrounds use any camera they can get access to and submit photos to create a massive historical document–”A Day in the World,” which will be published as a book in October 2012. Sign up today.
• Andy Adam’s Flak Photo is teaming up with Tom Griggs’ fototazo next week to host an online community conversation focused on essays from Gerry Badger’s recently published The Pleasures of Good Photographs (Aperture 2010). We’re looking forward to Monday, May 7, 2012, which is when the discussion kicks off with the essay, “Literate, Authoritative, Transcendent: Walker Evans’s American Photographs.”

How might the verbal atmosphere artists create around their work affect or complicate our understanding of it? Would our perception of Diane Arbus’ photographs change were we to hear what she had to say about them?

This Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 5:00pm, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival (now through May 6, 2012), MoMA is screening A Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus. The 40-minute film was compiled by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott from an original 1970 recording of a slide presentation given one year before the photographer’s death. It has been shown less than a dozen times publicly and offers us the rare opportunity to hear the photographer lecture on her images. Nearly 40 years after publication, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph which features 80 of those images, remains one of our most popular photobooks.

Following the screening, novelist and president of PEN American Center, Francine Prose along with Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, and Doon Arbus discuss how the photographer’s “precise use of language” illuminates her pictures. They will also read from the recently released book, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, which was primarily composed of exerpts from her letters, notebooks, writings, and journals. Through her own words, they explore the nature of her observation.

In the film, according to Yale Daily News, which reviewed a screening at Yale University Art Gallery last month, Arbus said on that topic: “I do it because I think there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”

Screening:
Saturday, May 5, 2012
5:00–6:30 pm

Film ticket: $12, $10 seniors, $8 students. MoMA members free but a screening ticket is required. Tickets are released one week in advance starting at 9:30 am at MoMA’s main lobby information desk. Please view MoMA’s ticketing policy here.

Museum of Modern Art
Theater 1
11 West 53rd Street
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

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

• LightBox presents an essay written by Tim Hetherington, who was featured in Aperture issue 204, from the new book Photographs Not Taken, one year after the photographer’s death in Libya. The collection, compiled by Will Steacy (one of Aperture’s Green Cart Commissioned photographers), also features essays by Roger Ballen, Ed Kashi, Mary Ellen Mark, Alec Soth, Peter van Agtmael and more. Additionally, PDN features an 8 image retrospective by Hetherington, whose work is now on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York (through May 12, 2012).
• This week in commentary: LPV Magazine  digests Instagram articles by Om Malik, the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch and New York Magazine’s Paul Ford, finds out, “Facebook Buys Instagram, Some Photographers Sad.” APhotoEditor reads Paul Melcher‘s poignant article on La Lettre de La Photographie alongside Marc Andreessen‘s WSJ piece “Software Will Eat The World,” and explores “how a company with 13 employees and no profits [Instagram] can replace a now bankrupt company [Kodak] that once employed over 120,000 people with annual sales of $10 billion as the ‘manufacturer’ of a device to bring photography to the masses.” In related news, NPPA opens a mobile phone photo contest, calling for entries through Sunday, April 22, 2012, while Magnum Photos has deployed another team to Rochester to document the once-vibrant home of Kodak as part of their Postcards From America series.
• Poynter investigates the controversy over the Pentagon delaying the LA Times from publishing photographs of US soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan corpses, a story which has since elicited over 2000 comments on the Times’ website.
• Sophie Calle, featured in Aperture issues 191 and 142, talks to the Guardian about her best shot from the series Voir La Mer, in which she “took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s, to see [the sea] for the first time.” She photographed them from behind so as to not obstruct their initial encounter, and she captured the entire process, including their reactions, on video. Her current exhibition, Historias de Pared (at Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín through June 3, 2012) is reviewed on Fototazo.
• In honor of Albert Hoffman’s infamous Bicycle Day (April 19), LIFE Magazine shares a number of never-before-published dream-like photographs that were to accompany an original 1966 article titled, “New Experience That Bombards the Senses: LSD Art.”
• American Suburb X shares journal entries from William Gedney on “Kentucky, Sex and Diane Arbus,” alongside scans of the archival material culled from the Duke University Rare Books and Manuscript Library.  Speaking of rare books, ICP Library profiles some of the innovative and experimental photobooks they found and photographed at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair last week.
• Time Magazine releases their annual list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World,” alongside a portrait gallery of 24 of the honorees.  Included this year is artist Christian Marclay, of the monumental video installation recently purchased by MoMA, The Clock, and the 2007 Aperture monograph Shuffle, which takes the form of a deck of cards. The Clock will be shown for free this summer from the middle of July to mid-August at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium. Stake out your places now!

In the clip above, Alex Prager, in conversation with gallerist Yancey Richardson (September 30, 2010 at Aperture as part of the Parsons Lecture Series), talks about wandering through the Getty Center one day, never before having considered photography, stumbling upon William Eggleston’s print of old shoes under a bed and being completely moved and inspired to pick up a camera for the first time.

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Out of 100 nominees from around the world, an international jury has selected photographer Alex Prager, who was showcased at MoMA’s New Photography 2010 exhibition, as winner of the Foam Paul Huf Award 2012. Simon Baker, chairman of the jury, said:

Prager’s work is original, intelligent and seductive. She thoroughly deserves her place in the company of former Foam Paul Huf winners, which is fast becoming a who’s who of contemporary photographic practice.

The annual € 20,000 prize is awarded to a photographer under 35 years of age, who then goes on to present their work in a solo exhibition at the Foam Museum. Prager’s saturated, cinematic, stylized and glamourously surreal photographs will be on view in Amsterdam August 31, 2012 – October 14, 2012.

Foam Amsterdam
Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS
Binnenstad, Netherlands
+31 20 551 6500

Prager will also have a multi-city solo exhibition, Compulsion, on view simultaneously at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, M+B Gallery in LA, and Michael Hoppen Gallery in London, April 5, 2012 – May 19, 2012.  Huffington Post has a behind-the-scenes photo exclusive of the show and Q&A with the photographer.

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York, NY 10011
(646) 230-9610

M+B Gallery
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, California 90069
(310) 550-0050

Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place,
London SW3 3TD
+44 (0)20 7352 3649

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

• LensBlog explores why Rodrigo Abd‘s photograph of a young Syrian boy expressing grief over the death of his father landed on the front page of three of the most prominent national papers in the United States.

• Time magazine’s photo blog Lightbox celebrated it’s one year anniversary, revisiting their first post and the continuing saga of War is Personal by legendary photojournalist Eugene Richards, of the controversial 1994 Aperture monograph Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue.

• Conscientious, GalleristNY and LVP Magazine weigh in on Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at MOMA and on the “unanimity” among critics in New York reviewing it.

• One year after a devastating tsunami hit the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, The New York Times does a “Side-by-Side look at Distruction and Renewal.” The Big Picture at Boston.com, Huffington Post, National Geographic, and The New Yorker ran similar posts, as did Time’s Lightbox, featuring a slideshow of photos by James Nachtwey, whose work is in The New York Times Magazine Photographs (Aperture 2011) edited by Kathy Ryan.

• NPR prompts the question: “You know Ansel, But Who is Robert Adams (And Why Should You Care)?” Bob Adams, of the recently reissued Aperture monographs The New West and Summer Nights, Walking, has a traveling retrospective The Place We Live now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

• Sarah Palmer was just announced winner of the Aperture 2011 Portfolio Prize for her series As a Real House. Read her 2009 review of Eirik Johnson’s Sawdust Mountain, Robert Adam’s Summer Nights and Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy, from when she was editor at Metropolis Magazine.

• Finally, Jonathan Blaustein‘s intensely personal column on APhotoEditor.com reviewing Donald Weber‘s beautifully put together photobook Interrogations is one of the best-written posts we’ve read all week. Interrogations will also be reviewed in the upcoming second issue of The Photobook Review.

Image by Daniel Gordon

Daniel Gordon Artist Talk at Aperture

Artist Daniel Gordon will discuss his large-scale color photographs and unique process at Aperture tomorrow as part of the Parsons Lecture series. Gordon’s work was most recently featured in MoMA/PS1′s Greater NY show. The artist’s collage imagery which has been described by Conscientious blog’s Joerg Colberg as falling in the “somewhat disturbing part of the spectrum,” has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries.

Parsons Lecture Series: Daniel Gordon
6:30 PM, Tuesday, November 30th

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street
New York, New York

Image by Hank Willis Thomas

A Conversation with Leslie Hewitt and Hank Willis Thomas

Tomorrow evening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, artists Leslie Hewitt and Hank Willis Thomas will appear in conversation with Eva Respini, associate curator of MoMA’s photography department. This talk is the latest installment of the museum’s panel discussion series Conversations: Among Friends which brings artists, scholars and curators together in consideration of Art’s political and social contexts. Leslie Hewitt, was featured in Aperture published essay collection Words Without Pictures. Hank Willis Thomas’ monograph Pitch Blackness was released by Aperture in 2008.

Click here to buy tickets

A Conversation with Leslie Hewitt and Hank Willis Thomas
November 30, 6:45 pm doors,

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, New York

Image by Richard Misrach

Richard Misrach at SF Camerawork

Richard Misrach’s book tour for recent release and critically acclaimed publication Destroy This Memory continues tomorrow night at SF Camerawork in San Francisco. Recently called a “Masterpiece” by writer Geoff Dyer in the Financial Times, Destroy This Memory presents an affecting reminder of the physical and psychological impact of Hurricane Katrina capturing the grafitti and messages scrawled by survivor’s on walls during the Hurricane’s tragic aftermath. The talk will be followed by a book signing and artist’s reception.

Lecture and Book Signing with Richard Misrach
November 30th, 7:00 pm

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA

Untitled Film Still #43, 1979, © Cindy Sherman

Exhibition on view:
Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West

Sunday, March 29–Monday, June 8, 2009

MoMA
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
11 West 53 Street
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West is now on view at the Special Exhibitions Gallery at MoMA. The exhibition’s theme evolves around the importance of photography in shaping our collective imagination of the West.

Since 1850, photography has certainly played a fundamental role in the revolution of the American West, and has helped form and change our perception and image creation of the West’s physical and social landscape, through a variety of photographic traditions and genres.

Into the Sunset brings together over 120 photographs, dating from the ninetieth to the twenty first century, that integrate a range of different artistic strategies and motifs. The photographs, which are organized thematically, illustrate a piece of cultural heritage, and help us understand how general ideas about the West, as Manifest Destiny and the “land of opportunity,” have evolved through the years.

The exhibition features work of approximately seventy renowned photographers including Aperture-published Robert Adams, Katy Grannan, Dorothea Lange, Timothy O’Sullivan, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Edward Weston.

In conjunction with the exhibition, MoMA also holds lunch lectures and discussion panels on Monday, April 6 and Thurday, April 9 both at 12:30 p.m.

In addition, the museum offers a special lecture for deaf and hard-of-hearing visitors, as a part of Interpreting MoMA, on Thursday, May 14, at 5:30 p.m. 

Installation view: Popular Mechanics, © Walead Beshty

Exhibition on view:
Popular Mechanics
Tuesday, March 3–Saturday, April 4, 2009

WALLSPACE
619 West 27th Street
New York, New York
(212) 594-9478

Now on view at WALLSPACE gallery in Chelsea is photographer Walead Beshty’s recent project Popular Mechanics.

Beshty is known for using photography as a tool to explore the social and political conditions of our material culture. He has a focused eye but yet a very laid-back awareness of the subjects around him. There is often a sense of uncertainty when looking at his work. He uses several media, including photograms, which appear as luminous abstract compositions where lines of demarcation do not seem to apply.

Walead Beshty’s work can also be seen in Altermodern: TateTriennial 2009, at Tate Britain in London, and he will be included in MoMA‘s annual New Photography 2009 in September.

Beshty was featured in the Fall 2008 issue of Aperture magazine.

New York City, 1966 © Lee Friedlander

Friedlander
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Sunday, March 1–Sunday, May 31, 2009
11150 East Blvd
Cleveland, Ohio
(216) 421-7350

FREE

Now on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is a special exhibition focusing on the career of the legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander. The retrospective is organized by Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography at MoMA in New York, and gathers about 375 photographs plus special-edition books and portfolios that document his five-decade career.

In the early 1960s Friedlander became famous with off-balanced street photographs that made note of the complexity of the everyday American life. Through his photographs, Friedlander created a detailed portrait of contemporary American life. His images are communicative, packed with visual ideas, have a wicked sense of humor and the bizarre ability to compress multiple layers of meaning in random visual events.

In his attempt to communicate his visualization of what he calls “the American social landscape,” he takes us on a journey through detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combined to capture the look of modern life. This body of work also includes subjects such as portraits of musicians, self-portraits, landscapes, still lives, nudes, and studies of people at work that depict the diversity of contemporary urban America.

Lee Frielander has also been featured in the Fall 2007 issue of Aperture magazine.

Artist’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus
December 11, 2008–February 23, 2009
MoMA, Special Exhibitions Gallery
11 West 53 Street,
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

The Artist’ Choice is a series of exhibitions held by MoMA in which an artist serves as a curator to create an exceptionally personalized selection of artworks. For their latest show, MoMA invited renowned photographer Vik Muniz to select works from the museum’s vast collection, allowing him to leave his own distinguished mark on the exhibition.

Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961) is known for his extremely innovative way of presenting his creative ideas. He questions the function and traditions of visual representation by using unlikely materials, working with chocolate sauce, spaghetti marinara, or the detrius of hole punchers to render the subjects in his photographs. For this exhibition, Muniz has chosen a rebus, a combination of unrelated visual and linguistic elements to create a larger deductive meaning, as the organizing principle of his presentation.

The exhibition features approximately 80 works of sculpture, photography, painting, prints, drawings, video, and design objects selected and installed by the artist in a narrative sequence to create surprising juxtapositions and new meanings. Among the artists whose work was included are John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nan Goldin, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Atget, and Rachel Whiteread.

Aperture Foundation published the book Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer in 2005.

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Yellow, 1951, © Ellsworth Kelly
Yolk, 1999, © Kiki Smith
Timer Model No. 152, 1960, © Rodolfo Bonetto