This summer, the world descends on London for the Olympic Games.  A photo project commissioned by the Photographer’s Gallery, however, shows us that the world is already there.  “The World in London” is a collection of 204 portraits of 204 Londoners, each of whom hail from one of the 204 countries competing in this year’s Games. Since each portrait was carried out by a different photographer, the style of the work is as diverse as its subjects: formal studio portraits, Skype screengrabs, and casual snapshots, by established artists and emerging talents, all make their way into the collection.  The resulting work is a portrait of both human and artistic diversity, showcasing one of the world’s most international cities through the lenses of some of its most creative photographers.  See photographs by Martin Parr, Stephen Shore, Rinko Kawauchi, Penelope Umbrico and 200 others at The World in London.

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.

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

• Time magazine’s Lightbox features Manish Swarup’s photograph of a Tibetan exile self-immolating during a demonstration in New Delhi in their Pictures of the Week, reminding of Malcolm Brown’s iconic image of a Buddhist monk who set himself aflame in protest in 1963, and the photojournalistic ethical issues that go with it.
• Conscientious explores the challenges of still portraiture and points to a new study published by the British Psychology Society which finds that “the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos.”
• NPR’s The Picture Show features “A Lifetime of Photos in a Little Email Retrospective,” images by “somewhat hermetic” Dennis Darling who relishes “staying under most radar” and rarely publishes or exhibits his work for other than those on his small email chain.
• The New Yorker‘s Photobooth commemorates Edward Steichen’s would-be 130th birthday with a slideshow of the seminal photographer’s images published in their magazine across the years.  Several limited edition prints from his early work are available at Aperture.
• “Taking a photograph is a response… it’s a pre-rational response, it’s an intuitive emotional response, it’s spontaneous, it’s immediate,” says Alex Webb of The Suffering of Light in Part 4 of 6 of the Q&A  session with Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb by David Chickey of Radius Books at The National Museum Of Singapore on March 9, 2012, now all posted on Invisible Photographer Asia.
• APhotoEditor suggests, “Perhaps Most Photographers Don’t Understand the Value of Usage,” posting a reader-submitted story in which an “ex-student lied about having [her] permission and gave the image to the college, which then used the image on a billboard advertisement that wraps around a 20 story building on a very busy road in the city.” How was this resolved and did she get paid?
• Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston, Alec Soth, Diane Arbus are all photographers you should… IGNORE? That’s according to Bryan Formhals’ brash OpEd piece on LPV Magazine “10 Oeuvres Aspiring Photographers Should Ignore.”  Wired and the Click got a kick out of the post, which was inspired by “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” We think self-willed ignorance is more harmful than knowing one’s precedents and counter with this oldie but goodie: those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In 1982 Aperture published photographer Stephen Shore’s monograph Uncommon Places, a photographic portrait of the American vernacular landscape. The book went on to become a definitive classic, greatly influencing a generation of photographers and considered by many one of the most important photography books of its time. The book was rereleased with previously unseen material in 2004 under the title Uncommon Places: The Complete Works and an accompanying exhibition Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore was launched, touring galleries and museums around the world. Now after six years of touring, Biographical Landscape will make its final and thirteenth stop as part of a survey show entitled Stephen Shore and the New Dusseldorf Photography at NRW-Forum in Dusseldorf, Germany this fall.

When Uncommon Places was republished by Aperture in 2004 the new edition included extensive texts by noted curator and critic Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and writer Lynne Tillman and was accompanied by images from Shore’s series American Surfaces as well as from his series Amarillo: Tall in Texas. The exhibition Biographical Landscape which complemented this comprehensive second run of the monograph and which has been integrated into a new exhibition by NRW-forum, also includes excerpts from several different bodies of work by Shore including an excerpt from American Surfaces, Shore’s early work shot on a 35mm camera, Shore’s edition of postcards from his work Amarillo, Texas and a collection of photographs featured in Shore’s 1972 exhibit All the Meat You Can Eat. The exhibition is primarily comprised of a selection of 25 prints from Uncommon places as well as twenty one prints from later bodies of work.

New exhibition Stephen Shore and the New Dusseldorf Photography considers the influence of both Shore’s pioneering of color photography and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s innovative typology influenced images on German artists who studied with Bernd Becher between the years of 1976 and 1996. Along with Shore’s bodies of work this exhibition will include works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Volker Dohne, Axel Hutte, Andreas Gursky, Claus Goedicke and more.

Stephen Shore and the New Dusseldorf Photography
On view September 11th, 2010 – January 11th, 2011

NRW-Forum
Ehrenhof 2
40479 Dusseldorf, Germany

Click here to purchase Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

Check out this Q&A between Aperture-published artists, first seen in the February issue of Modern Painters, now on artinfo.com. James Welling asks Stephen Shore five questions about his work and process, including views on color and digital photography.

Photograph by Stephen Shore

Pioneers of Color, an exhibition opening this week at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York, showcases the influential work of master photographers Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz and William Eggelston. Juxtaposing three distinct artists whose works have come to define color photography’s emergence onto the photography scene in the 1970s, this show celebrates the bold images that laid the foundation for contemporary photography today.

In addition Edwynn Houk Gallery will host a conversation with Kevin Moore, the curator of Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970 – 1980., currently on view at the Cincinnati Museum of Art, as well as the Hatje Cantz-published exhibition publication of the same title, and photographer Joel Meyerowitz on Saturday, March 6th.

Pioneers of Color: Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, William Eggleston
February 25th – April 24th, 2010

Opening reception
Thursday, February 25, 6:00PM – 8:00 PM

Artist Joel Meyerowitz and curator Kevin Moore in conversation
Saturday, March 6, 3:00PM

Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue
New york, New York
(212) 750 – 7070

View Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places

View Joel Meyerowitz’s Legacy

Photo by Martin Parr

Aperture Foundation’s Annual Benefit & Auction is next week! Photographer William Christenberry will be honored and there will be silent and live auctions. Over 60 amazing photographs will be available at the auctions, including work from Christenberry,  Mitch Epstein, Pamela Hanson, Richard Misrach, Gabriel Orozco, Martin Parr, Stephen Shore, Paul Strand, Dan Winters, Carrie Mae Weems, Garry Winogrand, and more. See all the auction items here.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2008
Pier 60, Chelsea Piers
New York, New York

6:30–8:00 p.m. Cocktails and Silent Auction
8:00–10:00 p.m. Dinner, Live Auction, and Award Ceremony

All proceeds benefit Aperture Foundation’s publications, exhibitions, and public programs at Aperture Gallery and at other venues worldwide.

A few tickets are still available. Email mgrasso@aperture.org for availability.

Coinciding with the exhibition Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore, 1969–1979 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Stephen Shore, one of the most prominent and influential American photographers to emerge in the last half-century, will discuss his work from the exhibition and the accompanying Aperture monograph Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (2005).

Stephen Shore Artist Lecture
April 26, 2008
2:00 p.m.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City, MO

Exhibition on view:
February 22, 2008 — May 18, 2008
More info here.

(more…)