On the occasion of the first comprehensive survey of work from the extremely brief but prolific career of American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), the Guggenheim Museum presents Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman. The program examines the relationship between the still and moving image in Woodman’s and other artists’ production during the 1970s, particularly as associated with Post-Minimalism, performance, and video.

The program is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, and includes conversations led by an esteemed roster of acclaimed contemporary artists and scholars: George Baker, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, Jane Blocker, Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, William Kaizen, Assistant Professor of Art History and Media Studies, Northeastern University, Moyra Davey, an artist and photographer, based in New York, and Joan Jonas, acclaimed multi-media performance artist.

Francesca Woodman is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was on view earlier this year. You can find a video walkthrough of that show shot on January 2, 2012 on YouTube.

Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman

Friday, May 18 @ 4:00 pm
$10, $7 members, FREE for students with a valid ID
To reserve a student ticket, please e-mailboxoffice@guggenheim.org

›› Read more about Woodman’s “deeply personal photographic revelations” in critic David Levi Strauss’ Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture 2003).

›› View a slideshow of images from the exhibition at Guggenheim on The New York Times website, after which you can read Ken Johnson’s review of the show.

Exhibition Photos by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

The first comprehensive survey of work from the extremely brief but prolific career of American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) to be shown in North America is now on view at the Guggenheim Museum (through June 13, 2012).

More than thirty years after Woodman’s suicide at the age of 22–often one of the first things people recall about the artist–the exhibition offers an occasion for the “historical reconsideration of her work and its reception.”

Over 120 vintage photographs on view were culled from her estate of 800 prints and over 10,000 negatives, which is managed by her parents. They span her early experimental responses to class assignments completed while she was still enrolled at RISD in the mid-seventies, to the large-scale blueprint studies of her Temple project from 1980. The exhibition also includes six of her recently discovered and rarely seen short videos, as well as two of her artist books.

Her black-and-white images, dark, ethereal and moody, softened and blurred through the use of a long exposure time, are remarkably coherent explorations of herself, and sometimes other women, in very particular environments.

The Times‘ Ken Johnson calls it a “borderline kitschy style, a heady mix of Victorian Gothic, Surrealism and 19th-century spirit photography,” exploring the non-documentary realm of photography in a manner reminiscent of some of her contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman.

They were taken mostly with a medium format 6×6 camera and printed at 8×10″ or smaller, adding a timeless or antique quality, and necessitating a physically intimate viewing experience.

So “strong, particular, personal and tragic,” is her work, British art dealer Anthony d’Offay, who acquired 18 of her prints from the artist’s boyfriend, says in a video interview, “that you have to confront elements of yourself which perhaps sometimes you’ve avoided.”

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On Friday, May 18, 2012, the Guggenheim is hosting a symposium on “Art in the 1970s: Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman,” examining the relationship between the still and moving image in Woodman’s and other artists’ production during the 1970s, particularly as associated with Post-Minimalism, performance, and video, organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography.

Francesca Woodman is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the exhibition was on view earlier this year. You can find a video walkthrough of that show shot on January 2, 2012 on YouTube.

Read more about Woodman’s “deeply personal photographic revelations” in critic David Levi Strauss’ Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (Aperture 2003).

View a slideshow of images from the exhibition at Guggenheim on The New York Times website, after which you can read Ken Johnson’s review of the show.

Exhibition on view:
March 13 – June 13, 2012

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue
(at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173

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

• Time’s Lightbox profiles ‘Act’: Meditations on the Disabled Body by Denis Darzacq, a two-year project of photographing “people who have had trouble finding a place in society from the beginning of their lives,” he says. The Paris-based photographer known for his high-energy images and dynamic subjects will be giving an artist talk at Aperture this Monday, April 16, 2012 at 6:30 pm, FREE.
• Kathy Ryan, editor of The New York Times Magazine Photographs, shares the fascinating backstory of a photograph of Mohammad Ali with his future wife Lonnie that ran in the Sunday Magazine, taken at “the moment Cassius and I met,”  Lonnie wrote in an email to the photographer, Steve Schapiro.
• The New Yorker‘s photo department shares a collection of reader-submitted, “Hand-Picked Instagrams,” (as Wall Street Journal did last week, and more publications probably will in the future) alongside a thought-provoking essay by Ian Crouch, “Instagram’s Instant Nostalgia.” This, in the same week New York Times’ Bits Blog reports Facebook will buy Instagram for $1 billion.
• The British Journal of Photography reports on a controversial ad campaign for photographers’ rights launched by the French organization Union des Photographes Professionnels – Auteurs. In related news this week, the American Society of Media Photographers has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, PetaPixel reports, for “scanning, indexing, and storing copyright work without permission of the copyright holders” for their ambitions Google Books project.
• DIY gallerists take note: Phototuts+ shares “An Expert Guide to Matting and Framing a Photo,” which should be useful after you’ve watched their video lecture on Ansel Adams–delivered by Allan Ross who was Adams’ darkroom assistant for many years–and printed a bunch of restrained, expertly metered black-and-white landscape photographs of your own.
• American Suburb X shares a number of Nan Goldin readings this week, including an essay by Nan on actress and close friend Cookie Mueller who died of AIDS in 1989, as well as a fascinating in-depth paper by Mihaela Precup, “The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin’s Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning.” All great reads; our only quibble is: where did they come from? [UPDATE: ASX has appended the source of one of the pieces, created originally by Dirck Halstead at the once-pioneering web journal digitaljournalist.org]
• The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announce their 2012 Fellowships in photography, PDN Pulse reports. Ten photographers, including Doug Dubois of the monograph All the Days and Nights, and John Gossage, whose exhibition The Pond and a Little Romance opens today in Chicago, join the ranks of past recipients Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Richard Mosse, Brian Ulrich, and Penelope Umbrico.

Check out the latest press on Aperture’s new and upcoming releases!

Coming Soon the new edition of the Robert Adams classic, Summer Nights, Walking as featured in the September issue of Visionaire magazine.

Click here to view Lyle Rexer’s The Edge of Vision.

Click here to view Dan Winters’ Periodical Photographs.

Join author Philip Gefter at SF Camerawork in San Francisco as he discusses his latest title Photography After Frank, a collection of essays published by Aperture. Gefter traces the evolution of photography from Robert Frank’s work, The Americans, to the present day. This highly-anticipated title draws both from work published by Gefter in the New York Times as well as essays written specifically for the book. Don’t miss your chance to meet one of the most insightful contributors to the field of photography.

Photography After Frank, Philip Gefter
Lecture and Book Signing
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 7:00 pm

FREE

SF Camerawork
657 Mission Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, California
(415) 512-2020

For those on the east-coast, Philip Gefter will be in conversation with Andy Grundberg in New York on May 17, 2009. Click here for full event details.

Click here to purchase your copy of Photography After Frank through Aperture and save 30%.

New book from Aperture making headlines: Paul Fusco: RFK has been featured in Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Magazine, CNN, and FOX News.

Paul Fusco: RFK, published during the fortieth anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles while campaigning for the Presidential nomination, is the long-awaited follow-up to Fusco’s acclaimed RFK Funeral Train, a body of work heralded as a contemporary classic. This historical new publication features over seventy never-before-seen images, many selected from the untapped treasure trove of slides that comprise the Library of Congress’s Look magazine Collection.

The new book will be published in September. Included are a tribute by Edward M. Kennedy and essays by Evan Thomas, Norman Mailer, and Vicki Goldberg.

Hear Fusco talk about his experience in this slideshow from The New York Times.

The work is now on view at Danziger Projects.

(more…)

Read all about Aperture artists Catherine Chalmers and Charles Lindsay ‘s upstate hideaway located in Rensselaerville, New York, where they go to relax and create their stunning visual art, featured today in the Away section of the The New York Times. Read the article here.

From the Aperture publication American Cockroach © Catherine Chalmers

Brown Trout, California, 1996 © Charles Lindsay

Limited-Edition photograph available.