Artist Chen Chun-Hao uses a nail gun to replicate traditional Chinese landscape paintings of masters Fan Kuan and Guo Xi. Each “mosquito nail” creates a dot on the canvas, and when viewing the dots as a whole you see mountains, forests, streams, and other elements.
TIMO STAMMBERGER: ‘UNDERGROUND LANDSCAPES’
“Underground Landscapes” by the Berlin based photographer Timo Stammberger depicts subway tunnels of cities such as Berlin, Dortmund, New York, Philadelphia, Lisbon or Stockholm. These tunnels are part of large, well-branched mass transit systems, which are used by many people on a daily basis, playing an immense though hidden role in the life of today’s metropolises.
«By calling these underground scenarios “landscapes”, I links them to other urban infrastructure like the “Autobahn” (the Highway), sharing the similar, purely functional purpose. However, for most passengers on their way through the underground of cities, the tunnel environment creates only one picture: a dark, black something, passing by the window. The French anthropologist Marc Augé writing about “Non-Places” says that space of the non-resort creates no particular identity, and no special relation, but loneliness and similarity. Based on constructivism and due to my previous work as a graffiti artist, I experience and show the subway tunnel as a “Place”. The tunnels gain identity through my photographic interpretation of the various carefully chosen subway systems.»
© Timo Stammberger
MATHEW SCOTT: ‘OBSERVING VENICE’
Mathew Scott portrays reality in a way neither reassuring nor alarming. In the series “Observing Venice” the American photographer, far from representations intentionally disturbing or grotesque, surprises us for his way of describing the reality free from excessive handling.
The impression is that the space slips into the background to raise as protagonists common extras. The subjects for this are well defined, the composition is pretty clean for the benefit of the contrasts on which plays Scott’s visual tale.
The figures are alternated as inhabitants of a two-dimensional background, a sort of tinted bas-relief composed of many stories each different but due to the same place. A place that is somewhat abstract so as not to trip and fall into the habit of stereotyped portrayals.
ANDRÉS MEDINA: “LIGHT IN DARKNESS”
The night seems to provide the Spanish photographer Andrés Medina the chance to reclaim the space in its most neutral dimension. Deprived of the life that flows through it during the day, the space becomes the perfect setting in which the artist moves, casually talking with the light necessary to give breath and importance to its most striking forms and lines.
«With “The Night Experience” series I wanted to show the importance of light that transforms urban landscapes when night falls. Locations are special to me, as a result of the search that took place for long night exposures. Empty places with great visual strength, simplicity but effective. They are industrial sites, car parks, civil constructions, railway stations, sports facilities. All this serves to express myself when night falls. Overall I seek places that no one expects to be photographed. Places away from people, emptied for a moment of its activities. These sites are usually gloomy, with a cold atmosphere and sometimes they produce uncomfortable rejection in the observer.»
George Dureau
‘Black 1973-1986
Higher Pictures, New York
31.5.2012 - 13.7.2012
Higher Pictures presents Black the first New York solo exhibition by George Dureau (B. 1930 New Orleans). The exhibition consists of fifteen photographs from 1973 - 1986 whose subjects are black males, all New Orleans locals.
With a cult-like following, George Dureau’s photographs are a striking mix of carnal and heroic, unsentimental yet completely intimate and personal. Known as a painter who began making photographs as an extension of his paintings, Dureau’s photographs are a significant contribution to art history, yet somehow, even today, are largely unknown.
On the obvious link to Robert Mapplethorpe, Claude J. Summers had this to say:
Dureau’s photographs have often been compared with those of Robert Mapplethorpe. But the influence runs not from Mapplethorpe to Dureau but from Dureau to Mapplethorpe. The photographers were friends in the early 1970s. Mapplethorpe was greatly moved by Dureau’s photographs, even to the point of restaging many of Dureau’s earlier compositions. For all their similarities, however, the photographs of Dureau and Mapplethorpe are quite different. Whereas Mapplethorpe exhibits his subjects as cool and objective, self-contained and remote icons, Dureau presents his as exposed and vulnerable, playful and needy, complex and entirely human individuals. The difference is foremost a matter of empathy.
George Dureau was born on December 28, 1930. He attended Louisiana State University, where he received a B.A. in fine arts in 1952. After serving in the United States Army, he briefly attended Tulane University, where he studied architecture.
YEE LING TANG: ‘TO LOSE THE IDEA OF DIMENSIONS’
Artist made in Hong Kong but living in Holland, Yee Ling Tang faces and compares, with particular attention, issues of perception and dynamics among cultural and social contexts. In the series “To lose the idea of dimensions” this research push her within the reality itself, through manipulations of scale and overlapping of distinct environments. “The images”, she writes, “show that I am simultaneously in multiple locations. I grew up in many worlds and cultures, I cannot choose. I live in multiple worlds”. Hence what we see is not just an exercise in surrealism. For the artist diving into the artistic production becomes a way to interrogate the environment, to investigate its dynamics, to resize point of views. Yee Ling Tang seems almost to mock reality, and willing to demonstrate her ability to move quickly and easily between parallel dimensions. In doing so she reminds us of the fragility inherent in every stereotypical view, but also how through the imagination a place can mean so many places and vice versa. A research that appears as a very timely question in a historical moment in which humans are slipped into a cultural geography increasingly and continuosly mixed.
© Yee Ling Tang
Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs
‘Light of Other Days’
Foam Fotografie Museum, Amsterdam
08.06.2012 - 22.08.2012
The Swiss duo Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (1979) are viewed by many as one of the most promising teams in contemporary photography. Since 2003 the pair have worked together on a variety of projects on the cutting edge of photography, sculpture and installation art. Their work provides intelligent and often ironic commentary on the history of photography, the nature of photos, how cameras operate and the role of the photographer. Few subjects remain untouched in their complex yet highly accessible work where reality collides with fiction and humour converges with seriousness. This summer Foam will be the first museum in the Netherlands to organise an exhibition of work by Onorato & Krebs, consisting of a unique presentation of new work and objects from their previous projects.
Tayio Onorato and Nico Krebs became acquainted during their studies at the Zurich University of the Arts. Typical of their oeuvre is the interplay with the two-dimensional character of photography. They carefully construct their photos as sculptors do, moulding them until the final result is perfect - often paired with a subtle feeling for humour. This playful approach was developed during their studies, in reaction to the influential but strict and rigid documentary style of the Dusseldorf School of Photography.
The Light of Other Days exhibition comprises both spatial and two-dimensional work. The principal ingredients are dozens of photos created by placing a sheet of a photosensitive paper directly in front of a camera. The light then falls on the paper instead of a negative and an instant image is created. Manipulation would seem to be impossible - the image gives an accurate reproduction of the subject. But fact and fiction are seldom unambiguous with Onorato & Krebs. With references to camera obscuras and photograms, they create their own complete universe in which object and representation clash with each other.
© Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs
Jerry Uelsmann
‘The Mind’s Eye: 50 years of Photography’
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem
11.2.2012 - 15.7.2012
Surreal, funny and provocative, Jerry Uelsmann’s photographs are icons of American photo history. His most famous technique — seamlessly fabricating photographs from unrelated negatives to create imaginary scenes — cemented his standing as a leading light of non-literal photography. The exhibition combines Uelsmann’s most celebrated works with many never-before-seen pieces for his first retrospective in 40 years.Support provided by the East India Marine Associates (EIMA) of the Peabody Essex Museum.The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann is part of PEM’s Year of Photography, which is sponsored in part by WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, Hunt’s Photo & Video, and Canon.
Of this exhibition wrote William Meyers:
It really isn’t fair: Jerry Uelsmann, who was born in 1934, had to devise ingenious darkroom techniques to create surrealistic images that nowadays anyone competent with Photoshop can produce with ease. But being able to reverse positive and negative versions of a photograph and to merge two or more photographs into a single composition are only the mechanical aspects of Mr. Uelsmann’s art. The indispensable element of his work is his ability to envision images that are totally impossible, but absolutely right. It takes more than the most complex computer program to do that.
“The Mind’s Eye,” a retrospective of Mr. Uelsmann’s career at the Peabody Essex Museum, is the first in a series of exhibitions that Phillip Prodger, the curator of photography, has planned for PEM’s 2012 Year of Photography. Given the idiosyncratic nature of Mr. Uelsmann’s pictures, he may seem an unlikely choice with which to begin the series. But, in fact, his work is deeply imbued with the history of the medium. “Full Dome” (1973) is a wry comment on his friend Ansel Adams’s famous picture of the Half Dome peak in Yosemite National Park: He printed his picture of the mountain on one side of the paper, flipped the negative and printed it again of the other side to make a perfectly symmetrical—but plausible—Full Dome. “Untitled” (1969) was shot at Point Lobos, the beach that figures in many photographs by Edward Weston and other California photographers. Rather than show the majestic sweep of the ocean, it concentrates on the shriveled innards of a clam.
Visual wit figures in many of Mr. Uelsmann’s pictures. In “Self-Portrait as Robinson and Rejlander” (1964), he appears naked twice, once with and once without eyeglasses, sitting in a bathtub. This is his homage to two mid-19th-century British photographers famous for their composite pictures. Other works pay respects to Surrealist photographers Man Ray and Lee Miller, as well as artists Joseph Cornell and René Magritte. “Philistine’s Eye” (1961), a human eye peering out of a urinal, must owe its inspiration to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.”
PEM has up many of Mr. Uelsmann’s best-known works, nearly all black and white. The elements that recur most frequently are trees, rocks, bodies of water, naked women, decaying houses, children, sky, and scenes imagined underground, all psychologically potent, even totemic. In a noted image, “Untitled” (1969), a tree with a full canopy of branches and leaves hovers over a small island that hovers, in turn, over a body of placid water. The reflection of the underside of the island looks something like a gigantic open peapod. A smaller version of the tree drifts away in the sky to the right toward a distant line of snow-covered mountains. Like so many of Mr. Uelsmann’s pictures, this is a very satisfying image to look at. In spite of its contradiction of nature, we feel we are in the hands of a beneficent conjuror. (read full article here).
DAVID GIANCATARINA: “GOING VIETNAM”
«Portrait of a Communist country in the era of globalization. Tradition, history and recent mass consumerism… the most diverse influences mixed along the rice fields of the North.» These few words by David Giancatarina, Marseille-based photographer with a strong propensity for human landscapes and their inner conflicts, perfectly summarize the intent of his photographic research in the heart of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with sincerely exciting results. The sense of disorientation, at times of subtle but real disbelief, is inevitable in the face of landscapes crystallized in the collective memory as suspended across the passage of time, yet spoiled by individual elements of an invasive and harsh modernity, that in a gesture demolishes and reconstructs spatial and cultural references without any mediation.
DUSTIN SHUM: XIANGGANG ALIAS HONG KONG
After the expiration of British control in 1997 Dustin Shum, Hong Kong based photographer, started capturing images of his city to see whether or not there were subtle changes happening in “Xianggang” (the Putonghua pronunciation of “Hong Kong”). However, in his own words, this new city is only a place of mind, a sort of “psychological landscape”. “Hong Kong is getting more and more dramatic, sometimes even absurd”, he confirms, “and this chaotic situation can be shown through the artificial topographic landscape built and created by Hong Kong people after 1997.” By trying to explain himself Shum doesn’t hesitate to recall a curious technologic parallelism, a common experience for Mac users: “We Hong Kong people feel that we have created a new Hong Kong, but haven’t we just created an “alias”, an alias named Xianggang?”. An error, as trying to open a long time deleted file.
Anne-Marie Merryman collected postcards between 1937 and 1980, a collection inherited by her granddaughter, Anne Sophie Merryman.
The book, Mrs. Merryman’s Collection, presents the postcards which together form the story of two intertwined lives - one life lived travelling the world through the postcard images, the other a child and then adult whose life and relationship to her own history and her future were influenced by the collection.
While Anne-Marie and Anne Sophie never met, both their lives were inspired by the postcard collection - a relationship that was born, and continues to flourish, in the realms of the imagination.
Mrs. Merryman’s Collection is the winner of the First Book Award 2012, an award by the National Media Museum and MACK to support the publication of a book by a previously unpublished photographer.
112 pages
86 colour plates
24.5 cm x 27 cm
Hardback
© MACK
Eva Besnyö
‘Eva Besnyö (1910–2003): The Sensuous Image’
Jeu de Paume, Paris
22.05.2012 - 23.09.2012
In 1930, when Eva Besnyö arrived in Berlin at the age of only twenty, a certificate of successful apprenticeship from a recognised Budapest photographic studio in her bag, she had made two momentous decisions already: to turn photography into her profession and to put fascist Hungary behind her forever. Like her Hungarian colleagues Moholy-Nagy, Kepes and Munkacsi and – a little later – Capa, Besnyö experienced Berlin as a metropolis of deeply satisfying artistic experimentation and democratic ways of life. She had found work with the press photographer Dr. Peter Weller and roamed the city with her camera during the day, searching for motifs on construction sites, by Lake Wannsee, at the zoo or in the sports stadiums, and her photographs were published – albeit, as was customary at the time, under the name of the studio. Besnyö’s best-known photo originates from those years: the gypsy boy with a cello on his back – an image of the homeless tramp that has become familiar all over the world. Eva Besnyö had a keen political sense, evidenced by the fact that she fled in good time from anti-Semitic, National Socialist persecution, leaving Berlin for Amsterdam in autumn 1932. Supported by the circle surrounding woman painter Charley Toorop, filmmaker Joris Ivens and designer Gerrit Rietveld, Besnyö — meanwhile married to cameraman John Fernhout — soon enjoyed public recognition as a photographer. An individual exhibition in the internationally respected Van Lier art gallery in 1933 made her reputation in the Netherlands practically overnight. Besnyö experienced a further breakthrough with her architectural photography only a few years later: translating the idea of functionalist “New Building” into a “New Seeing”.
Josef Koudelka
‘Gypsies’
Les Rencontres Arles Photographie
02.07.2012 - 23.09.2012
In 1975, the first edition of Josef Koudelka’s photographs was published by Robert Delpire in a book that became a myth and was never published again. In 2011, Josef Koudelka exhumed a former dummy of the same book and decided to re-publish it with a larger amount of photographs. Exceptional pictures, exhibited for the first time together, unique prints, the show tells, through unpublished documents, the story of those two books published with a thirty-six-year gap.
In the 1975 edition, Robert Delpire said about this special project that impacted the twentieth century history of photography: ‘In the very stillness of the characters Josef questions and who question him, there is a kind of tension, a quivering, the muffled murmuring of flowing blood suddenly contained. It is not so much the temporary nature of immobility, the suspended time peculiar to the snapshot, as the feeling that this precarious immutability is only a surface phenomenon. Beneath each of these weather-beaten and hairless complexions silently glides the ice of all fears. Rooted like dried trees inside these bare, white walls, men mark out lines, indicate the masses of a statistically geometric order. Prisoners of the attention that they bring to bear, without naivety, on the photographic event, they are both witnesses and actors of their own presence. Whether they keep watch over the victim of a murder, show their pathetic treasures or flaunt themselves in front of Josef in the ironic ostentation of an accepted impoverishment, they give to the image its weight of classicism and tradition.’
Robert Delpire, excerpt from ‘Josef ou la fureur de voir’, 1975.
Klavdij Sluban & Laurent Tixador
ARTS RESIDENCY IN KERGUELEN
Les Rencontres Arles Photographie
02.07.2012 - 23.09.2012
Klavdij Sluban, photographer, and Laurent Tixador, visual artist, are the first recipients of the Atelier des Ailleurs residency. The Atelier des Ailleurs is an arts residency in the exceptional context of the Kerguelen Islands. It aims to offer two artists conditions beneficial to creativity and experimentation in a place without a permanent population and almost exclusively taken over by the scientific community. The two artists stayed for three months at Port-aux-Français, mingling in with the daily life of the scientific teams, to the rhythm of expeditions and rotations. The works presented at the Rencontres d’Arles are the result of work realised during this residency. The gaze they bring is not illustrative or descriptive, but fits within a logic that favours the relocation of artistic practice. Open to individual artists, the call for applications launched internationally received 440 artists’ projects. A jury composed of four state representatives (the minister in charge of Overseas Territories, TAFF, the minister of Culture and Communication, DAC-OI) and four personalities from the world of the arts (Erika Hoffmann, Caroline Smulders, Isabelle Gaudefroy and Antoine de Galbert), got together last October in Paris to select the two winning artists. Located in the Southern Hemisphere, fifteen days by sea from the Réunion Island, the islands of the Kerguelen Archipelago, once named the ‘Devastation Islands’, do not have a permanent population, but host, depending on the bases, from thirty to one hundred scientific and technical personnel, who stay there from six months to a year.
For this residency, Klavdij Sluban presents a project dealing with photography and its different formats, in black and white. It highlights the very themes he deals with: travels and claustration.
Laurent Tixador has chosen to help scientists. Erasing his own work to emphasize the ones of the scientific community working on the islands, he shows his desire to comprehend nature’s diversity, to live different and unique experiences, confronting himself with specific points of view on landscapes.
IN THE IN-BETWEEN, NEW PHOTO ART BLOG!!!
In conjunction with Urbanautica journal of contemporary photography, co-editor Greg Jones is proud to introduce a new photography blog, In the In-Between.
The inaugural post is a feature and interview with Rochester Native, Nadine Boughton. Nadine Boughton is a recipient of the “Top 50” Critical Mass 2011 competition, Photolucida. Her work has been exhibited at Photo Center Northwest, Seattle,WA, Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR, RayKo Photo Center,San Francisco, CA, Davis Orton Gallery, Hudson, NY, and Panopticon Gallery, Photographic Resource Center, Griffin Museum of Photography, Danforth Museum of Art, in the Boston area. Her work has been featured on-line in Lenscratch, Plates to Pixels, Flavorwire, Aparte 20 minutos. She was an IRIS lecturer 2012, at The Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, CA, Adventures in Digital Collage. Boughton grew up in Rochester, New York, under the shadow of George Eastman’s Kodak Tower. She studied photography with Garry Winogrand, and at Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, and Lesley University Seminars, Cambridge, MA. She currently lives in Gloucester, MA where she teaches photography, collage and creative writing.
If you would like to be considered for an feature/interview please email the following items:
Please direct your emails to gejones.info@gmail.com
