IN THE IN-BETWEEN: “KAREN DIVINE”

New Interview by Greg Jones featured on our sister blog In The In-Between with American photographer Karine Divine.

«Karen has been shooting images since 1972 and has won numerous International Awards including: Discovery of the Year with the International Photography Awards in NYC 2011, First Place in Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Julia Margaret Cameron, Prix de la Photographie Gold Award, Eyephonegraphy #3 in Madrid on Tour through Spain 2013, WPGA Pollux Award First Place, exhibitions in Atlanta, NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boulder, CO, Texas Photographic Print Program, and the Center for Fine Art Photography just to name a few.  Karen resides in Boulder, Colorado and will be offering iphone workshops in Denver this fall and at the Santa Fe Workshops in 2013».

Read more HERE:

© In The In-Between | Karen Divine

New kickstarter campaign for David Chancellor new photobook “Hunters”. Exploring the complex relationship that man has with animal in sub Saharan Africa, through the eyes of the tourist trophy hunter. You can read our special interview with here.

Hunters by David Chancellor

In 2008, I started work on the first of 3 books, documenting the industry behind the wildlife in sub Saharan Africa. Not just the animals, but the growing industry that surrounds them. The first of these books ‘hunters’ explores the complex relationship that man has with animal, through the eyes of the tourist trophy hunter. 

In the 19th Century these hunters would have been from aristocratic backgrounds, the monied elite of Europe and America. Today’s hunters are hedge fund managers, surgeons, dentists, attorneys, and their wives and children. They have the option to attend ‘safari’ training schools in their home countries, shooting remote controlled Elephants, Leopards, and Lions. Most have a place for their trophies in their homes back in the US and Europe, long before they even arrive in Africa. They have expectations of Africa, and these must be met by an industry priding itself on the fact that size does matter.

So far this work as been totally self funded. I can only now publish the book, if funds can be found to contribute to the cost, which is why I am asking you, and the Kickstarter community, for sponsorship to help fund the publication of this book.

I’ve been approached by an amazing dutch fine art publisher, Schilt, who wants to produce the book in a limited edition (2000), but only if funds can be found to contribute to the cost.

The book will be 24.5 x 30 cm (landscape) and hardbound with a dust jacket. There will be 192 pages, and approx 120 full colour plates.

In the back of the book, I intend to put a second, smaller book in concertina format. This will be enclosed in a pouch in the back cover, and hold the work from ‘elephant story’ (see below). On the back of the plates will be the complete essay ‘shooting an elephant’ by George Orwell.

Read more HERE:

© David Chancellor 

Candida Höfer

Artipelag, Gustavsberg

30.06.2012 - 28.10.2012

Candida Höfer is one of the foremost representatives of contemporary photographers. This is the first time that her artwork will be shown in Sweden in a large exhibition. The exhibition includes about 100 works spanning from 1968 up until today. Artipelag is showing her early black and white photographs of Turkish immigrants in Germany during the 1970s and street scenes in Liverpool from 1968 together with later photographs of interiors (taken) from churches, libraries, and museums around the world.

”The exhibition is an invitation to follow an exercise of self-examination: I attempt to identifiy – across time, across sets of motives and across the presentation forms used - common denominators of the visual memory that is guiding me.”

Candida Höfer was born in 1944 in Eberswalde, Germany. She was educated at the Düsseldorf Art Academy where she first studied film under Ole John and thereafter photography under Bernd and Hilla Becher. Candida Höfer’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at museums such as Kunsthalle Basel, Kunsthalle Bern, Portikus in Frankfurt, and at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 2012, she took part in the renowned Dokumenta 11 exhibition at Kassel, Germany. In 2003, she represented (together with Martin Kippenberger) Germany at the world famous Venice Biennial art exhibition in Italy (Biennale di Venezia). Candida Höfer is represented at several of the world’s most important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. Candida Höfer currently lives in Cologne, Germany.

© Candida Hofer

Taryn Simon

‘A Living Man declared dead and other chapters I-XVIII’

MoMa, New York

02.05.2012 - 03.09.2012

This exhibition is the U.S. premiere of Taryn Simon’s (b. 1975, New York) photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII. The work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the 18 “chapters” that make up the work, external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

Simon’s project is divided into 18 chapters, nine of which will be presented at MoMA. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: one of a large portrait series depicting bloodline members (portrait panel); a second featuring text (annotation panel); and a third containing photographic evidence (footnote panel).

©Taryn Simon

Simon Roberts

‘We English’

Third Floor Gallery, Cardiff

14.07.2012 - 02.09.2012

Over the course of a year Simon Roberts travelled England in a motor home, training his large format 4×5 plate camera on people and places across the country. His richly detailed large-scale photographs provide a vivid and elegiac account of modern England. Showing people playing golf in the shadow of a power station, enjoying a picnic at the side of the road or congregating en masse on a sandy beach, the photographs in We English explore issues of identity, belonging and the relationship between a people and their land.

We English is a very personal work, drawing on Roberts’s childhood memories, his engagement with the tradition of British photographic work (from Bill Brandt to Paul Graham) and his journey across the country. It is also a shared vision, informed by the public participation that Roberts encouraged during his journey via his website.

© Simon Roberts

Robert Doisneau

‘A certain Robert Doisneau’

Abbaye De Stavelot, Belgium

3.02.2012 - 30.09.2012

Born barely 100 years ago, Robert Doisneau is the last century’s best known and most acknowledged French photographer. Author of the famous The Kiss at City Hall, Doisneau wonderfully masters the art the instant, seeming to capture a second of the intimacy of a life in an action shot. Subtly staging the anecdote, his humanist photographs are marked with humour, simple happiness, nostalgia, irony and tenderness. The photographs by Doisneau, a true poet of the eighth art, take us on a journey through time and make us relive almost a century of the everyday life of a crowd, a child or two lovers.

Doisneau’s renown is firmly established through his black and white photographs of the inhabitants of Paris: craftsmen, tramps, street urchins, lovers in the bistros, streets, suburbs and avenues. The exhibition A certain Robert Doisneau provides us with an opportunity to meet Robert Doisneau beyond his most famous photos by also presenting us coloured photographs and, exclusively at Stavelot Abbey, unpublished photographs of Belgium.

Chris Killip

‘What Happened Great-Britain 1970-1990′

Le Bal, Paris

12.05.2012 - 19.08.2012

One of the most important British photographers, from the early 1970s Chris Killip opened up new perspectives for documentary photography whose influence is perceptible in the work of others such as Martin Parr, Tom Wood and Paul Graham.

Born in Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1946, Chris Killip took up full-time photography at 17 and was hired as assistant to a leading advertising photographer in London. Inspired by the work of Paul Strand and Walker Evans in America, Bill Brandt, August Sander and Robert Franck in Europe, in 1969 he returned to the Isle of Man whose new status as a tax haven was transforming the age-old Manx culture and way of life. Killip was determined to record its faces and landscapes, equally rugged and graceful; a world which had always seemed set in stone and was now at a tipping point.

A founding member, in 1976, of Side Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Chris Killip would spend the next twenty years among the people of the north of England, in Huddersfield, Lynemouth and Skinningrove. He immersed himself in the region, its landscape and topography, and its inhabitants. He became the chronicler of declining British industry, and the often violent confrontation between the working class and hostile economic policy.

© Le Bal

We are glad to announce our new exhibition ‘Madre Russia’ that will take place from 18 August through 16 September 2012 during the new edition of AsoloArtFilmFestival 2012. ‘Madre Russia’ is a collective exhibition of russian photographers focusing on the representation of female portrait in contemporary society. Part of ‘Madre Russia’ is also the personal exhibition of Olga Chagaoutdinova and the installation of Polina Pakhomova “Generations of Winter”.

GROUP SHOW OF RUSSIAN CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

Museo Civico, Asolo
from august 18 to september 16
saturday and sunday: 10.00-12.00 | 15.00-20.00
monday to friday (only from 18 al 29 august): 18.00-20.00

Group exhibition of contemporary photography, which focuses on women and their role and representation in Russian society. A journey through everyday life, dreams and aesthetics. The selection of different projects comes from the need to gather evidence of a variety of interpretations on the female world at the time of profound social transformations in Russia. The role of women is seen as a mirror of the right to freedom and emancipation. The exhibition represents a unique opportunity to observe and compare the interpretations of 11 contemporary Russian authors: Nikita Pigorov, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Anastasia Tailakova, Max Sher, Igor Starkov, Katerina Belkina, Sasha Rudelsky, Olya Ivanova, Alla Esipovich, Margo Ovcharenko, Anna Kharina.

MADRE RUSSIA

‘Prisoners’
EXHIBITION BY OLGA CHAGAOUTDINOVA
Exhibition rooms Gobbato, Asolo
from august 18 to september 29
from monday to sunday: 10.00-12.00 | 18.00-23.00

The solo exhibition by Olga Chagaoutdinova is linked to the parallel collective photography exhibition. It includes a series of portraits of Russian female prisoners and a video installation. The series “prisoners,” that begun in 2005 and went on for two years, consists of psychological portraits taken in a women’s prison in the Russian Far East. The intent of the project is to observe human existence in a panoptic and punishing environment. Long interviews with the prisoners have allowed the artist to investigate the notion of personal identity, virtually extinguished under the pressure and rules of the penal system. Gender issues and the official suppression of sexuality within the penitentiary system constitute a further aspect of her study.

Axel Stevens
‘For Paul Graham’, 2012

«All I did was follow my strong urge to photograph this man. Maybe he was still drunk from the night before, he was leaning/sleeping against this wall almost like he was trying to push the building over. I feel a very strong connection with people who look lonely (at first sight, actually I do not know if this man is/was lonely) and with people who seem not to fit in our current societies that are driven by money, greed, the current economic climate..It was a very warm morning too and then here is this man with his thick green coat.

It was only afterwards when looking at those pictures that an almost spontanious connection came in my mind with the work of Paul Graham, a photographer whom I greatly admire and respect.»

ARAS KARIMI

I look at photography as a relationship between light and film: light as a playful actor and film as a serious recorder. The job of a photographer, which is experimental by nature, is to write the best scenario for this one-time instant play. A genuine play is inevitably the result of accurate eyes, free mind, and fundamentals of photography at heart. Light is the subject of my works. Unlike the usual process in photography that uses light as a mean to record a scene and tell its story, I am interested in light as a story teller. In fact the scene in my works is the medium to picture light, its mood on different surfaces, and its personality in different spaces. Photography has become a meditation for me. I capture light through a process and technique that I have developed myself and take lots of patience and passion. Sometimes I set the camera in a location and take pictures of natural light through time. Sometimes I move the camera with the change of light in time. All of these efforts are to illustrate light in its most naked way, freeing and extracting it from the sense of time, space, and objects. What satisfy me and urge me to do more and more photography projects are the results which is the ability to depict my childhood fascination and share it with others: the irresistible playful beauty of light.

All of my photographs are purposefully Untitled. I like to give a chance to the viewer to experience their own emotion while they are coinciding with an expression of mine. It is also unnatural to apply a rational meaning to something that is opposite from being a product of intellect as all of my works are pure reflections of my vision, and emotion at the moment the shot is taken.

© Aras Karimi

IN THE IN-BETWEEN: ‘ASGER CARLSEN’

New Interview by Greg Jones featured on our sister blog In The In-Between with Danish photographer Asger Carlsen.

Asger Carlsen’s documentary-like images create an uncanny vision of the grotesque. What I find interesting about them is the sculptural quality lent to his subjects, as well as the sparse and un-kept environments they’re photographed in. The tension between his realist style of his photographs and their un-real subject matter creates a seamless platform from which we can ruminate over our own physical mortality.

This interview was co-written by Meghan Maloney.

Read more HERE:

© In The In-Between | Asger Carlsen

Group Show

‘There’s Something Happening Here’

Brancolini Grimaldi, London

14.09.12 - 10.11.12

Brancolini Grimaldi announces There’s Something Happening Here, a group exhibition showcasing the work of a new generation of photographers curated by James Reid and Tom Watt.

In these troubled and uncertain times of upheaval and dissent on a global scale, a new generation of photographers and image-makers is emerging. Steeped in the process and versed in the psychology of the medium, they are exploring angst, neurosis, notions of fragility and identity and even the subjectivity of photography itself.

The photographers included in the exhibition come from a diverse range of photographic backgrounds: from fashion and still life to conceptual photography and contemporary art. Despite the diversity of their practice, shared interests emerge. Their work challenges conventional boundaries of photography in surprising and unconventional ways, from appropriating found images to incorporating other media.

© Brancolini Grimaldi

Diane Arbus

Berliner Festspiele, Berlin

22.06.2012 - 23.09.2012

An exhibition by Jeu de Paume, Paris. In association with The Estate of Diane Arbus LLC, New York and with the participation of Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam.

Diane Arbus (New York, 1923–1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.

Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land.

She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts.Her contemporary anthropology—portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities—also stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theatre and reality.

The Martin-Gropius-Bau presents a selection of two hundred photographs that afford an opportunity to explore the origins and aspirations in the photography of Diane Arbus. The exhibition shows all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never before been publicly exhibited. The final rooms of the exhibition are devoted to extensive biographical and critical documentation of Diane Arbus’ life and oeuvre.

Rather than a chronological, thematic or academic approach, we have chosen to present Arbus’ singularly powerful images accompanied only by the artist’s own titles so that each viewer encounters the images much as the photographer encountered her subjects: directly and unencumbered by preconceptions.

© Berliner Festspiele 

ALEXEY TITARENKO

City of Shadows (1992-1994)

“The idea of The City of Shadows emerged quite unexpectedly and quite naturally during the collapse [of the Soviet Union] in the fall of 1991. I mean that the concept itself stemmed from my impressions nourished by the everyday reality. At that period, I continued to work on my series Nomenklatura of Signs. Suddenly, at some point I realized that I was struggling with emptiness and that my creative impulses – initially absolutely sincere – were running the risk of contemplating upon ideas no longer valid. This happened because the Soviet people, all these human beings deprived of their individuality and turned into “signs” by a criminal regime, began transforming from smiling and happy-looking “signs” into wandering shadows, even though rejecting the role of a “sign” could result in the loss of life. The year of 1992 was approaching…

The northern city of St. Petersburg is known for its summer “white nights” and its short, dark winter days lasting for just a few hours. In the winter of 1991-1992, one cold and gloomy day, I strolled sadly down a street which used to be packed with people, which used to be full of joyful vibrancy and dynamism. It was poorly lit; evening was settling in. There was not a single car visible. The depressing and strange quietness was interrupted by the sounds of banging grocery store and bakery doors, stores in which the shelves were absolutely empty. I saw people on the verge of insanity, in confusion: unattractively dressed men and women with eyes full of sorrow and desperation, tottering on their routine dreary routes with their last ounce of strength, in search of some food which could prolong their lives and the lives of their families. They looked like shadows, undernourished and worn out. Nothing like that had occurred since World War II, when the Nazis blockaded the city. My impressions as well as my emotional state were enormously powerful and long lasting. I felt an intense desire to articulate these sufferings and grieving, to visualize them through my photographs, to awaken empathy and love for my native city’s inhabitants, people who have been constantly victimized and ruined during the course of the 20th Century. 

More than anything, I wanted to convey my “people-shadows” metaphor as accurately as possible. This metaphor became the core of both my new vision and new series. I placed my Hasselblad camera near the entrance to the Vasilievostrovskaia subway station, where the shopping district was located. The events occurring there were imposed on my already mentioned impressions, as were sensations stirred by Shostakovich’s music, and his 13th Symphony in particular, with its movement called “At the Store.” A crowd of people flowing near the subway station formed a sort of human sea, providing me with a feeling of non-reality, a phantasmagoria; these people were like shadows from the underworld, a world visited by Aenius, Virgil’s character. It was a place where time had come to a standstill. This perception of time stopped convinced me that it could also be stopped by means of a camera shutter. I already knew how to achieve this effect, as in my childhood I often took pictures by trying the long exposure process in the dusk and evening, and later, when attending the university at the end of the 1970’s and beginning of the 1980’s, I studied this technique of 19th Century French photography.

I began taking pictures every day. When several good pictures were accumulated, I started grouping them with the intention of following a certain narrative line. This process helps me to make decisions regarding further subjects to be captured. There is the story behind The City of Shadows. As a rule, Shostakovich’s 2nd Cello Concerto and his 13th Symphony accompany the exhibit of this series.”

© Alexey Titarenko

Group Show

‘Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s’

Barbican, London

13.09.2012 - 13.01.2013

This major photography exhibition surveys the medium from an international perspective, and includes renowned photographers from across the globe, all working during two of the most memorable decades of the 20th century. Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s brings together over 400 works, some rarely seen, others recently discovered and many shown in the UK for the first time.

It features 12 key figures including Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston, David Goldblatt, Graciela Iturbide, Boris Mikhailov, Sigmar Polke, Malick Sidibé, Shomei Tomatsu, and Li Zhensheng as well as important innovators whose lives were cut tragically short such as Ernest Cole, Raghubir Singh and Larry Burrows.

The world changed dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. From the Cultural Revolution to the Cold War; from America’s colonialist misadventure in Vietnam to the indelible values of the civil rights movement; this was the defining period of the modern age. It also coincided with a golden age in photography: the moment when the medium flowered as a modern art form.

Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s presents some of the most inspiring voices in 20th century photography, in order to reflect on the world then – and now.

© Barbican