JOEL MEYEROWITZ RETROSPECTIVE NEW BOOK!

Taking My Time is the retrospective monograph covering the life and career of Joel Meyerowitz and provides you with an unprecedented insight into the mind and work of this iconic American photographer.  

This two-volume limited edition is presented in a slipcase and includes a signed print (Paris, France, 1967), a DVD of Meyerowitz’s award-winning film, Pop, a unique ‘graphic novel’ insert that tells the story of Pop and a second insert for Meyerowitz’s lesson in colour versus black and white photography.  

Showing the growth and development of Meyerowitz and his photography from the 1960s to the present day, Taking My Time explores the pivotal points of Meyerowitz’s career and his experiments in both colour and black and white photography and explorations of human intimacy, architecture, light and space. Including text that Meyerowitz, one of photography’s most articulate practitioners, has contributed, Taking My Time is a unique body of work and an unbeatable account of a significant period of evolution in photography. 

As design commissions go, being asked to produce the limited edition two volume book documenting the career of one of America’s most iconic photographers must be both exhilarating and a bit terrifying. But London-based Studio Baer have more than risen to the challenge with this beautiful Joel Meyerowitz retrospective for Phaidon.

With nearly 600 of Joel’s photographs on show, the designers let his brilliance speak for itself in a series of big, beautifully reproduced images. But there’s a few neat tricks as well like the specially created graphic novel insert based on Joel’s movie Pop (a DVD of which comes in a slip-pocket at the end of the book) and another insert who presents paired colour and monochrome images side-by-side.

As Joel explains in the video interview below, his practice has evolved along with photography which has gone from being something “amateur” and “trade” to ” to something that has a reigning place in the art world” and so his tale is a fascinating microcosm of this artform’s development since the 1960s to which Studio Baer have done real justice.

With a weighty £500 price tag it’s not going cheap but when a book looks this good it goes some way to justifying such an outlay. [It’s Nice That]

© Phaidon

Manuel Álvarez Bravo
A Photographer on the Watch (1902-2002)
Jeu de Paume, Paris
16.10.2012 - 20.01.2013

Getting away from the stereotypes about exotic Surrealism and the folkloric vision of Mexican culture, this exhibition of work by Manuel Álvarez Bravo at Jeu de Paume offers a boldly contemporary view of this Mexican photographer.

The photographic work done by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexico City, 1902-2002) over his eight decades of activity represent an essential contribution to Mexican culture in the 20th century. His strange and fascinating images have often been seen as the product of an exotic imagination or an eccentric version of the Surrealist avant-garde. This exhibition will go beyond such readings. While not denying the links with Surrealism and the clichés relating to Mexican culture, the selection of 150 photographs is designed to bring out a specific set of iconographic themes running through Álvarez Bravo’s practice: reflections and trompe-l’œil effects in the big city; prone bodies reduced to simple masses; volumes of fabric affording glimpses of bodies; minimalist, geometrically harmonious settings; ambiguous objects, etc.

The exhibition thus takes a fresh look at the work, without reducing it to a set of emblematic images and the stereotyped interpretations that go with them. This approach brings out little-known aspects of his art that turn out to be remarkably topical and immediate. Images become symbols, words turn into images, objects act as signs and reflections become objects: these recurring phenomena are like visual syllables repeated all through his œuvre, from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. They give his images a structure and intentional quality that goes well beyond the fortuitous encounter with the raw magical realism of the Mexican scene.

Indeed, Álvarez Bravo’s work constitutes an autonomous and coherent poetic discourse in its own right, one that he patiently built up over the years. For it is indeed time that bestows unity on the imaginary fabric of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs. Behind these disturbing and poetic images, which are like hieroglyphs, there is a cinematic intention which explains their formal quality and also their sequential nature. Arguably, Álvarez Bravo’s photographs could be viewed as images from a film. The exhibition explores this hypothesis by juxtaposing some of his most famous pictures with short experimental films made in the 1960s, taken from the family archives. The show also features some late, highly cinematic images, and a selection of colour prints and Polaroids. By revealing the photographer’s experiments, this presentation shows how the poetic quality of Álvarez Bravo’s images is grounded in a constant concern with modernity and language. Subject to semantic ambiguity, but underpinned by a strong visual syntax, his photography is a unique synthesis of Mexican localism and the modernist project, and shows how modernism was a multifaceted phenomenon, constructed around a plurality of visions, poetics and cultural backgrounds, and not built on one central practice.

© Jeu de Paume

SOPHIE T. LOVFF
Nothing is Stirring

“I made this series because I was interested in trees being lit up at night. I would drive around the Northeast and search for the brightest lights and photograph the surrounding foliage. Many times, the plants and trees were the only things lit by these very powerful and carefully placed light sources. I thought it was a strange use of energy, and wondered if it kept the trees awake, while at the same time exposing a latent fear of the dark.” —Sophie T. Lvoff

Sophie T. Lvoff’s ‘Nothing is Stirring’  was featured in reGeneration 2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, the second book in Aperture’s series shining a spotlight on the next generation’s rising stars. In the Nothing is Stirring series, Lvoff  focuses her camera on trees, which she observes at night under artificial light. Through her work without colour, Lvoff manages to give an impression of suspended time. This image of a birch forest evokes the Russian light described by Leo Tolstoy, who is in fact her ancestor.

Sophie T. Lvoff (born in New York, 1986) graduated from Tisch School of Arts in 2008. She has participated in exhibitions in both the U.S. and in Germany. Her work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Michaelis School of Fine Arts, Cape Town, South Aftrica; and the Leo Tolstoy Museum, Tula, Russia.

© Sophie T. Lvoff

David Chancellor
‘Hunters’
Jackbell Gallery, London
31.10.2012 - 10.11.2013

Using medium format film, Chancellor documents the tourist trophy hunting industry in Africa today. Work from the same series, entitled ‘Hunters’, won the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at National Portrait Gallery, London. The show is also accompanied by the launch of a new artist publication.

In many parts of Africa the traditional landowners have switched from farming livestock to big game.  The landowners become shareholders in these animals and by default become very effective game wardens, making poaching a difficult and risky pastime. Rural Zimbabweans, for example, now encourage foreign hunters onto their communal lands to hunt elephant in exchange for the meat, and a percentage of the revenue derived from these hunts. While a picture of a man who just shot a Leopard may appear loathsome, the whole chain of events becomes less straightforward within a wider context.

The industry developed in Kenya in the early 20th century, with wealthy European and American visitors paying landowners to guide them on hunting safaris in the area. Similar tourist hunting scenarios soon developed elsewhere, including Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia and to a lesser extent in Zambia, Mozambique and Swaziland. Now a major industry in Africa, trophy hunting occurs in 23 sub Saharan African countries.

Those portrayed here are not the landed gentry of the 19th Century; these are people of today, hedge fund managers, surgeons, doctors, and attorneys. Most save all their lives to hunt game in Africa, which is still accessible if you can afford the sizable price tag. This body of work explores the complex relationship that exists between man and animal sharing terrain, the hunter and the hunted, as both struggle to adapt to their changing environments.

DAVID WILSON

I share with pleasure some recent images of the photographer David Wilson, relating to its investigation of the Greater London. Moved to the east side of the capital in October 2011, he began to seek a dialogue with the human landscape, with acute sensitivity and careful research of composition. He seems to move to the edge of town, but it is actually in the city. This is where he want to get rid of a stereotyped view. In his walks, he observes, takes notes and capture significant moments and situations. What emerges is a human puzzle that does not pretend to be exhaustive but to get closer to reality without in any way deceive it. There is a desire to collect impressions, to decipher the landscape in its entirety, to discover the different identities of a place before even express them. Somehow we like to think of David Wilson as a sort of humanist geographer.

Steve Bisson

© David Wilson

CYRILLE WEINER

Within the context of the Mois de la Photo 2012 [Photo Month] in Paris, the fifth Lucien Hervé and Rodolf Hervé Prize for Photography—based on the theme “Society, Architecture, and Habitat”—was awarded to Cyrille Weiner for his work entitled “La fabrique du pré [The Factory in the Meadow].” 

The exhibition is running from 17.11.2012 to 7.12.2012 and is hosted at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris.

© Cyrille Weiner

LUIGI GHIRRI
Kodachrome

In 1978 Luigi Ghirri self-published his first book, an avant-garde manifesto for the medium of photography and a landmark in his own remarkable oeuvre. Kodachrome has long been out of print and on the 20th anniversary of Ghirri’s death, MACK is proud to publish the second edition.

‘Ghirri fights to maintain our ability to see. His works are powerful devices for the re-education of the gaze. They alter the perception we have of the world without proposing a single path to follow, rather they provide us with the tools we need to find the one we’re looking for.’ Francesco Zanot

Part amateur photo-album, Ghirri presents his surroundings in tightly cropped images, making photographs of photographs and recording the Italian landscape through it’s adverts, postcards, potted plants, walls, windows, and people. His work is deadpan, reflecting a dry wit, and is a continuous engagement with the subject of reality and of landscape as a snapshot of our interaction with the world.

This new edition of Kodachrome is published as a facsimile of the original, adopting the original design, text layout and image sequence, but using new image files scanned from Ghirri’s original film to take advantage of modern technology and printing methods. A small booklet is included with an essay by Francesco Zanot, which offers a contemporary perspective on the historical impact of Kodachrome, alongside French and German translations of the original texts from the book (which were published in English and Italian).

‘The daily encounter with reality, the fictions, the surrogates, the ambiguous, poetic or alienating aspects, all seem to preclude any way out of the labyrinth, the walls of which are ever more illusory… to the point at which we might merge with them… The meaning that I am trying to render through my work is a verification of how it is still possible to desire and face a path of knowledge, to be able finally to distinguish the precise identity of man, things, life, from the image of man, things, and life.’ Luigi Ghirri

Born in Scandiano in 1942, Luigi Ghirri spent his working life in the Emilia Romagna region, where he produced one of the most open and layered bodies of work in the history of photography. He was published and exhibited extensively both in Italy and internationally and was at the height of his career at the time of his death in 1992.

Photography critic and curator Francesco Zanot has been working with some of the most renowned European and international photographers, including Alec Soth and Olivo Barbieri, for over 10 years. He has participated in multiple conferences and seminars on photography in different institutions such as Columbia University in New York and the American Academy in Rome. He is associate editor of Fantom, photographic quarterly magazine based in Milan and New York.

6 page booklet
Essay by Francesco Zanot 
104 pages
92 colour plates
20.2 cm x 27 cm
Paperback with booklet insert
Publication date: November 2012

© MACK

Cyrille Weiner
‘La Fabrique du pré’
Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture, Paris
16.11.2012 - 7.12.2012

This bed of greenery inspires not abandon but an awaiting. Overhanging a vast motorway junction, circled by towers, it is a vegetal stop against which the historical axe of the Parisian West comes to break. On this section of motorway returned to a state of wilderness, the stones tell no more stories. They allow the unexpected to come into being.

Sensitive to the interactions of the natural and the man-made, Cyrille Weiner interprets the space in its force of both destruction and renewal: spurts of sap crack through the cement, fluid sands destroy the supporting walls, plants grip onto the motorway parapets. Everything communicates, overflows, spreading out over the infrastructures that shape the landscape to the measure of man. The wasteland, with its tangles of plants, converts the territory into a free-zone, open to a multitude of uses. As if escaped from towns in which introversion, private property and isolation triumph, a few men here seem to reconquer their own time, energy and imagination. Cyrille Weiner observes this concrete reappropriation of the wasteland, the bodies and hands that dig, plant, weed and hence create the field. But this primary reality is filtered, transcribed into a fiction of the end-of-the-world and a paradise lost. In this wasteland of designs suspended, usual bearings of time become blurred ; these men come to resemble both the first and the last. (From Urban To Human, by Marguerite Pilven)

Created upon the initiative of Judith and Lucien Hervé, in memory of their son Rodolf, according to the objectives originally established by its founders. The purpose of the prize –open to candidates of all nationalities, resident in France or in Hungary for at least three years– is to assist a photographer, between 25 and 43 years old, in exposing his work to a larger audience.

The École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, is a privileged partner of the Lucien Hervé and Rodolf Hervé Prize and currently hosts the Cyrille Weiner and Ildi Hermann exhibition, in the Galerie Spéciale.

© Cyrille Weiner

KIRK CRIPPENS
Ten Thousand Scrolls

An ancient Chinese proverb states:
”Traveling ten thousand miles is better than reading ten thousand scrolls.”
 
«I received an invitation to visit China in 2011. While making travel plans I remembered the Chinese tanks hesitating and halting as they rumbled toward Tiananmen Square, blocked so powerfully by a man holding grocery bags. I realized ominous news reports and ubiquitous ‘Made in China’ labels had colored my perceptions of China over the years. I also knew my understanding of China would never be the same after visiting; I was glad of that.

I wanted to find a simple, quick way to work during my visit. I purchased a used film camera from craigslist, the same model I learned to photograph with as a child. I don’t speak Mandarin; I had to learn to say ‘Hello’ (Ni Hao) and ‘Thank You’ (Xie Xie) upon my arrival. I used these two phrases and my simple camera to introduce myself to hundreds of people during my stay. I used hand gestures to ask if I could take photos. I wanted to meet as many people as I could and look them in the eye. I wanted an opportunity to interact, if only for a moment. These meetings sometimes blossomed into invitations to visit their homes, to have soup (or tea, or apples, or oranges), to visit rooftop gardens, and once I was even invited to a wedding banquet. The camera became a vehicle to remove obstacles and open doors.

The black and white film I shot was hand processed during a residency at RayKo Photo Center. It was a joy to return to the darkroom. I spent ten months making test prints and then silver gelatin exhibition prints. I can’t thank RayKo enough for their support, this project could not have been completed without them. The Artist-in-Residence exhibition will be on view November 16th-December 14th. RayKo will host an opening reception on Friday, November 16th from 6-8» [ Kirk Crippens]

© Kirk Crippens 

Bojan Radovič, Jose Pedro Cortez
‘European Eyes on Japan’
Vetrinj Mansion, Maribor
8.11.2012 - 30.12.2012

«This was my first trip to Japan and I did not know exactly what to expect there. Of course, I tried to gather as much data as possible, especially on the area of Toyama, but it was quite difficult to find a lot of information in English. Of the information I managed to find, I was drawn in particular to that about the festival Marumage.

My idea, before going to Japan, was that my work would be based on the Japanese story of the  “fox window”. When you encounter unknown scenery and find yourself suddenly crossing a mental threshold of no return, then using the thumb and forefinger of both hands, you make a circle, and through the resulting hole, look again at the scenery. That opening you make with your hands is called a “fox window”. The camera is similar; it acts as a kind of fox window for somebody entering unknown territory. A story I heard in Himi was in some way related to the fox window story.  There the beautiful views of the Japanese Alps, rising above the sea, are unique. The view is not always clear, and sometimes you’re not sure whether you are seeing the mountains, or just clouds. As I was told, and if I understand correctly, the locals call this phenomenon “mirage.” It seemed the perfect name to describe my work in Himi.

At the beginning of my work I had quite a few problems. My projects are usually based on a concept, which required time observing the new environment and communicating with people to develop. I ended up wanting to incorporate elements that were quite unexpected, namely the contrast between tradition and traditional aesthetics on the one hand and commercialization and pop culture on the other. The results of this approach were smaller stories.

© Bojan Radovič 

YTO BARRADA
‘Riffs’
FotoMuseum, Winterthur
01.12.2012 - 10.02.2013

Yto Barrada – Riffs is the first large-scale museum exhibition by the French-Moroccan artist. In 2011 she was selected by Deutsche Bank as “Artist of the Year” 2011. The award includes an exhibition made possible by the financial institution, which was presented at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin followed by stops in Brussels, Chicago, Birmingham, and Rome, and which can now be seen at Fotomuseum Winterthur.

For more than a decade, Yto Barrada (*1971) has confronted the political realities of North Africa in her photographs, films, and sculptures. Her work engages with life in her hometown of Tangier, Morocco, whose particular situation along the Strait of Gibraltar is emblematic of the historical upheavals experienced by many countries in northern Africa.

“I’ve always been attentive to what lies beneath the surface of public behavior,” says Yto Barrada. “In public, the oppressed accept their domination, but they always question their domination offstage. Subversive tactics, strategies of class contestation, forms of sabotage used by the poor – this is what I am most interested in.” Yto Barrada monitors the changes in her city with hawk-like attentiveness, responding to them with actions, images, and films that nevertheless maintain a remarkable calm, distance, and restraint. Neither iconic nor bellicose, they do not purport to be a weapon of enlightenment, nor do they offer a complacent, arrogant visual world that knows exactly how to behave and what to attain. As if the artist would always take a step back, her quiet, nearly static square color photographs offer visual fields opening up onto a landscape, an urban constellation, a being, a repose.

They reveal objects, buildings, and people so we might engage with them as observers, immersing ourselves, seeking, exploring, contemplating. We see here a sign and a gesture, there a rebellion; strikingly de-dramatized, real and allegorical at the same time.

© Yto Barrada | Fotomuseum Winterthur