RAFAL MILACH

Rafal Milach is a documentary photographer based in Warsaw, Poland. He graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland and ITF in Opava, Czech Republic. For more than 10 years he has been working on transition issues in Russian speaking countries and CEE region. This work resulted with the books “7 Rooms” (Kehrer Verlag 2011), “Black Sea of Concrete” (self published 2013) and such essays as “Disappearing Circus” (2008) or “The Winners” (2012). Rafal’s photos were exhibited in C/O Berlin, Noorderlicht, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, MoCA Shanghai and are the part of collection of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art in Japan. They have been also presented within Photoespana, Look3, Rencontres Photogrphiques d’Arles. In 2007 Rafal took part in Joop Swart Masterclass run by World Press Photo Foundation. Within next 3 years he received stipends from Polish Ministry of Culture, European Cultural Foundation and Visegrad Fund. His pictures and books have been awarded with World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, Magnum Expression Awards , Photography Book Now and New York Photo Festival awards.

Rafal Milach has now joined INSTITUTE!

© Rafal Milach | INSTITUTE

We love these images from above…
NASA - Earth As Art [free ebook/app] 

Dear Urbanautica readers,

at the end of last year we launched the open call ‘Bye Bye 2012’ to thank you all for the special support throughout the year. In few days, between Christmas and New Year, we received hundreds of images. An incredible panorama of contemporary photography. Artists and photographers of all levels and from around the world took part. The call has traveled on facebook with an average of over 15,000 views a week. Thousands of comments and likes!

We decided to make a online book out of it which will gather the images that we and you have enjoyed the most. A reminder of this important moment for global sharing. 

At Urbanautica we believe that we can improve the world through the sharing of words and images that have a significant human meaning. This is why we have been invited to curate the exhibition for the opening of The Salt Yard, the new indipendent space for photography in Hong Kong (next week January 18). During this event we will launch a new Open Call dedicated to the issue of ‘Humans’!

Stay tuned and Thank you for helping us to make a better cultural world!

Steve Bisson (founder of Urbanautica)

KEVIN MERTENS
Hurtland 

«Welcome to HURTLAND. All I really knew when I started this project was that I wanted to photograph in my father’s town of birth. For years I had thought about documenting life in Iowa. I flew over, got a rental car and started driving around. This place, where I had been so many times since my childhood, felt different now while looking through a viewfinder. Weeks passed by and I just couldn’t quite find the story that I had originally imagined. It seemed like I first had to re-discover the reality of the area. As if, what I had in my mind were images of my desire that didn’t reflect the actual situation. I asked myself how it could be that in past visits I hadn’t noticed all the worn-down houses, the empty stores, the exhausted looking people. An analog camera forces you to focus. 

One evening and by coincidence I met Jerod, a tall, friendly, non-stop talker, as I was shooting a street-scene near his house. He saw me and wanted to know what I was up to. As I told him where I came from and what I was doing, he invited me for a beer in his front yard. Thankfully, he later introduced me to the others from the area. In the beginning some of them actually thought I was an undercover cop. After some time though, they started to trust me and let me into their lives, with all the pain, struggle, beauty and hope that belongs to it. 

The first chapter of HURTLAND deals with The Laws of Power, which I became aware of through Robby, who had written some of these strange and uncommon rules onto a piece of paper. We talked about them and their meanings and I was curious where these laws came from. It turned out that while serving a term in prison, the father of Robby’s roommate had written them into a small notebook which he later passed on to his son. To me it seemed rather odd that these rules could be applied to daily life in Southeast Iowa. But I guess when times are difficult, and they are in this area, you look for ways to ‘elevate above the battlefield’». 

© Kevin Mertens 

ALENA ZHANDAROVA
Cornflower Tea and Concealing Chocolate

This is the story about one girl, her attitude to life, time and space around her. Each photo has a different state, which at the end of the story creates a new complete picture. It’s like a map, which helps not to forget, that fear and imperfection are small pieces of herself. And only through understanding and acceptance it is possible to find the right way.

This series is about the moment, it’s about what’s going on right now.  About  the uniqueness and value, the importance of each second. About the questions “Why?” and answers “because accidents are not accidental.”

There is always something happening around us. There are no unimportant moments. Each of them teach us something, each of them leave something very important behind all of us. It’s like an artifact, that given by the keeper for the knowledge.

The smell of apples, the sound of dripping water, cornflower tea taste in a candy store of beloved city. Every moment. This series – is only a microscopic part of me. My moments. My life. It is for me. It is my artifact. Embodiment of my strength, my ideas, my space. It is amazing as well,  that at the same time, the series is a mirror. It reflects each of your experience, whether it is а fear of loneliness or feeling lost.

And it is curious! Through such a deeply personal and intimate project, you can cognize yourself, find yourself artifacts, and live by yourself moments, curiously wondering at every moment: «Do I really do want to do more than anything else in this planet?».

 © AnzenbergerGallery

BERT DANCKAERT
‘Simple present ‘

Stieglitz19, Antwerp
26.01.2013 - 03.03.2013

We see in Bert Danckaert’s work a strangely familiar universe: that of the unremarkable, undistinguished places in which all of us spend so much of our lives, places we pass through without giving them any notice, spaces that are just trajectories, parts of a line connecting one place with another. Places, in short, that define our lives and that of so many other people in the urbanized world.

Danckaert’s work thus becomes a landmark of intercultural understanding, something that manages not to be trapped in the easy imageries of the exotic-typical, but brings us back to where things begin and end: in real human life. In an age of globalization, such levels of understanding are real, valuable forms of knowledge. [Jan Blommaert]

Bert Danckaert (°1965, Antwerp, Belgium) studied photography at the Academy for Fine Arts and the National Higher Institute for Fine Arts (NHISK) in Antwerp (B). Since the mid nineties, he has been working as a photographer and has showed his work in several solo and group exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. Besides his artistic activities, Danckaert also writes about photography for several newspapers and magazines (mainly ART) and has worked as freelance curator. He is associate professor of photography at the Academy of Antwerp (B).

©  Stieglitz19 | Bert Danckaert | photoexhibitions.org

PAOLA FERRARIO
‎’Signs & Remains’

Rick Wester Fine Art, New York, NY
16.11.2012 - 12.01.2013 (extended to 02.02.2013)

Everyone has a camera today. Pencils and paper, once the tools used to jot down reminders and memories have been supplanted by the cellphone camera. Language is evolving from the written word to the impromptu snapshot. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook reach hundreds, thousands, millions, in a flash. The work of Paola Ferrario trades our conceit for the formal expectations of art photographs for a uniquely personal impression of the world. Her pictures are an intensely quixotic and obsessive catalogue of discarded, distended details painstakingly gathered like orphans amidst a crowd of clearer appeal. It is the quietude in her pictures that make them so compelling. If we expect things to happen in photographs then her pictures will disappoint. Her surgical distillation of any occurrence makes them reverberate with the suggested rhythms of an unseen world, the ghostly shadows of what passed by. To imply action she strings sister images together based on their own oddities, their own uniqueness. Ferrario’s photographs celebrate the cry of the anonymous, the stance of one against a mob. They are as selfless as pictures can be without fading away. Paola Ferrario’s subjects belong to no one and everyone, and are found everywhere. Beyond her sly humor, there is the melancholic pang of abandonment, the trash and detritus of post-modern, pre-apocalyptic culture, the signs and remains of which appear to anyone willing to look.

© Rick Wester Fine Art | Paola Ferrario 

SERGEY MELNITCHENKO
Schwarzenegger is my idol

“Schwarzenegger is my idol” is the story about the young guys from Nikolaev, who are united by one thing - it is a goal to become the best of the best and they will do everything possible to achieve it. The photos show the young people who engage in athletics, acrobatics, fitness, and bodybuilding. I asked one of the boys to tell me what role his hobby plays in his life. Here’s what he told me: “For me, my sport is what I live for. Daily control and hard work - that leads me to success. Sport disciplines a man, enables him to understand the value of labor, the value of choice. I always wanted to be something more than an ordinary man in the street, more colossal than an ordinary representative of the society, so in my sport I do all the best I can, because I want to reach the top”. 

Why are my «models» nude on photos? I think it adds them a kind of courage and naturalness.

Of course it also looks funny and ironic. The series was created in 2012 - 2013 years.

© Sergey Melnitchenko

JAY
Hell is real

«My name is Jay,  I take photos. I could spend thousands of words describing how cool and good I am at it but I rather invite you to enjoy the images instead…»

© A Mad Tea Party

MARK COHEN
‘Grim Street’

Third Floor Gallery, Cardiff
08.12.2012 - 27.01.2013

Pennsylvania’s rust belt. In Mark Cohen’s photographs the overcast days feel as dark as nights. Worn brick walls and pavements feel tired and grey. The streets, back alleys and yards are inhabited by shadows and traces of human presence. Occasionally we find a full on confrontation with the inhabitants of Wilkes-Barre. It is as if the camera was an alien probe in search of the true mood and feeling of this industrial town.

Mark Cohen’s Grim Street is a seminal piece of 1960-1970s street photography. Leaving the much walked paths of its predecessors, but not the town of Wilkes-Barre, Cohen approaches photography in a truly confrontational manner, focusing often on the abstract patterns, textures and gloomy atmosphere that results from fast grab shots. Radical crops, disorienting closeups, a touch of of-kilter humour and the strong contrast resulting from the use of flash all took the art world by storm. In one photograph, against a dark and sinister background a woman’s face is occluded by a voluminous bubble gum and a hand seems to come off her head, in another a group of women all hide their faces from the encounter with the camera.

Mark Cohen has lived and photographed in Wilkes-Barre for his whole career. While running a commercial photography studio in the small city, his artistic career diverted into exhibitions at MoMA, George Eastman House, and other prestigious international museums and galleries. He has also been twice awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Out of his published books Grim Street and True Color are two of the most influential.

© Third Floor Gallery 

TORBJØRN RØDLAND
‘American Photography’

Nils Stærk, Copenhagen, Denmark
19.01.2013 - 02.03.2013

Nils Stærk is pleased to announce the exhibition American Photography with ten new works by Los Angeles based artist Torbjørn Rødland. This is Rødland’s fourth solo-presentation at the gallery. In making and combining photographs, Rødland’s practice is a subversive one. Familiar images and motifs are tapped for intuitive internal connections and mythological connotations – this often leads to hybrid genres. 

With its wilfully generic title, this new collection of photographs builds a loose but symbolically saturated weave of culturally recognizable and sometimes stolen visuals from American politics, nature and religion. Most of the photographed surfaces are flat, hard and pale: an Arizona canyon, a gravestone, marble chips in stucco, a foam roller, ceramic tiles, asphalt and concrete. The Great Seal of the United States at the facade of Beijing’s U.S. embassy is photographed head on and in colour while three smaller silver gelatine prints focus on key scenes relating to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Six crumpled white napkins photographed on messy terrace tiles reveal, on closer inspection, the Reagan Coat of Arms appropriated as a green pub logo.

Propaganda posters from the 1980 U.S. presidential election, one from each of the two main political parties, are physically interrupted and re-photographed. A photograph of a Joshua tree, so named by a group of Mormon settlers who crossed the Californian desert in the mid-19th century, is juxtaposed with a picture of the majestic twin towers of the San Diego Mormon Temple.

Rødland’s practice interrogates commercial photography and its longing for and representation of authenticity alongside certain overfamiliar tropes bound to contemporary visual culture. While mainly concerned with the visualization and ambiguity of moral conflicts and issues both personal and collective, Torbjørn Rødland isolates and revisits these persistent American tropes.

© Nils Stærk | Torbjørn Rødland

WHITNEY HUBBS
‘The Song Itself Is Already A Skip’

M+B, Los Angeles, California
19.01.2013 - 09.03.2013

Dark, raw, powerful and swimming in sensuality, the work of Whitney Hubbs is at once blunt and lyrical, formal and improvised, recognizable to daily experience and yet totally foreign from it. Full of unlikely visual rhythms, Hubbs’ work creates and provokes with aesthetic force. Her images reside in a reticence of feeling. Through profound light and dark, a specific refusal of continuity or seriality, as well as latent eroticism, Hubbs demonstrates over and over her disinterest in generic narratives. Her work persuasively follows its own internal logic through her willingness to challenge the relationship between photographic immediacy and “authenticity.” This is the point of contact where reality and representation become muddled.

While we are accustomed to the photographic medium as the revelator, Hubbs confounds this idea. Abstracting through framing and with little desire to illuminate or provide an understanding, Hubbs prefers to leave the viewer feeling — sensing. A continual tension builds throughout the work. The darkness confronts you. The release overpowers. It is a sense of intuitive wonder you are left with. Defining, while withholding. Simply there. If you care to look into the corners, around the edges and crawl into the vastness, you find yourself pulling wonder out of the chaos and revealing something more.

© M + B  | Whitney Hubbs

DANIEL SHEA
‘Venezuela’

Daniel also takes commissions for clients including TIME, Monocle, Dwell, Wired, The Fader, The Atlantic, Details, Bloomberg Businessweek, Esquire Russia, The Wall Street Journal (Magazine and Newspaper), Frieze, Bloomberg Markets, Sunday Telegraph (UK), Mother Jones, Fast Company, Le Monde, Inc, Nylon, Time Style & Design, Marie Claire, Guitar World, Revolver, Pitchfork, Orion, Chicago Magazine, Food & Wine, Popular Mechanics, W Magazine, Rolling Stone, National Public Radio, The New York Review of Books, Runner’s World, Smart Car, Budget Travel, Cynergy Systems, Indie Energy, The Fry Foundation, The U.S. Green Building Council.

Check out more of Daniel Shea work on his website and blog!

© Daniel Shea

BRUCE DAVIDSON
‘East 100th Street’

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
19.01.2013 - 08.09.2013

This exhibition celebrates the MFA’s recent acquisition of the 43 prints by renowned New York photographer Bruce Davidson that were originally showcased in his groundbreaking show, “East 100th Street,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. These powerful images capture the gritty reality of life on the block between First and Second Avenues, which had been described during the 1950s as the most dangerous in the entire city. Davidson began the project in 1967, when this section of East Harlem was slowly improving.

Carrying his bulky, large-format camera and tripod, Davidson returned almost daily for nearly two years recording the strength and diversity of the inhabitants of this Harlem neighborhood. Gradually gaining the trust of the residents meant that Davidson was able to make intimate, close-up portraits like this young pair on the street.

Bruce Davidson, Untitled, [Close Up of Boy and Girl with Faces Together], from East 100th Street series, 1967–68, printed 1969. Museum purchase with funds donated by Haluk and Elisa Soykan and the Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund.

JOEL MEYEROWITZ
Une rétrospective’

MEP Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris
23.01-07.04.2013

Joel Meyerowitz’s colour work revolutionised the history of photography. Born in 1938 in New York, he began photographing the city in black and white with a 35mm camera after meeting Robert Frank in 1962. In the mid 1960s, a long trip to Europe marked a turning point in his career and enabled him to affirm his personal style. Only in the 1970s did he begin working exclusively in colour.

Joel Meyerowitz developed a highly individual style, capturing “the decisive instant” with a 35mm camera and revealing the beauty of reality using longer exposure times with a 20 x 25 Deardorff view camera. This retrospective presents both his early black and white photographs and his colour work, including the famous pictures of the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York following the events of 11 September 2001.

© MEP Maison Européene de la Photographie