ROGER BALLEN
‘Retrospective (1969-2012)’

Museum WestLicht, Vienna
22.02.2013 - 28.04.2013

In his pictorial world between documentary and fiction, equally disturbing and striking, Roger Ballen is one of the most idiosyncratic and distinctive photographers of his generation. Born in New York in 1950, he has been living and working in South Africa for many years. The exhibition, for the first time on display in Austria, will offer a comprehensive insight into all creative periods of the artist.

Already during the sixties, Roger Ballen was familiar with well-known photographers such as André Kertész, Bruce Davidson or Henri-Cartier-Bresson, his mother being an employee at Magnum’s New York office. Over time photography became his passion, in spite of this he decided to take a degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Ballen’s fascination for the grotesque and the abysmal is reflected already in his early photographs. Taken between 1969 and 1973, they anticipate characteristics of later series, such as the fragmentation of subjects or isolation in front of white walls.

The death of his mother in 1973 incited him to go on a journey round the world, accompanied by his camera. The photographs of these years, published in Boyhood in 1979, are evidence of the influence street photography had on him. Subsequently Ballen studied at the Colorado School of Mines, returning to Johannesburg in 1981 to work as a geologist there. On his trips through the country he discovered the Dorps, rural communities, until today home to descendants of the Boers: Dorps. Small Towns of South Africa (1986).

While the portrayed in Platteland (1994) were usually photographed frontal and in full body shots, in their sparsely furnished homes, surrounded by objects of daily life, he took a different approach in his series Outland (2001). In this project he acted out absurd role plays, with props such as cables, pipes and masks, but also animals such as dogs, cats and pigs were held and displayed.  In Shadow Chamber (2005) the human only exists in fragments. Drawings and objects, made by the artist, conquer the space. Less interested in the outer-, focusing on the inner world, the series leads onto hidden terrain and into the dark zones of life. The search for the subconscious, often seeming almost nightmarish, Ballen continues in Boarding House (2009) and his most recent series Asylum.

The artist understands every photograph as part of the self and hence as an extension of his own person. Photography is like a journey of discovery of his own psyche: “The older I get the more I need to get to the source, the place where dreams originate, the source of the psyche.“

Curators: Dr. Ulrich Pohlmann, director of the photography collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, and Rebekka Reuter, chief curator of WestLicht.

© Roger Ballen | Museum WestLicht

OPEN CALL ‘FAUNA’
ANDREA ALESSIO
‘Bestiario’

  FAUNA’ is a new call open to any suggestions on photographic series related to animals. We will be posting the best submissions on Urbanautica and related channels. Deadline is February 18th. One project selected from among those submitted will be published and printed on the 4th issue 4 of “Stand Quarterly” magazine together with the works of Alec Soth, Céline Clanet, Vincent Fournier and Trine Søndergaard. Stand is an advertisement-free photographic journal showcasing the work and thoughts of various contemporary photographers from all areas of the world. Submissions of the series are welcome at info@urbanautica.com or directly on our facebook page. Steve Bisson curator and art director of Urbanautica will also be selecting works for future exhibitions. The selection is made on series (full project). Yet we accept single images to share with our readers here on facebook… Thank you all and best wishes!!! 

© Andrea Alessio 

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
‘The Man, the Image & the World’

Fotografiska, Swedish Museum of Photography
08.03.2013 - 26.05.2013

I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life - to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.

- Henri Cartier-Bresson

In cooperation with Magnum Photos, Fotografiska presents the ultimate retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson. It consists of about 250 photographs, including rare and never shown before, surveying Cartier-Bressons entire career, as well as a generous collection of classic photographs.

ogether with photographers such as Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, George Rodger and Bill Vandivert, Henri Cartier-Bresson founded the esteemed picture agency Magnum Photos. Magnum photographers have covered most of the historic events during the last decades and taken many of the most outstanding pictures. Henri Cartier-Bresson regarded photography as a way to tell stories about life. He was present in Spain during the Civil War, in Germany when the concentration camps were liberated, in China during the fall of Kuomintang and Mao’s march into Beijing, and he experienced the radical left movement during the student revolts in Paris in 1968.

Henri Cartier-Bresson had an almost uncanny talent at capturing moments in life with his Leica. He coined the expression, “the decisive moment” – the art of perfect timing, being able to release the shutter at the exact fraction of a second. “For me, the camera is a sketch book”, wrote Cartier-Bresson, “an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. In order to ‘give a meaning’ to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry”. For example, Henri Cartier-Bresson never cropped his pictures, he composed them in the viewfinder.

This retrospective exhibition at Fotografiska includes work from all periods of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s life. From the artistic and the avant-garde pictures from the 1930’s, to his photojournalistic work and his portraits of Alberto Giacometti, Simone de Beauvoir and Truman Capote, among others. The exhibition is curated by Robert Delpire and produced in collaboration with Magnum Photos and Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

 © Henri Cartier-Bresson | Fotografiska, Swedish Museum of Photography

BETH CHUCKER
‘Darkened Snapshots’ 

These photos were the rejected images from our family album that my parents kept private from me, from a time before I was brought into their lives. There is something about finding intimate images of your parents that turns them into strangers. Who is that woman who looks like she had too many cocktails in the woods? They reveal an everyday history. In light of this new discovery, I began creating new images derived from these photos, based on my childhood perception of my parents, privileging the conceptual mechanism of cognition over visibility. These images engage the act of remembering to consider what is buried and what is revealed over time.

© Beth Chucker 

OPEN CALL ‘FAUNA’
NINA THOLENS

  FAUNA’ is a new call open to any suggestions on photographic series related to animals. We will be posting the best submissions on Urbanautica and related channels. Deadline is February 18th. One project selected from among those submitted will be published and printed on the 4th issue 4 of “Stand Quarterly” magazine together with the works of Alec Soth, Céline Clanet, Vincent Fournier and Trine Søndergaard. Stand is an advertisement-free photographic journal showcasing the work and thoughts of various contemporary photographers from all areas of the world. Submissions of the series are welcome at info@urbanautica.com or directly on our facebook page. Steve Bisson curator and art director of Urbanautica will also be selecting works for future exhibitions. The selection is made on series (full project). Yet we accept single images to share with our readers here on facebook… Thank you all and best wishes!!! 

© Nina Tholens

OPEN CALL ‘SPORT’
Luc Rabaey 

‘We are the Champions! Cycling teams are sport teams, but also companies. Brand names of sponsoring enterprises. They want winning teams. Cycling is commerce. Commerce has influenced the need and development of dope. Possibly results are manipulated in other ways too. Despite of this bad side of the story, cycling remains popular. In Belgium almost everyone is crazy about cycling. It seems they don ‘t care about unsavory practices in cycling. What is understandable: first they want racing. Cycling belongs to folk culture and bycicle racers are heros. The famous classic races are entertainment and gathering. A big party of identification and group affirmation.’

‘Primapersona’ is a biannual magazine that features unpublished autobiographical texts, whether they are memoirs or autobiographies, diaries or letters that are traces of life written by “ordinary people”. The magazine gives voice to the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano in Italy, and moreover, to the general debate on the issues of autobiography. 

In each issue, depending on the subject matter, are presented excerpts from these texts, from all periods of our recent history and from all regions of Italy. Their responses act as in an indirect dialogue with the study and theoretical reflections of those who, anthropologist or historian, sociologist and linguist, philosopher and writer,  are convinced that writing is a gesture of inquiry. (to understand something more of ourselves).

Photography has an important role in this magazine. In each article, words torn from the diaries and autobiographical memories are accompanied by images in black and white. Photographs  are carefully selected to dialogue with rather than interpret these words.

Urbanautica will take part in this new issue dedicated to Sports by suggesting a series of photographic projects that will be collected through an open call. In addition our editorial manager Steve Bisson will write a specific essay.

Submission have to bent sent to info@urbanautica.com. Deadline for submission March 7, 2013.

© Luc Rabaey

OPEN CALL ‘SPORT’
Sergey Melnitchenko
‘Schwarzenegger is my idol’

“Schwarzenegger is my idol” is the story about the young guys from Nikolaev (Ukraine) 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.

‘Primapersona’ is a biannual magazine that features unpublished autobiographical texts, whether they are memoirs or autobiographies, diaries or letters that are traces of life written by “ordinary people”. The magazine gives voice to the National Diary Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano in Italy, and moreover, to the general debate on the issues of autobiography. 

In each issue, depending on the subject matter, are presented excerpts from these texts, from all periods of our recent history and from all regions of Italy. Their responses act as in an indirect dialogue with the study and theoretical reflections of those who, anthropologist or historian, sociologist and linguist, philosopher and writer,  are convinced that writing is a gesture of inquiry. (to understand something more of ourselves).

Photography has an important role in this magazine. In each article, words torn from the diaries and autobiographical memories are accompanied by images in black and white. Photographs  are carefully selected to dialogue with rather than interpret these words.

Urbanautica will take part in this new issue dedicated to Sports by suggesting a series of photographic projects that will be collected through an open call. In addition our editorial manager Steve Bisson will write a specific essay.

Submission have to bent sent to info@urbanautica.com. Deadline for submission March 7, 2013.

© Sergey Melnitchenko

LAURE ALBIN GUILLOT
‘The Question of Classicism’

Jeu De Paume, Paris
26.02.2013 - 12.05.2013

Laure Albin Guillot (Paris, 1879–1962), a “resounding name that should become famous”, one could read just after World War II. Indeed, the French photographic scene in the middle of the century was particularly marked by the signature and aura of this artist, who during her lifetime was certainly the most exhibited and recognized, not only for her talent and virtuosity but also for her professional engagement. Organised in four parts, the exhibition, “Laure Albin Guillot: The Question of Classicism” allows one to discover her art of portraiture and the nude, her active role in the advertising world, her printed work and, at last, a significant gathering of her “micrographies décoratives”, stupefying photographs of microscopic preparations that made her renown in 1931.

The exhibition presented at the Jeu de Paume gathers a significant collection of 200 original prints and books by Laure Albin Guillot, as well as magazines and documents of the period from public and private collections, such as the Parisienne de Photographie, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée Nicéphore Niépce (Chalon-sur-Saône) and the Musée Français de la Photographie (Bièvres).

A large number of the original prints and documents on show come from the collections of the Agence Roger-Viollet, which acquired Laure Albin Guillot’s studio stock in 1964. This archive, which now belongs to the City of Paris, recently became accessible after a long inventory process. Made up of 52,000 negatives and 20,000 prints, this source has made it possible to question the œuvre and the place that the photographer really occupies in history. 

The photographer’s work could appear as a counter-current to the French artistic scene of the 1920s to 40s, whose modernity and avant-garde production attract our attention and appeal to current tastes. It is however this photography, incarnating classicism and a certain “French style” that was widely celebrated at the time.

If Laure Albin Guillot’s photography was undeniably in vogue between the wars, her personality remains an enigma. Paradoxically, very little research has been carried out into the work and career of this artist. Her first works were seen in the salons and publications of the early 1920s, but it was essentially during the 1930s and 40s that Laure Albin Guillot, artist, professional and institutional figure, dominated the photographic arena. As an independent photographer, she practised several genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, still life and, to a lesser degree, documentary photography.

Technically unrivalled, she raised the practice to a certain elitism. A photographer of her epoch, she used the new means of distribution of the image to provide illustrations and advertising images for thepress and publishing industry. She was notably one of the first in France to consider the decorative use of photography through her formal research into the infinitely tiny. With photomicrography, which she renamed “micrographie”, Laure Albin Guillot thus offfered new creative perspectives in the combination of art and science.

Finally, as member of the Société des artistes décorateurs, the Société Française de Photographie, director of photographic archives for the Direction générale des Beaux-Arts (forerunner of the Ministry of Culture) and first curator of the Cinémathèque nationale, president of the Union Féminine des Carrières Libérales, she emerges as one of the most active personalities and most aware of the photographic and cultural stakes of the period.

© Jeu De Paume 

Shortcut of the day
YOSHINORI MIZUTANI

JOACHIM BROHM
‘Places & Edges’

Brancolini Grimaldi, London
22.03.2012 - 11.05.2013 

Brancolini Grimaldi announces the first ever UK solo exhibition by leading German photographer Joachim Brohm. The exhibition will feature work from throughout Brohm’s 30 year career, from early series including Ruhr (1980 - 1983) and Ohio (1983-84) through to more recent projects such as Culatra (2008 - 2010). The exhibition will also include Paradis, an early series, which has never been exhibited in a gallery show before.

Joachim Brohm rose to prominence in the early 1980s and was among the first Europeans of his generation to recognise the artistic power of American photographers including William Eggleston, Robert Adams and Stephen Shore. He was also one of the first photographers in Europe to shoot exclusively in colour starting in the late 1970s, connecting the visual possibilities of colour photography with a newly defined “everyday cultural landscape.” At the same time, Brohm’s sequences of photographs show how important the medium and the artist’s archive have become as reflectors of our day-to-day existence, challenging him to keep developing and reviewing them in the light of changes to the reality of our lives.

Culatra (2008 - 2010), forms the main focus of the exhibition. Culatra is a small, scarcely populated Portugese island on the edge of Europe, unspectacular but exotic in many ways, where solid houses sit next to shoddily built shacks. Brohm has created an archive of the island focusing on its inventory - boats, tractors, shacks, backyards, facades and more, many of which are removed from their original function and context. And despite the beautiful white sand and blue skies, the island looks almost deserted, adding to its sense of abandonment and desolation. Brohm’s pictures confront all this with a vantage point that shifts between overview and detail, distance and closeness. They reveal the hidden inner riches of the imagery of the banal.

In his early series Ruhr (1980 - 1983), we see different types of landscapes in the Ruhr region of Germany, an area undergoing huge change during a process of de-industrialization. Brohm turns his gaze on the edges of urban life, where existence tends to have a rural feel, where shopping-centres and small business zones have established themselves. The erratic settlement of the landscape where the cities burst out of their central structure is one of the interests with which Brohm anticipates the discussion of the ‘urbanization of the landscape’, which only developed around 1990. An elevated camera position is a constant feature in the composition of these pictures, so that we mostly see a larger segment of the landscape stretching out below us. People seem safely at home in it. This familiar, everyday ambience assumes a form of quiet monumentality.

In Ohio (1983-84), made by Brohm during a year long stay as a Fulbright-Scholar in the American city of Columbus, he captures aspects of an urban America not specific to any locale. Both familiarly American (the gas stations, the types of cars, the shops), and unfamiliar (from a car on fire to a deserted drive) Brohm is never trying to show us a documentary representation of reality. Rather these images give us a concept of America at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency depicting the transience of the American dream and the alienation and isolation related to it.

Throughout his career, Brohm’s work has explored the edges of places as he has sought to capture the on-going and perpetual changes happening in society and how they affect both the landscape and the people in it. It is in the hinterlands, the in-between places, where Brohm finds unexpected moments of hidden poetry, where neglect and decay become an expression of society and emphasise the temporary beauty of much that surrounds us.

© Brancolini Grimaldi

galleriabrowning:

PROCEDIMENTALI ‘EXHIBITION’
Images of Luca Capuano at Galleria Browning, Asolo 

Opening: March 16 at 18:00
Open Saturday and Sunday (11:00 - 12:30 and 15:30 - 19:30) or by appointment

Galleria Browning is pleased to present the new photography and art exhibition curated by art director Steve Bisson. The exhibition aims to discuss the overproduction - even suffocation - of images in society. What does it mean to be a photographer? The exhibition attempts to answer, without claiming to be exhaustive, by showing three projects, three actions, all Italians: Luca Capuano, Giuseppe De Mattia and Lorenzo Ferraro. The exhibited projects are an opportunity for dialogue, and for a discussion on new directions and procedural alternatives in photography that can change in response to the need to provide new life and possibilities of interpretation.

The series Spettacoli by Luca Capuano constitutes a single installation, as an ongoing process, not finished. The author in the wake of Guy Debord searches for traces of “spectacle” in the contemporary world, searching for fragments of real or reproduced images met in his journeys. Scattered and chaotic traces, man-made signs, pieces of land, the interstitial spaces  which provide meaning by working on sense combinations, on construction, on opposites and analogies, on the design of novel shapes where every detail, or any insistence of the gaze, participates in defining semantic foundations.

Luca Capuano builds visual mosaics, woven and communicating with each other, in which it is not so much the individual work but the emotional flow of the sequence which invites us to participate. All this without ever moving away from the charm of the documentary.What is evident is a continuous movement between modernity and tradition, between technological and poetic, between true and false.

© Galleria Browning

galleriabrowning:

PROCEDIMENTALI ‘EXHIBITION’
Images of Giuseppe De Mattia at Galleria Browning, Asolo 

Opening: March 16 at 18:00
Open Saturday and Sunday (11:00 - 12:30 and 15:30 - 19:30) or by appointment

Galleria Browning is pleased to present the new photography and art exhibition curated by art director Steve Bisson. The exhibition aims to discuss the overproduction - even suffocation - of images in society. What does it mean to be a photographer? The exhibition attempts to answer, without claiming to be exhaustive, by showing three projects, three actions, all Italians: Luca Capuano, Giuseppe De Mattia and Lorenzo Ferraro. The exhibited projects are an opportunity for dialogue, and for a discussion on new directions and procedural alternatives in photography that can change in response to the need to provide new life and possibilities of interpretation.

The section dedicated to Giuseppe De Mattia investigates three methods that represent time through random stratification of dust and therefore matter that makes up the atmosphere, air, space. These methods are related to photography as scientific system for fixing something on a surface. As seen in the red lacquer on the wooden beam of the seventeenth century which establishes the secular transformation of the path of woodworm.

This is also realized  as  dust spontaneously deposited on waste photographic film, nominated ‘Dust Collector’ and  is reclaimed through the use of a film scanner, rather than through the camera. There is also the work ‘Dust Constellation’, which reproduces the impression of a night sky and star dust. It is a work in collaboration with the musician Claudio Rocchetti, who gave voice to dust, reproducing the crackling sound of small motes of dust in the grooves of a vinyl record. Another example regards the old cinema hall ‘Strippoli’, in Bari, where the stratification of powder (and time) has changed  its appearance over the years.

© Galleria Browning