JIM NAUGHTEN
‘Conflict and Costume’

Klompching Gallery, New York
14.03.2013 - 04.05.2013

Continuing with an abiding interest in collective perceptions of history and relationships with the past, Naughten presents a spectacular new series of portraits. As with his first series, Re-enactors, he is not so much interested in the individuals themselves as subjects, but the costumes being worn and their significance in forming a cultural identity.

In the case of the Hereros, it is the adoption of 19th Century European clothing, originally introduced to the Herero people by German missionaries, traders and immigrants during the time of Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Taken out of the context of the subjects’ everyday lives, the portraits are photographed against the stark backdrop of the Namib Desert. Each figure is isolated, bringing forth the vivid colors of voluminous petticoated gowns, cattle-horn-shaped headdresses and colorful military uniforms, to center stage in a spectacular fashion. The unusual vantage point presents the subjects—although anonymous—as empowered, stoic and regal. 

Jim Naughten (b. 1969) is an internationally-exhibited artist, including a solo show at the Imperial War Museum in London and inclusion in the UK’s Royal Academy Summer Show (2012). He is the recipient of several awards, including a commendation from The National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, and in 2012 he was awarded the Best in Category for a Non-commissioned Portrait Series by the Association of Photographers, London. His first series of photographs, Re-enactors, was published as a monograph (Hotshoe Books, 2009), with several photographs acquired by The Imperial War Museum (UK).

© Klompching Gallery

ANNE LASS
‘Triple Seven’

Peter Lav Gallery, Copenhagen
01.03.2013 - 27.04.2013

‘Triple Seven’ is a photographic examination of private casinos and gambling dens in Berlin. Since the beginning of the current financial crisis, the number of casinos has increased very fast. There are today approximately five hundred »gambling dens,« mainly in areas with social problems. This development is not unusual, but it illustrates that there is a correlation between economic crisis, high unemployment, increasing poverty and the spreading of problem gambling.

The gambling dens in Berlin look very different. Many of them seem improvised and are not meant to exist particularly long. Anne Lass has photographed these places without gamblers and gambling machines to underline the puzzling atmosphere that she thinks pervades the suspect places.

The puzzling element is intensified by symbolic references to the gambling world, running like a red thread through the gambling dens, a combination of tarot and magic, religion, natural phenomena and space, all of it helping the gambler to achieve success and wealth.

Since 2011, Lass, motivated by curiosity to examine what is behind the façades, has visited more than one hundred gambling dens. To Lass, the venues represent an illusion of reality, a kind of ambiguous parallel world, intended as a place of refuge, and, at the same time, a place that one should dissociate oneself from. The individual photographs are made in consideration of forms and colours that appear more immediate than concrete and documentary. Through the narrow cut and sharpe gaze of the works, the spaces are interpreted by the fact that the individual elements are emphasized and centred. The world that Lass presents to us is, at the same time, abstract, colourful and exotic – and secret, put aside and somewhat depressing.

Graduating from the Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, Germany, in 2007, Anne Lass studied documentary photography in conducting with professor Jörg Sasse. Her works have been exhibited at galleries in Europe, Australia and the United States, such as C/O Berlin, Australian Centre for Photography and GrazMuseum. Her photographs have been purchased by the Danish Arts Foundation and C/O Berlin, and they appear in several publications. After travelling around and an extended stay in the United States, she now lives in Berlin.

© Peter Lav Gallery 

NATALIA POKROVSKAYA
From memorabilia to ephemera

The common photo album has significantly transformed its memory function since its invention. Instagram, the latest incarnation of a personal photo album, produces an enormous amount of personal imagery, formally identical to that of the traditional photo albums. But today these photographs have evolved from “ça a été” into “what’s going on”. Photos taken aren’t supposed to preserve memories – they are meant to be glanced at and then to flow away with the stream.

A photo album was intended to be a private experience, shared by its owner with people of their choice. An Instagram photo is meant to be shared, with such built-in tools as tags and geotags. What if in the age of cloudified data our personal photographs have also formed a “cloud memory”? I wanted to explore the idea that in the world where everything has been photographed, one might not need to take a picture, but just pull it out from a “cloud” of shared personal imagery. Paraphrasing Lacan, with these photos one sees him/herself “in The Other’s Other”. Personal becomes shared and then, anonymous.

“Cloud Memory” consists of 2 parts: a physical object that is an old photo album found at a flea market in Paris and a website. The album was empty, with only captions and 2 original photos left in it. I filled it with Instagram photos found by tags and geotags corresponding to the captions, placing them in the “traditional” photography context. The website features 5 pages of the album where each photo is, in fact, a stream generated with a specific tag or location, according to the original caption. Every time you open the album, you see new pictures. Instagram photos can’t get old, they can only go away.

©  Natalia Pokrovskaya

DUSTIN O’HARA
‘A. Brooks’

A Brooks Art, London
04.04.2013 - 18.05.2013 

Before becoming a gallery, A. Brooks was a family run flower shop. For roughly 70 years the Brooks family sold flowers to their neighbours. Remembered by many local residents, the A. Brooks flower shop, and its family, became an integral part of the Hoxton landscape. The transition from a family run flower shop to a contemporary art gallery is emblematic of the wider changes currently unfolding across the neighbourhood. This exhibition mines the shop’s recent and personal history, as a way of reflecting upon both the personal lives that animated the flower shop and the wider collective identity of the Hoxton neighbourhood. 

“The power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory - remains untapped for most working people’s neighbourhoods.”
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place 

The ‘A. Brooks’ exhibition was developed in collaboration between Dustin O’Hara, Julia Riddiough, and Toni Brooks. Dustin O’Hara’s work could be described as experimental community archiving, Julia Riddiough currently runs the A. Brooks gallery and Toni Brooks is a retired florist. Kathy and Mark Brooks also worked in the shop and family business for over thirty years. Mark now has a stall in Hoxton Street market and continues to sell flowers today.

Bio

Dustin O’Hara grew up in southern California and in 2011 finished an MFA in the Digital Arts New Media program at University of California, Santa Cruz. While at UCSC O’Hara worked with Warren Sack in the participatory culture research group and Dee Hibbert-Jones in the social practice art research centre. O’Hara’s own practice continues to reflect community participation and the outcomes that this work facilitates. O’Hara lives in Hackney and recent projects include The Shoreditch Park Project 2013 (a UK Heritage Lottery Funded Project), Me You Hoxton Too at PEER Gallery 2012 and the Shoreditch Festival London 2012.

© A Brooks Art 

TACA SUI
‘Odes’

The Salt Yard, Hong Kong
06.04.2013 - 02.06.2013

The Salt Yard, an independent arts space dedicated to photography, will showcase Odes by Taca Sui from April 6 to June 2. This is the first ever solo exhibition of Sui in Hong Kong. Inspired by the Book of Odes (Shi Jing), the celebrated collection of Chinese poems and songs dating back to the Bronze Age, Sui has been working on this photographic series since 2010. He first spent a year immersed in the classic text and the many extensive researches. Basing on places named in the text, he then worked out an itinerary and visited these places one by one in person. In order to echo the artistic technique of the Book of Odes, Sui created a visual world lying between two and three dimensions with his unique black and white photography. Regarding this profound and abstruse topic, Sui said, “I hope to construct a stable and concrete structure that can establish intertextuality with the structure of poems in some ways. I want to drive the meaning of literature to a remote and strange world so that these shapeless and mysterious stuff can enter into reality, to dissect this model which carries endless possibilities.”

© Taca Sui | The Salt Yard 

PAUL MCDONOUGH
‘Sight Seeing’

Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York
13.03.2013 - 05.05.2013

In this body of work McDonough leaves behind his main stomping grounds, the streets of New York City, and sets out on the road, traveling throughout the United States during the summer months of the 1970s and early 80s. Although the landscape he encounters is very different, McDonough’s photographs are remarkably similar to his urban pictures. They retain the aesthetic of street photography- pictures secretly snapped of often unsuspecting subjects- but there is also, quite often, a strong sense of intimacy and McDonough’s characteristic affection for his subjects.

McDonough has often said that the intimacy he could feel, if only for a second, in the moments when he snapped his pictures was extremely seductive to him and I think it could be said that the lasting feeling of intimacy is what we, the viewers wind up experiencing and celebrating in his work.

In McDonough’s travels he captured scenes of people at leisure: walking, playing, relaxing and flirting and although he barely stops moving when he snaps these pictures McDonough sacrifices nothing here in the way of composition. His photographs are crisp and clean, almost light and airy like the environment he is in. The end result is that both composition and content are perfectly in balance.

galleriabrowning:

PROCEDIMENTALI ‘EXHIBITION’
Images of Lorenzo Ferraro 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 photographs of Lorenzo Ferraro were all taken on film and printed in the darkroom. It is an approach that moves in the shadow of tradition but is revealed only by planned post-production distortions. Taken from the series “Sventranapoli” these photos were made by overlapping each other and forming a single sequence as long as the negative film. The author examines this ‘strip’ prints a portion by exposing with the enlarger each part of the negative with different exposure times, and thereby tying them together more evenly. Ferraro also exhibits some works from the series “Rough” including photos, that from the print quality to the “grain” size, appear to be “rough and dirty”. Particularly in the underwater image we can see that the negative film is ruined by sand and salt already present in the camera or on the lens while shooting.

© Galleria Browning

GEORGE GEORGIOU
‘Fault Lines/Turkey/East/West’

Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta
22.02.2013 - 13.04.2013

Jackson Fine Art is thrilled to kick off 2013 with three exhibitions that explore changing foreign lands. In our main gallery space, we present George Georgiouʼs colorful and captivating photographs of modern-day Turkey as the country struggles to reconcile its history and traditions with new developments and Westernization. In addition to its own population surge, over 33 million travelers are projected to visit Turkey in 2013, becoming one of the worldʼs leading tourist destinations.

Georgiou writes, “While living in Turkey for four and a half years, I was surprised at how quickly change was taking place: landscapes, towns, and cities reshaped, an extensive road network under construction, town centers ʻbeautified,ʼ and large apartment blocks springing up at a rapid rate around every town and city. Almost always, the architecture and infrastructure follow the same blueprint. Cities are becoming carbon copies of each other.”

© Jackson Fine Art

PATRICE TERRAZ
‘Welcome on Board’
 

They come from the ends of the earth, navigating the world’s oceans according to the dictates of the shipowners. Seafarers. They ensure the smooth operation of the merchant marine, the engine of the global economy, carrying around 90% of the world’s trade. Most of them are exploited, because international shipping is social chaos, its ways made even murkier by the owners’ use of flags of convenience. The cloak they provide allows owners to transport toxic cargoes, paying little attention to health and safety, the crew underpaid, even unpaid, and liable to be abandoned at the slightest problem.

It was 10 yars ago that i first met thesedistressed and abandoned seafarers. I was following Yves Reynaud, an Inspector for the ITF in Marseille, whose remit covers the entire Mediterranean. The ITF (International Transport Workers’ Federation) is a coalition of unions based in London that works for the rights of sailors, fighting the obscure practices that come with flags of convenience. 

The most striking example was the Florenz, a Panamanian freighter abandoned in Sète in January 2001. Wage arrears were so high, the owner preferred to abandon both ship and crew. There were 22 sailors on board, Greek, Croatian, Georgian, Cameroonian, Ghanaian. Caught between anxiety, despair and sheer boredom, going home impossible without money. The ITF had organised their relief through a support committee and, fortunately, the boat still had some value. But the wait would be long: a year and three months until an auction could recover the wage arrears. The ship changed its name, acquired a new Flag of Convenience, Cambodian this time, and set off on the waves, still in a terrible state, but with a new Filipino crew…

My first photographs documenting this situation gave birth to the book “Welcome on Board “, published by Images en Manoeuvres in November 2005. But the story did not stop there. A trip to Dakar brrought me to the Marine One, where an abandoned crew had survived for two years in appalling conditions. As a sailor, your chances depend on where a ship is abandoned. In Dakar, with no support committee, the sailors lived on fish from local fishermen, drank stagnant bilge water and became ill.

January 2010. A commission for Le Monde plunges me back into this story. I leave for Istanbul, where hundreds of ships with uncertain futures line the sides of the Bosphorus. Victims of the financial crisis, some are completely empty, slowly sinking, threatening to capsize or to come crashing against the shore. The slowdown in the global economy has had an immediate impact on trade in the Black Sea and Istanbul is at its entrance.

At the end of the economic chain, you find sailors, exhausted and homeless, abandoned to fate, drifting between boredom and isolation – almost any ship will do. The Nemesis, for example. Flying the flag of Sierra Leone, this 1965 freighter pitches about in the Sea of Marmara, pending some improbable return to service. Its two watchmen haven’t been paid for a year. Its Ukrainian owner, nevertheless arranges the delivery of food and water once a week. Around 500 ships have been abandoned in Istanbul. The Solvita, in the cargo business since 1977, flying the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, stuck for several months with nine Ukrainian sailors. Pending their repatriation, the local branch of the International Transport Workers’ Federation brings supplies to what has become a floating prison.

September 2010, the ITF sends me to Algeciras to photograph the Eastern Planet, a Sierra Leone-flagged freighter. Without news of the owner for several months, the morale of the Ukrainian crew sinks, eaten away by inactivity, trapped by the inactivity of others. Food is provided by humanitarian organizations. Fuel is running out. It’s a typical case for the ITF.

But the subject is infinite. January 2011, I return to Sète, ten years after the first images of the Florenz. The Rio Tagus, built in 1979, also flying the flag of St Vincent and the Grenadines, is held in port, no longer seaworthy. Wages have not been paid for a long time. The ship has no market value, the cost of repair is too high, the owner is in debt. For ITF Inspector Yves Reynaud, repatriating the crew is the only solution, but it is the nightmare of every sailor, having left his family for months, to go home without money. The ship will be just one more on a list of rustbuckets, sinking in different ports.

In ten years the situation hasn’t changed. Sailors exist at the world’s margins. Plato’s thinking still holds true. “A sailor is neither among the living nor the dead; for man, made for the soil, launches himself upon the waters like an amphibian and belongs to the earth and not to the sea and when he sets out upon it, he puts himself at fortune’s mercy.”

© Patrice Terraz

MAXIME TAILLEZ
‘Border’

I started that work during my photography studies 2 years ago, for a simple exercise about “heterotopy”, so I worked on an old border crossing near my family house in north of France, where the customs officers facilities are now chocolate stores. Then I enlarge it to French-Belgian border, because this border is a part of my personal geography as I explain it in my introduction text. In the collective imagination, the idea of crossing a border depicts a sudden, or even brutal change of surrounding. In a globalized world, this is less and less the case, especially in the Europe of Schengen. Having lived in the north of France, I have crossed the border to Belgium so often that it seems it does not even exist anymore. For me, border areas reflect more of a personal geography than a concrete delimitation. Nevertheless, border areas are for most people a space of exchange more than a place for fast transitions. The no man’s land found around the former customs have become actual destinations dedicated to a low range tourism in low-taxes commercial areas. It’s the work that you just watch on my website, and it’s what I presented for my graduation last year, which did work well for me. Now I’m working on the french-english border, actually at Calais, where a lot of illegal immigrates try to cross the sea to England. I’m still in the beginning, this is pretty hard because the border is more administrative than geographic, and the weather really bad this winter, plus I have a shitty job to make money and pay my large format film, so time is missing… At last, I want to work about the whole french border, because each border with another country have a particular geography and history (Germany, Switzerland, Italy, etc…). So I still have a lot of work.

© Maxime Taillez

ANTOINE SEGUIN
Les Allées Du Château 

«It’s late afternoon in November, at the verge of a french municipality like many others. Since my last visit, something has changed in the landscape. Between the cemetery and the most off-centered houses, paths are emerging. It’s sunday, nobody’s around, the place is soulless.

Time goes by, seasons change, and so does the landscape. Layers of asphalt unroll on the fallow fields. Roses flower along the deserted roads. “Belle-époque” streetlights blossom here and there, too. The stage is set. Though, as time passes by, the site freezes and weeds cover up the flower beds, overflowing the footpaths and the roads…

I keep coming here at more or less regular intervals, always on the week-ends. Negatives are piling up. I am becoming aware of my role as a witness. It’s a necessity for me to keep documenting the evolution of this place.

Stacks of cinderblocks are rising between mounds of greasy earth. At the bottom of holes, slabs harden. Quickly, the first house is standing on its foundations. Then, everything follows, others emerge from the ground, at different stages of completion. On each one of my visits, the advancement is obvious. Subtle variations distinguish the houses : the tint of a coating, the molding of a door, the color of shutters, the number of windows…

Soon, I won’t be alone anymore. The first inhabitants will appear. Children will flourish in the streets. Life always finds its way.

Birth of a piece of a XXIst century ‘s town. Not that of the year 2000, with its glass and steel skycrapers and its flying cars… But one that “keeps its name silent” and that appears, discretely, at the edge of a french municipality like many others, a late afternoon in November…»

- translated by Ab. 

© Antoine Seguin

PETROCHEMICAL AMERICA
Photographs by Richard Misrach
Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “throughlines,” speculative drawings developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region.

This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of decades of environmental abuse along the largest river system in North America. Even more critically, the project offers an extensively researched guidebook to the way in which the petrochemical industry has permeated every facet of contemporary life. What is revealed over the course of the book is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his latest published monograph, shows a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, which garnered Aperture a nomination for a 2010 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year, and won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format Aperture book On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Earlier, Aperture published Violent Legacies, which addressed, in part, the contamination of the desert due to nuclear testing. Richard Misrach’s other books include Golden Gate, also being released by Aperture in spring 2012, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.

Kate Orff (born in Maryland, 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.

© Aperture

JAMES WELLING
‘Monograph’

Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
02.02.2013 - 05.05.2013

Artist James Welling has created beautiful and challenging photographs for over thirty-five years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting and sculpture and traditional photography, he is a foremost photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s practice has unflaggingly shifted to address an impressive array of issues and ideas: the tenets of realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography.

His program, in particular, helps refine our definition of a photograph while offering a meaningful new paradigm for contemporary art. Monograph is the first comprehensive exhibition of this singular artist. It witnesses Welling’s sustained relevance and enviable staying power in this field while simultaneously explicating the primary strands that permeate this artist’s seemingly disparate oeuvre over three decades.

© James Welling 

GIOVANNI PASINATO
Intraluoghi

Galleria Browning, Asolo
13.04.2013 - 25.04.2013

curated by Steve Bisson

The Galleria Browning is pleased to host the photographic exhibition ‘Intraluoghi’ which displays a selection of works by Giovanni Pasinato from the series ‘Tensions’. A project that can be defined as ‘a job within a job.’ Thousands of photographs were collected during several working trips as a sales manager through a large part of the Po Valley.

Over two years of rapid and instinctive searching during which the author nevertheless relies with humility on the analogical medium that forces him to slow down and take in the surroundings more calmly. Photography that is used almost as a medicine to loosen the grip of time, to stand and get a better vantage point. 

To stay in the landscape. An ‘intermediate’ landscape such as the one that we often cross on the run, with a foot on the accelerator, from one commitment to another. In these lands, this ‘Intraluoghi,’ the photographer maintains the inquiry, that co-exists with all the misunderstandings and difficulties inherent in seeing through a car window. These ‘tensions’ are reflected in images carved from time and read as breaks. Implacable pauses, where the black and white images give no respite to eyes that are fixed on the subjects through lines and shapes that are never random.

Appearances, as the author defines them, that competes with but does not escape from reality, and allows a freedom from distraction. Distinct images, attentive, fearless and yet quiet. The author does not express his desire to judge, but to express himself through what he sees. He documents his reality, and in so doing he can not help but reveal its beauty. Created with the same courage of those who suddenly interrupt their work to question what they have been doing.

© Galleria Browning  | Giovanni Pasinato

HISAJI HARA
‘A photographic portrayal of the paintings of Balthus’

Reflex Art Gallery, Amsterdam
23.03.2013 - 11.05.2013