‘The Walk…in green’

Laura Bartlett, London
22.02.2014 - 30.03.2014

Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to present The Walk…in green, our fourth solo exhibition with artist Becky Beasley.

Robert Walser’s relatively long short story, The Walk, is the story of a day in the form of a walk ending at nightfall. Along the way the story unfolds through domestic, urban and country landscapes. It is a kind of straight story (A to B), which nevertheless proceeds by a shaggy dog method (via C). It is a model for the exhibition.

The various photographs in the exhibition – in the form of silver prints, postcards and offset litho prints – were originally taken by Beasley between 1999-2003. Taking time to revisit her own archive of unprinted negatives, Beasley’s works imagine an intimate relation to nature which, similarly to Walser’s narrative, passes through domestic (Re-potting (2000, Coldharbour Lane), urban (Auxiliary Flora and Fig Tree (2001, Amwell Street) and rural (Flora, A Life (1999-2001) settings. In each, however, a sense of domesticity emerges as a result of varieties of scale, proximity or distance.

Bearings (2014) is a three metre long, brass cast made from nine twigs collected by the artist’s father from wind-fall after the St. Jude storm. The purposely-tapering fragments screw together like a snooker cue and rotate at one and a half revolutions per minute (1.5 rpm). Inhabiting, by turns, the large bay window area of the gallery, this minimal work quietly takes up extroverted space.Bearings proposes The Walk…in green as a dis-oriented journey, which proceeds only by slow, attentive circling. This point is underlined, albeit differently, in the form of the revolving postcard-rack work, Flora, A Life.

The other sculpture, Steppe (Cloche version), is a reprise on an ongoing series of works whose original dimensions are identical. Despite its domesticity, the original black work, Steppe, invokes a hard landscape. Here the transparent green glazing suggests a horticultural device (cloche) used for incubating seedlings and as a protective covering to shield plants, primarily from the undesirable effects of weather, but also from insect damage. Also sculptural, but employing photographs to produce volumes, the two works, Re-potting 2000 and Flora, A Life have take away elements. Visitors are invited to choose a postcard and take a litho-print.

Like a routine daily walk from A to B and back again, the exhibition is a detected cosmos [Cosmos [ Kosmos, 1965) is a novel by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. It is a metaphysical thriller which revolves around an absurd investigation ] in which new clues can be discovered by attentively recovering the same ground.

Becky Beasley (b.1975 Portsmouth) lives and works in St.Leonards-on-Sea. Recent solo exhibitions include Spring Rain at Spike Island, Bristol and Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, A Slight Nausea at South London Gallery, London, The Man Nobody Could Lift at Leal Rios Foundation, Lisbon and The Outside, Tate Britain, 13 Pieces, 17 Feet, “park Nights”, Serpentine Gallery, London

Selected group exhibitions include Viral Research at Whitechapel Gallery, London, The Imaginary Museum at Kunstverein Munich, Je Suis Un Autre, Kunstverein Freiburg, Structure and Material, Becky Beasley, Karla Black, Claire Barclay, Arts Council (tour), British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (tour), La Carte d’Après Nature, Curated by Thomas Demand, NMNM Villa Paloma, Monaco.

© Laura Bartlett Gallery | Becky Beasley

‘Transition’
Robert Koch, San Francisco
06.02.2014 - 29.03.2014

The Robert Koch Gallery is pleased to present Transition, the first solo exhibition at the gallery for French artist, Lauren Marsolier. We are also proud to announce that the Robert Koch Gallery now represents Lauren Marsolier.

While Lauren Marsolier’s work is photographic, her process is similar to painting. Marsolier’s work is composed and assembled from photographs she takes at multiple geographic locations over spans of time. “Months or years often separate the capture of elements juxtaposed in my landscapes,” she explains. “This approach reminds me of many painters who would make sketches at different locations to use as reference for their future paintings.” Akin to the way a painter would use his sketchbook, Marsolier uses this data-bank of collected imagery to construct her photomontage landscapes.

At first glance, Marsolier’s appear to be seductively lit, neatly-composed, landscapes. However on further examination, we soon realize that the soft-hued dreamlike images comprised of elemental architectural structures encroaching on the natural landscape are devoid of protagonists, and that something is amiss. Marsolier’s mysterious and psychologically imbued images blur the distinction between the natural and constructed, both literally and conceptually.

Of her work Marsolier remarks, “I became interested in how we perceive reality and how our times, marked by constant changes, affect us on a psychological level.” Initially Marsolier scrubbed her images of “the tracks of time and the signs of life” as a method of describing “a lonely experience, like being lost in your own mindscape, something close to an existential angst.” Writer Stefan Mattessich further elaborates, “This is the felt stake in Marsolier’s evacuated edges and borders, the transitional non-places where human action and inhabitation are recorded in strange antitheses of nature and artifice, or, better still, artificial nature and natural artifice.”

Marsolier currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the 2013 Houston Center for Photography fellowship award, which included a solo exhibition of her work at the institution. In 2013, she was also featured alongside Mitch Epstein, Robert Adams, Simon Norfolk, Edward Burtynsky, and others, in the London exhibition Landmark: The Fields of Photography, curated by William Ewing at the Somerset House. She was part of the Humble Art Foundation 2012 selection of “31 Women in Art Photography” and has been featured in the British Journal of Photography as one of 20 photographers to watch in 2013.

© Robert Koch | Lauren Marsolier

BY STEVE BISSON

We are glad to introduce this new work by the Italian photographer Gianfranco Gallucci that we’ve already interviewed recently for Photo Schools (Stories # 3 october 2013). This time we present his research on immigration in this city of Rome. The project alternates portraits of foreign workers, snapped in their respective home and workplace. The alternation between the use of the color with black and white creates a double reading, a kind of parallel narrative. Each person is also described through a place, a place that he particularly likes. In this way, this project is also an emotional map, and a set of desires to be preserved. The text written by Gianfranco is very useful for getting deep into his intentions. We like this project because without expressing too many opinions is capable of bringing out from oblivion the lives of several people who have left their country to redeem their own life. It seems to us representative, and capable of giving voice, though silently, to a highly relevant social condition.

© Hui, Home, Work, Zone

- ” Immigrant ” is one who moves to another country, leaving their own land, because driven by the need for better living conditions. -

« Eh ! Integration is a big word ! Eh ! The integration is still a concept, a bit ’ far, for me it takes many, many years before this happens. For me, integration is yet to come . There are still many people who say that we should better stay at home. They say: What are they doing here , that the work there is not even for us, and all these things.. »  (An Immigrant)

Between 2010 and 2013 I searched and met 18 extraordinary, although common, people. The project “You’re Welcome” tells the story of these people.The only thing they have in common is Rome, coming each one from a different country, everyone with his/her own story, and now all living here, in the Italian capital. I took three portraits each person. One in their house, where they live sorrounded by their most intimate and personal things, objects and memories; the other one at work, showing their real and concrete contribution to the society; and the third one, even if without the subject indoors, that represents a further portrait of themselves, showing their most beloved and favorite place in Rome. Italy is a country where integration is not at all completely realized, most of all socially,as a result of the attitude of most people. I wanted to show how much richer and wonderful a multiethnic society is, where each person brings his/her contribution, and lives with the same rights and duties as everyone else. I narrated these stories, in order to tell, for once, a positive story about immigration, about people who left their “homes”, leaving everything, and fortunately found something better.

© Maria, Home, Work, Zone

When I decided to develop a project about immigration, I was confronted immediately with the vastness and complexity of the issue. My thinking began with the desire to understand what my personal relationship was with this topic, from my point of view as an”Italian citizen”. Which had been, till today, my attitude towards immigrants and immigration (despite having lived my childhood in a small town where immigrants where not common at that time, to be the son of southern Italian immigrants who moved to the north, and to be born and raised in a land that was not my parents home)? I really think that too many people, and not only in Italy, have never asked this question, or perhaps more simply, we just quickly forgot  our own recent past as immigrants. 

 © Alema, Home, Work, Zone

I did not know what I could say or tell about it, being able to say many things and nothing at the same time.
The phenomenon of immigration is often associated within media to individual episodes of anonymous negative realities. When repeated on the television information space daily, it ends up creating only prejudices and stereotypes against those who, for the simple fact of having left their country looking for a better way of life, later become the ‘carriers’ of a series of negative judgments that are not part of their everyday life.

In the end I chose to tell the stories of these people; eighteen stories, which have in common only the fact of coming from a country other than Italy and living in Rome with the hope of building a better future. I photographed each of them at home and at the workplace, with staged portraits that would tell something about them and their condition. I portrayed their favorite places in the city, getting a visual mapping of the same, according to their point of view.

© Kamila, Home, Work, Zone

The stories I have heard, recorded and later told, are very different from each other. Each one carries with it, the image of a country, and a culture, different from our own, and the combination of all these stories is a credit to the extraordinary wealth potential that resides in a multi-ethnic society. I avoided the stereotypes socio-economic context of the roman society, where certain ethnic groups or populations, because of cultural heritage or the particular dynamics of the market, have “monopolized” some sectors of the labor market. An example can be the Romanians, mostly employed in construction industry or of Bengali, in the bazaars or phone centers.

 © Eddaoudi, Home, Work, Zone

My meeting with each one of these stories, happened almost by accident, after having studied and identified the decisive nationalities of theRoman area in the recent years. Based on studies and statistics, drawn up by the various institutions, I pointed out that migration flows are changing, even massively, for socio-economic-cultural reasons, from year to year or cycles of 5-10years and can even completely distort the previous situation. Therefore, this project is located in a very precise temporal context by referring to the current situation of migration within the Roman location. One of the aims of the project includes an observation of a wider phenomenon unrelated to the particular conditions of temporality or location.This begins with a desire to make us think a little more about how we live every day and the people who are going, even just for a few seconds, to become part of our lives.

© Gianfranco Gallucci

Leonore Mau
'Second Sight'
Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
02.02.2014 - 23.03.2014

The Hamburg photographer Leonore Mau passed away on September 22, 2013, at the age of 97. A side-gallery exhibition presenting exemplary individual works from the photographer’s large oeuvre will be held in her memory. The 2005 exhibition «Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau» at the House of Photography, paid tribute to Mau’s work in a comprehensive form.

© Installation view Deichtorhallen Hamburg

© Self-Portrait of Leonore Mau with a picture of Hubert Fichte, 60s

Leonore Mau worked for every well-known German magazine. She found the most important theme of her life in her documentary work on Afro-American and West-African cults and rituals, which she researched together with the author Hubert Fichte. Her pictures are explosions of color and full of magic — sometimes disturbing and always simultaneously artworks and records of ethnographic histories.

© Mother Darling, Xango Ceremonie in Trinidad 1973

Leonore Mau, 1916 born in Leipzig. From 1953 worked as a photographer, at first mainly with architectural photography. From 1962 she lived and worked together with writer Hubert Fichte. In 1964 she accompanied the writer to literary Colloquium Berlin, and in 1968 she visited him during a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome. She made numerous portraits of artists and writers. In 1969 she traveled to Brazil for the first time together with Fichte. They explored in the following years, the Afro-American religions in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa. In Africa, Leonore Mau documented mentally ill people in psychiatric villages in Togo and Senegal, as well as on the streets of Ouagadougou.

Leonore Mau Haiti 1972 © Nachlass Leonore Mau, S. Fischer Stiftung

In 1975 they got The World Press Award for the photo of an african boy with mask tablets. In 1988, she portrayed the Pina Bausch in Wuppertal ensemble. Later she mainly produces still lifes, masks and sculptures and Objects trouvé from her home under the title Fata Morgana. Leonore Mau died on 22 September 2013 in Hamburg.

In cooperation with the S. Fischer Foundation and the F. C. Gundlach Foundation.

© Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Galleria Browning, Asolo
22.03.2014 – 04.04.2014

Opening: March 22, 2014, at 18:00
Open saturday (15:00 - 19:30) and sunday (10:00 - 12:30 e 15:00-19:30) or by appointment

«After all, sings Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose, is a rose, and this is all we know.»

The Galleria Browning of Asolo is pleased to begin the new season 2014 with an exhibition that arises from a special flowering. The meeting of Eber Bosa, photographer by passion and mostly a craftsman printer, and Antonino Gianquinto, writer. Both from Asolo.

The white roses of Monforca portrayed in all their neutrality by Bosa, through the contrasts of white and black devotedly adjusted in the darkroom, are contaminated by the bloody verses of Gianquinto, that reminds us of the violent massacre of the Jewish community of Asolo in 1547.

This shows that speaks philosophically beyond good and evil, in the sense of Nietzsche, is a warning to the flattening of the critical thinking and to the passive acceptance of morality.

The roses of Monforca are a tribute to Asolo and the artists who have often lived in the town. However this is also an occasion to launch our new programming in which we will propose alongside and in succession artists of different backgrounds and paths. A season of dialogue and debate inbetween languages.

© Galleria Browning

BY GAIA MUSACCHIO

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

When I was young, maybe ten years old or less, I used to ask my father if I could take some photographs with his reflex, an Olympus OM 2. After having taught me how to focus with the camera and some other useful techniques, I started to take the very first shots or, at least, I tried. This happened mainly during mountain excursions, family parties and on other similar occasions when my father carried his camera. I think that these first almost casual and playful experiences are an important basis for my photographic education.

© Giacomo Streliotto

After these early experiences, my parents gave me a small compact camera, but during high school I did not use it very often. However, in those years my interest in art and images in general increased. I then decided to enroll in the degree course in Visual Arts at IUAV, in Venice, to pursue these interests and find new ones. I did my first photographic project  during a course with Marco Zanta. The project was a series of photos which described different aspects of a small post-industrial area near Venice.

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

If I think about the first photographs I took when I was a child I believe it obvious to think that my research has evolved based on the experiences, the influences different types of images had on me, and the studies I carried out. What still remains now, however, it is a sort of playful approach to reality through photography. Then, while on my very first photographic projects at university, many things have evolved. Particularly in the last three years of university, I explored various features of photography and tried to find the best way to put together all the influences I have acquired through those years. Influences that come from the study of different photographers’ works, some artistic research projects, and a range of other things, such as exhibitions, books, memories, places, everyday life experiences, etc. Trying to put together all the influences that you have been exposed to in order to create something personal and original it is certainly not that easy. This is still something that I try to do and it will surely be a constant feature of my work.

© Giacomo Streliotto

3. Tell us about your educational path. Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts at IUAV and then you got a Master’s degree in Cultural Heritage Photography at ISIA in Urbino. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography at that time?

As I said before, I decided to enroll in the bachelor degree course in Visual Arts to deepen my interests and learn more about arts. At university, we attended many frontal lectures, and also workshops where we were asked to develop tasks according to a theme or specific guidelines. To complete those tasks, I used photography most of the times, as it came very easy. It was the photographic medium that I felt more comfortable to work with. So, after having gone through this three-year experience, I decided to improve my technical and theoretical skills in photography by enrolling in the second-cycle degree course in Cultural Heritage Photography at the ISIA in Urbino.

© Giacomo Streliotto

Here I assimilated the basic principles of studio photography and how to shoot various cultural heritage subjects (outdoor an indoor shooting) by employing a wide range of techniques. I acquired a great number of photo editing techniques, and learned how to work better with analogue and digital photography. I also had the possibility to attend lessons and workshops held by important authors and photographers, which helped me to better understand my work and know how to better develop a project. I have a lot of nice memories of my studies, but I think the best ones are about the experiences and views I shared with some people.

4. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you.

During the years at IUAV, the lessons of Antonello Frongia and Guido Guidi have been very important and formative thanks to their multidisciplinary teaching approach. I also remember with great pleasure a course with René Gabri, in which we were encouraged to exchange our views on various issues such as culture, politics and art, starting from philosophical texts and personal experiences. I did other important courses at ISIA, which have been useful. Those courses help me to improve my technical skills and learn how to better “read” an image or a photographic project.

© Giacomo Streliotto

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

I have been lucky to work under the guidance of some very motivating and inspirational figures at IUAV and ISIA. All of them, in different ways, have helped me to improve my skills, to change some points of view, to better understand my work. One of the last and important teachers I met  has been Luca Capuano. He encouraged me to change some features of my work and try different ways to carry out a photographic project. He also had always some good advice which improved my technical and artistic skills.

© Giacomo Streliotto

6. You’ve participated as well to workshops, with photographers like Franco Vaccari, Mario Cresci and Guido Guidi. Tell us about these experiences in general and how they affect your personal research.

In 2008, I attended a workshop held by Guido Guidi, which has been very important for my education. In this workshop, Guido helped us to reflect on photography and other issues related to representation. Between other important teachings, this experience taught me how to carefully observe the reality that surrounds me, how to deal with the less considered features of the landscape, such as marginal areas and industrial ones. What Guido Guidi thaugt me has influenced my work and also some of the formal aspects of my photos. However, I am constantly working in order to find my own point of view. On the other hand, the workshops of Franco Vaccari and Mario Cresci have been less influential, but still very useful. They help me to reason about the photographic medium, the relationship between photography and society and the importance of photo archives.

© Giacomo Streliotto

7. By looking at your bio I can see that you’ve been featured in some exhibitions. Did you also get the chance to publish something of your own work?

Actually, I have exhibited my works only a few times, because I have not focused on displaying that much. I have recently felt more comfortable with showing my projects mainly through my website. I am also looking for different ways to exhibit my work. I believe that publishing a photographic book is probably the best way to present a project. I still have not got the chance to do so.

8. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

I always try to represent with photography the complexity of certain places. I am interested in the complexity of landscapes and in the interaction between the human being and the environment, as much as in the ambiguities of photography, as a means of representation. Taking photographs is an activity that constantly teaches me how to have a different attitude towards things and pay close attention to everything around me. A fundamental feature of my work, especially in the last years, has been the activity of walking. By walking slowly in a place you can focus on what you usually do not watch. Another important feature of my research is to look at other authors’ works, which are not necessarily photographic projects.

© Giacomo Streliotto

9. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

It depends on the project I am going to work on, but I tend not to have any preferences. I have used different types of analogic and digital cameras. As far as the format is concerned, I prefer the 6x7 format, but I also like the 6x6 one.

10. Tell us about ‘La Brenta’.

The idea of a photographic analysis of the river called Brenta, which is located in the northeast of Italy, originates from my affection for this river and the places it crosses. I did not want to report the environmental issues that affect the river and I did not want to map the territory or to catalogue the artistic heritage and the natural one. My aim was to give the image of the river while exploring various features. For this reason, I started by reading the history of the river that is strictly connected to the history of the Veneto region, which is now characterized by what might be called an urbanistic chaos. It is a tangle of small and medium urban centers, industrial and commercial areas which, with their gradual expansion, have almost deleted the difference between the urban dimension and the agricultural/natural one.

© Giacomo Streliotto

Then I visited various museums, examined their material, and studied archives and private collections. In so doing I retrieved images and historical photographs, which are used as objet trouvé inside the project. Pictures which maintain the folds, the cracks or the stains, features that help to enhance the “photography object”, its materiality and the value that it acquires in the photo sequence. It is a sequence composed of photographs taken during the various routes I have followed along the course of the river. The series of images is not organized on a thematic index, nor according to a precise travel itinerary, but composed from scattered fragments linked together by a network of analogies. It is an attempt to trace a new possible path through images and find specific characteristics and identities of the landscape crossed by the river.

11. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

As I said above, what Guido Guidi taught me has really influenced my work, but many other photographers have done so, such as Robert Adams and, in general, all the photographers of the “New Topographics” exhibition, Luigi Ghirri, Michael Schmidt, the Düssledorf School, just to name a few.

© Giacomo Streliotto

12. Three books of photography that you recommend?

There are many photography books that I could recommend. I list the first ones that come to mind:

Michael Schmidt, ‘89/90’

Guido Guidi, ‘Varianti’

Paul Graham, ‘A Shimmer of Possibilities’

13. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Recently, I have visited the Foam Museum in Amsterdam. I believe that “America by Car” by Lee Friedlander and the installation of a young photographer called Peter Puklus were interesting projects.

14. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

I am thinking about to start a new work and I have some ideas. I would like to develop a project in the area around the Monte Grappa, a famous area which has been a strategic point in the first World War. I am interested in the landscape of the mountain, but I would also consider some of the historical photographs and written memories of soldiers.

© Giacomo Streliotto

Recently I have been involved for collaborations on other different projects and I am looking for let my work known.

© Giacomo Streliotto

‘Apartheid & After’

HUIS MARSEILLE, Amsterdam
15.03.2014 - 08.06.2014

Paul Alberts, Hugh Exton, David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Santu Mofokeng, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Daniel Naudé, Jo Ractliffe, Mikhael Subotzky, Guy Tillim, Paul Weinberg, Graeme Williams and the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg

The exhibition Apartheid & After reveals how powerfully the recent past can colour our perception of the present; this theme runs through the work of all twelve participating photographers after 1990. However powerful the individual images may be, this is photography with a hidden agenda – in a positive sense of the word. Knowledge of the past brings the present into sharp focus, and vice versa. It’s a tightrope act. Being a photographer in South Africa demands a sober, articulate, and skilled approach to the country’s burden of memory, trauma, and resulting guilt, as well as to the mysterious colouring and extravagant beauty of Africa so eagerly exploited by today’s tourist industry.

The exhibition Apartheid & After, which is based on an idea by David Goldblatt, aims to display the quality, diversity and dynamism of contemporary South African photography to a Dutch audience; there are, after all, historic links between the two countries. Today, twenty years after South Africa’s first-ever free elections were held in 1994, Goldblatt is not alone in having a solid international reputation; he is joined by Guy Tillim, Jo Ractliffe, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi and Pieter Hugo, as well as by a new cohort of younger photographers such as Mikhael Subotzky, Daniel Naudé, and Sabelo Mlangeni. The dynamism and breadth of contemporary South African photography is due in no small part to the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, where – under John Fleetwood’s leadership – many remarkable talents have emerged over a comparatively short period of time.

‘It is astonishing to think that until the beginning of the 1990s, merely two decades ago, modern and contemporary African photography was largely in the shadows.’ Okwui Enwezor in ‘Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity: Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection’, Steidl 2013 p.23.

© Huis Marseille | Pieter Hugo | Guy Tillim

TODD HIDO
‘Excerpts from Silver Meadows’

Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York
13.03.2014 - 26.04.2014

Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to present the third solo show of new works by Todd Hido.  In conjunction with the publication of Hido’s latest book,  Excerpts from Silver Meadows (Nazraeli, 2013) the gallery will feature a selection of images from this highly personal yet fictionalized body of work  that  surrounds  his  return  to  the  “architecture”  of  his childhood and  a particular  street  in  suburban  Ohio  where the artist was raised.  The works displayed introduce a new larger format for the artist and are printed in an edition of one.

Over the past twenty-five years Todd Hido has created a distinct visual language replete with  psychological  tension  and  emotional  drama  set  in  the  suburban American landscape.   Any narrative inferred from his work is entirely a construct of the viewer’s imagination heightened by Hido’s power of sequencing images and his fascination with a cinematic  style of  image  making.    His landscapes or  suburban scenes nearly always seem fraught with evocation, the weight of something about to be undone, or having recently  occurred (for better or worse).   Hido speaks of his works in the language  of memory, so that the holes and patches of an image are inherent to its finished composition. 

Todd Hido (b.1968, Kent, OH) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist who received his M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1996 and his B.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Pier 24, San Francisco; and the Bidwell Foundation, Cleveland  and are included in numerous museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of Art,  the  Solomon  R.  Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections worldwide. In 2001 an award-winning monograph of his work titled House Hunting was published by Nazraeli Press and a companion monograph, Outskirts, was published in 2002. His third book, Roaming, was published in 2004.  His first book focusing on portraits and nudes, Between the Two, was published in 2006 and A Road Divided was published in 2010. He is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California.

© Bruce Silverstein | Todd Hido

COLLIER SCHORR
'8 Women'

303 Gallery, New York
27.02.2014 - 12.04.2014

303 Gallery is pleased to present “8 Women”, our tenth exhibition of the work of Collier Schorr. In “8 Women”, Schorr presents works spanning from the mid-nineties to the present. Schorr’s earliest works utilized appropriated ads from fashion magazines to address issues of authorship and desire. The works introduced a female gaze into the debate about female representation. Appropriation was Schorr’s first medium and in some sense she returns to it, taking her own commissioned fashion images and folding them into a dialogue with other works. Using the language of appropriation, found images are redefined as Schorr is in a sense “finding” and using her own images to explore new ways of relating the performer to the photographer. Far from the detachment of typical post-appropriation aesthetics, Schorr intimates subversion in the origins of her own photographs, suggesting that the texture of a circulated image carries a particular charge, both in its restaging and in its relation to other images.

The works in “8 Women” propose a variety of subjects, all of whom are involved in performance, be it as artists, models or musicians. Schorr, who has been working in fashion for the last 10 years, created sets that doubled as her studio, teasing out images that could only be made with a subject that could travel between the object of desire and the enforcer of an identity crafted in that very moment. Drawing inspiration from photo histories of female performance, film, and dance artists, Schorr began to work with models that seemed to strike a similar balance between display and authorship. Working between out-takes and manipulations of tear sheets, Schorr questions who the women that desire to be looked at are, as well as what power exists in acknowledging that as a post-feminist position.

Works from this exhibition will be featured in the upcoming catalogue, “8 Women,” published by Mack.

A future solo retrospective of Collier Schorr’s work is planned to take place at the Jewish Museum in New York. Recent exhibitions include “More American Photographs”, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; “History in Art”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; and “Better Than Before”, Le Consortium, Dijon. In 2010, her work was included in “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has also been included in the recent exhibitions at Ellipse Foundation, Cascais; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hartware Medienkunstverein, Dortmund; and Kunstwerke Berlin, as well as publishing numerous books with Steidl/Mack. Collier Schorr lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

© 303 Gallery

twentyseven.one.seven

Zenon X Gallery, Antwerp
02.03.2014 - 12.04.2014

Zeno X Gallery has the pleasure to announce a new solo exhibition by the Belgian artist Dirk Braeckman (°1958, Eeklo). Twentyseven.one.seven brings a new ensemble of works in which his quest for abstraction, tactility and uniqueness is expressed in an even more pronounced manner than before. This is manifested not only in the finished work, but forms part of the creation process itself, for which his dark room is transformed into a field of experimentation in which the artist manipulates the paper, working with the materiality of the picture, revealing influences of chance and time. The artist avoids images that are over-reasoned and opts for the unpredictable. 

© 27.1/21.7/026/2014/b, 2014, 90 x 60 cm
solarised gelatin silver print mounted on Japanese paper
aluminium support & frame

Freedom and spontaneity therefore become essential notions in his creative process. He always carries a camera with him, not only during his travels but also when he wanders around in Ghent, where he lives and works. Braeckman is never searching for images, he simply notices things and finds images in what surrounds him. Even
if, sometimes, there are long periods of time – months, sometimes years – before he prints the images, his state of  mind remains the same as in the moment when he first took the picture. Both these stages in the creation of his work are equally important to the artist. Although he has made a number of digital images for this exhibition, his focus nevertheless remains on the analogue image. For twentyseven.one.seven, he manipulates the print and modifies
it to the extent where there can be only one final image: no other prints can be made from the same negative to resemble it. The artist questions one of the main characteristics of the medium, its reproducibility, by creating a unique image. It is no secret that Braeckman also painted during his studies. He is not a photographer in the full sense of the word; instead he seeks out the boundaries of other disciplines. Photography, for him, is a tool rather
than a goal in itself.

© 27.1/21.7/021/2014, 2014, 90 x 60 cm
gelatin silver print mounted on japanese paper aluminium support & frame

“In his most recent works, Braeckman bridges the gap to his artistic beginnings on various levels: In the middle of the 1980s he started with the creation of unique photographic images. He definitely had the intention to undermine the medium’s conventions, such as, for example, its reproducibility. But the connection to rather
expressive painterly techniques from that time is not so obvious anymore. Nowadays, Dirk Braeckman expands the photographic medium to the point where it becomes rather akin to the practice of a sculptor. In an often physically demanding way he works in the dark room with the chemicals and other items found in his studio, such
as dust and other rather unexpected materials. What is particularly remarkable is his use of one of the most basic elements in the photographic process, the light: it can certainly be said that Dirk Braeckman is manipulating and essentially sculpting the light. He transcends this technical framework by creating unique images: to do so he even appropriates parts of his own oeuvre, for example by repeatedly using the same negative. The result is a series of ‘original versions’ with which he expands his visual universe toward the inside.

© 27.1/21.7/029/2014, 2014, 60 x 90 cm
gelatin silver print mounted on japanese paper
aluminium support & frame

© 27.1/21.7/041/2014, 2014, 180 x 120 cm
ultrachrome ink jet print on matte paper mounted on aluminium

By establishing work of such paradoxical characteristics, Braeckman takes a further and highly contemporary step in his practice, which is unceasingly devoted to a highly personal deconstruction of the photographic medium.” (Martin Germann)
Braeckman’s work is highly subjective and evades the conventions of documentary photography, yet remains highly autobiographical. Even though his images are often deprived of human figures, his own personality and thoughts are very present. In his work we can distinguish several themes: female nudes, curtains, empty corners
in rooms, walls, abandoned hotel rooms, etc. His images are intriguing and suggestive. They raise more questions
than they answer.

© 27.1/21.7/011/2014, 2014, 90 x 60 cm
gelatin silver print mounted on japanese paper aluminium support & frame

Currently his installation Anonymous / Dirk Braeckman / /  Schwarzschild is on view at S.M.A.K., Ghent. Jan Hoet invited Braeckman a few months ago to create the campaign image of a new large-scale urban exhibition entitled ‘The Sea’ in Ostend, in collaboration with Philippe Van Den Bossche. Works of the artist will also be on view in this exhibition. Braeckman has also been commissioned to make works for A.F. Vandevorst, Louis Vuitton and
Queen Paola. Braeckman has had solo exhibitions at Museum M in Leuven (BE), De Appel in Amsterdam (NL), Kunsthalle Erfurt (DE) and Fotohof Salzburg (AT). His work was part of several group exhibitions such as Upside Down at the Cultural Centre in Strombeek (BE), BAZAAR Belgium in the Central for Contemporary Art in Brussels (BE), De Pont in Tilburg (NL), Antoine Watteau BOZAR Brussels (BE), Sint-Jan in Ghent (BE) and Robbrecht & Daem: Pacing through Architecture at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (GB). Works of Braeckman are permanently on view at the Concertgebouw in Bruges and the Ghent courthouse. Work of the artist can be found in the following public collections: Artothèque in Annecy (FR), Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris (FR), Centro Fotografia de la Universidad Salamanca (ES), De Pont in Tilburg (NL), Fondation national d’art contemporain in Paris (FR), Fotomuseum in Antwerp (BE), FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkirk (FR), FRAC Rhône -Alpes in Villerbanne (FR), Haags Gemeentemuseum (NL), MACs Hornu (BE), Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (FR), Musée d’Art Contemporain et Moderne in Strasbourg (FR), Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi (BE), Musée de l’ Elysée in Lausanne (FR), Musee Niepce in Chalon-sur-Saône (FR), MUHKA in Antwerp (BE), Mu.ZEE in Ostend (BE), Royal Palace in Brussels (BE), Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels (BE), and SMAK in Ghent (BE).

© Zeno X Gallery

HGG, New York
27.02.2014 - 12.04.2014

An exhibition of photographs by Berenice Abbott and Charles Marville will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from February 27 – April 12, 2014. Documenting now vanished streets and landmarks, Abbott and Marville: The City in Transition contrasts two cities – New York in the 1930s and Paris in the 1860s. Many of the images are on public view for the first time.

© Berenice Abbott, American Shops, Lodi, NJ, July 30, 1954

One of the last century’s greatest photographers, Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) took photographs of New York City for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). With a clean modern eye, Abbott sought to preserve the new face of New York in the 1930s. After eight years in Paris where she worked as Man Ray’s assistant, she returned to New York in 1929 to find that during her absence, many 19th –century buildings had been demolished to make way for skyscrapers.

© Berenice Abbott, Fulton Market, 1953

Inspired by Eugène Atget, whom she had met in Paris shortly before he died, Abbott had been struck by what she described as the “unadorned realism” of his photographs. Every Wednesday she documented the social, commercial, and architectural aspects of New York City. From an Esso gas station to the Lyric Theater to the elevated Second and Third Avenue train lines, Abbott focused her lens on all aspects of the city including busy commercial streets, row houses, parks, docks, and bridges in all five boroughs – a project that would stand as the centerpiece of her career. When the Stock Market crashed and the Depression began, she struggled to pursue her project. In 1935, the Federal Art Project offered her a grant, which included a $145 monthly salary, assistants, and a car. Five years later, she had completed Changing New York, images that have come to define New York City in the 1930s. In 1939, the budget for the Federal Art Project was cut, and Abbot lost her job.

© Berenice Abbott, Norris Dam, Construction, Looking East, Tennessee, 1935

One of the most important photographers of the 19th century, Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879) is known for his images of Paris both before and after its medieval streets were razed to make way for the broad boulevards, parks, buildings, and streetlights that have come to represent the City of Light.

The massive transformation of Paris was launched by Emperor Napoleon III and his chief urban planner, George-Eugène Haussmann, beginning in 1853. Not only did Haussmann seek to beautify the city, but to also improve traffic circulation, the sewer system, and other public works. All in all, it is said that the project transformed 60 percent of Paris’s buildings, creating more parks, light, and space as well as new bridges, government buildings, and an opera house.

© Berenice Abbott, Untitled, 1954

As official photographer for the city of Paris, Marville recorded the disappearance of the Old Paris and also focused on the creation of the new city, an urban vision that dominates Paris even today. From 1865 to 1869, his subjects ranged from a spectacularly elaborate wrought iron gate at Parc Monceau to a gas lamp suspended from an arcade at the Louvre to a street lamp and view at Gare de l’Ouest in Montparnasse.

Abbott and Marville: The City in Transition at Howard Greenberg Gallery coincides with an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York entitled Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris on view January 29 -May 4, 2014.

© Howard Greenberg

BY STEVE BISSON

Photography. How many definitions? And what about means? The creation of documentary materials can serve several purposes. Among these are the conservation and production of collective memories. Sometime photography ceases to be a result and becomes a means by which the presence of the photographer is sewn to a past with what is yet to come.

Today people question the usefulness of the conservative dimension since everything passes, everything evolves at a tremendous pace. However what often proves to be essential in photography is a sort of inner growth, the possibility to cross human trajectories, and to become richer in “human capital”. For some people, for some artists or photographers this becomes almost a necessity in life. As if the comparison with other stories could mean a confirmation of their own.

And this is the feeling I have found in the publication Métier. Small Businesses in London by Laura Braun. A special collection of stories that refers more to fairy tales. The protagonists are the small traders in London that have withstood the economies of scale and preserved an authentic dimension. And perhaps they have found an identity.

There is someone who made it and claims to have worked well at 10 Downing Street. Others have closed, such as the New Piccadilly Cafe of Lorenzo Marioni that served breakfast to the West End since the 50s. Or the darkroom by Klaus Kalde in Hackney Road which resists despite the emergence of digital photography and photoshop.

The author seems to be attracted to the spirit of survival of these businesses. «Places», as she writes «where space and service are personal, and wares and tools have a tangibile connection with individual histories». Laura Braun thus takes us through a map of feelings like pride, nostalgia or resignation. Like Harry who, after the advent of electronics, was left with less and less room to physically manipulate automatic transmissions. Or Theo Argiriadis who in the 1970s came from Greece to London to live a hippy life and ended up adjusting musical equipment, valves and tubes, and gaining experience that was slowly becoming obselete, a rarity.

Each story is told through a few pictures, mostly portraits, and a brief summary on the history of the company. Reading these words allows one to plunge into many different worlds of craftsmanship that share a need for manual work, and a passion that shouldn’t be given up. Like the one of Kristin Baybars who has been selling and making toys for more than fifty years. How can a portrait can summarize the story of a lifetime? In 1987 Adam Whone took over Withers, the oldest existing violin shop in the UK. In 1997 he closed and moved the business to his home in Acton. How can we sum up a man’s dedication to his craft? Braun’s consideration leaves us with a series of suggestions that are not intended to exhaust our curiosity, but to encourages us to deal with what surrounds us and perhaps to discover the treasures that often hide inside. A fascinating journey that was to last a few months but instead continued for 6 years for this London based photographer.

As I write this text, people talk of 3D home printers, self-produced design, downsized manufacturing and so on. I don’t know if that’s true but when I look at these faces portrayed by Braun, I can not think of how inexorable our fate is. Everything we produce is intended eventually to become obsolete. What remains is perhaps the intensity of the gaze of those who sold us something, their kindness or not, their behavior, their gestures, words, smells and perfumes. And if any of this is passed to us, even through an image, then perhaps something of a passion, no matter if damning or truthfull, can be metabolized within us.

© Laura Braun

‘Photographs’

Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
27.02.2014 - 19.04.2014

The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present a selection of photographs from photographer and filmmaker Peter Lindbergh’s expansive and influential career. Lindbergh’s work helped define the contemporary era of fashion and portrait photography. Having captured the most notable figures in the industry—Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss, Amber Valletta, Kristen McMenamy, Gisele Bundchen, and Cara Delevingne— Lindbergh’s indelible photographs go beyond the iconography of the “supermodel”. With a seductively intimate style and approach, Peter Lindbergh’s portraits reveal an inner truth to his subjects.

© Hollywood Sign, Hollywood, CA, USA 1995

Inspired by the austere beauty of his childhood in Germany, Lindbergh’s intense and dramatic photographs employ the cinematic language of Fellini and early German filmmakers. Consciously alluding to images from 20th Century photographers Andre Kertesz, Marc Riboud, and Paul Strand, Lindbergh creates multilayered and multifaceted images with nuances of meaning. His deeply saturated black and white photographs resonate a story-within-a-story, intentionally playing with traditional archetypes of women in photography—dancers, actresses, vamps, femme fatales, heroines—to define and redefine the narratives of the women who inhabit his world. Lindbergh’s photographs explore the intermediate spaces that exist between fashion and portrait, portrait and nude, nude and landscape.

© Olya Ivanisevic, Romina Lanaro, Vogue Italy, Downtown, Los Angeles, USA, 2006

© Hommage a Pina Bausch, Vogue Italy, Paris, France, 1997

Peter Lindbergh is often credited with creating the “birth certificate” of the supermodel with his landmark 1990 cover for British Vogue—establishing a touchstone for the decade. He had a major part in launching the careers of the most recognizable supermodels of the time. Reinventing traditional notions of glamour, femininity, and seduction, Lindbergh’s models are moody, raw, gritty, sulky, uninhibited, and joyful. His women appear undeniably beautiful, yet strong, striking, and handsome— typically with their intense gaze fixed firmly on the viewer. It is evident that collaborating with Peter Lindbergh is a two-way process, as he ultimately approaches them not as models, but as modern women.

© Installation Photographs Fahey / Klein Gallery

“The perception of the modern fashion photographer as someone whose rapid-fire apparatus commits countless thousands of exposures onto film accords exactly with the pattern of a relentless pursuit of an unattainable dream. But Lindbergh’s photographs, in spite of the apparent contradiction, provide some of the most concrete and confident depictions of contemporary women. His models may not necessarily comply with the putative ‘typical’ or ‘average’ women of today, but they nevertheless operate as cyphers for a type of women who has attained a demonstrable degree of freedom and independence. It is an independence they retain in the images; however improbable the fictional setting Lindbergh creates, there is never the impression that his women are merely being manipulated.” (Martin Harrisson, Images of Women Introduction, “Images of Women”, Schirmer/Mosel, 1997)

© Fred Ward, Guinevere Van Seenus, Vogue Italy, El Mirage, California, USA, 2000

© Sandra Bullock, Vogue US, El Mirage, California, USA, 2013

Peter Lindbergh moved to Paris in 1978, where he started working internationally for Italian, English, French, German,and American Vogue, and later for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Allureand Rolling Stone. In 1992, Lindbergh began working for American Harper’s Bazaar in New York and photographed the campaigns for Giorgio Armani, Jil Sander, Prada, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Comme des Garçons. Recognized for both photography and film, Peter Lindbergh is the recipient of numerous awards including the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), Raymond Loewy Design Award (Germany), and the IFTC Best Documentary award at the International Festival of Cinema in Toronto. His work has been exhibited, collected, and published internationally. Most recently, in 2013, his classic Fashion monograph Images of Women was republished by Schirmer/Mosel. Peter Lindbergh lives in Paris, New York, and Arles.

© Fahey/Klein Galllery

Photo: Gabriel Jones “8 alternate covers issued for the CD version of the album”

Arcade Fire “The Suburbs” 2010 City Slang 

The first album “Funeral” made them known and appreciated, “Neon Bible” exaggerated certain pomp and orchestral atmospheres and  the third “Suburbs” brings us to the center of the alt / mainstream / pop / rock world. The recent realization of “Her”, filmed by director Spike Jonze, recently in theaters, takes them back again to the center of media attention. Jonze is also the author of the first short-film video that accompanies the first song of the album that relates to the splendor, the disorientation, the epiphanies of the unique golden age of adolescence. The Canadians, always mindful of the school of Simon and Garfunkel, are able to assert their style in which the diversity of their sound is further influenced by echoes of African and Brazilian rhythms. Orfeo Negro in “Berlin sauce”? Mittle Europe meets Van Dyke Parks? Instruments in profusion, different rhythm sections and a refined use of the electronic recording studio, Win Butler and multi-instrumentalist (and wife) Regine Chassagne mark in a bubbling magma of sound their sumptuous arrangements and their bright melodies.

Gabriel Jones (Montreal, 1973), lives and works in Brooklyn and Paris and is the author of the 8 covers of the album ‘The Suburbs’, in collaboration with Arcade Fire, art director Vincent Morisset and Caroline Robert designers. The artwork has received a Grammy Award in 2012 for Best Album Packaging. The photographs were taken during a ‘road trip’ in various neighborhoods in Texas and tell the experiences of the American suburbs. Stories of ordinary life, seen from the car, and anonymous residential areas where the pre-tension drama evaporates into the usual story of disillusionment. As if to emphasize the centrality of the suburbs for them, who are peripherally native (the French-speaking Quebec) in a peripheral country (Canada) and to recall how each of us actually lives one’s own personal cultural, social, and ideological geography. These are places from which to leave, but also the place of America where its dreams, and its more intimate aspirations are raised. The images were projected on a large format screen, in which a car and the band members were part of the scenery, while Jones was photographing the set. The moods that emerge are those colorful, nostalgic and vibrant  Xerox atmospheres. The portraits of Jones were commissioned by numerous magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde Magazine, and Surface Magazine.

© Video Arcade Fire “The Suburbs”

"The Suburbs"

In the suburbs I
I learned to drive
And you told me we’d never survive
Grab your mother’s keys we’re leavin’

You always seemed so sure
That one day we’d be fighting
In a suburban war
Your part of town against mine
I saw you standing on the opposite shore

But by the time the first bombs fell
We were already bored
We were already, already bored

© Video Arcade Fire “Ready to Start”

PAST ISSUES OF UNDERCOVER HERE!

Text by Gianpaolo Arena

© Gabriel Jones | All copyright remains with the photographer and property

Yancey Richardson, New York
03.04.2014 - 10.05.2014

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Historyʼs Shadow, the first exhibition at the gallery by American artist David  Maisel. For over twenty-five years, Maiselʼs photographic  work has been wide-ranging in scope, and yet deeply focused  on what he describes as a “long-term investigation into the  aesthetics of entropy, and the dual processes of memory and  excavation.”

© David Maisel, History’s Shadow GM25, Archival Pigment Print, 2010

Maiselʼs previous work includes several aerial landscape  portfolios exposing the surreal, almost incandescent imprint of  industrial mining and mineral extraction operations throughout  the American West. In a later project, Library of Dust, Maiselʼs inquiries shifted dramatically in scale, to the unique imprint of mineral corrosion on individual copper canisters from a hospital archive.

Historyʼs Shadow represents an elegant continuation of these well-established themes, utilizing x-rays as source material to explore the intersection of scientific research and visual art. The exhibitionʼs title comes from a project of the same name, inspired by the artistʼs residency at the Getty Research Institute, during which time he re-photographed x-rays of sculptural antiquities culled from the useumʼs conservation archives. According to Maisel, Historyʼs Shadow refers “both to the literal images that the x-rays create as they are re-photographed, and to the metaphorical content informed by the past from which these objects derive.” 

© David Maisel, History’s Shadow GM12, Archival Pigment Print, 2010

In his essay, Trace Elements and Core Samples, Maisel describes the transformative nature of the material: “The ghostly images of these x-rays seemed to surpass the potency of the original objects of art. These spectral renderings were like transmissions from the distant past, conveying messages across time, and connecting the contemporary viewer to the art impulse at the core of these ancient works. Through the x-ray process, the artworks of origin become de-familiarized and de-contextualized, yet acutely alive and renewed, revivified. The shadow-worlds they occupy are informed by the black space surrounding the images, which in some instances becomes a vast nether world, and in others becomes the velvety ground of some kind of brain scan/portrait.”

In addition to Historyʼs Shadow, selections from Maiselʼs Library of Dust series will be on display in the galleryʼs project space. In Library of Dust, the artist photographed individual copper canisters containing
the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital, documenting the beautiful yet disquieting effect of mineral corrosion on each unique object. As in Historyʼs Shadow, these
transformative still-life objects float in a void against a pure black background, sublime meditations on the passage of time, memory, loss, and the metaphorical illustration of matter versus spirit.

© David Maisel, History’s Shadow GM16, Archival Pigment Print, 2010

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts. His photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations
have been exhibited internationally, and are included in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Victoria & Albert Museum; the National Gallery of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Nevada Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
among others. Maiselʼs work has been the subject of five onographs: Black Maps (2013), Historyʼs Shadow (2011), Library of Dust (2008), Oblivion (2006), and The Lake Project (2004).

© Yancey Richardson | David Maisel

STEPHEN DUPONT
’The White Sheet Series No. 1’

Edmund Pearce, Melbourne
02.04.2014 - 03.05.2014

This body of work is a selection of portraits I made in 2010 at India’s most important Hindu festival called the Kumbh Mela. In one of four locations every four years Hindu pilgrims and visitors descend into the holy waters of the Ganges River to purify the soul in a spiritual ritual considered the largest peaceful gathering in the world. The photographs were taken in Haridwar of pilgrims and sadhus I chose randomly during that festival.

Inspired by an earlier series I made of anonymous portraits of Afghans in Kabul titled Axe Me Biggie, or Mr Take My Picture, but instead of an existing Afghan outdoor studio backdrop I chose the white sheet this time for its purity and simplicity. My subjects were asked to simply stand and pose before my camera. I use a white bed sheet to create an outdoor studio that not only captures my subject but also allows me to reveal the audience gathering and the environment around the sheet. This is meant to give the viewer a real sense of place and time, and a window onto the streets of Haridwar. Had I used the backdrop in a conventional way, to solely isolate a person, you’d have the impression that they were taken anywhere — New York, Sydney, or in a studio. This process is a creative choice and allows me with some control over my sitter but brings with it the spontaneity and surprise of what may take place around the zone I am working in: the gaze of someone holding the sheet that has no idea they are in the frame, or a hand holding the sheet or something else that crops up in front or behind. In the end my portraits are environmental or even landscapes.

Over many years of travel throughout India I have been collecting textile stamps and I decided to use them on my photographs. The research and experiments started in my field journal and then to the final hand printed images in this show. I wanted to create a relationship with Indian design and cloth, the Polaroid borders and the people in my pictures. Much like my photographic practice here the wood block printing was made with much spontaneity and feeling. The photographs have been handcrafted by Chris Reid at Blanco Negro using warmtone paper and processed in a specialised developer for unique tonality.

© Edmund Pearce

Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
22.02.2014 - 04.05.2014

Open Eye Gallery presents for the first time in the UK the intense work of Sicilian photographer and photojournalist Letizia Battaglia (born 1935 in Palermo, Italy). A large selection of her iconic black and white images will be presented at the gallery, guiding the viewer along a journey into one of the darkest periods in the post-war Italian history. Drawing from Battaglia’s personal archive, comprising of over 600,000 images, the exhibition showcases work spanning from the mid ’70s to the early ’90s and also includes some recent projects. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to approach her genre-defining photographic practice (often linked to that of American ‘crime’ photographer Weegee) and reflect on the role of photography as an individual and collective means for taking action, bearing witness, providing evidence and documenting history.

© Letizia Battaglia

Battaglia took up photography in the early ’70s, when she realised that, as a journalist, it was easier to place her articles in newspapers and magazines if these were accompanied by images. After a short period spent in Milan where she met her partner and collaborator Franco Zecchin, Letizia Battaglia returned to Sicily in 1974. After relocating to Palermo and regularly contributing to the daily L’Ora, she became the pictures editor until the newspaper was shut down in 1990.

© Letizia Battaglia

Over the years, Battaglia has recorded her love/hate relationship to her home-country with (com)passion and dedication, often putting her life at risk. By alternating stark images of death, graphic violence and intimidation connected to the Mafia with poetic still-life photos and intense portraiture of children and women, Battaglia provides a textured and layered narrative of her country.

© Letizia Battaglia

Letizia Battaglia worked on the front-line as a photo-reporter during one of the most tragic periods in contemporary Italian history, the so-called anni di piombo - the years of (flying) lead, as they say in Italian. “[These were] eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia’s dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.” (Peter Jinks, The Observer, 4 March 2012)

The selected works on show at Open Eye illustrate this period and document Battaglia’s attempt to come to terms with that history and reconcile the love for her country with the memory of these dramatic events.

© ‘Letizia Battaglia: In Conversation’

Over the last two decades, Battaglia persevered in her struggle against the mafia. A fight that she pursued not only by means of her photographic work, but also as a politician and public figure, a publisher and as a woman.

© Open Eye Gallery

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

Photography appeared quite late in my life. I studied Fine Arts, and I was convinced that I wanted to be a graphic designer, but gradually I moved away from design and I began to feel more interested in art, which I saw as a powerful tool of expression.

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

As part of my trajectory as a fine artist, photography has always been my preferred medium for engagement with my narrative lines and visual language. However, at the very beginning I wasn’t interested in the process, it was the outcome, in terms of narrative success what attracted me the most. That’s why I used to work always with digital, and it was not until I had time to think about my methodology, during my MA, when I bumped into analog processes and the beauty of traditional photography rather than digital imagery. Leaving the excesses of the digital explostion, I encountered in the very early stages, the very demanding methodology of analog. I was learning how to educate my creative process in order to ‘achieve a photograph’, rather than bump into it among a thousand JPEGs. I understood this process as a journey towards my maturity as an image-maker, some kind of ‘intensive training’ of my methodology and aesthetics.

© Jesús Madriñán from the series ‘Boa Noites’

3. Tell us about your educational path. You have studied at Bellas Artes Universidad de Barcelona and later Central Saint Martins in London. How has your interest in photography evolved in relation to these experiences?

Studying Fine Arts was the best decision I could ever make, one of my best experiences, because that critical and reflective view of the world shaped the person I am now. On the other hand, studying at Central Saint Martins wasn´t so important for me, as it was a self-directed course -too much self-directed in my opinion- so for me it meant the chance to take time for myself and my projects, but with professional guidance. The facilities, the photo technicians, the classmates, the research… all these together provided a good environment in which to learn and to carry out a personal project. For me that course was like discovering the best recipe for achieving a good dish. That course at CSM gave me all those ingredients and the steps I had to follow in order to become a professional in my medium. What I loved about CSM was working and learning hand-in-hand with a lot of talented people, extraordinarily qualified, from all around the world with similar interests, ages and experiences.

© Jesús Madriñán from the series ‘Boa Noites’

4. What are the courses that you are passionate about and which are meaningful for you? Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

I did not have a good relationship with my tutor at CSM, he was a very narrow-minded person -which is something unusual in a photographer- and he wasn’t developing his tasks properly as a teacher, so me and all my classmates were quite frustrated. Curiously, I found an important support in the photo technicians, that were amazing, and were always happy to help. You could book the photo studio with them and they were 100% available for you and your questions. They guided you with anything you needed for your shooting or project. Also you had the option of just trying things out in order to learn; lighting, cameras, video, etc. So it was like a personalised private lesson. The facilities had all the materials and equipment you needed. I can say that the photo technicians, Jet and James, taught me everything I know about photography technique, and for me that was fundamental in my development as a photographer.

© Jesús Madriñán from the series ‘Looking for something’

5. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

I draw inspiration from my own experience and from the context that surrounds me to create my works. I enjoy exploring documentary photography by subverting the principles of the genre itself. The paradox of capturing life’s spontaneity by techniques taken from the studio’s predictability constitutes the realm where I locate my reflections about the limits between reality and fiction. I love photography because it gives me the immediacy, the ability to narrow a reality and, somehow, the ability to capture that which depends solely on chance. This is something that interests me a lot, because photography allows me, in many cases, to be the first one surprised when I see the outcome. This is wonderful. I use a large format film camera, which is quite cumbersome and requires a lot of concentration because of its complexity, so, my work thrives on the contradiction of using meticulous techniques in inevitably spontaneous and chaotic situations.

© Jesús Madriñán from the series ‘Looking for something’

6. Taking portraits it’s quite central theme of your works. From where did this come? And how is this attitude evolving through your works?

I have always been interested in portraiture, not only as a document, but also as a tool for capturing the identity of the portrayed, hidden under several layers of representation and trapped in the form of a picture forever . If I focus on young people is because, in my projects, I tend to be inspired by my own experiences. I belong to those environments where I work. You could say that I interrogate myself by taking those pictures, because, somehow, they are a projection of myself, since we belong to the same generation, and we live in the same time.

© Jesús Madriñán from the series ‘Portraits’

7. Tell us about ‘Good Night London’ series?

“Good Night London” is a series of documentary portraits taken in several London night clubs. Shot in such a hostile scenario, this series explores how artificial environments work as a key element in teenagers’ identity construction. Studio conventional photography is then taken out of context, invading this complex scenario. The calm and inspiration of a studio is here substituted for the hostile and noisy nightclub as a background in which the characters are cast.

© Jesús Madriñán from the series ‘Good Night London’

Just like the many other elements of their night, being exposed to the camera offers portraiture and the portrayed another twist of the game in which to invent a way to project themselves according to whatever narrative they may want to construct. “Good Night London” freezes real scenes, turning the noisy and the wild into an atmosphere of calm and serenity.

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

I tend to work with large format, 4x5 or 8x10.

9. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

Of course, I can say names like Gareth McConnel, Nikolay Bakharev, Richard Learoyd, Marguerite Kelsey, Emile Friant, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas…

© Rineke Dijkstra, Shany, Palmachim Israeli Air Force Base, Palmachim, Israel 

10. Three books of photography that you recommend?

I´m gonna say the ones that I am reading right now, “Wolfgang Tillmans. Lighter”, “Contexto Crítico. Fotografía Española del Siglo XXI”, and “El Bodegón Español en el Museo del Prado”.

© Wolfgang Tillmans, ‘Lighter’ from haveanicebook on Vimeo.

11. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Biographical Forms. Construction and Individual Mythology, at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid.

12. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

I am moving to Colombia, where I´ll be living for the next months, as I´ll be teaching in the University. Also I am working in three new projects, and at the end of the year the publishing house Fabulatorio will be publishing a book about the ‘Boas Noites’ series, which is very exciting. In the meantime I´ll be opening solo exhibitions in Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, and Spain, and several group exhibitions in Spain.

© Jesús Madriñán

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
01.05.2014 - 03.07.2014

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Acts of God, to be presented May 1 – July 3, 2014. This exhibition is the first U.S. presentation of Sugimoto’s The Last Supper: Acts of God (1999/2012), a five-panel photograph, more than 24 feet in length. The artist first created this work in 1999, from a life-size wax reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, which he photographed at a museum in Izu, Japan. In 2012, while the work was stored in the artist’s basement, it was damaged by the storm surge and flooding that occurred when Hurricane Sandy hit New York City.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Last Supper: Acts of God (detail), 1999/2012

Sugimoto chose to retain the dramatic marks, colorations and ripples that have changed the character of the photograph. He commented:

I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished Last Supper to completion. Leonardo completed his Last Supper over five hundred years ago, and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through a half-millennium’s worth of stresses in so short a time.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, The Last Supper: Acts of God, 1999/2012

Gallery II also will feature a single work, Sea of Galilee, Golan, 1992, a black-and-white seascape with a quietly undulating surface and a nebulous horizon. This is the sea on which Jesus is said to have walked—one of the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels. Gallery III will present five large-format prints from Sugimoto’s most recent series, In Praise of Shadows. Each photograph is an extreme close-up of a single candle flame, whose flickering white heat seems to sear the paper.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Galilee, Golan, 1992

Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in New York and Japan. Among his series are Seascapes, Theaters, Dioramas, Portraits (of wax figures), Architecture, Lightning Fields, and Photogenic Drawings. His work is in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Foundation Cartier, Paris, among many others. In 2013 he received the decoration of Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. His work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, on view through June 8, 2014.

© Hiroshi Sugimoto | Fraenkel Gallery

AXEL STEVENS
'Block'

I’ve stumbled on these images as by accident ; maybe the initial idea as been present in the back of my mind for some time and I’ve taken pictures that led me to this sequence of images. The working title is “Violent Structures” but I begin to think that “BLOK” is a better title ;-)

These buildings, structures have a “looming” kind of atmosphere. Their presence is very much felt…hence their “violent” nature

They are ment to “contain” and exert pressure on their immediate surroundings - the 6x6 format makes this whole series cube like as well…and the cheap expired black and white film ( which by the way comes from eastern europe before the Berlin Wall went down ) does the trick…the images wouldn’t be as powerfull in color.

The reason why these images are surfacing up in my mind is because one way or another I’ve always been attracted to them, visually and emotionally ; they look impenetrable but they have a great sadness about them also. Yes, a bit like me I suppose… [Axel Stevens]

© Axel Stevens