BY NATALYA REZNIK

Valeri, could you tell us about your art. Are you from the generation of documentary photographers which started shooting Russia in 90’s? I know that you were involved in war photography and visited ‘hot spots’. You covered the collapse of USSR for Western media, but mainly you work in Russian province. You mentioned once that you are able to shoot even ‘emptiness’. Who are you - visual anthropologist? Art photographer? Or documentary photographer who uses methods of art photography? Why did you decide to move towards deep photographic research, what influenced you?

I don’t remember much from the first so called ‘news’ period of my career. I dimly remember this period. It was mostly related to my self-determination and a search of myself. At that time photography was a tool for search and experiment with oneself. I saw a lot of events, I photographed them, published photos. That was useful experience. This experience is less photographic but more adventurous. It is the most important thing I kept from the period of making the news photography, that lasted less than 3 years.

© ValerI Nistratov

Ideally, I wouldn’t like to be classified to any categories you mentioned. In my point of view, belonging to any category and defining borders restricts the territory of actions. But of course I understand that the author is the style. I wouldn’t define myself as a photojournalist nor art photographer. Probably, I am an Observer and partly a Researcher and my photographs are ‘lyrical’ or ‘poetical’ documents. It seems like I am somewhere in-between of documentary space and I am satisfied with it.

Who are your favourite photographers?

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I have no favourite photographers nor writers or filmmakers. Everyone from my long list of ‘favourite’ influenced me, left something very deep and controversial in my consciousness and I am not sure if I understand now who was the most important. When I was young, my idols were Bresson and Capa. Bresson was a kind of ikon - we idolized him. It was hard to resist it. Capa wasn’t idolized, we just were envious of him and fascinated by him. Capa has been attracting me as a man who lived as he wanted and who’s life was full of adventures. Cold and a bit closed type of personality of Bresson and very open, practically Gipsy type of Capa. I perceive these two conditions like yin and yang and they are still in me. They supplement each other. But  cinema, literature and painting still inspire me the most. I saw many times Dovzenko (Earth), New Wave Films (‘Breathless’ and ‘Pierrot the madman’ by Jean-Luc Godard), Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Ran by Kurosava, movies by Paradzanov, Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders and Alan Tanner. The list can be continued, but I think it is enough to mention these because they are, actually, the whole worlds and planets. And planets have orbits and satellites. That is astronomy in photography.

© ValerI Nistratov

I consider photography as a system of languages. For instance, the American kind of photographical language and its inflexions were always closer to me than the European. For me it is not related to a particular author nor a school, but with spirits, distance, light, color, form and ‘the magical space of realism’ that has been (or rather was) in American photography. Not without reason, one of my favourite artists was Edward Hopper. I share his feelings of surprise and loneliness, I think I feel something similar in Eurasian spaces.

I liked the idea of freedom and light in early works of Edward S. Curtis, a documentary style, a poetry of local and daily life of Walter Evans, subjectivity, melancholy and critical eye of Robert Frank as well as a calm and peaceful world in works of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. I suppose I am quite familiar with history of photography and of course I am aware of mutual influences in the Anglo-Saxon world. However American ideas did not  overshadow, but rather awoken the interest to Russian and Eastern culture. An introduction to the world of Russian (at that time Soviet) photography began with a Soviet Photo magazine. There was a series ‘Opening of peasant resort in Livadia’ by Arkady Shaikhet. I was touched by the way the author expresses irony and absurdity. Then I saw Lithuanian photographers and Soviet non-conformists who are already well-known.

© ValerI Nistratov

Maxim Dmitriev and Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky - pioneers of pure documentary in Russia - are also fascinating me. Now one talks a lot (not without irony) about need of ‘special Russian gaze’ in photography.  Of course, we should have topics which are relevant for us, because we live here, we have connection with this place - that’s normal thing. But, as everybody knows, you can only see the big picture from a distance. We need to become a bit foreign in order to see our own ‘Russianness’, uniqueness and peculiarity and reflect it in photography. Then, you’ll see a difference, but rather in a quality of your photographs, not in quantity of love to the homeland.

How did you end up teaching photography? Was it your purposeful decision or it just happened? What does teaching mean for you?

It seems like I started teaching because of my desire to share my experience and to find like-minded persons among students who want to look at the reality in different way and to dedicate their life to photography. The main goal for me is to teach students to think visually and change their mind, not only to make them ‘professional photographers’ who work in the industry (which is also sometimes not that bad).

© ValerI Nistratov

One could be trained in all the things and majority of art schools in the world have been doing it very well, but it is impossible to teach how to develop your  personality. Obsession with photography is impossible to teach either. But without it you can not be a good photographer. Sometimes young people with different mental problems come to the school. Probably, they believe that art can help them to fight with these problems. Of course the school is not psychological center, but we have to help them. We are all a bit psychotherapists and even spiritualists. I would insist on ortodoxal point of view - talent is something that you get from the nature. I believe in it.

You are the curator of the course ‘Documentary photography’. What is the most important for you when you look at portfolios of future students? What kind of persons do you choose? I guess it is very competitive and you have to select strictly!

In our school there are preliminary tutorials where a curator can meet entrants and  give them advices. Different young people come to these consultations (mostly in their twenty, sometimes in early thirty). I am not interested to take in my group people who work professionally in commercial photography, because their eye is already spoiled and it is very unlikely that they will think differently. Nonetheless there are some exceptions. More than a half of our students are women. A portrait of Russian girl who wants to become a photo-based artist remain mysterious to me.

© Данила Ткаченко, student work

Nevertheless I can say that they have more energy and obsession with art in comparison with boys. The most important qualities for me (when I select my future students) are charisma, taste to adventures, obsession with what they are doing, vitality and even sexuality - all other things could be learned during your study.

In one of your interviews you mentioned that your approach to photography is an intuitive one. Though while being a teacher you need to articulate a lot of things in order to teach someone (and it is the most common problem among artists, who used to work this way). ‘Technology of shooting has nothing to do with logic. A man gets information from outside and records it on paper, film or something else. In this regard a photoshoot starts from the feeling. You can not think about anything during your shooting. Ideally, you need to turn off your head' (from your interview for photographer.ru). How do you manage to verbalize this feeling for students?

Usually, I don’t even try to teach someone to feel what do I feel intuitively. It is something like teaching people to love. It’s impossible and even dangerous. Because of that I am not in a hurry to teach shooting process in my class. Usually, I narrate about my way of shooting (or someone’s else way) and let them know that they will surely work differently. I would like them to find their own way of doing things and don’t copy anyone although it is terribly hard in the epoch of postmodernity.

© Лилия Ли Ми Ян, student work

How is your course structured? Do you go to shoot outside of Moscow? Do you shoot street? Do your students work with texts? What kind of projects they work on?

The school year is divided into 3 semesters. I propose to my students at the beginning of each semester to make a big project (usually it is an interpretation of a particular topic - for instance, ‘a balance’) and a couple of small tasks. At the end of the semesters we open student’s exhibitions in the school gallery. While working on the tasks we are discussing the stages of shooting. We meet once a week in a studio. These meetings begin from my lessons and finish by analysis of student’s works. Usually, our classes take the whole day long until the late evening. My main task is to deconstruct photographical structure of a particular shot and then to construct it again while explaining how could one use this later.

© Ксения Коржикова, student work

Students finish their study with a graduate work and take part in a collective exhibition in Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. During our lectures we discuss very different topics ranging from  contemporary photography to the current affairs in Russia and abroad.   In our school there are a lot of lessons on contemporary art, history of photography and new media, so students work with texts a lot. On my lectures we discuss the most important texts on photography and work with texts written for projects and series, study how to write photographical proposals. I must admit that working with texts is the hardest work in my teaching experience, because our students don’t like to write texts at all.

I would like to touch on the theoretical aspect of your work. For example, there are a lot of links to the books of Soviet historian Lev Gumilev in your photo project ‘Forest-steppe’. You read a lot, you are interested in history of Russia and USSR and your photographs are, to some extent, results of this research. Do your students read a lot as well? Do you recommend them what to read?

In my point of view, today people read  books less and more click links to some texts in the Internet. But the interest to the classical texts such as books written by Benjamin, Flusser,  Baudrillard, Sontag and Szarkowski is still high. It is a must read because they are included in the exams our students have to pass. I read aloud fragments of these texts during my lectures and we try to discuss them together.

Who are your famous students? What are their achievements?

It is the hardest question for me, because if I name someone others could be disappointed. Nonetheless, I would say that all of my students are very promising. And being well-known fully depends on their actions. You are the master of your own business. Nevertheless, I would mention the most obsessed students such as Danila Tkachenko, Dmitry Lukjanov, Lilia Limi Jan, Ksenia Ivanova, Natalia Maximova, Anastasia Rudenko, Ksenia Galkina, Yulia Abzaltdinova.

© Дмитрий Лукьянов, student work

How does teaching change you? Do you look at your own work differently? Probably, it is not only you who influence the students, but they influence you also? What project are you currently working on?

I comfort myself (sincerely and a bit naively) with the idea that teaching can improve my metabolism and cell renewal. It is very important for me to keep the unity of the process - Shooting - Editing - Teaching. In my case they all are connected together. The school is actually a kind of art laboratory and it is interesting for me. I have no illusions about getting something new for myself from young people - I am still young myself, in fact. Nevertheless, I happened to have more experience than they. In this sense, I look up to Stephen Shore and Minor White, who succeeded in combining teaching and doing their own art.

© ValerI Nistratov

This year I finished to work on several series. The first one called ‘Home’ and it is a part of my long-term project named ‘Russian Typologies’. The second one is a trilogy ‘Lost Horizon’ and I am currently editing it. In the near future I do not plan to work on big projects, rather I would like to focus on small essays and series.

© ValerI Nistratov | Rodchenko Art School

This week marks the beginning of Riga Photomonth 2014 – a new photography festival in the Baltic Sea region, including several exhibitions, artist talks, a portfolio review, self-publishing events, film screenings and other activities. The Photomonth is a European Capital of Culture event.

Room of Love, an exhibition by Estonian artist Margit Lõhmus will open at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) Office Gallery on April 28th. The intense month of May will be ushered in by the iRiga exhibition, on display at Galerija Centrs shopping mall from May 1. The photographs will reflect Riga through the eyes of its residents.

From May 2, the Latvian Museum of Photography will host an exhibition – Life and Work– by Swedish photographer Sune Jonsson (1930-2009), while from May 5 the collaborative project Neighbours by 5 Latvian photographers will be on view at public transport stops around the city.

© Sune Jonsson

The thematic centre of Riga Photomonth is the Viewfinders. Contemporary Baltic and Nordic Photography exhibition, at Riga Art Space from May 8 – June 5. The exhibition features the work of fifteen artists, including two Latvians – Ieva Epnere and Ivars Grāvlejs – with a focus on the search for a place in the contemporary space that surrounds us. At the same time the Intro hall of Riga Art Space will host a solo exhibition by conceptual artist Dawid (Sweden), ROST/RUST. The work – photographs created without a camera – caused great debate in 1980s Sweden, changing the idea of photography as a medium

The Portfolio Review on May 9 is an opportunity for emerging and professional photographers to showcase their work to a select group of international professionals in the field of photography. Applications to the review are still open.

From May 9-11, Self Publish Riga will take place at The Mill (Brīvības Street 33), with events including an international self-published book and book dummy contest, exhibition and talks on self-publishing, photobooks and book design.

© Photo by Antoine D’Agata

On May 14 and 16 at 6:00 PM, two internationally renowned photographers – JH Engström (Sweden) and Antoine D’Agata (France) – will give talks at the new building of the National Library of Latvia. The talks are organized in collaboration with Tête-à-Tête 2014, the Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation arts festival.

Riga Photomonth 2014 offers a number of other collaborative events and exhibitions, including a solo exhibition by Danish documentary photographer Jan Grarup at the Latvian War Museum, the Frames of America show by Mary Ellen Mark, as well as solo exhibitions by Māra Brašmane, Iveta Vaivode, Imants Gross, Aija Bley, and other events. The full programme can be found on the Riga Photomonth website.

A catalogue will also be printed and distributed together with Latvian Photography Yearbook 2014.

BY STEVE BISSON

Recently, I leafed through a book by Pedro Ramos published by The Spring Press NYC. Another interesting discovery. The book is titled ‘Ilha’ (Island) and is the first monograph of the Portuguese photographer Pedro Ramos.He was born, not surprisingly, on Madeira Island and currently living on another island, a little bigger, Australia.

But let’s immediately consider the book, an exciting one. It is an intimate story, which is revealed right away, like some novels written in the first person. And we know that is not easy to write in this manner because the pitfalls are many. Among which is a matching of the narrator with the author.

The book appeared to me as a collection of personal feelings, made of moments. The people are portrayed in a natural way and the images, in this sense, seem drawn from a diary. The book took me into a pleasant, sunny, offhand and sometimes dreamlike atmosphere. This island is not described geographically, and it may appear to the reader as a kind of “Neverland”. An utopian reality of random situations and encounters that are only partially vernacular.

At first I felt the lack of some word, some reference, but then I realized that the skill of Pedro Ramos lies in having created a suspended dimension. For a moment the reader abandons all preconceptions. The sequence of images kept me intrigued until the end. And after closing the book I had the pleasant feeling of having shared an emotion. I felt that many of these photographs are strong and conscious and this has slowed my reading as well as those white spaces, which do not create any detachment but increased my imagination.

I think that is in the encounter between the water and the human being that this story shows its strength. In this diving or jumping into nature, in this desire that comes from far away and yet makes its way effortlessly inside of us, we discover a need for freedom, sun, air and light.

However, this coexistence is also dubious and curious. Pedro Ramos expresses it through some beautiful images of architecture and buildings which stand out against the sky, the sea, and a seemingly untouched nature.

In this “biting” of the coast and its surface, in this inevitable desire for transformation, I do not see a need for destruction but a way to embed our roots and cling to life before time passes us by.

© Pedro Ramos | Urbanautica

BY GAIA MUSACCHIO

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

My mother handed me the family point-and-pray 35mm Kodak camera at my sister’s 8th grade graduation. It was my job to finish out the roll of 24-exposure film so we could take it Walmart and wait an hour for the film to get processed. I relished in the little orange strips of plastic and the 4x6 prints that came in that plastic padded pouch. I got to see my work realized, a kind of somewhat instant gratification in a tangible form. That feeling wasn’t lost on me as a teeanger when I first began taking pictures a little more seriously down by the creek in my old neighborhood. I made long exposure pictures of the water, transformed into silk on the rocks and my dad’s white truck going up and down the hills in that same neighborhood in the piedmont of North Carolina. I was interested in what the camera could see that I couldn’t see regularly and, in a way, I’m still after that view of the world: to make what’s before our regular eyes seem more interesting.

© Aaron Canipe

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

It evovled in that my work came back, geographically, to where it first began. I wanted to photograph more than what that creek had to offer so I escaped to study in Washington, DC.  While I was there, thoughts of home came to me while walking down Pennsylvania Avenue and I missed it like I never thought I would. I started to see in my mind’s eye, the entire world reflected in the creek’s waters.

3. Tell us about your educational path. You recent graduate from the Corcoran College of Art + Design with a BFA in fine art photography. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography when you started?

I had a great teacher in high school that encouraged us a great deal to work in the darkroom. I believe we were the last class to use that space. The camera was our central tool whereas my other education in the arts focused the possibilities of charcoal, pastel, graphite, watercolor, etc. I guess it was harder for me to choose a voice out of all those. The camera was much more elusive to me. I went to the Corcoran with a little darkroom experience and knowledge of some of the big names in photography’s history. But from the first few sessions in my first photography class, my eyes were gradually more opened to photographers like William Eggleston and Robert Frank. Some of my best memories took place in the darkroom, hunkered down with bottled water, snacks, in for a full day of printing. There was a much more communal atmosphere in that darkroom that’s a lot harder to replicate at the computer.

© Aaron Canipe

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

All of them. Every class was meaningful in my growth as an artist. Of course the photography classes helped me the most to keenly understand my medium. The core classes were central to my craft and formulation of my own questions. A set of classes I feel especially grateful for were color photography. Just like I was a part of the last group of students in high school to use the black and white darkroom, I was also a part of the last few classes to use the color processsor with Kodak Endura papers. As a part of that class, I was immeresed into the world of photobooks and it made me want to make my own.

© Aaron Canipe

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

I was alluding to Terri’s color and advanced color photography classes. Jen made me work my hardest at photography in the darkroom and learn all the photographic styles and see what I liked best. Claudia and Margaret shaped me in the formative semesters at school, made me an adequate printer and better speaker about my own work. Jared pushed me to really find my voice in photography and see where it could reach and Frank helped me in innumerable ways to create and work with my digital files for printing.

6. About your work now. How would you described your personal research in general?

My work now is fully rooted in North Carolina. I’m looking for how the piedmont region has changed through history and what it means to be living in this part of the South that’s growing up.

© Aaron Canipe

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

Whichever format helps me say what I want to say in a picture. When I need everything included in the photograph, down to the last detail in the landscape, 4x5 is my preference, but when I need something a little more swift, 6x7 is my go-to. That stout rectangle sort of encompasses the world in a way that’s congruent to how I think.

8. Tell us about ‘Native Place’.

Native Place is my undergraduate thesis project. The pictures are mainly from my hometown of Hickory, North Carolina and they’re about growing up. It’s about my own memories coming up as well as the stories and family members and friends that I’ve carried with me. I’ve used hand-applied text at the bottom of the images and by themselves to tell those stories.

© Aaron Canipe

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

For my money, you can’t get any more inspirational and influential than my friends Nate and Jordan and the work they show and books they publish at Empty Stretch. My classmates, past and present, continue to educate my own work.

© Aaron Canipe

10. Three books of photography that you recommend?

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans

Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams

Hotel Oracle by Jason Fulford

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

The MFA thesis exibitions at Duke University.

© Aaron Canipe

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

It’s an untitled project as of now, but I’m currently working on my masters thesis project at Duke, assembling my committes and gathering reading sources that will stay with me while I’m out in the field. I’m also working on a new zine of past work that I’m just now beginning to see through and preparing to teach my first class in photography. My future lies in that, I think, in trying to be like the amazing faculty I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. I want to make the same impact they had on me.

© Aaron Canipe

August Sander/Bernd and Hilla Becher
‘A Dialogue’

Bruce Silverstein, New York
01.05.2014 - 07.06.2014

Bruce Silverstein in collaboration with Sonnabend Gallery is pleased to present August Sander / Bernd and Hilla Becher: A Dialogue, curated by Hilla Becher.

© August Sander, 1940. / Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur ­ August Sander Archiv, Cologne; ARS, New York, 2014

This thought-provoking exhibition offers a visual and conceptual parallel of the best-known typological projects from the 20th century—images of industrial and residential architecture by Bernd and Hilla Becher are juxtaposed with August Sander’s portraits of German citizens from his rigorous People of the Twentieth Century series.
This new context for these iconic images provokes a fascinating conversation between these artists’ works occurring on both a formal and ideological level. It is relevant to note that the Bechers’ contribution to contemporary art as artists and educators resides in their radical presentation of their photographs as a typology, or classification of images of the same subject—i.e. grain elevators, coalbunkers, water towers, etc.—in a grid format which necessitates the viewer’s interpretation of the group of images as a single work as well as a comparative study of the differences between the individual subjects. This current exhibition is unusual as the Bechers’ architectural images are displayed as singular “portraits” while Sander’s photographs of people are presented as typological grids.

© Bernd and Hilla Becher, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 1998

August Sander (1876-1964) began his People of the Twentieth Century series in 1911—his attempt to capture through “absolute photography” a “true psychology of our time and our people”—a mirror of the age. He worked to create portraits of individuals from various social strata and their particular surroundings as an attempt to order the myriad types of human characters he saw around him and create a more universal portrait of human existence in the 20th
century. An earlier manifestation of the Bechers’ attitude, Sander’s project in its totality highlights a tension between image and document, specific and general.

© August Sander 1925 / Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur ­ August Sander Archiv, Cologne; ARS, New York, 2014

Bernd and Hilla Becher (b.1931-2007 / b.1934) first collaborated in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. They set out to document via photography the various designs of industrial buildings in the Ruhr Valley, choosing for a background a flat, uniformly lit sky, and decidedly portraying the buildings exactly as they were, as clearly and legibly as possible. By the 1960s, they defined their conceptual approach to presenting these images as
typologies, employing a purposefully neutral, reductive style of image-making that prioritizes their systematic practice and chosen mode of display, creating an interpretation of these images both as aesthetic, formal exercises, and documents of industrial architecture.

© Bernd and Hilla Becher, Katznbach, Westerwald, Germany, 1989

August Sander’s work and the Bechers’ works have been exhibited widely. Their images are a part of the world’s most celebrated collections.

© Bruce Silverstein

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
09.05.2014 - 14.06.2014

Curated by Yumiko Chiba

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japan was witness to a shift in the response to existing fundamentals previously accepted in modern art. Through the reevaluation of conventional approaches to perspective, form, and memory in the postwar era, artists Norio Imai, Masafumi Maita, Jiro Takamatsu, Keiji Uematsu, Kanji Wakae, and Katsuro Yoshida utilized photography, as well as sculpture, painting, and performance art, to challenge the constraints of these boundaries. The result was a surge of coinciding movements, centering around Tokyo, that radically confronted the reaction to the stark realism so implicit in the postwar years, while establishing photography as a progressive art form.

© Imai Norio, Three Ton Boulder, (1970), Installation view: Invitational Competition of Contemporary Sculpture for Landscaping the Japan World Expo 1970.

As Conceptualism and Pop Art materialized in the West, perhaps the first movement in this direction in Japan, parallel to Western manifestations, was the Gutai, active from the mid-‘50s into the ‘70s and best known for the emergence of an innovative approach to installation and performance. Norio Imai joined the Gutai Art Association in 1965 as its youngest member and moved from filmmaking onto exploring the fusion of photography, performance, and sculpture with a monochromatic approach to minimalism as seen in the artist’s series ‘Fragments of Images’ (1973). By transforming a commonplace object in his photographs, the artist redefined the presence of the objects depicted.

The Hi-Red Center was formed in the early ‘60s by Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Jiro Takamatsu with the intent of collapsing the dividing line between art and life. In the series ‘Photograph of Photograph’ (1973-74), Takamatsu hired a photographer to photograph prints from the artist’s personal family photo album, resulting in a fragmented narrative that provides an authentic exposure of the world as it actually is – also termed as the “naked reality.” In doing so, Takamatsu successfully disregarded traditional perspective.

© Jiro Takamatsu, Photograph of Photograph, 1973.

Further developing these themes, the movement Mono-ha (translated as “School of Things”) came to light in the late ‘60s with the intent of emphasizing the relationship between the man-made or industrial and natural materials. Katsuro Yoshida, a forerunner of the acclaimed movement, silkscreened scenes from city streets. He used color to define commonplace objects, as seen in ‘Work “43” AB-B’ (1974). The artist considered the significance of the object and redefined the viewer’s perception of the ordinary by creating an altered state of reality.

© Katsuro Yoshida, Work “3”, 1969, Silkscreen

Parallel to Yoshida’s version of an altered reality, Kanji Wakae explored the relationship between diverse expressions of various mediums – sculpture, drawing, installation, and photography. In his series ‘Paints’ (1973 – 73), Wakae surveyed the effects of repeated imagery through the employment of halftone printing, printmaking, and photography. The effect was an analytical approach to the act of viewing and an investigation of the pairing of photography and painting. This exploration was also fostered by Keiji Uematsu, who carried on Yoshida’s study by incorporating the human body. ‘Tree/Man/Rope I’ (1973) represents an attempt to depict the gravitational field that connects the viewer and the object.

© Keiji Uematsu. Interval three stones III, 1976

Masafumi Maita’s emphasis on materiality and the viewer’s experience relates to his peers through light and the motif of water. In his series ‘Natural Line – Artificial Line’ (1971), Maita creates a high contrast landscape that allows the viewer to appreciate the medium of the photograph itself. He disturbs the serene surface of water by silk screening on the photograph, achieving a solely objective work that successfully tackles the study of perspective and materiality present in 1970s photography.

© Masafumi Maita, Natural line-Artificial line, 1971, silkscreen and tape on photograph, 16 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches; Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York © Masafumi Maita, photo credit: Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo

For further information, please reference Yuri Mitsuda’s “The Recapturing of Recognition: The Turning Point of Photography and Art” and Minoru Shimizu’s “Premature Postmodernism: A Matrix for Japanese Photography of the 1970s” in the exhibition leaflet.

© Marianne Boesky Gallery

Silly to the max
Curated by Marina Coelho

Kunsthalle, Sao Paulo
10.05.2014 - 07.06.2014

KUNSTHALLE São Paulo invites Swiss artist Beni Bischof to present Silly to the max, his first solo exhibition in Brazil, which continues the project LX92.

Bischof’s work is characterized by questioning the absurdity of the routine and monotony of everyday life, and the lack of direction and ridiculous nature of human pleasures. With a cynical humor and a clear preference for chaos, the artist, through intuitive gestures, manipulates and modifies the context of existing things, creating a playful and absurd ‘cosmos’.

Music, literature, TV shows, gossip magazines, trinkets of consumer society, and primarily, the internet and its daily insane amount  of news, are all inspiration and serve as raw material for his works, which are funny, but at the same time an bit disturbing. Using painting, drawing, collage, sculpture and photo manipulation, his work addresses not only pop and underground current themes, but also political matters and social critiques, presented through his interest in anti-aesthetics, deconstruction, absurdity, and destroyed beauty.

For the project at KUNSTHALLE São Paulo, the artist, whose audacious exhibitions seem chaotic at a first glance, will create new works in loco, during the period in which he will be in the city, allowing that the traces of the work process remain visible to the observer.

Kunsthalle | Beni Bischof

‘Truppe Fledermaus & The Carnival at the End of the World’

Yancey Richardson, New York
15.05.2014 - 03.07.2014

Yancey Richardson is pleased to present Truppe Fledermaus & The Carnival at the End of the World, the fifth exhibition at the gallery by 
the collaborative duo Kahn & Selesnick. Known for elaborately staged metanarratives blending historical events with their own Dadaist performance, the darkly humorous visual fantasies of Kahn & Selesnick operate as wry metaphor, addressing economic, political, and ecological crises around the globe.

Utilizing photography, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and performance, the artists create robust mythic realities for each project, building imaginary, character-driven fictions from kernels of obscure historical truth. Previous bodies of work have addressed climate change and hyperinflation in 1920s Germany (Eisbergfreistadt), technology, space exploration and societal collapse (Mars: Adrift
on the Hourglass Sea, and The Apollo Prophecies), oil, spirituality and the uneasy divide between East and West (City of Salt), and post-civilization tribalism (Scotlandfuturebog).

Kahn & Selesnickʼs latest project follows a fictitious cabaret troupe – Truppe Fledermaus (Bat Troupe) – who travel the countryside staging absurd and inscrutable performances in abandoned landscapes for an audience of no one. The playful but dire message presented by the troupe is of impending ecological disaster, caused by rising waters and a warming planet, the immediate consequences of which include the extinction of the Bat, in this mythology a shamanistic figure representing both nature and humanity. In one sense, the entire cabaret troupe can be seen as a direct reflection of the artists themselves, both entities employing farce and black humor to engage utterly serious concerns.

The exhibition includes photographs, sculpture and ephemera. A large wall of drawings, posters and handbills advertises the performances of Truppe Fledermaus while opposite, an installation of 100 photographic prints serves as the primary visual record of the troupeʼs characters and activities. Titled 100 Views of a Drowning World, the series references Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, which described a
floating world of pleasure and beauty. Kahn & Selesnick invert that concept to illustrate instead a world that is sinking into a marsh.

© Yancey Richardson | Kahn & Selesnick

BY STEVE BISSON

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

I come from a family that exposed us kids to the arts in general and literature in particular. My father was a writer/journalist and my mother was an English teacher who loved reading. All three of us kids have many memories of our mother reading to us, story after story, as we fell asleep each night. Our house was packed with books of all kinds and we all were brought up with a great respect for the written word.  Naturally I was sure I would be a writer too, but after a failed attempt at a novel and a few short stories as well as trying my hand at journalism at the local paper, I eventually understood that I wasn’t talented enough. I stumbled upon photography and learned what I could on my own and then took a basic course in B&W photography. From that point onwards I started investigating the medium till I eventually enrolled in the BFA program at Bezalel. Even Then I still wasn’t sure that this was something serious, I was just trying to expand my knowledge of the medium further. 

As to remembering my first images, every now and then I come across an old slip case album at my Mom’s; with snap shots I took as a kid. There isn’t anything special about them, just the usual snaps of family life, but I can see a connection in the fact that I still deal with the way I experience the world through image making… this is of course a very loose interpretation.

© Yaakov Israel, The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey

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

My work today is focused on the same points of interest that I had during my years as a student. My images were always connected to social and political aspects that were linked to my life and the lives of the people around me. This is still interesting to me, but I find with time I have started to experiment and explore different ways of telling a story. So actually I haven’t strayed far from my initial intention to become a story teller, I just shifted the medium to photography.

© Yaakov Israel, The Legitimacy of Landscape

3. Tell us about your educational path. You have graduated from Department of Photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. What was your relationship with photography at that time? 

At a certain point I understood that I had become very serious about photography and I decided that if I was to spend 4 years in Art school I would benefit the most from being exposed to the best photographers in Israel, so Bezalel was somehow the natural place to go. I remember that I was looking for the school with the largest variety of teachers as I was interested in experiencing as much as possible, I was interested in everything about photography and wanted to try everything.

© Yaakov Israel, The Legitimacy of Landscape

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

Well I enjoyed many of my classes, but there were two classes that really stood out in my second year and thanks to them I figured out what it was that I was most passionate about and wanted to do: the first was a documentary class by Hally Pancer, who had so much passion for the medium that it was contagious, I owe Hally for encouraging me in my desire to work with 8x10. The second class was Landscape photography by Yosaif Cohain, from him I learned that photography was hard work and not just fun. Going out into the field with him I picked up the discipline one needs and even more important – the patience. Yosaif’s support didn’t end there, he saw how keen I was to get an 8x10 and knowing I was broke, he found out just how much I could scrape together and then went and bought me one for just that price on ebay. He also filled my freezer with 100 plates as a gift. Yosaif is still a very close friend and this camera is still the one I own and use today.  

© Yaakov Israel, The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey

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

So many people over the years helped me better understand my work that I feel it a bit unfair to single out names, but the ones at the top of the list for me were Igael Shemtov, Yossi Breger and Ruven Kupermam, because they not only enthused me, but really motivated me to go and do.

© Igael Shemtov, Har Homa 2009

6. Since 2004 you have been teaching photography at some of the most prominent art and photography schools and colleges in Israel. Tell us about this experience?

Well it really just sort of happened. After I graduated, I received a scholarship and a private darkroom for an extra year of research in the photography department. In this year I was working towards a solo show in the department gallery, I could choose any professor to be my tutor and I could consult with any of the teachers. In return for all this I became a TA for 2 classes and who knew that by assisting I would learn so much? 

The following year I was struggling to make a living by doing any commercial photography work that I could find and I was also focusing on finding the time to work on my projects. Then I got a phone call offering me a class at the department of photography at the Sapir Collage, I drove down South to meet the head of the department and the next thing I knew I was no longer a student, but a teacher and the rest just followed, more classes other departments etc. 

© Yaakov Israel, The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey

When I started teaching I thought this was a great opportunity to give back some of what I received from so many generous teachers. I like teaching because verbalizing things and discussing them helps me gain a deeper understand of them and teaching in the best schools means my student are smart and serious.

7. What do you think about teaching methodology in the era of digital and social networking? 

I’m a big user of all new technologies and today almost everything has gone digital, but funnily enough I haven’t changed my teaching methods, as in the end it’s all about what images we are after and not the tools we use or the technologies. A lot of what I teach is about observing and articulating ideas verbally and visually. It is this dialog between people that moves us forward and the more we expose and are exposed the better we understand ours and others work. The technological advancement I really think is worth focusing on is social networking, as this has presented us all with a fantastic way to share work within the ever growing photo community. 

8. Your work has been widely exhibited across the world. What’s your general impression about the photo exhibitions world? What are the main threads and opportunities for a young photographer?

I have been extremely lucky in the way “The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey” was received. I’m a big believer in working on a project till its really finished and this one took 10 years… so I always recommend first doing the work and only when you are sure that it’s finished to start looking for an audience.

© Images of the book The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey

9. About your work now. How would you described your personal research in general? 

Since I started I have been working under the umbrella of the social and political aspects of my country. Using photography to try and better understand the place I live in. These are not just a phrases - my work reflects how these aspects reflect on my life on a daily basis. The way I integrate these realities in my work varies, when I started I was interested in creating stories that commented on reality (some of the projects that I’m still working on are based on this type of logic), but today I’m more interested in building photographic work that uses elements of reality to form fiction – one could call this a photographic novel, this is more like a narrative based on images made in a documentary style.

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

I’m interested in many ways of working, camera formats and the way each describes space. I am a strong believer in matching the tool to the project. I use medium format and 4x5 inch, but somehow the 8x10 inch camera works best for me. It’s a big, cumbersome and heavy apparatus that has many downsides, but I have found that all these reasons for not using it are the exact same ones that make it logistical for me to use it.  The relative slowness makes me very focused when using it and it generates a photographic moment that is hard to create with other camera.

© Yaakov Israel, South West Jerusalem

11. Tell us about ‘South West Jerusalem’ project that started in your school days and is still ongoing?

This project really started in black and white when I was in my second year. In my fourth and final year I came back to it with a new understanding that I wanted to concentrate on the way my biography was connected to this city. This understanding focused me on the working class neighborhoods I grew up in and still live in today - the neighborhoods of South West Jerusalem. 

I started my exploration with my 8x10 inch camera, which I had just finished fixing. This was a place I knew very well and the type of excitement this project brought with it was based in rediscovering it. After a while, I found that I was focusing on portraits of the buildings from the side or the back, portraits of the inhabitants and landscape style images that were descriptive of the topography of these neighborhoods. Work on this project has actually never stopped, I keep trying to finish it up, but things keep changing and I want to capture these changes… at the moment I’m making the final images in this body of work, but finishing things up could take a year or two…

© Yaakov Israel, South West Jerusalem

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

I’m always following what is going on in photography. In past years many Artists and photographers have deeply influenced me to name just a few classics Walker Evans, Eugène Atget Robert Frank, Robert Adams and Henry Wessel. The list goes on and on. Now days I think my main inspiration is self-generated by the work itself.

13. Three books of photography that you recommend?

Trent Parke | Minutes To Midnight

Tobias Zielony | Story/No Story

David Goldblatt | Johannesburg Photographs 1948-2010

© Tobias Zielony, Story No Story, Essay by Florian Ebner. Edited by Maik Schluter.

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

Sharon Yaari at Tel Aviv Museum and not so recently Joel Sternfeld at Foam, it was great to see the mini retrospective of all his projects.

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

At the moment I’m trying to finish up two ongoing projects: ‘The legitimacy of landscape’ and ‘South West Jerusalem’. These are projects I started early in 2000 and feel it’s time to bring them to a close. As I’m the type of person who likes working on a several things simultaneously I have quite a few projects up in the air at the moment. They are all connected as they all stemmed from the same core interests but each took off on a different trajectory. At the moment I feel that the book format has become crucial to my working process and I have started to plan the outcome of my future projects as books, I am enjoying this stage immensely.

© Yaakov Israel

A book introduction by STEVE BISSON

1. Tell us about your current photographic research?

My current research has a few lines of enquiry, mostly it has to do with Architecture, but I’m also interested in repetition, geology and entropy. Architecture interests me because of what it can represent, buildings can stand for the time in which they were built, as well as the motives behind their construction. In the case of Frameworks, the reasons for their incompletion as well.

2. Let’s talk about Frameworks?

I’ve been working on Frameworks on and off for a couple of years now. It’s a study of unfinished skeletal structures around Europe. I want to hint at the spaces they were supposed to become, whilst likening them to ancient ruins in both their appearance, and the reason behind their ruination. The difference here is that they have become ruins before they were buildings, a kind of paused architecture, which is normally concealed when construction is completed. The concrete frame is the essential structure of these buildings, but with no facade to support, they are merely skeletons.

3. How did you get the idea for the book?

The series is ongoing, so the initial idea for this book was to evaluate where the series is now. Seeing all of the images together is very important for me and it’s a great way to show the work. Now that it has been published the series feels more tangible, I like the idea that someone can hold all of the images and browse through them.

4. How did you choose the editor?

I was in Foyle’s bookshop in London and saw a shelf of publications from The Velvet Cell, including books from photographers I have exhibited with and admire. I contacted them to let them know I had enjoyed their books and we went from there.

5. How was your relationship with the publisher in the book making?

As they are based in Asia, it consisted of many e-mails. We discussed every aspect in detail and went through many drafts that were sent back and forth. It was a rewarding dialogue.

6. What did your learn from this experience, plus and minus?

I learnt that often your own ideas about your projects, whether they be about sequencing or text can always be improved if you have an editor that understands the series. In this case I did, so that was a big plus. At times the distance made things difficult, it would’ve been nice to sit down together and go through things. I suppose that’s the only minus point, but we managed.

8. Plans for the future?

Continue working on ‘Frameworks’, amongst other series’. Basically keep working, exhibiting, publishing and never stop.

9. Can you suggest us 3 photography books that you liked?

Two books that have been big inspirations to me for a long time and one that’s not a photo-book in the strict sense, and very rewarding because of it.

Jochen Lempert: Recent Field Work
Michael Schmidt: Berlin Nach 45
Paul Virilio: Bunker Archaeology

INFO
© Sam Laughlin
Frameworks

published by The Velvet Cell 

28 pp / 152 x 193 mm
Saddle-Stitch, Colour Offset
ISBN 978-1-908889-23-2
Limited Edition of 300
May 2014
£10

A Visual Chronicle of the Changes within Liverpool’s Chinatown’

Open Eye, Liverpool
17.05.2014 - 22.06.2014

Ebb and Flow is an audio, visual survey of the history and changes that have taken place within the oldest Chinese community in Europe, curated by Jill Carruthers.

Drawing from the rich selection of photographic prints preserved in the Open Eye Gallery Archive, the show looks at the physical and architectural transformations of Liverpool’s Chinatown, as well as documenting the establishment and development of the local Chinese community.

© Shanghai Restaurant, Nelson Street, Liverpool © Bert Hardy, May 1942

Included in the show are works by Bert Hardy who photographed the Chinese seamen that came to the city from Shanghai on the Blue Funnel Shipping Company vessels in 1940s. He recorded their lives, living conditions and recreation as well as Liverpool at the time.

Four decades on and the Chinese community was well established in a new area of Liverpool, relocated to Nelson Street, after the May Blitz during WWII. British photographer Martin Parr documented Chinatown in the 80’s, exploring the restaurants, hair salons, Chinese supermarkets and community centers that were popular at the time.

© GB. England. Liverpool. Berry Street. Chinatown. 1985. © Martin Parr

Alongside these historical images, this exhibition also includes two contemporary works exploring the Chinatown that Liverpool is home to now.

Liverpool based artist duo John Campbell & Moira Kenny, The Sound Agents, have been funded by Heritage Lottery Fund to record Liverpool Chinatown Oral History, creating an audio visual digital archive of interviews, personal documents and photographs.

UK based photographer Jamie Lau has been commissioned to create a new body of work, looking at the Chinese community as it is now. Lau will visually explore the notion of being isolated in a city full of people, where human interaction may only happen on a base level, passing each other in the street, in shops and restaurants, like ships in the night.

© Golden Fish From the series The Dark Ages, 2010 © Jamie Lau

About Jill Carruthers, Exhibition Coordinator, Open Eye Gallery:
Jill has been working for Open Eye Gallery for a year and this is the first exhibition she has curated since her move. Prior to her current position, Jill was Assistant Curator of QUAD, Derby and worked on the 2011 and 2013 reiterations of FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby. Jill was Programme Assistant for East Street Arts, Leeds and has also worked with the V&A as freelance Exhibition Coordinator.

© Open Eye

Group Show
‘Multi Panel’
Pace/MacGill, New York
27.03.2014 - 29.05.2014

New York, March 20, 2014 — Pace/MacGill Gallery is pleased to present Multi Panel, an exhibition on view March 27 through May 29, 2014. Featuring works by Vito Acconci, Richard Benson, Harry Callahan, William  Christenberry, Chuck Close, Robert Cumming, Robert Frank, Emmet Gowin, Paul Graham, Robert Heinecken, Peter Hujar, Michal Rovner, Lucas Samaras, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto,
JoAnn Verburg, Andy Warhol and William Wegman, the show
explores the myriad ways artists have embraced and employed multi-part, serial, and sequential imagery throughout 20th- and 21st-century photography. A public opening will be held on Thursday, March 27 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

© William Christenberry, Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1974-2004

© Kiki Smith, Eve in the Pomegrantes, 2001

The practice of pictorial storytelling pervades the history of  art. From the earliest cave paintings, to Egyptian hieroglyphic  friezes, Greek vases, and polyptychs above altars in churches and cathedrals, narratives have been continuously constructed through the juxtaposition and combination of images. When translated to photography – a medium of multiples by nature – this tradition takes on new and unexpected forms.

© William Wegman, Man ray on Stilts, 1975

© Peter Hujar, Nude Self-Portrait Series #1A, #3, #2, #4, 1966

Simple in subject but structurally inventive, Paul Graham’s New Orleans, 2004 from the series a shimmer of  possibility is a visual vignette of a moment in everyday life. Choosing not to confine the narrative to a single frame, Graham depicts a scene of a woman eating takeout from multiple points of view to create what he aptly
refers to as a “filmic haiku.”

© Robert Heinecken, Figure/Flower, 1968

Contrary to this approach, Harry Callahan presents three images taken from the exact same position in Highland Park, Michigan, 1941. Without a clear order or linear progression, the pictures explore the concepts of time and change in their slight variations, rather than attempting to tell a story. The notion of narrative is also deconstructed in Eve in the Pomegranates, 2001, as Kiki Smith calls upon viewers to assimilate composite imagery to reveal the work’s mythic allusion.

Read more from HERE

© Pace/MacGill Gallery

Julia Borissova completes every her project in a book format. The book «The Farther Shore» was presented at open-air exhibition in Noorderlicht Festival’ 2013 in the Netherlands. The same year this book entered the short-list of the international photobook festival in Kassel (Germany). «Running to the edge», another Julia’s completed project, was exhibited in 2012 at FotoDepartament Gallery and later, in April 2014, Julia released it in 2 book versions — open and limited edition. 

Her new project «DOM (Document Object Model)» has just started it way. The first, trial part of the project was presented in the one-day insulation in «Taiga» space after the workshop of Dutch photographer Anouk Kruithof in 2013. Then, in 2014, the project took part in the group exhibition «Look into her», which was a part of X International Photobiennale in Moscow. Also one part of the project was published for the first time in the «Iskusstvo» magazine («Art» magazine) in N1 (588) 2014, which was fully devoted to the photography. 

More information

© Julia Borissova | FotoDepartment

GEERT VAN HERTUM
Places

This serie, called ‘Places’, shows areas which you probably wouldn’t notice when walking past. These are the places that fade away in the corner of your eyes when on your way to your school or job. These places only exist because of their functionality, because they are forgotten by their accidental “architect”. Often, spontaneous installation art or extremely absurd constructions emerge here. The two things absolutely necessary to find them are to acknowledge they exist and the time needed to look. For me this is a kind of quest. Sometimes I feel like I’m an explorer. The feel of time has completely disappeared in the images. Often it not only looks like time is standing still in these pictures but also at the places they were made. The only movement at that time will be created by the wind. By photographing this, by ‘framing’ those places and displaying them somewhere else, there’s an even bigger alienation between the final image and the place. The use of a large white border and frame steers the images even further away from the original context. As a photographer it’s my purpose to create some sort of awareness for the viewer, to show them those places like I see them myself. I want to create, for them, the same wonder that I saw at my first ‘discovery’.

© Geert Van Hertum

PETER GRANSER
J´ai perdu ma tête

«There are words that sound too narrow and finite, underlying the real nature and complexity of their meaning, words that are nothing but codes, in an exercise of comfortable simplification. “Insanity” is one of them. Peter Granser opens countless windows on a world that is unknown – and consequently feared, set aside, intentionally or not but perhaps for the specific purpose that forgets its existence – and he does so by replacing words with photography. The first communication is what we put in place for ourselves when we try to interpret what is around us, even before we attempt any form of sharing, and words come later, to rethink what is the origin of our own experience, that is purely perceptual. It is when words fail, when they cannot be lined up and rearranged, that we feel inadequate when facing a world where we think we don’t belong, while it is our own world, though ruled by a logic that is much more simple and basic as to be disarming. It’s up to the viewer looking out of the windows that Peter Granser opened, it’s up to us to dig below the surface, and deprive us of the rules now settled in our communication, to catch the slightest gap between what exists and what we only choose to call real.» [by Andrea Filippin, Urbanautica]

Info
Edition Taube / Marraine Ginette Éditions, 2014 
hardcover
4c offset print, spot finish
3 inserted leporello posters
32 x 23 cm
104 pages
ISBN 978-3-9814518-6-3
Info on the book here
Buy the book here

© Peter Granser

We are pleased to announce two exhibitions of five artists being shown at Fraenkel Gallery for the first time. Who Do You Love is a solo show of twelve unique pieces by John Gossage. Presented concurrently is Where There’s Smoke, a group exhibition of four contemporary photographers: Ruth van Beek, Jason Fulford, Michael Lundgren, and Viviane Sassen.

John Gossage (b. 1946) is well known to fellow artists for his enigmatic projects and extensive photobook production, yet remains something of a secret to the broader community. Who Do You Love presents a tightly curated group of photographic distractions, in the words of the artist, culled from scores made over the course of that decade. Using photographic prints and simple materials, these works from the 1990s push at the edge between collage and straight photography, not sitting squarely in either space.

Where There’s Smoke gathers together four artists who subvert the viewer’s sense of how a photograph can and should operate, both conceptually and perceptually. This is no mere photographic deconstruction, however; a metaphorical intent ricochets through the works. By turns subtle and overt, the imagery both guides and confronts the viewer. The tools employed run the gamut of photographic expression—from hand-collage to the art of sequencing, from the use of reflection and shadow, to chance, suggestion, craft, and, at its most fundamental, a sophisticated intensity of looking.

© Viviane Sassen, Axiom R03, 2014

The title of the exhibition references a common idiom that if something looks wrong, it probably is. In the case of these works, the traditional terms of photography have been abandoned, leaving the viewer initially disoriented. One is led to a set of basic questions: “What am I looking at? Why am I looking at it? Why is it compelling? Is the photographer off-kilter or is the subject? Is this a digital fabrication or did it happen in front of the lens, in real time?” The cumulative sense is that boundaries have expanded, and nascent languages have taken root.

Ruth Van Beek (b. 1977) uses the established visual codes of photography—a shadow, pedestal, dark backdrop, or gesture—to guide viewers into a belief in the incredible rarity or importance of the shown object, even when that object is unidentifiable. The pieces presented are from her latest book, The Arrangement (2013). Van Beek lives and works in Koog aan de Zaan, in the Netherlands.

© Ruth Van Beek, Untitled (The Arrangements), 2012

Jason Fulford (b. 1973) has adopted the photobook format as a primary mode of expression in which his photographs build a layered articulation through sequence and arrangement. Many of the questions posed by the work are intentionally left unanswered, and are sometimes unanswerable. The photographs on view in this exhibition are from Hotel Oracle(2013), his most recent book. He is a 2014 Guggenheim fellow; a cofounder of J&L Books; the coeditor, with Gregory Halpern, of The Photographer’s Playbook (2014); and the coauthor with Tamara Shopsin of a photobook for children, This Equals That (2014). 

© Jason Fulford, San Francisco, CA, 2013

Michael Lundgren (b. 1974) draws on a deep current in photographic tradition that takes the natural world as a seat of transcendence. Having spent his formative years in upstate New York, Lundgren was pulled west by the vastness of the desert. His first monograph,Transfigurations (2008) seeks to refine the value of the primitive landscape. This exhibition comprises work from Matter, a mythological manifestation of ruin and regeneration. 

© Michael Lundgren, Displace 2008

Viviane Sassen (b. 1972) first gained notice through her striking color photographs in which form and content balance on the edge of abstraction. The photographs in this exhibition are from UMBRA, a new, multifaceted body of work in which shadow is often a metaphor for the human psyche. The human figure, the body, and the pose are major classical and artistic themes in her work; however, her play with realism and abstraction, which confuses our perception and leaves meaning open, is uniquely modern. Her work has been shown internationally, and she has published numerous books of her photography. She received first prize at the 2007 Prix de Rome, was featured in the central pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale, and was included in “New Photography,” an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2011. 

© Fraenkel Gallery

THE SALT YARD, HONG KONG

“The Game is Killing The Game”
David Chancellor
28 Jun, 2014 – 24 Aug, 2014

curated by Steve Bisson

The Salt Yard, an independent art space, will exhibit David Chancellor’s “The Game Is Killing The Game”, a documentary series on hunting safaris that he photographed in South Africa over the years. Since the beginning of the 20th century, East African hunting safaris has became a fashionable pursuit among members of the privileged classes in Europe and the United States. It was also a source of revenue for the British colonial government and produces a group of professional hunters who especially served these privileged classes. Big-game hunting is still vibrant recently but it now exists in the form of the so-called game ranching that habitats of livestock farming are turned into venues for wild animals in captivity and places for tourists enjoying hunting. These ranches are now popular in South Africa and are authorized in many African countries.

© Bloodied Hunter # V, South Africa, 2010 Photograph: David Chancellor/INSTITUTE 

The documentary series of David Chancellor fully revealed the various perspectives of South African hunting safaris, including the hunter and the hunted as well as the displaying of stuffed animals as trophies. People hunted in order to fill their stomachs or make a living in the past but now they hunt for pleasure. Chancellor’s works call for a reflection of this ancient and uncivilized “sport” when animal right is a hot topic in the globe. An opening reception will be held between 6pm and 8am on June 28, whilst a seminar will be held between 4.30pm and 6pm on the same day. Curator Steve Bisson will share with us about the representation of animals/faunas in the history of art with a specific outlook in photography. Members of the public are welcomed to participate.

© Gymnasium, Dallas, Texas, 2011 Photograph: David Chancellor/INSTITUTE

David Chancellor, born London England, works and lives in South Africa. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, exhibited in major galleries and museums around the world. Named Nikon photographer of the year three times. In 2009, he won the National Portrait Gallery London’s Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. In 2013, he received a number of awards including World Understanding Award in the Pictures of the Year International competition from the US, the Kuala Lumpur International Photo Award for portraiture, the Vienna International Photo Award for documentary photography, and the Kontinent Award for documentary photography.

© Fallen Giraffe, Somerset East, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 2012 Photograph: David Chancellor/INSTITUTE

In recent years, Chancellor has increasingly turned his focus onto documenting man’s commodification of wildlife. He released his first monograph ‘hunters’, in which he explores the complex relationship that exists between man and animal, the hunter and the hunted. One of the series, “Elephant Story” won the World Press Photo Award in 2010.’

© The Salt Yard | David Chancellor | INSTITUTE

Saint-Petersburg, Russia
29.06.2014 - 31.08.2014

Participants:
Natalya Baluta (Moscow) / Filipp Beloborodof (Petersburg) / Alexey Bogolepov (Petersburg) / Anastasia Bogomolova (Chelyabinsk) / Daria Gontsova (Petersburg) / Andrey Ivanov (Moscow) / Alla Mirovskaya (Moscow) / Evgeniy Molodtsov (Petersburg) / Natasha Podunova (Ekaterinburg) / Maria Sakirko (Moscow) / Elena Holkina (Moscow) / Elena Churikova (Moscow) / Fedor Shklyaruk (Moscow) / Katya Yushkevich (Petersburg)

Curator:
Nadya Sheremetova / FotoDepartament

There is an old grammatical dilemma in Russian language; one can solve it by making a choice in favor of one meaning or another by adding a comma. The phrase “Execute no Mercy” will have a reverse meaning depending on a comma before or after “no”. This punctuation unleashes a decisive action for someone’s fate. Perhaps not so elegantly, but hopefully in a similarly ample and multi-layered way, we encrypted our stream of thought about time in the title of exhibition. This is a time in which we find ourselves today, a time which we still remember, a space of collective memory through which we can try and grasp the idea of “here and now”. An artist is always tuned into his time, and his ability to accentuate the right things can surpass the prevalent mood and understanding of history.

We are a group of photographers from different cities, exploring from all angles that which is deep-seated, archetypal and timeless for our country. We dove deep into history, and found out that the lack of a single unifying idea in Russia is due to each evolutionary shift bringing something from the outside. This introduction then started to flourish in local soil, producing bright flashes, like the Russian avant-garde of the early XXth century or “traditional” Russian Matryoshka. Oddly enough, by being open outwards in all periods of history, our culture only gained in richness and distinctiveness.

We studied sociological research, covering the last 100 years of our history, three historical and ideological regimes, two revolutions and the personality traits created by them. We talked to strangers in the street and made our own observations. Photography helped us, more so than naked eye or language, to reveal the contradictions and unity of a modern society, which are difficult to accept and put into words.

The geopolitical territory called Russia is obviously uniting us. We know it through the map, which hung on our parents’ wall and which we have now inherited. Most probably we would not know the name of the person who lives next door, but driven by a contradictory impulse, would feel at one with the tourist, screaming “Tagiiil” at the Palace Square.

That is because by virtue of being been born within these cultural, linguistic, geographical, and, finally, moral borders, you become involuntarily aware of yourself as part of this vast space – where the Far East, while at the opposite end, is closer than ever in its simultaneity with us. This distance of aspirations, relationships, routines, and horizons, a distance that alienates us endlessly, is also where a common ground is found. Here the collisions of ours/alien, far/close, miracle/action, fool/hero have long shaped a Russian person, revealing one of the important qualities, noted by the researchers – dualism of the Russian soul.

© Alla Mirovskaya

© Katya Yushkevich

We are trying to discover a shared space of experience. The exhibition is our attempt to define a field, which is greater than any ideology, handed down to each generation; to define the dream of a country, a dream that everyone carries deep inside. This silent understanding will be associated to a great extent with the notion of home; with memories of the courtyard playground; with the rich culture, recalled from the textbooks; with pictures from the albums that were treasured at home; with visits to the museums; with kitchen smells and lively feasts, gathering generations of family and friends around one table.

We explore ideological, historical and personal spaces, uncovering whatever shapes the history through forgetting – important rituals and marks, by which a community identifies itself. There is something we strive to understand, something to overcome and something to keep and transfer into our time, to make it well-timed – own it in a time given to us. [Nadya Sheremetova]

More info HERE

© FotoDepartament Foundation 

BY STEVE BISSON

This new work Instragrams (Faces) follows the journey of visual research began with the previous series Instragrams (Landscape), and Instagrams (Flowers). The title deliberately deceives the observer and could lead one to think of some bizarre contemporary photographic art. Nothing could be much further from the truth. Just take a look at the works made by Ng Sai-Kit, since the eighties, to understand that we face a meaningful investigation on the potential of the medium.

© Ng Sai-Kit 

There is confidence and creativity in the images created by Hong Kong base photographer, yet I see also a great ability to cut out significant moments from reality, as well as a desire to translate the pictures into fragments of simplicity that joined together may constitute a poetics of place.

From this point of view, compared to the previous works I feel the same commitment to relate critically to his own places, but with less drama and a different tension, through a mature detachment, and perhaps with a greater awareness. 

© Ng Sai-Kit 

The photographer plays with space and with the faces. The images due to their reproducibility has invaded the city. And so happen to be in private with Jimi Hendrix on a tshirt while ignoring those we actually face. Or again becomes himself a reflection in the mirror along with others. 

© Ng Sai-Kit 

Among the faces magnified, magnified, forgotten moves the photographer. Smiling faces, faces crumpled on the ground, faces that overlap almost as in Mimmo Rotella’s torn iconic posters, becoming a raw materials, a commodity exchange. Is this the new face of Hong Kong?

© Ng Sai-Kit 

Biography. Ng Sai-Kit was born in Hong Kong in 1957. He has started his photography projects since the early 80s; at the same period, he set up the photography workshop The Photoventurers Workshop with other photographers. At that time, his photography was inspired by Ng Hon-lam and Cheung King-hung; in 1985, he participated his first group photography exhibition “Sensitive, Transitive”, which was curated by them. Afterward, between 1989 to 1990, he travelled to France and some of his photography works were collected by the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, France. After he returned to Hong Kong, The Photoventurers Workshop was reformed as The Workshop. Between 1993 to 1999, he took part in the editorial of eleven issues of non-periodical visual culture publications issued by The Workshop with the sponsorship from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Between 2005 to 2008, the Photocrafters workshop was set up. This workshop aims at promoting visual cultural activities in Hong Kong and it held many photography courses and exhibitions. In 2008, he set up the Out-Focus Group with friends at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong. Until now, his works have been exhibited in Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Canada and Paris, and some of the works were collected by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum.

© Ng Sai-Kit

BY STEVE BISSON

1. Tell us about your current photographic research?

Currently I am focusing my attention on a project I’ve been slowly working on for a number of years. The project focuses on 6,000+ Found Polaroids I have collected. The project explores what we can learn from misplaced images and the material manifestations of our lives and the lives of others.

© Out West by Kyler Zeleny (The Velvet Cell, 2014)

2. Let’s talk about ‘Out West’?

Out West is a project exploring small rural communities and rural culture in the Canadian West. Over two summers I visited and documented 160 communities with a population of 1,000 (or less). I was interested in looking at the current state of these communities and wanted to document what I thought was their decline into neglect and ambiguity.

© Out West by Kyler Zeleny (The Velvet Cell, 2014)

3. How did you get the idea for the book?

The idea for the project came when I was living in London, originally it was not intended as a book. I started to see a lot of emphasis being placed on ‘the urban’ in popular culture and academia. I felt that rural studies were lacking, possibly being undervalued as a redundant system. I also try to work off the belief that when everyone is looking at one thing (no matter the mechanism or approach), it is best to set one’s gaze upon something else.

© Out West by Kyler Zeleny (The Velvet Cell, 2014)

4. How did you choose the editor?

I studied with Eanna, The Editor and Founder of The Velvet Cell, in London, and from a friendship emerged our working relationship. He was interested in the work and so I chose to publish with him because I knew his level of dedication and belief in his projects.

5. How was your relationship with the publisher in the book making?

The Velvet Cell and I have a strong collaborative relationship. I do not think either one of us, on our own, could have created such a well-rounded book.

© Out West by Kyler Zeleny (The Velvet Cell, 2014)

6. What did your learn from this experience, plus and minus?

The overall experience is positive and in my eyes is ongoing. Departing (cliché) words of wisdom—nothing easy is worth doing. The project required a lot of work from The Velvet Cell and myself, like anything that is actually worth doing.

7. Plans for the future?

I will be moving to Toronto at the end of summer to continue my studies as a doctoral student at a joint York/Ryerson program in Communication and Culture. While there I hope to explore some questions that arose out of the Out West project.

8. Can you suggest us 3 photography books that you liked?

Mike Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is stunning, Boris Mikhailov’s The Wedding Book is beyond original in my opinion and Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi has great execution.

© Out West by Kyler Zeleny (The Velvet Cell, 2014)

MORE INFO:

'Out West'
Kyler Zeleny

112 pp / 148 x 210 mm
Section-Sewn with Card Cover,
Colour Offset Printed
ISBN 978-1-908889-24-9
Limited Edition of 500
July 2014

© The Velvet Cell