The first major photography exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, London, since the highly acclaimed and controversial 2001 show I Am a Camera, presents 38 artists who offer an international perspective on current trends in photography, working with the medium in diverse, innovative and arresting ways. This exhibition comes at a time when the world of photography is going through one of its richest and also most complicated moments. Millions of images are being uploaded onto the internet every day making available more visual stimuli than ever before; old ideas about ’professional’ and ‘amateur’ photographers are being upturned; the traditional boundaries between various territories within the world of photography – fashion, documentary, advertising and art – are blurring into one another in unexpected, exciting and not always tension-free ways; and even the labels ‘artist’ and ‘photographer’ are the subject of debate (Olaf Breuning responds to this thorny topic by describing himself as “a four-wheel drive, all-purpose terrain vehicle”). Against the backdrop of this new world of the photographic image, Out of Focus brings together 38 artists from the US, UK, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Switzerland, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Turkey and Benin. Their work challenges the received rules and regulations of the medium. They have shared concerns – the body and gender tensions, mind and memory, a sense of place and home, the face, bonds of family, friends, tribes and other subcultures – but display a huge range of approaches from classic documentary photography to the reworking of found images, from capturing collaborative performances to photographs of three-dimensional assemblages themselves made out of photographs.
Out of Focus features works by Michele Abeles, Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Olaf Breuning, Jonny Briggs, Elina Brotherus, Anders Clausen, Mat Collishaw, J H Engström, Mitch Epstein, Andreas Gefeller, Daniel Gordon, Noémie Goudal, Katy Grannan, Luis Gispert, Matthew Day Jackson, Chris Levine, Matt Lipps, Ryan McGinley, Mohau Modisakeng, Laurel Nakadate, Sohei Nishino, David Noonan, Marlo Pascual, Mariah Robertson, Hannah Sawtell, David Benjamin Sherry, Meredyth Sparks, Hannah Starkey, John Stezaker, A L Steiner, Mikhael Subotzky, Yumiko Utsu, Sara VanDerBeek, Nicole Wermers, Jennifer West and Pinar Yolaçan.
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| JH Engström Nude 3, 2005 |
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