Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Kassel Photobook Dummy Award 2017



The Fotobookfestival Kassel together with its partner Verlag Kettler once again invites all photographers to present their as-yet unpublished photobooks to an international public and eminent experts.

Here is what the Kassel Fotobookfestival has to say:
In 2017 the best 50 books will be shortlisted by a shortlist-jury and will be exhibited at international photo events, amongst others, in Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid, Dublin, Aarhus and Lodz. From these 50 titles, 3 winners will be chosen by an international jury at the ISTANBUL PHOTOBOOK FESTIVAL on 29 April. The winner of the First Prize will be produced and published by our cooperation partner Verlag Kettler, Germany. Second and Third Prize is a book production voucher given by our partner k-books, who specializes in high-quality book productions in small quantities.
The members of our international main jury in Istanbul are: Federica Chiocchetti (Photocaptionist.com), Martin Parr (Bristol), Jason Fulford (J+L Books, ), Aron Mörel (Mörel Books, London), Markus Schaden (The PhotobookMuseum, Cologne), Verlag Kettler (N.N., Dortmund) and Dieter Neubert (Kasseler Fotobookfestival, Kassel).
Who can enter?
Any photographer from around the world who accepts our entry conditions can participate by registering for the competition and submitting an unpublished work as a book. Registrations will be open until 10 April 2017. All self-published books in small print runs or books published through publishing platforms like blurb can be submitted. Only books already published by a publishing house will not be accepted.

Guidelines
We require one copy of a physical printed book of all the entries sent to us by the photographers /authors. Entries can only be registered online. We charge € 34 per entry and book. There is no limit to the number of entries per person. If you would like your book to be returned to you, then we will require a further postage and handling charge during the registration process. Payments can only be made online via our Paypal account during the registration process. Dummies that make the shortlist will be shown during different photo events as announced. Because some of these events take place at the same time, we request two copies of all shortlisted dummies. This second copy must arrive at our Kassel office 10 days after the shortlist has been announced.

For up-to-date information you can subscribe to the email-newsletter.
Read the ENTRY CONDITIONS
Register HERE


Sunday, January 29, 2017

Pieter Hugo at Yossi Milo NYC


Pieter Hugo - from the series 1994

Yossi Milo Gallery is currently showing an exhibition of South African artist Pieter Hugo, images from his most recent body of work, 1994. The show opened January 26 and will run until March 11.

This is Pieter Hugo’s fifth exhibition at Yossi Milo gallery and features color photographs taken of children born in Rwanda and South Africa after the year 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocides and of the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Wearing often fanciful clothes and posed in nature, each child symbolizes the budding hope of a life unladen by active oppression, yet is rooted inextricably in the landscape into which they were born.

Describing the project, Hugo states: I happened to start the work in Rwanda but I’ve been thinking about the year 1994 in relation to both countries over a period of 10 or 20 years. I noticed how the kids, particularly in South Africa, don’t carry the same historical baggage as their parents. I find their engagement with the world to be very refreshing in that they are not burdened by the past, but at the same time you witness them growing up with these liberation narratives that are in some ways fabrications. It’s like you know something they don’t know about the potential failure or shortcomings of these narratives…Most of the images were taken in villages around Rwanda and South Africa. There’s a thin line between nature being seen as idyllic and as a place where terrible things happen – permeated by genocide, a constantly contested space. Seen as a metaphor, it’s as if the further you leave the city and its systems of control, the more primal things become. At times the children appear conservative, existing in an orderly world; at other times there’s something feral about them, as in Lord of the Flies, a place devoid of rules. This is most noticeable in the Rwanda images where clothes donated from Europe, with particular cultural significations, are transposed into a completely different context. 

You can read more on the Yossi Milo website HERE .
Yossi Milo Gallery - 245 Tenth Avenue (between 24th & 25th St.) New York, NY 10001

Pieter Hugo - from the series 1994

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Centre Pompidou, Paris, turns 40 with a free weekend - February 4 and 5



Centre Pompidou or Beaubourg as it's know in Paris turns 40 this year and to celebrate the museum is offering a free weekend February 4 and 5.
Apart from an array of special events and performances there is the opportunity to see the amazing Cy Twombly show which runs until April 24.
Organized around three major cycles – Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), Fifty Days at Iliam (1978) and Coronation of Sesostris (2000) – this retrospective covers the artist’s entire career in a chronological circuit of some 140 paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs, providing a clear picture of an extraordinarily rich body of work which is both intellectual and sensual. The selection includes many of Twombly’s iconic works, several of them never previously exhibited in France.

You can go to the Centre Pompidou website HERE.

Monday, January 23, 2017

The Power of Art - Jane Hirshfield writes...

 

In the course of talking to photographer and friend Lynn Alleva Lilley about her upcoming book Tender Mint, Lynn mentioned her use of a poem by Jane Hirshfield. I was reminded that I have Hirshfield's wonderful book Ten Windows - How Great Poems Transform the World. Poetry and photography share many attributes, most notably their ability to say something quite profound and moving from something so simple.

Hirshfield writes: Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for "more" is in us - more range, more depth, more feeling, more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and un-stunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also the existence of others. More capacity to be astonished. Art adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it. And by changing selves, one by one, art changes the outer world that selves create and share. 

Although Jane Hirshfield in Ten Windows Investigates the power of poetry to move and change us, her writing is also about how art, how photography works.

Jane Hirshfield's Ten Windows is a must in any artist's library. Here's a link to Amazon.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has edited and cotranslated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and is the author of two major collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall–Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, The New Republic, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California since 1974, she is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Friday, January 20, 2017

Diane Arbus - in the beginning at SF MoMA


Woman with white gloves and pocket book, NYC 1956

diane arbus: in the beginning considers the first seven years of the photographer’s career, from 1956 to 1962. A lifelong New Yorker, Arbus found the city and its citizens an endlessly rich subject for her art. Working in Times Square, the Lower East Side, and Coney Island, she made some of the most powerful portraits of the twentieth century, training her lens on the pedestrians and performers she encountered there. This exhibition highlights her early and enduring interest in the subject matter that would come to define her as an artist. It also reveals the artist’s evolution from a 35mm format to the now instantly recognizable and widely imitated look of the square format she adopted in 1962. Bringing together over 100 photographs from this formative period, many on display for the first time, diane arbus: in the beginning offers fresh insights into the distinctive vision of this iconic American photographer.

This is a wonderfully intimate and highly personal show. Small prints depicting small anarchies, a way of looking that Arbus made all her own.

The exhibition opens at San Francisco MoMA this Saturday January 21st and runs until April 30. This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fire Eater at a carnival, Palisades Park, NJ, 1957

Lady on a bus, NYC, 1957

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Marian Goodman, Paris - opens bookstore in rue du Temple


Marian Goodman Bookshop - Paris
 
Next Tuesday January 24, New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery will open a second Paris space which will house exhibitions and a bookstore. Located at 66 rue du Temple in the city’s Marais district the new space significantly expands Goodman’s Paris presence. The bookstore at the new address will offer a selection of books, exhibition catalogues, printed matter and artist's editions. The store is situated almost opposite the dealer’s other gallery at 79 rue du Temple. The original gallery is inside the Hôtel de Montmor, a 17th-century hotel particulier. It has occupied that space since 1999.

The other Parisian gallery bookshop that is always worth a visit is the Yvon Lambert Booshop. The bookshop opened in 2001 and is managed by Bruno who has excellent taste. They present a selection of art books, exhibition catalogues, artists books, rare and out of print books, limited edition prints, posters, DVDs, CDs, t-shirts and art objects. Well worth a visit at 108 rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais. You can check out their website HERE. Although the Yvon Lambert Gallery closed a couple of years ago the bookstore is a reminder of the importance of M. Lambert in the International art scene.



Last but not least is the Pompidou Center bookstore. With around 10,000 titles and no less than 300 art magazines and reviews Flammarion is one of the best bookstores for modern art, architecture and design plus an incredible selection of photobooks.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Photo London announces 2017 exhibitors

 

The third edition of Photo London will be presented at Somerset House, May 18 to 21st. The list of exhibitors is now available to view on line HERE.

Photo London was created to give London an international photography event befitting the city’s status as a global cultural capital. Now in its third year, Photo London has established itself as a world-class photography fair and as a catalyst for London’s dynamic photography community. From the capital’s major museums, to its auction houses, galleries large and small, right into the burgeoning creative communities in the East End and South London, Photo London harnesses the city’s outstanding creative talent and brings the world’s leading photographers, curators, exhibitors, dealers and the public to celebrate photography, the medium of our time. 

Along with the selection of the world’s leading galleries showing at the Fair, Photo London presents the Discovery section for the most exciting emerging galleries and artists; there is an original Public Programme bringing together special exhibitions, installations, a curated programme of talks and presentations by publishers. Each edition of the Fair also sees a number of Awards announced, headlined by the Photo London Master of Photography, Photo London Residency Unlimited Award and the Magnum Photos Graduate Photographers Award. Hosted awards include the Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and the MACK First Book Award. Beyond the Fair, Photo London regularly hosts Pre-Fair Talks and related events engaging with the craft, market and knowledge of photography. 





Monday, January 16, 2017

Joel Sternfeld - a photograph is only a fragment of a shattered pot...


McLean, Virginia, December 1978

In this weeks the guardian art weekly Sean O'Hagan talks to Joel Sternfeld. Sternfeld’s images are often not quite what they seem. Called McLean, Virginia, 1978, that shot of the fireman, the pumpkins and the burning house is indeed a record of an actual event he witnessed, but the blaze is part of a training exercise from which the fireman is taking a break. “You take 35 degrees out of 360 degrees and call it a photo,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium.” Today, he reiterates that sentiment: “A photograph is only a fragment of a shattered pot.”
For all his epic undertakings, Sternfeld’s work remains relatively under-exhibited. “Again, I have been too busy making work to show it that much.” he says, “but for me, the best place to see the images is in the books.” Was he influenced by any great photography books along the way? “No. I didn’t care about photobooks.” he says matter-of-factly. “I thought most photographers were idiots.” Can he elaborate? “Well, it often seemed to me that some beautiful, magical things could be happening in the world and they were too busy fumbling with their lenses to see it. There are exceptions, of course. I’ve never seen a Robert Adams photograph that hasn’t amazed me, but my point is you need to look out to the world.”

Sternfeld has a show Joel Sternfeld, Colour Photographs: 1977-1988 at Beetles + Huxley, London, 27 January to 18 February. The exhibition features 30 vintage dye transfer and chromogenic prints, the exhibition will include well known images by the artist as well as works that have never been seen before.
The exhibition will showcase several examples of vintage dye transfer prints from one of Sternfeld's best-known bodies of work, "American Prospects". Sternfeld traversed the United States with his 8 x 10 inch camera, in order to capture the essential character of the country. First exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and then published in book form in 1987, "American Prospects" is regarded as one of the most influential bodies of photographic work from this period.

You can read the complete O'Hagan interview HERE. And take a moment to check out the guardian art weekly HERE.

Red Rock State Campground (boy), Gallup, New Mexico, September 1982

Canyon Country, California, June 1983

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Jim Goldberg - The Last Son, book signing at Dashwood NYC next Tuesday

 

If you're in NYC next Tuesday the 17th head along to Dashwood Books where from 6.30pm Jim Goldberg will be signing his Super Labo edition The Last Son.

The Last Son is Goldberg’s bildungsroman and the second book in Coming and Going, a personal three part series weaving together an assemblage of visual memories that chart his evolution as a photographer. In this mixed media coming of age story, Goldberg, the youngest son of a wholesale candy distributor, traces his dreams alongside his father’s as he traverses memory through ephemera. The precursor to Rich and Poor, The Last Son contrasts Goldberg’s ascent as an artist with his father’s decline into dashed and unrealized dreams. His father emerges as a Willy Loman-esque manifestation of unfulfilled American perseverance as his son exceeds the expectations of his role as family dunce.
Mixing photographs, collage, handwritten text and stills from home movies, Goldberg mines his archive to build a linear narrative of memories beginning with his first pictures. The dummy book is a wonderful sculptural stack of overflowing pages held together with post-it notes and tape that allows for an interactive physical process of narrative shifting. The Last Son is preceded by 134 Ways to Forget, a double-sided interactive poster/zine that juxtaposes Goldberg’s personal photographs with his own writing as he brainstorms ways to forget an ended relationship. The third installment in the trilogy will continue Goldberg’s rising narrative of artistic evolution as he follows his work to Asia funded by social security payments granted him on account of his father’s disability.

The Last Son by Jim Goldberg / Hardcover, 134 pages / $80
Dashwood Books, 33 Bond St., NY, NY 10012





Friday, January 13, 2017

Pierre Bessard, Publisher - a profile

 
Pierre Bessard

If you've ever spent time at any of the European Photography festivals, Paris, London, the Kassel Photobook festival you will probably have met Pierre Bessard. Pierre is unmistakably and flamboyantly Parisian and moreover a dedicated Sinophile with a passion for anything Chinese. This love of Chinese culture is central to the culture of Editions Bessard a unique publishing venture that makes photobooks of uncompromising excellence.

Pierre Bessard is profiled on the site Photography of China a website established by Marine Cabos an art historian specialized in the arts of China. The piece is well worth a read, you can do so HERE.

And you can go to the Editions Bessard website HERE.

In the following extract Pierre Bessard, with typical enthusiasm, outlines his philosophy:
Aesthete and precursor, Bessard Editions’ goal is to slide the world of photography into different prisms: novelty and originality, passion and excellence. This requires openness to the world, and permanent intellectual curiosity. We live in a hyper-communicating and hyper-connected society. We need to be receptive, to observe, in order to develop new ideas. My role is precisely to synthetise all the information, the exchange coming from various sources, whether they relate to the technological, cultural, and critical amongst other fields.
This publishing house intends to rethink the book format, to assert a savoir-faire, and to explore all facets of creativity, including design, art, typography, graphic design, bookbinding, and so forth. It reflects harmony, extravagance, inspiration, and passion. It is my role as a publisher to promote such values. 

Pieter Hugo, "Flat Noodle Soup Talk" bookwork

Editions Bessard - Bespoke collection

Thursday, January 12, 2017

MACK - New books for 2017


 
MACK have just announced their new titles due for release soon. They say this: We are excited to announce the titles we will be publishing in the next few months, including the first books of Sam Contis, Kevin Lear and Cesare Fabbri, new publications with Anthony Hernandez, Ron Jude and Mårten Lange, Richard Mosse’s new video installation as a 575 page artist book, and new editions of two of the defining books of photobook history - Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home and Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens. And we have our annual First Book Award which will be launched in May with an exhibition at Photo London.

In particular it's great to see new books from two of my favorite photographers Ron Jude and Anthony Hernandez. Also a new-look reprint of the seminal Larry Sultan book Pictures from Home.


Ron Jude, Nausea - taken from the title of Sartre’s 1938 existential novel—is a body of photographs that registers the interiors of public schools in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Atlanta, Georgia from 1990-92 by American pho- tographer Ron Jude. Departing from mere documentation, however, Jude lures us into peering through windows, doorways and crevices of walls into empty classrooms and corridors, as we become increasingly conscious of the perils of our own gaze. Rousing, rather than abating, the uncertainty of looking, Nausea established the building blocks for the next twenty-five years of Jude’s photographic output, including Other Nature, Alpine Star, Lick Creek Line and Lago.

At the heart of Nausea lies the premise that philosophical inquiry might be filtered and consumed through photographs, just as it is filtered through Sartre’s work of literary fiction. Taking as his subject the banality of institutional learning, the monotonous spaces and objects captured in Nausea serve as a platform for exploring the nexus between the narrative limitations of photography and consciousness. Employing a distinctive visual language, marked by an acute sense of colour, radical framing and shallow focus, Jude created a world both familiar and uncanny, imbued with a pervasive sense of unease.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the inaugural exhibition of Nausea in 1992 at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, Jude has made an entirely new edit of this work. Many of the photographs in this volume have never before been published or exhibited.


Anthony Hernandez, Forever comprises photographs taken in the downtown area of Los Angeles and the poorer neighborhoods of Compton, Watts and South Central, made between 2007–2012. The work traces the movements of the homeless, in images which take up the point of view of the homeless person. So, rather than photographing the material trace – a chair or bed – Hernandez photographs what might be might seen and observed from the street itself.
The title was drawn from a previous work Landscapes for the Homeless (1996), exhibited at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. The catalogue included a conversation between Hernandez and Lewis Baltz titled Forever Homeless: A Dialogue. It was Baltz who chose the title, and Hernandez speaks of its prevailing significance, “The title is very important because, as I write this, fifteen years on, the homeless population of Los Angeles has only increased; I could technically keep photographing this subject, making these kinds of pictures, forever.”

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Whitechapel Gallery London, Terrains of the Body, photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington USA

 
Hellen van Meene, Untitled (79), (2000), detail

Opening next week and running until April 16, Terrains of the Body is drawn from the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, U.S.). This collection showcases photography and video work by seventeen contemporary artists from around the world.
By turning their camera to women, including themselves, these artists embrace the female body as a vital medium for storytelling, expressing identity and reflecting individual and collective experience.
The exhibition features work by: Marina Abramović, Rineke Dijkstra, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Candida Höfer, Icelandic Love Corporation, Mwangi Hutter, Kirsten Justesen, Justine Kurland, Nikki S. Lee, Hellen van Meene, Shirin Neshat, Daniela Rossell, Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, Janaina Tschäpe and Adriana Varejão.

You can go to the Whitechapel Gallery website HERE. And if you're in London there is still time to catch the stunning Willam Kentridge show which closes this coming Sunday the 15th

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Photobooks 2016 - a list of the lists

 
Zzyzx – Gregory Halpern
 
Viory Schellekens is a Dutch documentary photographer whose work investigates social, political and economic issues. 
When not making photographs Schellekens has assembled the ultimate in photobook lists for 2016. A daunting task. 

Schellekens writes: Are you sure you're done with 2016?
In the last two months 162 different photographers, curators, collectors, bloggers, etcetera chose 546 photobooks as the most interesting, the best and their favourite books. They are collected in a meta-list. Here you can check out the top 140 of it. I added links to videos or articles about the books.

In this post I've only included those books that received 10 selections or more. To see the complete list you can go to this facebook link HERE.
And while you're at it you can check out Viory Schellekens work on her website HERE. It's well worth a look.
.
22 selections
* Zzyzx – Gregory Halpern
(Selected by Robin Titchener, Aaron Suman, Ron Jude, Leo Hsu, Tim Clark, Antone Dolezal, Moises Saman, Sarah Bradley, Christer Ehrling, Mark Power, Martin Amis, PDN, Peggy Sue Amison, Alvaro Matias, Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, Anne Bourgeois-Vignon, American Photo, Sean O’Hagan, Bildband Berlin, Teju Cole, Vince Aletti, Homer Harianja) [https://vimeo.com/180167848]
.
16 selections
* Discordia – Moises Saman
(Selected by Rudi Thoemmes, Alice Gabriner, HAF, Anouk Kruithof, 10x10 Photobooks Team, Forrest Soper, Mark Power, Martin Amis, PDN, Colin Pantall, Atsushi Saito, Sean O’Hagan, Alvaro Matias, Rosy Santella, Bildband Berlin, Mark Murrmann)
[https://vimeo.com/183541194]
.
14 selections
* Astres Noirs – Katrin Koenning and Sarker Protick
(Selected by Fiona Rogers, Laura El-Tantawy, 10x10 Photobooks Team, Awoiska van der Molen, Daniel Boetker-Smith, Eamonn Doyle, Martin Amis, Colin Pantall, Regina Anzenberger, Erik Vroons, Peggy Sue Amison, Françoise Callier, Sean O’Hagan, Bildband Berlin) [https://vimeo.com/165124864]
.
13 selections
* Libyan Sugar – Michael Christopher Brown
(Sarah Leen, Rob Hornstra, Anne Wilkes-Tucker, Jonas Cuénin, María García Yelo, Anne Bourgeois-Vignon, Alvaro Matias, American Photo, F.D. Walker, Teju Cole, Mark Murrmann, Elizabeth Avedon, Vince Aletti)
[https://vimeo.com/192611051]
.
12 selections
* Sugar Paper Theories – Jack Latham
(Selected by Rob Hornstra, Yumi Goto for PhotoBookStore, Mark Power, Martin Amis, Clare Grafik, Matt Shonfeld, Teun van der Heijden, Iatã Cannabrava, Mariama Attah, Ramon Pez, Atsushi Saito, Tipi Photo Bookstore) [https://vimeo.com/182679010]
.
10 selections
* Anaesthesia – Valentina Abenavoli
(Gabriela Cendoya, Laura El-Tantawy, Mariela Sancari, Yumi Goto for PhotoBookStore, Jason Fulford, Bitume Photofest, Tipi Photo Bookshop, Rémi Coignet, Josef Chladek, Brad Feuerhelm)
[https://vimeo.com/185838232]


Discordia – Moises Saman

Astres Noirs – Katrin Koenning & Sarker Protick

 
Libyan Sugar – Michael Christopher Brown

Sugar Paper Theories – Jack Latham

Anaesthesia – Valentina Abenavoli

Monday, January 9, 2017

Andrei Tarkovsky - Poetic Harmony

 

Lewis Bond is a writer and film theorist who is behind YouTube's Channel Criswell. His objective is to create content that examines the art of cinema. I was drawn to Bond's 15 minute piece on Andrei Tarkovsky - Poetic Harmony, in part because I'm an admirer of Tarkovsky's films and also because of the connection between photography and poetry.

Poetic Harmony is well worth a look as in my view many of the elements and themes that drove Tarkovsky in his film making are equally important and influential in still photography.
In fact Bond comments that Tarkovsky's approach to cinematography may well have been influenced by his background as a photographer.
 
Tarkovsky's films are characterized by metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, and  images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs are dreams, memory, childhood, running water accompanied by fire, rain indoors, reflections, levitation, and characters re-appearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera. He once said, "Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”  Water, clouds, and reflections were used by him for their surreal beauty and photogenic value, as well as their symbolism, such as waves or the forms of brooks or running water. Bells and candles are also frequent symbols.

You can watch Andrei Tarkovsky - Poetic Harmony HERE. And go to the Channel Criswell site HERE.






Saturday, January 7, 2017

Tokyo Girls - Harajuku Style

Harajuku style originated among teens on the streets near Tokyo's Harajuku Station in Shibuya. The style is all about mismatch, mixing tradition with modern, punks looks, school uniforms, gothic, bright colours, anime, ruffles, cute, heavy makeup and so on...

When in Tokyo in 2006 I made a series of pictures of the Harajuku Girls. There are five photographs in this series each produced in an edition of 5. I numbered the images one to five. Tokyo Girl Number One in my view works best... I like how the girl is confronting the camera. She wears a Cold War period German Democratic Republic uniform from what was East Germany.

Here are the photographs:






Thursday, January 5, 2017

John Berger (5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) RIP



The art critic and novelist John Berger has died at the age of ninety. Berger was best known for the television series and complementing book Ways of Seeing (1972), Berger's writing  dealt with numerous subjects in the arts. His 1972 novel, G, was awarded the Man Booker Prize. 
Ways of Seeing was a  BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The book Ways of Seeing was written by Berger and Dibb, along with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis. The book consists of seven numbered essays: four using words and images; and three essays using only images. The book has contributed to feminist readings of popular culture, through essays that focus particularly on how women are portrayed in advertisements and paintings.


Ways of Seeing is a available on YouTube, you can view the first of the series HERE.