Melbourne and Sydney in May - 28 photographs

While in Melbourne and Sydney at the end May there was time to wander, explore and make photographs. The result, a 28 page photobook similar in format to my Paris series.

The edition is limited to 50 copies, each book signed and numbered. There are 28 photographs, over 28 pages, printed on 150gsm art paper, 226 x 160 mm. Below are some of the pages.

Copies can be obtained directly from me at: harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz
Prices are, €23 / £18 / US$30 / A$33 / NZ$36, which include packing and postage. For payment you can simply log on to my PayPal account using my email address above.

The Photobook - Yin and Yang

MOCA Sydney - Sunday May 25

The Sunday before last I took part in a panel discussion at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art where a panel consisting of publishers, photography educators and photographers attempted to prise open the photobook oyster to see if we could come up with any pearls of wisdom. The subject was tossed back and forth before a receptive audience and in an hour and a half not many substantive conclusions were reached.

As a committed maker of photobooks I’ve been thinking a lot about the photobook and the problems and opportunities of book making and distribution. Since I made my first photobook twenty years ago much has changed. On one hand it’s become hugely easier to actually get a book produced. With InDesign, working from PDF’s in a computer to plate environment, sheet-fed offset books are simpler to produce. Make-ready press times are shorter, plate turn around on the presses are faster and printers can now cost effectively print smaller runs, down to even 500 units. Possibly less. On top of this there is digital printing with state of the art printers from both Fuji Xerox and HP. And soon in this arena sheet sizes larger than A3. All this has meant a flood of photobooks. In effect the haystack has got bigger but the needle much smaller. What I’m saying is that amongst the flood of books, some books are not very good and it’s harder to get ones hands on the really outstanding stuff. Somebody commented at the panel discussion, “how many times have you gone into a photobook store and come out with nothing”. Right!

Once you’ve got your book in your hand the killer is distribution. Today, there are many more books seeking shelf-space with less shelf-space to go round. High Street art bookshops have closed and those that keep going have become more selective in what they stock. And for example the wonderful Flammarion bookshop in Centre Pompidou, Paris, seems to have a policy of just one stock-turn for most books. In other words they will order a book, display it, sell it but not restock. Then there is Amazon and Book Depository with their huge market share which enable them to dictate terms to publishers. Book resellers demand hefty discounts and more often than not publishers pay the freight costs of unsold returned books. I am still convinced that the photobook is the best vehicle for photography. The book makes a series of pictures into a work in itself. There is a wonderful tactile, format, scale thing that works with photographs in book form which adds to the experience of viewing the work. And unlike a short lived gallery show a book has long life, it can travel and becomes the photographers ultimate calling card.

As for acquiring photobooks, in my view you can’t go wrong it you buy and collect every new book from those photographers you admire with a history of making books where often one book can inform the next. For example I get hold of, sight unseen, every book from luminaries such as Robert Adams, Paul Graham, John Gossage, Wolfgang Tillmans and Collier Schorr, to name a few. I do this because I follow their work and know their books will be good. And I look for books from new voices such as Sacha Maric, Lucas Blalock and others.

Despite the changes of the last few years there is still life in photobook. Long live the photobook!

Harvey Benge - Can I leave the room?

Xavier Ribas at The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

 

Xavier Ribas - A History of Detonations, 2013

BARCELONA.- The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona presents the first solo exhibition by Xavier Ribas (Barcelona, 1960) that brings together a substantial body of work made by the photographer over the last decade. The exhibition takes its title from his latest investigative project into the extraction of sodium nitrate. The system of colonial exploitation led by British companies in the Chilean Atacama Desert is a case study whose geographical and historical scope is held to question by Ribas’s photographic practice. This ambitious study, produced between 2009 and 2014, is presented here for the first time along with a selection of his earlier works. The first part of the exhibition – which prefaces the section dedicated specifically to Nitrate – includes four photographs from the Sanctuary series (2002) and eight series from the most extensive group of works in the artist’s career, Concrete Geographies (2002–9). In the mid-1990s Xavier Ribas first became known with his project Sundays , 1994–97, an investigation of the outskirts of Barcelona. With this series, which initiated his anthropological perspective and earned him immediate recognition, he began his research on the relationship between the urban and the everyday. The projects collected under the title Sanctuary (1998–2002) continue the exploration of urban peripheries with works in which the author addresses the interstitial spaces of the city.

You can read the full text to this piece on artdaily HERE and more on the Ribas website HERE.

Xavier Ribas - Desert Trails, 2012 (detail)

LODZ - 13th International Festival of Photography

Continuing a Polish note, the 13th International Festival of Photography opens in Lodz tonight. Wish I could be there. Check out the program on the festival's site HERE.

Clare Strand - Further Reading

Clare Strand is a British camera artist whose work I have long admired. Strand is a risk taker and is not content to simply investigate the obvious. Here work transcends boundaries and takes photography to new and exciting places. Currently she has a show called Further Reading, at the National Museum in Krakow as part of the Krakow Photomonth.

Throughout Clare Strand’s photographic career, her projects have been underpinned by the act of “research.” Strand began collecting vernacular and functional imagery at a young age, and has, over the course of two decades, amassed her own personal archive of utilitarian imagery, describing her method as “like wearing a magnetic suit and seeing what it attracts, or rolling in the grass and seeing what you pick up on your jumper.  

The "Further Reading" exhibition showcases a cross-section of  Clare Strand's output, a British artist working in photography, video and installation. Many of Strand’s projects are inspired by photos made for functional usages – in criminal cases, instruction manuals or parascientific visual materials created by Spiritists. These provide her with a starting point for her individual, humorous aesthetic quests. By playing with conventions, Strand also constantly challenges the received wisdom that photography shows the truth.

Clare Strand is a multidisciplinary photographic artist based in Brighton, England. She has exhibited extensively both in England and abroad. Her work is held in major collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Recent publications include Clare Strand Monograph (Steidl, 2009) and Skirts (GOST Books, 2013). Strand is also half of the ideas-based collaborative team MacDonaldStrand,
  
If you don't plan to be in Poland anytime soon (exhibition closes August 17) you can see the show and its installation on Clare Strand's tumblr site HERE. Her website is well worth checking out too - HERE.

Kummer & Herrman - photobook design at its best!

 

Dutch designers Kummer and Herrman, winners of a bunch of European Design Awards have just redesigned their website. Well known for their ongoing collaboration with Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen's The Sochi Project, and new projects with Martin Parr, Aperture and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, their inspirational site is well worth a look. You can do so HERE.

Photographers whose work I like - No25/ Daniel Donnelly

Daniel Donnelly is a self taught English photographer who lives in Casablanca. He makes pictures that are mysteriously strange. With a lightness and humor in his looking he deftly transcends the Moroccan vernacular making pictures that could be anywhere, pictures where the details count for a lot.

You can see Daniel's first bookwork - For the Children - here at ANTLER PRESS and go to his website HERE.

André Príncipe and Marco Martins - TOKYO DIARIES

In 2009 André Príncipe and Marco Martins travelled to Tokyo to shoot a film about elliptical narratives and the importance of the diaristic practise in Japanese photography.
During a month and in a totally improvised way, the Portuguese filmmakers shot hours of 16mm footage and thousands of photographs of their daily life as well as their encounters with photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Hiromix, Kohei Yushiyuki and Kajii Syoin. Traces of a Diary was shown in film festivals around the world and received the jury prize at Documenta Madrid. Initially, the film was going to be a mixture of still photographs and 16mm material but during editing it was decided that only the moving images were to be used. About one hundred rolls of Tri-X 400 film remained in a box, unused. These photographs are now revisited in Tokyo Diaries, a book that is as much about photo books and the way we read them as it is about Japanese photographers.

TOKYO DIARIES / Softcover, B&W / 24 x 17 cm / 244 pages / Edition of 750 / Price: €28.00

The bookwork will be released in July and is available now at a special pre-sale price of  €22.00

Published by Pierre von Kleist Editions you can order a copy HERE.

Rinko Kawauchi and Terri Weifenbach - a collaboration

 
Following a simple exchange of photographs a collaboration grew and from that an exhibition at Tokyo's IMA Gallery and a bookwork - Gift.

Living in Tokyo and Washington D.C. respectively, Rinko Kawauchi and Terri Weifenbach, are two internationally recognized women photographers, maintaining friendship and contact by exchanging photographs. Kawauchi is one of Japan’s best-known photographers. American Weifenbach is well known for her fantastic and beautiful images of natural landscapes.
They each owned books of the other’s works and began exchanging images via email in 2011. Gift is a result of this photographic exchange. The images were sent as responses, one to another, and as gifts to a faraway friend, the pictures constitute a story of their relationship and communicate the seasons as well as various emotions.

The photographs began to create a line of narrative; in response to Weifenbach’s image of a water surface Kawauchi emails an image of a water drop on tip of a leaf, when Weifenbach sends her an image of grass Kawauchi responds with an image showing silky hair of a child. Such exchanges continued, creating intimate conversation between the two women. Like a gift, the photographs encapsulate thoughts for the other. Through the exchange they share a moment in a passing season, or they remember the moon which both of them witnessed on the same night. The narrative woven through their photographic conversation invites the viewer into a lyrical and mysterious world.

Here are some of the correspondances:

Terri Weifenbach

Rinko Kawauchi

Terri Weifenbach

Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi

Terri Weifenbach

The exhibition at IMA Gallery Tokyo continues until June 22. The photobook Gift can be purchased from the galleries online store or from UK's PHOTOBOOKSTORE, where you can see a vimeo presentation of the book.

   

VESTIGIOS INVISIBLES at Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló, Spain

 

Xavier Ribas - Una Voce Unica e Inevitabile (2014)

Opening today and running until August 31st, the exhibition Vestigios invisibles (Invisible Traces) presents photographs by Mark Adams, Ana Teresa Ortega, Xavier Ribas, Ann Shelton and Vicente Tirado which record territories that were once the scene of events of which they are no visible traces left to photograph. These images ask us to rethink the representation of landscape and its memory.

For its theoretical framework the exhibition returns to the notion of late photography as expounded by David Campany, who defines it as follows: “These images appear to us as particularly static, often sombre and quite ‘straight’ kinds of pictures. They assume an aesthetic of utility closer to forensic photography than traditional photojournalism.” In Campany’s view, this type of photography is the trace of a trace and “a kind of photograph that foregoes the representation of events in progress and so cedes them to other media,” taking on the role of the “undertaker, summariser or accountant.” Contrary to the notion of the decisive moment introduced by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952, late photography “turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened, totting up the effects of the world’s activity.”
It's nice to see a show with fellow New Zealanders Mark Adams and Ann Shelton, showing with my friend Xavier Ribas.

The Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló is a centre for the production and dissemination of contemporary art, under Proyecto Castelló Cultural and the Consorcio de Museos de la Comunidad Valenciana, two public bodies belonging to the Generalitat Valenciana, the Valencian regional government.

Ann Shelton, installation view

Australia - Photography is Alive and Well

It was a pleasure to spend a few days in Melbourne  and Sydney this last week. I had been invited to give a talk on the photobook at Melbourne's Photography Studies College. This is an amazing organisation with a 40 year history, where the calibre of the teachers, students and facilities blew me away. In Sydney I participated in a panel discussion at Photobook Day at the Museum of Contemporary Art, ably organised by Daniel Boetker-Smith founder of Melbourne's Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive.

In my experience, often at these events I never get to see much photography because inevitably one gets wrapped up in meeting people and talking to photo friends.
However all was not lost, as generously, two Melbourne based photographers gave me copies of their latest bookworks. Both these artists are working at a high level, with passion and an authenticity that shines through in the work.

Robyn Daly has produced an enviable body of work. She still shoots on film and moves with ease from colour work to black and white. Her bookwork COLLINGWOOD (Volume One) is well worth a look.

Kristian Laemmle-Ruff's new and first photobook, In the Folds of the Hills is set in the secluded valleys of Lima, Victoria. The work in this series presents a seldom seen side of Australian rural life and delves beneath the surface of the lives of the rich characters living and working on the land.

Vanessa Winship at Fundacion Mapfre

 

Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia, 2007

The work of Vanessa Winship (b. 1960, Barton-upon-Humber, UK) focuses on issues such as frontier, identity, vulnerability and the body. Since the 1990s Winship has worked in regions including the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, places associated in the collective imagination with the instability and darkness of recent history and with the volatility of borders and identities. Her series offer a reflection on how the course of history moulds the shapes of the landscape and leaves its mark on its inhabitants' bodies, features and gestures. Travel and her encounters with the Other are thus central to her life and photographic output.

Winship's images place most emphasis on the powerful presence of a human landscape which imposes itself on political and social conflicts and emerges from among the ruins of vanishing worlds. The vestiges of a recent past (buildings, commemorative sculpture and means of transport) seem to proceed in the opposite direction to the people moving among them. Winship thus depicts the mythical and legendary component that roots these places in civilisation and history but simultaneously destabilises them. As a result, she forges a link between the archaic and a present that seems to lies abandoned by the wayside as progress passes by. The historical events that have marked these regions are evoked, but Winship places most emphasis on each one's micro-history: leisure activities, interiors of schools, working conditions and different forms of socialising and religious worship.

Using an aesthetic located between elegy and celebration, the photographs that Vanessa Winship produced until 2011 chart a personal map of Europe's edges and their points of contact with Asia. Her particular working method has given rise to series such as Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey; Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction; Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia; and Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind. All of them involve a movement from public to private space and from the immediacy of a specific event to the construction of a posed portrait.

In 2011 Winship was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Prize for photography. Her winning project was she dances on Jackson. United States, a series that focuses on signs of the decline of the American Dream, visible in both the surface of the land and in human features and body language. In 2014, commissioned by FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE, Winship travelled to Almería (Spain) in order to represent its remarkable geographical diversity, rootlessness and variable fortunes and history. These last two projects reveal a progressive disappearance of human forms and the emergence of a landscape that becomes eloquent through its apparent silence and immobility. The sense of a frontier territory, the vulnerability of the land and the weight of the past suggested in Almería. Where Gold Was Found closely connect this region to the other parts of the world that have been the subject of Vanessa Winship's photographic gaze.

Exhibition opens May 30 until August 31st

FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE
Bárbara de Braganza Exhibition Hall / Calle Bárbara de Braganza / Madrid / Spain

Humber, 2010

Metropolitan Museum NYC provides free access to digital Images from the Museum's renowned collection

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just announced that more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works in the Museum’s world-renowned collection may be downloaded directly from the Museum’s website for non-commercial use. The images can be used at no charge, without getting permission from the museum. In making this announcement, the Met joined other world-class museums in putting put large troves of digital art online.

To nominate just one example, The Steerage, made in 1907 by Alfred Steiglitz is available, complete with a detailed description of the work.

As proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and publisher of the photographic journals Camera Notes and Camera Work, Alfred Stieglitz was a major force in the promotion and elevation of photography as a fine art in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Steerage is considered Stieglitz's signature work, and was proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of the medium as his first "modernist" photograph. It marks Stieglitz's transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life.

The Steerage began its life as a masterpiece four years after its creation, with Stieglitz's publication of it in a 1911 issue of Camera Work devoted exclusively to his photographs in the "new" style, together with a Cubist drawing by Picasso. Stieglitz loved to recount how the great painter had praised the collagelike dispersal of forms and shifting depths of The Steerage. Canonized retroactively, the photograph allowed Stieglitz to put his chosen medium on par with the experimental European painting and sculpture he imported and exhibited so presciently at his gallery. In 1915, he lavishly reprinted the image in large-scale photogravure on both vellum and japanese paper for inclusion in his last magazine, 291.

The Steerage, 1907, Alfred Stieglitz, (American, Hoboken, New Jersey 1864–1946 New York), printed in or before 1913. Medium: Photogravure. Dimensions: 32.2 x 25.8 cm (12 11/16 x 10 3/16)

Museum Folkwang - (Mis)Understanding Photography

Aneta Grzeszykowska Untitled Film Stills #3, 2006

Running from June 14 through until August 17, (Mis)Understanding Photography – Works and Manifestos, is a large-scale exhibition of key contemporary photo-works, projects, films and installations by a wide range of artists, Tacita Dean, Hans-Peter Feldmann, John Hilliard, Erik Kessels, Sherrie Levine, Ugo Mulas, Barbara Probst, Timm Rautert, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans, Timm Ulrichs, Gillian Wearing, Christopher Williams and more than thirty others, takes for granted photography's centrality in contemporary art.

Ever since its invention 175 years ago artists have consistently questioned the nature of photography. Today artists acutely aware of the omnipresence of photographic images produce works exploring numerous aspects of photography: its materiality, its popularism, its psychological impact, its claims to objectivity, and its force in mass media. Against a familiar backdrop of the accelerating disappearance of analog photography and the simultaneously triumphal progress of digital photography, these works explore new ways of re-picturing and inhabiting that history.

(Mis)Understanding Photography presents a history of photography wild and ironic, melancholic and resolved at the same time it sets sights on the old longings and obsessions that people still connect with the camera.
Within this exhibition is another exhibition – Manifestos – presenting groundbreaking texts by those who are always the most radical writers on photography: photographers themselves. László Moholy-Nagy, August Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Martha Rosler and Germaine Krull and many others wrote strong declarative texts – in a 20th century context of avantgarde movements deeply wound up with photography announcing their intentions in seminal publications of all sorts and even radio broadcasts exhorting readers and listeners to see the world with new eyes through the new medium. Reflected in an elaborate spatial scenography, the manifestos are displayed alongside photographic incunabula of their authors.

Museum Folkwang, Museumsplatz 1, 45128 Essen 

Kenneth Josephson New York State, 1970

Newsprint Awards 2014 Recipients

The winners of the 2014 Newsprint Award have been announced. The overall winner is:

Noi Satirat Damampai with her project The War Within and runners up, Nobert Goertz with No Mans Land and Miro with I'm Lost in The World.
Noi Satirat Damampai was born in Hadyai, southern Thailand, where she is currently based.  Noi holds a Bachelor degree in Economics from Thammasat University in Bangkok and started a professional career as a journalist and photographer for various English-language publications in Southeast Asia 2005. As one of the judges for the Award I was asked to comment: It was a great pleasure to be involved as a judge in the 2014 Newsprint Award organized by Victor Sira in New York, Shiori Kawasaki in Tokyo and Reminders Photography Stronghold (Yumi Goto and Masaru Goto) Tokyo. Overall I was impressed with the high level of work. The stand-out winner, Thai photographer Noi Satirat Damampai exhibited a superb depth of understanding in the treatment of her project, which she developed with integrity and authenticity. Called THE WAR WITHIN the project deals with the struggles of the Karen ethnic group. The work was sensitively realized in a manner that went beyond the usual presentation of documentary work and what's more the design of the book-work was in perfect harmony with the newsprint medium. Below are some spreads from Noi Satirat Damampai's project The War Within.