Terri Weifenbach, Centers of Gravity from onestar press, Paris

 

Just published by Paris based onestar press is Terri Weifenbach's, Centers of Gravity. 

As Terri Weifenbach observed varying bird activity in the back of her studio, she captured highly charged movements images in her characteristically delicate manner, interplaying with focal length and a range of natural colors. For her book, Weifenbach decided to isolate the birds from each numbered print found in her CAMERA ARTIST portfolio work of the same name. Cropped, the images are now black and white flying silhouettes distributed along the pages of the book.

Acclaimed American poet Matthew Dickmann contributed to the artist book with an original postface:

A NOTE ON BEING ALONE AND THE BEATING OF WINGS
Sitting in the backyard at night is not like sitting in a government office waiting to see if you will receive the papers you need to join your family or sitting in a small room with neon lights while an TSA officer looks at your passport and asks what your name is and what your mother and father’s names are and asks if this man is your cousin or if this man is your cousin while other people walk around the airport free and upset at the long lines in front of the Starbucks. Loneliness knows if you are missing someone or feeling a little lost with how the night is acting or if your life is in danger, loneliness knows if you are being deported or just not wanting to go back inside and watch television. Back when the dark had some wind inside it I felt very alone. Back when we were just starting to learn to love each other within our new anger I would walk out to the backyard and sit and smoke cigarettes and wish you would come find me, come sit next to me. I like the sounds in the yard I can’t hear. The sound of a wing. Of just part of the wing lifted in the air or resting against the feathery sides of a bird. I don’t know the names of any birds but one: the one named shadows-shadows-shadows-shadows-across-the-cool-dark-grass. That one! Oh, don’t you want to be sitting alone in your backyard right now? Aren’t you like me? Don’t you want to be standing in the dark grass looking up into the sound of the sky and the dark small bodies flying over you? I am sitting alone right now. I’m punishing myself but also wondering about joy. Who’s going to sit next to me? I can hear the beating of wings all around my shoulders. It sounds like an ocean. It sounds like the beginning and the end of everything.

The book's specifications are: 185 x 210 mm, 106 pages, cover: paperback, color, glossy finish, binding: glue bound interior: Black and white, 35 €

The limited edition portfolio consists of 8 numbered copies, 2 Artist Proof and 2 Hors Commerce. It contains 10 original signed and numbered photographs
 (29.7 x 42 cm / 11.6 x 16.5 in.) and is accompanied by a 106 page artist book including an original text by poet Matthew Dickman (18.5 x 21 cm / 7.3 x 8.2 in.) 

Each box is individually numbered, photographs are printed on Hahnemühle Baryta FB 350 gsm. 

The photos and book are contained in a labeled custom made canvas clamshell box
. POA.

You can go to the onestar press website HERE. And Terri Weifenbach's site HERE.

Joel Meyerowitz at Howard Greenberg Gallery NYC, September 7 – October 21, 2017

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1977

NEW YORK – Two exhibitions of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from September 7 to October 21, 2017. Between the Dog and the Wolf presents images from the 1970s and 80s made in those mysterious moments around dusk. Many of the works will be on display for the first time. Morandi, Cézanne and Me surveys Meyerowitz’s recent still lifes of objects from Paul Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and Giorgio Morandi’s in Bologna. The exhibitions will open with a reception on September 7, from 6 to 8 p.m.

Two new books of photographs by Meyerowitz are to be published: Joel Meyerowitz: Cézanne’s Objects (Damiani, October 2017) and Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective (Laurence King, January 2018).

The exhibition title Between the Dog and the Wolf is a translation of a common French expression “Entre chien et loup,” which refers to oncoming twilight. As Meyerowitz notes, “It seemed to me that the French liken the twilight to the notion of the tame and the savage, the known and the unknown, where that special moment of the fading of the light offers us an entrance into the place where our senses might fail us slightly, making us vulnerable to the vagaries of our imagination.”

The majority of the photographs in the exhibition are from a period when Meyerowitz was spending summers on Cape Cod and had just begun working with an 8x10 view camera. “My whole way of seeing was both challenged and refreshed. I found that time became a greater element in my work. The view camera demands longer exposures, and I began looking into the oncoming twilight and seeing things that the small cameras either couldn’t handle or didn’t present in significant enough quality,” Meyerowitz explains. “What seems of more value to me now, 30 years later, is how that devotion to the questions back then taught me to see in a new and simpler way.”

The exhibition features photographs taken concurrently with Meyerowitz’s iconic series Cape Light, widely recognized for his use of color and appreciation of light. A young woman is perched on a wall that overlooks the Cape Cod Bay in a 1984 print, with the last of the daylight fading into a pink haze. A 1977 view of a dark house with one lit window has a sandy front yard with a sagging badminton net, an abandoned tricycle, and a blue doghouse with peeling paint. In a nearly abstract image from 1984, the viewer can barely see lights from a house on the beach as night falls. Other locations show a view of a serene sky with St. Louis’ Gateway Arch from 1977 and a palm tree in fading blue light in Florida from 1979.

As Meyerowitz notes, “I am grateful that my experience has allowed me to work both as a street photographer and as a view-camera photographer, and that I’m comfortable with both vocabularies. I speak two languages, classical and jazz. Street photography is jazz. The view camera, being so much slower, is more classical, more meditative, it has a different way of showing its content. You can be a jazz musician and play classically, and you can be a classical musician and love the immediacy and improvisation of jazz.”

Morandi, Cézanne and Me reflects Meyerowitz’s fascination with everyday objects, which also served as inspiration to Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi. He was granted permission to photograph in both artists’ studios in 2013 and 2015.

Meyerowitz was struck by the grey walls in Cézanne's studio, and how every object in the studio seemed to be absorbed into the grey of the background. He photographed just about every object there – from vases, pitchers, and carafes to a skull and Cézanne's hat. This project spurred him to visit Morandi’s studio to observe the objects that the master still life painter had used as inspiration for over 60 years. Meyerowitz was allowed access to all 275 of Morandi’s famous objects at his home and studio. He worked near the same window, sitting at Morandi’s table, photographing shells, pigment-filled bottles, funnels, watering cans, and other dusty aged objects against the same paper that Morandi had left on the wall, now brittle and yellow with age. Meyerowitz also began to look anew at items he found in Italian flea markets – a dented brass tube, a rusted tin flask, a capped container -- and he photographed them placed in grey corners and against heavy canvas backdrops in his studio in Tuscany.

You can go to the Howard Greenberg Gallery Site HERE.

Florida, 1978

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1976

Dusk, New Jersey, 1978

Ariel, Jeffersonville, New York, 1980

David Alan Harvey - "it starts right here at home"

 

Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey writes on his Instagram feed HERE that photography starts at home. My reading of that is that the best photography, authentic photography comes from the heart and the things we care about.

Here is Davis Alan Harvey wrote: End of summer front porch hang time. No big party. Just a few friends. Quiet. Moon. September a time for back to school back to work. I'm finishing up my project at home. Time to take a close look at all I've shot. I always feel like I didn't quite do enough, yet it's all I thought about all I did and all I tried to do. Those I mentor know well that I push them to photograph what is right around them either literally or psychologically. I'll be off soon to New York for my October workshops and to finish shooting at my second home soon to be gone. Keep your eye on my IG Stories in the coming weeks. I'll be reviewing books by some amazing photographers and also giving some insights into the thought process for making a book. In my case it all starts right here at home. What you care about is what you should photograph. How you feel how you think and what motivates your very being. You must write your own song. That can only come from inside. Photography is such a beautiful vehicle for traveling the road of life. I can't think of any other tool that quite allows the same freedoms of both experience and expression. Summer is over, yet adventure awaits.

You can see more of Harvey's work on his action packed website HERE.

Sotheby's New York, Postwar and Contemporary Photographs 28 September 2017

Edward Burtynsky

BREEZEWOOD, PENNSYLVANIA

Estimate 15,000 — 25,000 US$

Sotheby’s is pleased to present the inaugural sale of Postwar and Contemporary Photographs on 28 September 2017 in New York. The sale is led by 49 exceptional works from the distinguished Ames Collection, including masterpieces by Thomas Struth, Matthew Barney, Vik Muniz, and David Hockney, among many others. Alongside the Ames Collection, the sale offers a diverse selection of innovative works by artists including Vito Acconci, Helena Almeida, Shirin Neshat, Chris McCaw and Kohei Yoshiyuki. All photographs will be on view during a pre-sale exhibition in New York from 22 September through 27 September.

You can see the on-line catalogue HERE.

Rineke Dijkstra

CASTRICUM AAN ZEE, THE NETHERLANDS, JUNE 1992

Estimate 30,000 — 50,000 US$

Gregory Crewdson

UNTITLED (HOUSE FIRE)

Estimate 12,000 — 18,000 US$

Thomas Struth

WEST BROADWAY, NEW YORK, TRIBECA

Estimate 20,000 — 30,000 US$

MoMA NYC has launched a free course - Looking at Photographs as Art

MoMA curator Sarah Meister will be drawing on MoMA’s expansive photography collection for the free 6 session, self-paced Seeing Through Photographs class presented on Coursera.

About the course, MoMA says this: Although taking, sharing, and viewing photographs has become second nature for many of us, our regular engagement with images does not necessarily make us visually literate. This course aims to address the gap between seeing and truly understanding photographs by introducing a diversity of ideas, approaches, and technologies that inform their making. In this course you will look closely at photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art and hear a variety of perspectives on what a photograph is and the ways that photography has been used throughout its nearly 180 year history: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration; as an instrument of documentation; to tell stories and record histories; and as a mode of communication and critique in our ever increasingly visual culture. 

Learning Objectives • Develop skills to better examine and understand the differences between photographs and photographic images. • Discover how context influences the production, circulation, and reception of photographic images. • Learn about different modes of artistic and technological experimentation and innovation in photography. • Investigate photography’s role in our increasingly visual culture.

The course starts September 4, you can enroll HERE.

William Eggleston releases his album of synthesizer compositions

 

 William Eggleston will release Musik, an album of his synthesizer compositions, on October 20. You can listen to a 3 minute sample on this YouTube video HERE.

And when you are done with that you can watch a 21 minute documentary on Eggleston from The Art of Photography, HERE.

A 10x10 Salon - Photobooks from New Zealand and Japan

 

If you are in New York Wednesday September 13, you can hook up with 10x10 Photobooks and go along to their photobook event with presenters Anita Tótha of Remote Photobooks, Yoko Sawada of Osiris and Photographer Mikiko Hara.

Anita Tótha is a Hungarian-American curator and writer originally from New York, who worked at Yossi Milo Gallery prior to relocating to New Zealand in 2011. Currently based in Auckland, Anita is a co-founder of the NZ photography collective Tangent and the founder of Remote Photobooks, an international distribution initiative specializing in photobooks and photo-related publications by photographers and independent publishers from New Zealand. In 2015, she co-produced a short film Pictures on Paper: Photobooks in New Zealand, documenting 6 photobook makers.

Yoko Sawada has been involved with books and photography since the 1980s. Beginning her career on the editorial staff at Heibonsha Publishing in Tokyo, Yoko went on to co-found the seminal photography quarterly déjà-vu in 1990 before establishing Osiris, her own photobook imprint. More recently, she co-edited Change by Mikiko Hara and collaborated on the international traveling exhibition, “Provoke: Photography in Japan Between Protest and Performance, 1960-1975.” Osiris also represents several contemporary Japanese photographers as well as manages the archives of Takuma Nakahira, a leading postwar photographer and a founding member of Provoke magazine (1968-1969).

Mikiko Hara is a Japanese photographer who lives in Kawasaki and graduated with a degree in literature from Keio University before studying at Tokyo College of Photography. Mikiko, who recently received Japan's prestigious 42nd Ihei Kimura Award for her 2016 photobook Change, uses a medium format camera to photograph random people and places within her daily existence. Her works have been exhibited at and are included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Mikiko's work has been featured in the New York Times T Magazine. Her second solo exhibition in NYC will open at the Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery this September.

RSVP required at info@10x10photobooks.org 
The event starts at 7pm at an address in Brooklyn, this will be advised after you have sent RSVP.

 

More reasons than you will ever need to be in Paris this Autumn

September 1st signals what the French call la rentrée, it's when life returns to normal after the lengthy August holiday break. Schools start their new year and galleries present their new shows. 
Centre Pompidou, or as Parisians call it Beaubourg, (I don't think they liked M. Pompidou all that much) has just released their programme for la rentrée. Amongst many offerings there are shows featuring Baudelaire, Elina Brotherus, The Duchamp Prize, André Derain, Harmony Korine, William Kline plus a new presentation of their contemporary collection.

On top of all this there is Paris Photo! So, rendez-vous à Paris du 9 au 12 novembre 2017 au Grand Palais pour découvrir la première foire mondiale dédiée au médium photographique.

David Gaberle - Metropolight, an urban dystopia

 

Street photographer David Gaberle, resident of Prague and London has just produced his first photobook - Metropolight. With images made in Tokyo, London, New York, Hong Kong, Shanghai and beyond, the work is uncanny and unsettling. The reader is transported to some other dark place, an urban dystopia. The pictures present a Blade Runner sort of world, in endless motion with seemingly desensitised people going through the motions of being human. Coping, surviving. The work is Paul Graham on speed.

David says this about himself and the Metropolight project:
5 years ago, at the suggestion of a friend, I realised that carrying a camera around really eases the experience of the sensory overload that comes with living in a big city. The camera's a therapeutic tool. Paradoxically, it gives me the illusion that I'm in control of what I'm doing while at the same time making me realise that things are continually getting out of my hands. 
I'd like to think that the experience of taking photos helps me grow over time. Especially in street-photography, getting a good shot requires patience. In my personal life, I often have too clear an idea of what I want and how I should get there (frustratingly, I hardly ever do). Shooting out on the streets is a pleasant antithesis to that as it requires an openness to experience and a willingness to let go of a whole lot of preconceived ideas. In that way, it's a balancing act to my life outside of photography. 

Metropolight is a stunning book. You can get a copy from David's website and see more at the same time, HERE.

Ron Jude - his take on the photobook sequence

In a recent post in Photo District News Ron Jude talks about his approach to photobook sequencing... “The tricky part,” Jude explains, is to use these visual cues to bring viewers from one picture to the next “without it becoming clear on the surface exactly what you’re doing…. I think if anybody really studies [Nausea] or any of my books, you start to pick up on those things…but you don’t want to overplay that hand because then it just becomes a little trick that you’re doing and then suddenly that’s what the book is about.”

Below is a sequence from Ron's book Nausea made from images he shot 25 years ago.

You can read the complete PDN piece HERE.

Color palettes in film and photography

In a recent post from OPEN CULTURE the business of color palettes in film was discussed. Film makers have long used color to underline the emotional thrust of a movie. Different colors are loaded with distinctive psychological meanings and are powerful signifiers. Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love. Yellow is the color of sunshine. It's associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy. Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven. And so on...

The site Cinema Palettes, shows examples of various film color palettes, it's not difficult to see how these color choices contribute significantly to the take out from a film.

Lost in Translation (2003) dir. Sofia Coppola

The Shining (1980) dir. Stanley Kubrick

The Revenant (2015) dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu

American Beauty (1999) dir. Sam Mendes

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) dir. George Miller

In my recent photobook - THE LAMENT (Dewi Lewis UK)  I made a decision to go for an almost monochrome color palette using grays, dark blues and greens and ochre. I  punctuated these colors with strong reds. After all a lamentation is about loss and sadness and I wanted the overall look of the book to reinforce that. Below are some of the spreads from THE LAMENT, I think you can see what I'm on about.

If you are interested THE LAMENT is available from Dewi Lewis Publishing HERE or The Book Depository HERE. This hardback book has 96 pages with 83 photographs.