Paris Photo 2010, Spotlight on Central Europe

Spotlight on Central Europe: Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic

From November 18-21, Paris Photo 2010 will offer a rare overview of the Central European scene with work by more than 90 Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovakian and Slovenian artists from the 1920's avant-garde movement and the post-war years through to the most contemporary production.

The project consists of four parts. The General Section evokes major historical, contemporary and avant-garde figures, whereas the Statement section curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez highlights emerging talents.

The Central Exhibition and the Project Room presents "Transition Times: video art from Central Europe", a thematic selection of videos curated by Rita Kálmán and Tijana Stepanović, Ludwig Museum–Museum of Contemporary Art's affiliate ACAX | Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange. A series of conferences will give the public a closer look at the featured countries' photography scenes.

Central Europe photography is also the subject of an exceptional number of concurrent exhibitions in many institutions in Paris: "André Kertész" at the Jeu de Paume, "East – West // Icons" at Espace Polka, "FormElles" at the Hungarian Institute, "East Side Story - Central Europe Chronicles" at HSBC France, "Stepánka Stein and Salim Issa, Little Hanoi" at the Czech Centre.

Dates: Thursday 18th November – Sunday 21st November, 2010
Venue: Carrousel du Louvre, 99 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France
Opening hours: 18th, 19th and 20th November from 11:30 am to 8 pm and 21st November from 11:30 am to 7 pm
Opening preview (by invitation only): Wednesday 17th November from 7 pm to 10 pm

Photograph: Alena Kotzmannova, 2007.

Street Photography Now Project

Street Photography Now Project is a collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of the photobook anthology Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson).

Each week from 1 October 2010, a leading contemporary street photographer will issue a new instruction, written to inspire fresh ways of looking at and documenting the world we live in.

Over the following six days photographers around the world are invited to upload one photograph in response, to form part of a Street Photography Now Project Gallery on Flickr. After six days the next instruction will be issued.

The Project will run for 52 weeks. The aim is to build a global community of photographers exploring the rewards and challenges of documenting public life. All photographers, including those who contribute to the Instructions, will be encouraged to comment and respond to the images posted to the Flickr groups.

Though not a competition, at the end of the Project one photographer will be chosen who has made the most outstanding contribution to the project across a number of weeks. They will be awarded £1000 of Thames & Hudson books and have their work displayed on The Photographers’ Gallery digital Wall for All.

The Street Photography Now Project was launched in September 2010, as The Photographers’ Gallery closed its doors for the redevelopment of its building on London's Ramillies Street. The Project will run for one year and is scheduled to end when The Photographers’ Gallery reopens in late 2011.

The first instruction (posted above) is from American photographer Bruce Gilden.

In January 2011 Bruce will be in Auckland, together with Todd Hido for the annual AUT St Paul St photography workshop. If you're interested you can find out more about the workshop by contacting Neil Cameron at the AUT School of Art and Design, neil.cameron@aut.ac.nz

You can find out more about the Street Photography Now Project at:
http://streetphotographynowproject.wordpress.com/

Gabriel Orozco at Centre Pompidou Paris

Gabriel Orozco is recognized as one of the leading conceptual artists of his generation. Constantly traveling, and without any fixed studio, Orozco rejects national or regional identifications, drawing his inspiration from the different places he has lived or stayed in. Born in Jalapa, Mexico, in 1962, he currently lives between Mexico, New York and Paris. His open and constantly developing approach finds expression in works of widely varying scale in a great diversity of media, the artist showing equal ease, freedom and fluidity in photography, drawing, painting, sculpture and installation.
For this exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Orozco has come up with an original layout based on the idea of the studio. Doing without internal walls, labelling or commentary, the works are displayed in a simplicity that echoes the moment of their creation, before their appropriation by the museum and its apparatus.

Currently showing through until 3 Jan 2011. Centre Pompidou, rue Beaubourg, 4th. M° Hôtel de Ville or Rambuteau. www.centrepompidou.fr/

Orozco's photography has a strange simple mystery engaging the simple essence of found objects. His 2004 Steidl book is quite wonderful.

Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography

Der Rote Bulli is an important new photobook that explores the relationship between the Becher-School, New Dusseldorf Photography, and The New Color Photography of Stephen Shore.
Edited by Werner Lippert and Christoph Schaden with text by Christoph Schaden, Tony Hiss, Christoph Ribbat, Gerald Schröder, Jeffrey Ladd, Maren Polte. With photography by Stephen Shore, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Volker Döhne, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Tata Ronkholz, Wendelin Bottländer, Andreas Gursky and more.

Format 22.5 × 21.5 cm, 250 pages, Hardcover, 33,- Euro
Available now from Schaden.com

To support the book the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf has a just opened show, focusing on this transatlantic influence on photography in the 1970s and 1980s.
At its heart is a friendship between three artists that was forged in New York in the year 1973. It was here that the 26-year-old Stephen Shore met the Düsseldorf photographer Hilla Becher, whose typological photographic documentation of water-towers, which she had put together with husband, Bernd Becher, had gone on display at Ileana Sonnabend’s renowned gallery the previous year. Two years later, Stephen Shore and the Bechers became the only colour photographer and Europeans respectively to be part of the legendary New Topographics group exhibition.

The focus of the exhibition is on Stephen Shore, a key figure in the US New Color Photography movement. From the mid 1970s onwards, Shore made several road trips through the United States, documenting ‘American Life’, the apparent banality of which caused incredible irritation among his contemporaries. The first part of the exhibition will provide a comprehensive overview of Shore’s ground-breaking work in the 1970s and 1980s with bodies of works from the projects American Surfaces and Uncommon Places.

The exhibition also explores the innovative motifs that Becher’s class developed in the area between their own photographic tradition and that of the US tradition.
The exhibition investigates the extent to which the students on Bernd Becher’s photography course at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, were inspired by US subjects and image concepts from the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition juxtaposes works by students on Becher’s course that bear the hallmark of this transatlantic influence and Stephen Shore’s own photographs.

Participating artists: Stephen Shore, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte, Tata Ronkholz, Miles Coolidge, Martin Rosswog, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, Claus Goedicke, Simone Nieweg, Stefan Schneider, Kris Scholz, Wendelin Bottländer, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Boris Becker, Bernhard Fuchs, Laurenz Berges, Andi Brenner, Volker Döhne, Claudia Fährenkemper, Matthias Koch

cutlog - nouvelle foire internationale d’art contemporain

Organised by galerist, artist, film maker and curator Bruno Hadjadj, cutlog is a contemporary art fair in the heart of Paris, situated under the 1000 m2 dome of the Bourse du Commerce, 100 metres from the Cour Carrée du Louvre, between Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou), Concorde (Jeu de Paume museum) and the Grand Palais.

Située au cœur de Paris, à mi-chemin entre le Grand Palais et la Cour Carrée du Louvre, cutlog s’annonce comme un nouveau carrefour pour les artistes, collectionneurs, galeristes, conservateurs et directeurs de musées du monde entier. Evénement alternatif et complémentaire aux autres foires internationales et parisiennes, les 30 à 40 galeries sélectionnées auront pour point commun d’être émergentes ou de présenter le travail d’artistes émergents.
Le vendredi 22 octobre, un jury constitué de professionnels remettra un prix à l’artiste le plus surprenant de la foire et une invitation à exposer son travail dans le cadre de cutlog 2011.

Both an alternative and a complement to current Parisian and international art fairs, cutlog is a vibrant intersection for artists, collectors, galleries, curators and museum directors worldwide.
The 30 to 40 galleries chosen will be independent and emerging ones and / or galleries that support emerging artists from across the country and around the globe.
cutlog will welcome a large number of private collectors and prestigious institutions, both national and international.
A professional jury will award a prize to the fair’s most surprising artist, plus an invitation to exhibit personally at cutlog 2011.

Preview is on October 20 and cutlog runs through until 7.30pm on Sunday October 24th.

I will be showing my work AGAINST FORGETTING at the space of galerie SPREE.

Gossage and Soth - The Auckland Project

When John Gossage and Alec Soth were in Auckland in January of last year for the AUT St Paul St workshop they both took time to photograph as John and Martin Parr had done together a year or so before in Memphis. The result is The Auckland Project which went live today on Photo Eye....

The Auckland Project
Radius Books, 2010. 160pp, in two volumes, 80 colour illustrations, 9 x 11.5 inches

Both sets of work are contained in a slip case and a limited edition of 40 copies is available at US$1,400, which includes a signed and numbered archival pigment print from both John and Alec.

Show here are the offered prints and an image of the slip-cased work.

Larry Clark at Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Opening October 8 and running until January 2, 2011, the Musée d'Art moderne Paris presents the first French retrospective of photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark, born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Organised in close collaboration with Clark himself, the exhibition sums up a fifty-year oeuvre with over two hundred original prints, most shown here for the first time. From the black and white images of the early 1960s to the feature-length films – among them Kids (1995), Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002) – he has been making since 1995, this internationally recognised artist offers an uncompromisingly hard look at teenagers adrift without bearings.

In addition to portraits of newborn babies and animals by his photographer mother – Clark worked as her assistant – the exhibition includes the mythic images of Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), as well as other work from these periods never shown before. His 16mm film on addicts in Tulsa, made in 1968 and recently rediscovered, is also being screened for the first time.

In his photo series from the 1990s and 2000s Clark shows us teenagers in a daily round of staving off boredom with drugs, sex and firearms, together with skateboarders ranging geographically from New York to the Latino ghetto of Los Angeles. Equally based on street and rock culture, the series 1992, The Perfect Childhood (1993) and Punk Picasso (2003) confirm his cutting eye for a marginality America refuses to face up to. The large format colour works of the Los Angeles series 2003–2010, chronicle the evolution from child to adult of young skateboarder Jonathan Velasquez, the central character of Clark's film Wassup Rockers (2006).

Since the publication in 1971 of Tulsa, a seminal work on a generation's lostness and violence, Clark's work has haunted American culture. The power of his images, quite apart from their grimness and dark appeal, lies in his quest for a naked truth, a realism stripped of all prudishness.

Exhibition curator: Sébastien Gokalp

Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris 11 Avenue du Président Wilson 75116 Paris

The image above is from the series Tulsa

The London Art Book Fair - next weekend

The London Art Book Fair 2010 will take place at London's Whitechapel Gallery next weekend the 24-26 September 2010. This is an an annual event devoted to international art publishing. Hosted by the Whitechapel Gallery in association with Marcus Campbell Art Books, The London Art Book Fair presents the work of individual artist publishers, galleries, magazines, colleges, arts publishing houses, rare book dealers and distributors alongside a wider associated programme of talks and events.

Exhibitors have been selected by an advisory board comprising Marcus Campbell (rare book dealer); Tacita Dean (artist); Franz König (publisher & bookseller); Farshid Mousavi (Co-founder, Foreign Office Architects); and Soraya Rodriguez (Director, Zoo Art Fair) who have ensured that the fair includes representatives of the most vibrant, stimulating and diverse art book production. The fair will include a special preview on Thursday 23 September 2010 for booksellers, distributors, collectors, and the arts and literary press.

ABC Artist's Book Cooperative, of which I'm a member, will be one of the nearly ninety exhibitors.

The image above are a some of the baseball cards made by ABC to celebrate our first anniversary. This limited edition set of collectible trading cards was printed by Topps, manufacturers of fine baseball cards since 1950.

You can read more here:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/london-art-book-fair

Punctum..... (after Baldessari)

Barthes: "A photograph's punctum is that accident [of photographic detail] which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me), ...for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole and also a caste of the dice"

A photograph I made in Auckland yesterday.

Against Forgetting - Ron Brownson writes.....

Here is Ron Brownson's take on my artist's book AGAINST FORGETTING, published on OUTPOST the Auckland Art Gallery staff blog. Ron is Senior Curator, New Zealand and Pacific Art, Auckland Art Gallery.

I was trying to recall the last occasion when an Auckland photographer looked closely at one of this region’s suburbs. I think that it was during 2005 when Haruhiko Sameshima produced a photo-essay on Mount Roskill for the local community board. The resulting images were exhibited as part of that year’s Auckland Festival of Photography. Both Alan McDonald and Gavin Hipkins have also made a substantial body of photographs in the suburb. Haru’s photographs have not yet been published in book form but are all accessible through this city’s heritage images on line:
http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/dbtw-wpd/heritageimages/apphoto.htm

A few weeks ago, I came across Harvey Benge’s new book Against Forgetting (FAQ Editions, Auckland, 2010). The book also takes Mt Roskill as its subject and the illustrations contrast images made by the artist during 2009 with his own family photographs, a discarded map and an anonymous found portrait.
The book is modest in its physical scale, as well as in its production values, but it is not reserved in its aspiration to express a memorable and moving response to the reality of Mt Roskill.

This wonderful little book is, to my way of thinking, actually an artist’s book in its conception. It arranges the carefully sequenced images so that they reflect both the artist’s past and his present experience of this unique Auckland suburb. Against Forgetting is a dynamic response to place because it reveals the area’s identity as residing as much in its memory as in its current experience.

Harvey begins his book with an informative prefatory note, setting the scene for the visual narrative which follows:

“For the first thirteen years of my life I lived with my parents in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill. Our family home was a modest, two bedroom, weather-board house which my father had built about 1940. The suburb is known for its volcanic peak, 110 metres in height, one of the many extinct volcanic cones that dot the Auckland isthmus. Mt Roskill has been referred to as the Bible Belt of Auckland with more churches per capita than any other New Zealand suburb. Now, after more years than I care to think about I’ve gone back to look at my past. Where I grew up. Here are some photographs. Against forgetting.”

While Against Forgetting works as an autobiography of the artist’s Mt Roskill childhood, it also reflects upon the changing nature of the suburb. It is illustrated with snapshots gathered from his own family, a hodgepodge of signage including a silhouette of the crucifix that looms down from the mountain. There is recent graffiti, and a religious message presented as if it is an old grocershop's handmade sign writing. Among all this is a gathering of found material that have been, perhaps, mislaid or simply lost or even discarded.

There are two portraits of unknown children. A teenage boy captured in a battered mug shot, probably taken for his New Zealand Passport. A blond girl stands demurely against a dark background. Bibles are placed on chairs waiting for worshipers. A present day image of the Benge family’s home is contrasted with a period snapshot taken by Harvey’s Dad, who I am told was a “keen photographer”.

Against Forgetting reveals a suburb now reduced in scale and changed from what it once was. A passionate demonstration of self-discovery has occurred in Harvey’s returning ‘home’. His book reveals the suburb’s character and reminds us it has never been gentrified like Freeman's Bay or Grey Lynn, Parnell or Ponsonby. Mt Roskill remains a home place for people with modest means. I asked Harvey to comment on the difference between what Mt Roskill was like between 1943 and 1958, when his family decided to shift across to Mt Albert so that he could attend the Grammar School:
“Mt Roskill then was very much a white working to middle class suburb bounded by new sub-divisions to the south of Mt Albert Road. My old school (Dominion Road Primary) photos that I have show only white faces. Today the suburb is completely multicultural with a strong Indian community.”

Harvey's view of Auckland's suburban life shows the ways images can work as symbols rather than as a mere document. His photographs, at first, look like they might function in the tradition of documentary photography yet they frequently express a telling narrative. Harvey kindly sent me his take on locality:
“Sense of ‘place’ has always been central to my thinking and is often defined by the people. I've frequently been told my pictures have a cinematic feel to them and capture moments where something has just happened or something is about to happen. These edited still frames of course sometimes include people if only in the minds eye.”

Harvey Benge has an impressive website that is both international in its subject and scope: http://harveybenge.blogspot.com/

Wellington - Where it All Happens

Here is another flee market find from last Sunday.... Happens? What and with whom I wonder....

Rimini via Auckland - the beauty of the found photo

Here are some pictures I came across at Auckland's Takapuna Sunday morning market this last weekend. Strangely reminiscent of John Hinde's British seaside postcards, these were made Ediz. P. Squadrani a photography postcard publisher based in Rimini. The date 1950. If I was Hans-Peter Feldmann or Joachim Schmid I'd feel a book coming on.....

Alec Soth & Lester B. Morrison - Broken Manual

Created over four years (2006-2010), Alec Soth’s newest book represents a significant departure from his three previous Steidl publications. Entitled Broken Manual, Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization. Soth photographs monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways, but this isn’t a conventional documentary book on life “off the grid.” Instead, working with the writer Lester B. Morrison, the authors have created an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives.

It is common for artists to follow up the publication of their books with ‘Special Editions,’ but in the case of Broken Manual, this edition is being presented first. Made in an edition of 300, Soth calls this the ‘Ideal Edition’ of Broken Manual. Each copy of the book is housed inside of another, one-of-a-kind book. These signed and numbered ‘shell’ books are unique and cut by hand. Inside the shell, there is also a small booklet entitled ‘Liberation Billfold Manifest’ and an 8x10” print signed and numbered by Alec Soth and Lester B. Morrison.

This special edition can be ordered now but all 300 will be installed as a part of Soth's first major survey exhibition at Walker Art Center (September 12 - January 2, 2011) giving these editions an extraordinary provenance. They will be shipped to buyers in January 2011.

Special Edition of 300 copies. Softcover 21 cm x 29.7 cm, housed in its own unique book-safe, with a signed and numbered Alec Soth photograph and a small booklet.
£400 / US $600 / €470
Price will increase after the sale of every 50 copies

Paris - Publish It Yourself

Laurence Vecten, Paris based photobook collector and blogger (One Year of Books) has curated a show of self published photobooks - Publish It Yourself - which runs over next weekend September 11 and 12 at the Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz,16 rue Charles VII, Nogent-sur-Marne. Laurence has included two of my recent self published books, published under my own imprint, FAQEDITIONS, You Won't be With Me Tomorrow and Against Forgetting.

Une exposition de livres photos auto-publiés à la Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz à Nogent-sur-Marne les 11 et 12 septembre 2010 sur une proposition de Laurence Vecten et Laurent Champoussin avec le soutien de la FNAGP.

http://www.publishityourself.org/
Faire un livre est devenu facile, et quelques photographes deviennent des éditeurs indépendants. Bon nombre d'artistes sont de plus en plus séduits par les nouveaux outils qui proposent des possibilités de bonne qualité à des prix plus accessibles. Les réseaux rendent la promotion plus facile. Alors que le web permet aux collectionneurs de contacter les artistes, le livre photo est revenu à son premier sens: le livre photo en tant qu'oeuvre d'art, pour un public enthousiaste. Notre sélection tente de montrer différents types d'objets; du poster à la boîte, de la monographie au zine, de l'offset à l'impression à la maison, des acteurs importants de l'auto-édition à d'autres photographes plus confidentiels, sans oublier quelques choix plus impulsifs.

Producing a book has become easier, and some photographers became independent publishers. It is more and more attractive for many artists because the new tools give high quality at affordable prices, and networks are making it easier to promote.
While the web is helping collectors getting in touch with artists, the photobook has gone back to its very first purpose: the photo book as an art piece for an enthousiast audience. We quickly decide to focus on the self vibe, and work on a selection
of books we love, trying to show different range of objects: from the poster to the box, the monograph to zines, the offset to the home printed, important actors of the self-published scene as well as more confidential photographers, and impulsive choices too.

Artistes présentés (Participating Artists): Patricia Almeida, Maxwell Anderson, Michelle Arcila, Craig Atkinson, Noah Beil, Beierle + Keijser, Harvey Benge, Simon Berg, Justin Bland, Joscha Bruckert & Andreas Till, Dani Cardona, Laurent Champoussin, David Crespo, Jean Dolhats, Charlotte Dumas, Geoffrey Ellis, Roe Ethridge, Jason Evans, Sam Falls, Stephen Gill, Sébastien Girard, Yann Gross, T. Reilly Hodgson, Ana Kras, Seiji Kumagai, Mathieu Lambert, Marten Lange, Pierre Le Hors, Frank Loriou, Henrik Malmström, Jennilee Marigomen, Ye Rin Mok, Jim Newitt, Keith NG, Conor O'Brien, Andrew Phelps, David Potes, Preston is my Paris, Pedro Ramos, Justin James Reed, Denise Schatz, David Schoerner, Anne Schwalbe, RJ Shaughnessy, Theo Simpson & Tom Common & Ben Mclaughlin, Stéphanie Solinas, Alec Soth, Bert Teunissen, Graeme Vaughan, Wassink Lundgren, Jessica Williams, Grant Willing, Ofer Wolberger, Stuart Woodman.

RER A: Arrêt NOGENT-SUR-MARNE puis bus N°114 ou 210 RER E: Arrêt NOGENT-LE PERREUX, 10 minutes à pied direction centre ville METRO LIGNE 1: Station CHATEAU DE VINCENNES puis bus N°114 ou 210 AUTOROUTE A4: Sortie NOGENT-SUR-MARNE

Another very good reason to be in Paris next weekend!

Lewis Baltz at Art Institute Chicago

It was a pleasure to receive a hand addressed invitation from the Art Institute of Chicago for the September 24 opening of Lewis Baltz's show - Prototypes / Ronde de Nuit. Sadly I'll be in Auckland.....
And on Saturday September 25 between 10.45 and 12.45 the Art Institute is holding a Symposium: FOUR PICTURES - FOUR THINGS. John Gossage is one of the four speakers and if you're in Chicago this is a not to be missed event!

The Art Institute has this to say about the show which runs until January 9, 2011:

Beginning in 1965, but especially in the years between 1967 and 1971, photographer Lewis Baltz (born 1945 in Newport Beach, California) made a body of work concentrated on the dialectic between simple, regular geometric forms found in the postwar industrial landscape with the (far from simple) culture that generated such forms, or was conditioned by them. Stucco walls, parking lots, the sides of warehouse sheds or disused billboards baked in the steady Californian sunlight—these and other “hyper-banal” subjects were printed in blacks and whites of a breathtaking tonal evenness. Baltz called his works “Prototypes,” by which he meant replicable social conventions as well as model structures of replicable manufacture. The fraught relation of neutral form to highly charged content plays itself out on the emphatically planar surface of these prints, objects that exude magnificence and severity simultaneously.

Baltz has not had a solo exhibition in the United States since 1998, when works from that decade were shown at LA MoCA. He is best known for the 1974 book New Industrial Parks near Irvine, California and generally associated with the New Topographics movement, christened after a 1975 photography exhibition of that title at the George Eastman House. New Industrial Parks was first published, however, by Leo Castelli Gallery, and it is as part of that avant-garde art context that the impact of the Prototypes may best be recovered today. The present exhibition proposes to bring together approximately 40 of Baltz’s photographs from the series with a sculpture by Sol LeWitt from the Art Institute collections and an oilstick drawing by Richard Serra.

Augmenting this exhibition will be the presentation of a piece made by Baltz in 1992, initially for presentation at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris. Measuring 39 feet across and 7 feet tall and printed on aluminum-mounted cibachrome panels, Ronde de Nuit is as far in scale and appearance as one could get from the Prototypes. Yet across its manifest differences, this monumental work traduces underlying continuities in the artist’s preoccupations. Baltz remains substantially concerned over the cancerous spread of our industrially manufactured habitat and how the elements of manufacture can be used to standardize, control, and oppress the inhabitants—ourselves. Ronde de Nuit shows seven monumental photographs, joined end to end in a panoramic tableau, of various surveillance sites and the people who work at them. Some photographs are copies of screen images taken from closed-circuit monitors at these sites; others were made by the artist at widely varying distances from mainframe computers, cable conduits, and other equipment in the bowels of the companies he visited. The resulting composition merges Rembrandt with Piranesi in the digital age. Its effect on viewers is magnetic, moving, and uncanny.

The image: Lewis Baltz. Santa Cruz, 1970. Gift of Lewis Baltz. © Lewis Baltz.

Auckland - Gilden and Hido for AUT School of Art & Design summer photography workshop

Bruce Gilden and Todd Hido will be presenting the 2011 AUT School of Art and Design Summer Photography Workshop at AUT's St Paul Street Gallery over January 14, 15 and 16 next year.

Both are masters in their own areas, each with a unique vision and position for their work. Gilden’s and Hido’s work is conceptually and stylistically diametrically opposed and this alone will make for a compelling and entertaining learning experience.

Bruce Gilden is a New York based Magnum photographer and a master of the street. Known for getting up close with his subjects Gilden has established an expressive theatrical style with graphic hard-edged form that presents the world as a vast comedy of manners. A larger than life personality, his images of New York make it look like a frenetic and mad city. Japan is nasty, dark, full of tough yakuza guys with tattoos and cigarettes. His Magnum produced Fashion Magazine is an ode to mafia capos and beautiful femme fatales. He's cool and blunt. Gilden has fourteen photobooks to his name from extended projects on New York, Haiti, France, Ireland, India and Japan.
Gilden started exhibiting as early as 1971 and has since shown his work widely in museums and galleries all over the world. A recipient of numerous grants and awards for his work including three National Endowments for the Arts fellowships (1980, 1984 and 1992), a Villa Medicis Hors les Murs (1995), New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant (1979, 1992 and 2000), the European Award for Photography (1996) and a Japan Foundation Fellowship (1999).

Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay area based contemporary artist and photographer. With a strong interest in the dynamics of the American city and it’s suburbs Hido produces large, highly detailed and luminous color photographs and startling photo bookworks. Hido's photographs reveal isolation and anonymity in contemporary suburbia. Eerily lit rooms and suddenly abandoned homes increase the effect of loneliness and loss. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. Working closely with Nazraeli Press, Hido has eight published photobooks, the most recent, A Road Divided was published in 2010. With an M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California he is currently an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California.

To register your interest please email Neil Cameron, Registrar, AUT School of Art and Design - neil.cameron@aut.ac.nz

The images:
Bruce Gilden, Haiti, Plain-duNord; Todd Hido, House Hunting