Photographers whose work I like - No 12/ Simon Kossoff

Simon Kossoff is a British photographer who lives in Kansas City. Like many of the photographers I've got to know I've never met Simon, but I feel I know him through his work which is always perceptive, challenging, and hard-edged. Work you can't walk away from. Simon's blog, Altered States of Agoraphobia is well worth a look. Simon and I are both members of the Paris based collective get the picture.fr

Simon say this about his States of Grace series:
The work is in two parts and was made during my immigration process. Made between two dates in time, from my first initial application until the final arrival of my Green card - from Tourist to Illegal Alien to Permanent Resident. During this period I felt like very much like I was living on borrowed time. It was an extremely stressful period for my wife and I and we lived almost from day to day and could not make any solid future plans or put down any roots. Because of this I traveled and as much as possible and wanted to see as much as I could of America, just in case I was deported, because my case was complex. It was an interesting time for America too, it was an election year and in the middle of a recession. While making the work I felt in many ways that my own anxiety and hope during this period felt at times like an echo of the anxiety and hope of the nation I arrived in. 'States of Grace' is my personal document of this time, a mosaic, a diary and also poem of sorts. These images come from part two of this series.

You can see more of Simon's work here: http://simonkossoff.blogspot.com/

Lewis Baltz - CANDLESTICK POINT

A copy of Lewis Baltz's new, reprinted edition of CANDLESTICK POINT arrived in my mail box today. A profound and compelling look at man in conflict with nature. Landscapes of destruction where there is no deliverance, where life no longer stirs. But wait, these photographs underline why we consider the human condition. Why we look, why we photograph. Thank you Lewis Baltz for that.

The New York curator Marvin Heiferman characterized Lewis Baltz’s landscape photography as a “topography of the emptiness of random, damaged, remote places”. The images in his 1989 series Candlestick Point show Californian fallow land, where piles of rubble and waste accumulate in the middle of the prairie. Traces of technical land development – drainage channels and water dams – are visible, becoming a typically American theme: the development of a territory in the almost infinite prairie. Baltz’s photographic record of the development at Candlestick Point combines sociological and analytical rigour and is strongly oriented towards the tradition of Land Art, and retrospectively pays tribute to its crucial influence on conceptual art since the 1970s.

Candlestick Point was first published in 1989 and has been unavailable for decades, other than as an expensive collectible on the secondary photobook market.  

CANDLESTICK POINT - Photographs by Lewis Baltz.
Steidl, 2011. 128 pp., 12 color and 72 tritine illustrations, 12½x9¾".

Harvey Benge - All New Website

At last I have an up-to-date all new website which actually reflects what I'm doing now!

You can have a look here:  http://harveybenge.virb.com/

Jim Goldberg wins Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011

The winner of the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 has just been announced as Jim Goldberg. He was presented with the £30,000 award by broadcaster and critic Miranda Sawyer at a special ceremony at Ambika P3.
The three other shortlisted artists, Thomas Demand, Roe Rtheridge and Elad Lassry have each been awarded £3,000. You can view the exhibition until May 1 at Ambika P3 at the University of Westminster, London.

Amsterdam Art/Book Fair 2011

The first Amsterdam Art/Book Fair will take place the 14 & 15 of May 2011, presenting a high end international selection of art publications. The fair aims to reflect on the emerging practices and new development in art, through a selection of publishers from 16 countries. Printed matter and digital media edited by independent publishers and artists, magazines and institutions, art schools and graphic design studios are featured in this first edition.

Conferences and talks by keynote speakers, book launches, artist talks and performances will take place during the Amsterdam Art/Book Fair. Guests include Kenneth Goldsmith, Metahaven, Clive Phillpot, Mathieu Copeland. A unique series of curated tables will offer a selection of publications and posters. Book trading and signing, encounters and conversations will take place at ‘Black Market’, an informal meeting place for artists, designers, publishers and collectors.

The Amsterdam Art/Book Fair is initiated and organised by Delphine Bedel (Monospace Press) and Yannick Bouillis, and is hosted by the Flemish Cultural Centre De Brakke Grond. The Amsterdam Art/Book Fair aspires to be a meeting place during the Amsterdam Art Week. The entrance to the AA/BF is free.

Further information here: http://www.amsterdamartbookfair.com/

Amsterdam Art/Book Fair 2011
Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 May
De Brakke Grond
Amsterdam, NL

Cologne workshop at the Lichtblick School

I will be teaching a workshop at the Lichtblick School in Cologne over the weekend of May 28 and 29. Lichtblick has this to say about it:

Killing Time in Paradise - Workshop with Harvey Benge
Harvey Benge is one of the few photographers that today work with poetics and the philosophy of photography. Benge journeys through Europe and Asia, and his more than 25 photo-books help to further expand our understanding of visual language.

"Harvey Benge is a photographer with an eye for non-places. He finds them in diverse world cities such as London, Paris, Bangkok and Melbourne. At spots, which many would walk right past, he photographs details for his investigation into universal urban life. A doorbell, neon lights, a shop window - they are what he calls 'parallel signs' which occur everywhere in the world. Sporadically they betray something of their geographic location, but for the most part there appear to be hardly any cultural differences among world cities." Noorderlicht

In the workshop with Harvey Benge you will learn a lot about creating your own visual language. You start with generating visual ideas, followed by the editing and sequencing of the photographs found in urban life and finally the presentation of the series in exhibitions or in publications. Harvey Benge has a lot of experience in creating and publishing photo books and has exhibited his work all over the world in galleries and museums. With pleasure he will be giving workshop participants inspirational and practical advice for the progress of their photographic practice.

He conducted workshops in the past with: Antoine d’Agata, Peter Bialobrzeski, Louis Baltz, Slavica Perkovic, Alec Soth, John Gossage, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul Graham, Todd Hido.

Information about the workshop:
* weekend seminar: May 28th/29th 2011, 10–6 p.m. * maximal attendance: 12
* English speaking workshop. Fee for the workshop: 220.- Euro including 19% tax

You can see more here: http://www.lichtblick-school.com/

Alec Soth and friends are on the road....

This May in the first of a series of trips around America, five Magnum photographers, Christopher Anderson, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Mikhael Subotzky and writer Ginger Strand will be traveling from San Antonio to Oakland on a unique documentary experiment: Postcards From America.

You can follow them on their tumblr blog, postcardsfromamerica.tumblr.com

...and there is the opportunity to buy various publications and prints:

FIVE POSTCARDS
Pictures taken and printed on the trip and a message from each photographer, $125

LIMITED EDITION BOOK
Edition of 500 signed books documenting the journey from which only 250 will be made available at this time. Printed using HP Indigo technology. Includes a suite of five postcards, $250

PRINT PORTFOLIO
Five Signed Archival 11x14 inch HP inkjet prints, one by each photographer. Edition of 25. Includes a copy of the book and a suite of five postcards, $3000

EAT ME - my new bookwork

EAT ME is my latest bookwork. It's about perception. And with one recipe. Some might say the work is a typological homage to Hermann Rorschach.

This artist's book is 300 x 200 mm, 28 pages with 14 photographs and is printed on a 120 gsm stock with a board cover. The edition is limited to 75 copies, each signed and numbered.
Copies can be obtained directly from me: €26 / £22 / US$38 / NZ$45, this includes postage.

Photographers whose work I like - No 11/ Philippe Spigolon

Philippe is a French photographer who lives in Albi, France. He writes this about his new series Spigolon & Sons Furniture.

"Long ago, my father had hoped to bring me into his small woodworking business - now defunct - and later, perhaps, to have left it me to run. I said no; he was disappointed, but never let it be said that the sign " Spigolon and Son, Furniture " never existed."

Here are some of the pictures from the series.

You can see more here: http://www.philippespigolon.com/

Auckland, a beach walk today

It's school holiday time here in Auckland and this afternoon my daughter Zoe and I walked at low tide, under the soft crumbling cliffs from Takapuna Beach to Narrow Neck. We talked about the idea of making something out of nothing. And how things change. Here are some pictures I made.

Tim Hetherington 1970-2011

Award-winning filmmaker and photographer Tim Hetherington died yesterday in the besieged Libyan town of Misrata. Hetherington's recent Oscar-nominated war documentary Restrepo won an award at the Sundance Film Festival and his book Infidel has been highly acclaimed.
Getty photographer Chris Hondros is in critical condition in intensive care, doctors at the hospital where he was being treated said. He had suffered brain injuries.
The photographers were among a group caught by mortar fire on Tripoli Street, the main thoroughfare leading into the center of Misrata, the only major rebel-held town in western Libya and besieged by Muammar Gaddafi's forces for more than seven weeks.

Since I made this posting, it has been confirmed that Chris Hondros has also died.

Serrano's Piss Christ hits the headlines again!

If making art these days is as much about getting attention than anything else then nobody does it better than Andres Serrano.
Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950 in New York City) is an American photographer and artist who has become notorious through his photos of corpses and his use of feces and bodily fluids in his work, notably his controversial work Piss Christ, (1987), a red-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine.

The Piss Christ work was vandalised in Australia, and neo-Nazis ransacked a Serrano show in Sweden in 2007. And last Sunday, Piss Christ and The Church, were attacked at the museum housing the works, Collection Lambert in Avignon, France. After two weeks of protests and a campaign of hate mail and abusive phone calls to the gallery, orchestrated by groups of French Catholic fundamentalists, a thousand people marched through the streets of Avignon to protest outside the museum on April 16. On Sunday several people entered the museum, threatened the guards and proceeded to vandalize the works in question.

But it's not only Christian fundamentalists from the religious right who have questioned Serrano's work. Following his retrospective at the Barbican in 2001, The Guardian's art critic Adrian Searle wrote, "He is the artist who outraged America with Piss Christ. But has Andres Serrano run out of ideas? .....In the end, the show is all surface, and looking for hidden depths does no good. I keep thinking Serrano can do better than this, but then again, maybe he can't."

At the V&A, contemporary South African photography

The Victoria & Albert Museum presents Figures and Fictions, which opened April 12 and runs until July 17. This show of contemporary photography highlights the work of 17 South African photographers, all of whom live and work in the country and whose images were made between 2000 and 2010. Each photographer is represented by one or more projects that are linked by the depiction of people and a self-conscious engagement with South Africa’s political and photographic past.

Photographs showing figures raise pertinent issues of identity: how the gaze of the camera, photographer and viewer is returned by the subject, and the balance of power which that interaction implies. The ‘figure’ also implies not only the human figure but also the metaphorically figurative. Photographs can be like a ‘figure’ of speech, composed of familiar words but containing an ambiguity between literal and figurative interpretation.

As the Fictions part of this exhibition’s title suggests, it points not just to the geographical and social specificity of these photographs but also to the enigmatic relationship with the ‘real’ world that they seem to depict. A photograph is always a translation, distillation or filter of reality seen from the physical and conceptual standpoint of the person creating the image – as well as that of the viewer.

Many of the works shown in the exhibition are extracts from extended essayistic sequences, but can nevertheless be understood as fragments containing the essence of the whole. Many of the photographers’ series address, among other concerns: the threshold between documentary photography and fine art practice; the balance of the specific and the universal and the dialogue between the local and the global.

The excitement and urgency surrounding photography in South Africa today is partly explained by its local context: embedded in colonial history, ethnography, anthropology, journalism and political activism, the best photography emerging from the country has absorbed and grapples with its weighty history, questioning, manipulating and revivifying its visual codes and blending them with contemporary concerns. Post-Apartheid, complex and fundamental issues – race, society, gender, identity – remain very much on the surface. This is reflected by image makers who harness the resulting scenes as a form of creative tension within their personal vision. Here, distinctive photographic voices have emerged: local in character and subject matter, but of wider international interest because of their combined intensity.

The photograph: ‘Babalwa’, (from the series Real Beauty), Jodi Bieber, 2008.

Paul Graham at Whitechapel Gallery, London

In his catalogue essay for Paul Graham's imminent retrospective at east London's Whitechapel Gallery, the photography writer and curator David Chandler borrows a telling quotation from Richard Ford's novel, The Lay of the Land. "I do not credit the epiphanic, the seeing-through that reveals all, triggered by a mastering detail…" writes Ford in the voice of his American everyman narrator, Frank Bascombe. "Life's moments truly come at us heedless, not at the bidding of a gilded fragrance."

Pittsburgh, 2004 (Lawnmower Man) From the series 'A Shimmer of Possibility'

Paul Graham's most recent book of photographs, a shimmer of possibility, which was published in 2007, could be read as 12 visual short stories that illuminate – in their often open-ended, elliptical way – Bascombe's unvarnished view of life. Graham has said before that it was Anton Chekhov's short stories, rather than the work of any photographic precursor, that underpinned his way of seeing the world, when he began the project with the first of many journeys around America in the summer of 2004; but it is the quotidian America conjured up by writers such as Ford and John Updike that comes most readily to mind in the often interlinked images that make up his most epic, and well-received, book.

In one sequence, a man cuts a huge swathe of grass that borders a suburban car park in Pittsburgh, the haze of the setting sun suddenly illuminating the soft rain that falls around him. In another, a woman with straw-coloured hair sits on a roadside bench with a fast-food takeaway on her lap. Graham photographs her in profile, then homes in on the carton of fried chicken, then the litter on the pavement beneath her, and finally frames her dragging deeply on a post-snack cigarette. There are echoes here of William Eggleston's heightened everydayness, but, if anything, Graham's gaze is even more democratic, his subject matter even more quotidian. Life's moments might come at us heedless, these vignettes suggest, but they nonetheless contain a quiet, often overlooked, poetry.

"I have been taking photographs for 30 years now," says Graham, a softly spoken Englishman who has lived in New York since 2002, "and it has steadily become less important to me that the photographs are about something in the most obvious way. I am interested in more elusive and nebulous subject matter. The photography I most respect pulls something out of the ether of nothingness… you can't sum up the results in a single line. In a way, 'a shimmer of possibility' is really about these nothing moments in life."

The survey of Graham's work, which opens at the Whitechapel on 20 April, is surprising in two distinct ways: it shows how far this influential photographer has travelled formally, from the more social documentary-based work of his younger years, and it is, shockingly, the first solo show of his work in a British gallery since he exhibited a few early images on the walls of the Photographers' Gallery staircase in the early 1980s. "I don't want to sound conceited," he says, "but that is surely indicative of British attitudes towards photography in general. I know things are changing, finally, but London has a lot of catching up to do with New York. There is a real culture of photography out here that is very affirming."

Graham, 54, is a self-taught photographer, who first picked up a camera as a child at the bidding of his scout-master. He grew up in rural Buckinghamshire before the family relocated to Harlow new town, in Essex, where everything was "precise, planned and pristine". Initially he studied microbiology at university before happening on the works of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Edward Weston and Paul Strand in the social anthropology section of the college library. "Suddenly, it was like this light went on," he says. "It was the discovery that you could actually say something with photography. I got the work immediately, though I was completely unable to articulate it to anyone else." He cites Eggleston, Stephen Shore and Lee Friedlander as abiding influences, alongside formalists like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz.

Between 1981 and 1986, while living in London, Graham made three books of colour photography that are now much sought after by collectors and students alike: A1 – The Great North Road (1983), Beyond Caring (1986) and Troubled Land (1987). Back then, they were met with suspicion and even anger. "I gave a talk to photography students at Newport College of Art in 1985," he says, ruefully, "and one of the tutors described Beyond Caring as 'poisonous'. By that, I think he meant that it was poisonous to the established order of working, which was to use a Leica, shoot in black and white, and always have an establishing shot."

Beyond Caring, for all the controversy it caused, remains his most straightforward book, a work of undercover reportage shot in dole offices throughout Britain. It was funded by the Greater London Council in the last days of "Red" Ken Livingstone and, to Graham's great surprise, subsequently acquired "this strange double life: as both a political work of social reportage handed out at lefty political conferences, and as a fine art photography book". Since then his work has grown ever more elliptical. Troubled Land remains one of my favourite books on the Northern Irish Troubles, not least because it came at them sideways – highlighting the strange, normalised reality of a place that was anything but normal.

In 1994, Graham returned to Northern Ireland to make a series called Cease Fire, which is a contender – alongside his later book, American Night – for his most ambiguous body of work. It comprises photographs of the sky over some of the province's best-known trouble spots: Andersonstown, Ballymurphy, the Bogside and the Shankill Road. It is another measure of Graham's ongoing journey from the obvious to the nebulous. Likewise American Night, in which several of the images were so over-exposed and bleached out that some critics returned the book to the publishers, thinking there had been a problem in the printing process. Graham had, as he puts it, "whitened out" the images in the darkroom to emulate "the sense of disorientation and drama" he felt when he came out of a cinema in Tennessee into the bright, blinding sunlight of the American south.

"It was a shock to the critics," he says, chuckling, "but it was a shock to me, too. I always feel like I am the first member of the audience to see the work, and, in that instance, I did have to ask myself, 'Can I take this seriously?' It was a tough question, but I hope the work answered it." My own view is that the jury is still out on that one.

Like the Deutsche Börse prize, which he won in 2009, the Whitechapel show is, among other things, a long-overdue acknowledgment of Paul Graham's willingness to take risks in his work, and not to shy from making pictures that ask awkward questions about how we see – and interpret – the world through photography. "Sometimes, when I go out with a camera, I don't have a plan or even know what it is I am looking for," he says, in conclusion. "But I do go out every time and question how we make photographs of the world. It's the same question that photographers have always asked: how is this world? And, what are the new ways to find that out?"

From The Observer, April 10 2011 by Sean O'Hagan

New York: BALTZ, BECHER, RUSCHA

Lewis Baltz, construction detail, East Wall, Xerox, 1821 Dyer Road, Santa Ana, from The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California.

If you happen to be in New York this coming Thursday night there is an opening at the Yancey Richardson Gallery. Baltz, Becher, Ruscha, all highly influential conceptual photographers who each in their own way looked at the man-altered landscape in the 1960's and 1970's. A shared preoccupation with topographic and a stylistic anonymity characterize their works as well as conceptual formalism and a deadpan way of documenting the landscape. It doesn't get better than this.

Bernd and Hilla Becher, industrial facades

Ed Ruscha, gas station on Route 66, from 'Twenty Six Gasoline Stations', 1962

Photography Festival time in the northern Spring and Summer

Photography is alive and well north of the equator. Here is a list of upcoming photo festivals and events. Looks to be something for everybody.....

MOPLA - Los Angeles, USA
1 - 30 April 2011
MOPLA was established and exists to advance the celebration of Photography through a variety of events and programs designed to inspire and invigorate the photography professional, enthusiast, emerging professional and collector. MOPLA 2011’s theme, Adaptations and Reverberations, embodies the fluidity and versatility of the photographic medium.

World Photography Festival and Sony World Photography Awards
Somerset House, London, England
26 April - 1 May

Hyeres Fashion and Photography Festival
Villa Noailles, Hyeres, France.
29 April - 29 May
Diverse exhibitions, professional panel discussions and two competitions showcasing 10 photographers and 10 fashion designers selected by a jury of professionals in each field.

CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival
Toronto, Canada
1 - 31 May 2011

Liverpool Look
Liverpool, England
13 May - 26 June 2011
This is the first photography festival to be held in the city and is set within the context of Liverpool's Year of Social Justice and City of Radicals in 2011. Events will take place at galleries and exhibition spaces across Merseyside and will showcase significant new bodies of work by emerging and established photographers from both home and abroad. Look11 will launch with a four-day event in May 2011 featuring exhibition openings, artists’ talks, workshops and will play host to the 3rd National Photography Symposium. The festival will run for nearly two months and will centre on the theme of ‘A Call to Action?’ urging people to ‘stop, think, examine and debate’.

Photomonth in Krákow
Krákow, Poland
May 13 - June 6
Curated by the artists Adam Broomberg and Olivier Chanarin.

International Festival of Photography Łódz 2011
Łodz, Poland
May 5-15
Workshops, meet the authors and portfolio reviews.

New York Photo Festival
New York, USA
11-15 May 2011
The goal of the New York Photo Festival is to identify and document the future of photography in all its forms. Every year, a select group of internationally-respected curators are called upon to deliver their personal vision of the newest and most important trends in contemporary photography, each exhibited in their own pavilion and promising to draw the attention of the entire photographic community.

London International Documentary Festival
London, England
13 - 28 May 2011
The UK’s largest independent documentary festival. Sponsored by the London Review of Books, LIDF takes a questioning, critical attitude to the social and political issues of the day, engaging with filmmakers, their subjects and the London audience to create a highly distinct environment for cultural interaction.

Guernsey Photography Festival
Channel Islands, UK
1 - 30 June 1011
The new photography festival returns for its second year with with a refreshing combination of international names, intelligent presentation and an unbeatable island setting. Headline exhibitions include work by Martin Parr, Richard Billingham, Samuel Fosso and Tony Ray Jone

Flash Forward Festival
Boston, USA
2 - 5 June

Fotobook Festival
Kassel, Germany
1 – 5 June 2011
A festival wholly devoted to the Photobook, highlights include portfolio reviews, workshops, lectures and many exhibitions.

Photo España 2011
Madrid, Spain
1 June - 24 July 2011

PhotoIreland
Dublin, Ireland
1 - 31 July 2011
Exhibitions from the 1st July, and the educational and professional programme will take place from 15th onwards.

Rencontres d’Arles
Arles, France
4 Jul—18 September 2011
Portfolio review registration begins end of April, email photofolio@rencontres-arles.com for details.
Each year thousands descend on the small town of Arles in the south of France for a week-long photographic celebration. Photography is everywhere – in churches and ruins, in old factories and swish lobbies, official town buildings and stately palais. Nearest airport Marseilles.

London Street Photography Festival
London, England
7 - 17 July 2011
The only festival in the UK dedicated to preserving and celebrating the art of street photography. The festival will combine world-class photography with a diverse programme of events at central London venues including St Pancras International, the British Library, the German Gymnasium and the National Portrait Gallery.

Fotopub
Novo mesto, Slovenia
2011 dates and programme not yet announced (26 July - 6 August)
Themed exhibitions, portfolio reviews and a series of workshops.

Rhubarb International Festival Of The Image
Birmingham, England
2011 dates and programme not yet announced (30 Jul to 1 Aug 2010)
Portfolio Review - bookings start end of April.

Belfast Photo Festival
Belfast, Northern Ireland
4 - 14 August 2011

Visa pour l’image
Perpignan, France
27 August - 11 September (Professionals week 29 Aug – 4 Sep 2011)
Taking place in the winding streets of old-town Perpignan, this festival features many exhibitions from photographers reporting on wars, nature, the environment, people, religious issues, and social phenomena. The festival is mostly photojournalistic in nature, and many photographers attend during professional week, which costs €60 for accreditation and allows entrance to portfolio reviews. Failing that, just sit in the Café de la Poste all day and meet everyone there. Nearest airport Perpignan.

Internationale Photoszene Köln
Köln, Germany
2011 dates and programme not yet announced (3 – 26 Sep 2010)
Special events on the main weekend and a photo exhibition covering all themes. Also on the agenda is a Portfolio Review for ‘young photographers’ and podium discussions in cooperation with various associations, other organisations and publishers. Nearest airport is Hamburg or Lübeck, with regular trains to Kiel.

Noorderlicht International Photofestival
Groningen, Netherlands
2011 dates and programme not yet announced (4 Sep – 31 Oct 2010)

International podium for documentary photography.
Internationales Fotografiefestival F/Stop
Leipzig Germany
2011 dates and programme not yet announced (23 Sep — 3 Oct 2010)
Features workshops, lectures, exhibitions, and portfolio reviews.

Hereford Photography Festival
Hereford, England
28 October - 26 November 2011
The theme will be 'Movement' with an emphasis on sport.

Paris Photo
Grand Palais, Paris, France
9 - 13 November
15th anniversary of Paris Photo. Artists and their work, dealers, and publishers, will enjoy an exceptional environment to show photography in all its diversity. This year's edition will turn the spotlight on African photography, from Bamako to Cape Town.

From The Telegraph issue of April 15

Miroslav Tichý - November 20, 1926 – April 12, 2011

Nonconformist Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy from Kyjov, south Moravia, who won international fame only in the past few years, died on Tuesday at the age of 84. Tichý was a photographer who from the 1960s to 1985 took thousands of surreptitious pictures of women in his hometown of Kyjov in the Czech Republic, using homemade cameras constructed of cardboard tubes, tin cans and other at-hand materials. Most of his subjects were unaware they are being photographed. A few struck beauty-pageant poses when they sighted him, perhaps not realizing that the parody of a camera he carried was real. His soft focus, fleeting glimpses of the women of Kyjov are skewed, spotted and badly printed, flawed by the limitations of his primitive equipment and a series of deliberate processing mistakes meant to add poetic imperfections.
Of his technical methods, he has said, "First of all, you have to have a bad camera", and, "If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world."
During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Tichý was considered a dissident and badly treated. His photographs remained largely unknown until an exhibition was held for him in 2004. Tichý did not attend exhibitions, and lived a life of self-sufficiency and freedom from the standards of society.

Alec Soth - Lonely Boy Mag. (NoA-1)

Alec Soth has a new bookwork..... Lonely Boy Mag. (No. A-1: Alec Soth’s Midwestern Exotica). Published in March in an edition of 1000, 64 pages, 5.4×8.5in, color offset, staple-bound. This is the first in a series of men’s magazines, the issue features poetry, erotic text, pictures of ex-girlfriends and a photo-story by Soth.
The book is 100% Soth, so out there, demanding and irreverent! Great!

The book is $18US you can order a copy here:
http://littlebrownmushroom.com/index.html

New York, it's photography auction time

April is traditionally photography auction time in New York. Here are a few stand out photographs from Christie's sale last Friday. There were a total of 211 lots which sold for a total of 5,367,500 USD

Lot 480 - William Eggleston, Memphis (Tricycle) c.1969-1970 266,500 USD

Lot 441 - Robert Frank, Parade, 1955 - 170,500 USD

Lot 593 - Eugene Atget, La Villette, rue Asselin, 1921 - 242,500 USD

Lot 419 - Gregory Crewdson, Dream House - 116,500 USD