Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA NYC

Being: New Photography 2018, the latest edition of MoMA’s longstanding and celebrated New Photography series, investigates charged and layered notions of personhood and subjectivity in recent photography and photo-based art, presenting works by 17 artists working in the US and internationally.

The works included in Being respond to diverse lived experiences and circumstances through a range of issues and tactics, including interrogations of traditional modes of photographic portraiture, the use of surrogates or masks as replacements for the body, tensions between privacy and exposure, formations of community or social relations, and the agency of the sitter and of the artist. Some works in the exhibition might be considered straightforward figurative depictions, while others do not include imagery of the human body at all. Since its earliest manifestations, photography has been widely seen as a means by which to capture an exact likeness of a person; the artists featured in Being mine or upset this rich history as they explore photographic representations of personhood today, when rights of representation are contested for many individuals.

Being: New Photography 2018 is constituted primarily of works made since 2016, both by artists who are just starting out in their careers, some showing in New York for the first time, and by others with more established practices who, in some cases, have been supporting the field of photography through teaching or creating other platforms for production. For all the artists, this will be the first exhibition of their work at the Museum.

The artists included are: Sofia Borges (Brazilian, born 1984) Matthew Connors (American, born 1976) Sam Contis (American, born 1982) Shilpa Gupta (Indian, born 1976) Adelita Husni-Bey (Italian, born 1985) Yazan Khalili (Palestinian, born Syria, 1981) Harold Mendez (American, born 1977) Aïda Muluneh (Ethiopian, born 1974) Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương (American, born Hong Kong, 1979; American, born 1976) B. Ingrid Olson (American, born 1987) Joanna Piotrowska (Polish, born 1985) Em Rooney (American, born 1983) Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, born 1982) Andrzej Steinbach (German, born Poland, 1983) Stephanie Syjuco (American, born Philippines, 1974) Carmen Winant (American, born 1983) Organized by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography.

Being: New Photography 2018, March 18 - August 19, 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation 2017 PhotoBook Awards Shortlist

Photography Catalogue of the Year

Brassaï: Graffiti, Le Langage du Mur
Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska
Éditions Xavier Barral

CLAP! 10x10 Contemporary Latin American Photobooks: 2000–2016
Olga Yatskevich, Russet Lederman, and Matthew Carson
10x10 Photobooks

Diary of a Leap Year
Rabith Mroué
Kunsthalle Mainz and Kapth Books

Hans Eijkelboom: Photo Concepts 1970
Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Wim van Sinderen, Gerrit Willems and Dieter Roelstraete
Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft mbH

New Realities: Photography in the 19th Century
Mattie Boom, Hans Rooseboom
Rijiksmuseum

First PhotoBook

Mathieu Asselin
Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation
Verlag Kettler

Zackary Canepari
REX
Contrasto Books

Teju Cole
Blind Spot
Penguin Random House

Sam Contis
Deep Springs
MACK

Debi Cornwall
Welcome to Camp America, Inside Guantánamo Bay
Radius Books

Albert Elm
What Sort of Life Is This
The Ice Plant

Mary Frey
Reading Raymond Carver
Peperoni Books

Jenia Fridlyand
Entrance to Our Valley
Self-published

Darren Harvey-Regan
The Erratics
RVB Books

Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen
Eyes As Big As Plates
Forlaget Press

Dawn Kim
Creation.IMG
Self-published

Laura Larson
Hidden Mother
Saint Lucy Books

Feng Li
White Night
Jiazazhi Press

Cecil McDonald Jr.
In the Company of Black
Candor Arts

Virginie Rebetez
Out of the Blue
Meta/Books

Claudius Schulze
State of Nature
Hartmann Books

Nadya Sheremetova, ed.
With Alexey Bogolepov, Margo Ovcharenko, Irina Ivannikova, Anastasia Tsayder, Igor Samolet, Yury Gudkov, Olya Ivanova, Irina Zadorozhnaia, Anastasia Tailakova, and Irina Yulieva.
Amplitude No.1
FotoDepartment

Senta Simond
Rayon Vert
Self-published

Alnis Stakle
Melancholic Road
Self-published

Mayumi Suzuki
The Restoration Will
Self-published

PhotoBook of the Year

Anne Golaz
Corbeau
MACK

Jim Goldberg
The Last Son
SUPER LABO

Nicholas Muellner
In Most Tides an Island
SPBH Editions

Mark Neville
Fancy Pictures
Steidl

Alison Rossiter
Expired Paper
Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery

Paul Scheik, ed.
Mike Mandel, Susan Meiselas, Bill Burke, and Lee Friedlander
Subscription Series No. 5

Dayanita Singh
Museum Bhavan
Steidl

Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril
La Grieta (The Crack)
Astiberri Ediciones

Erik van der Weijde
This Is Not My Book
Spector Books

Henk Wildschut
Ville de Calais
Self-published

The shortlisted books will be profiled in issue 013 of The PhotoBook Review, Aperture’s biannual publication dedicated to the consideration of the photobook, to be released in November 2017 at Paris Photo. Copies will also be available at Aperture Gallery and Bookstore, as well as distributed with Aperture magazine and through other distribution partners.

The shortlist is also available at Aperture Foundation’s website and Paris Photo’s website.

A final jury in Paris will select the winners for all three prizes, which will be revealed at Paris Photo on Friday, November 10, 2017.

The Lament - now available from photobookstore UK, comes with exclusive signed and numbered print

 

Photobookstore UK now have copies of my most recent book-work, The Lament, from Dewi Lewis Publishing. This 96 page hardback book comes with an exclusive signed 6"x4" print, see image below.

 
The Lament is partly fiction and partly autobiographical. The pictures mine the unusual and the perverse. They make strange connections and exploit the unexpected. Nothing is as it seems, though we nevertheless sense that there is a truth in everything. Mystery prevails and it is up to the viewer to bring his or her own life experience to the reading of the work.
The Lament deals with loss, change and the inevitability of impermanence. All thoughts, emotions and circumstances that each and every one us have experienced and have dealt with in our lives. There is sexual misadventure too. Yet despite the apparent angst, Benge isn’t about to slit his wrists anytime soon: a wry sense of humour runs through the work and if you look hard enough you might even spot a sense of optimism.

Photobookstore also have the last few copies of my self published limited edition work, The Month Before Trump. This also comes with a signed 6"x4" print.

You can go to the photobookstore site HERE.

The NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1 September 22 -24

Printed Matter presents the twelfth annual NY Art Book Fair, from September 22 to 24, 2017, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens. Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. The 2017 NY Art Book Fair will feature over 370 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries.

Thursday, September 21 from 6 to 9 pm, at MoMA PS1 is the opening night preview. The evening will feature special live performances on the steps of PS1 by Upstate Music, BLONDES and Alexis Taylor (Hot Chip). Entry to the Preview costs $10.

This year’s NY Art Book Fair will included an ever-growing variety of exhibitors – from the zinesters in (XE)ROX, PAPER + SCISSORS and the Small Press Dome representing publishing at its most innovative and affordable, to rare and antiquarian dealers offering out-of-print books and ephemera from art and artist book history, plus the NYABF-classic Friendly Fire, focused on the intersections of art and activism.
NYABF17 will host an array of programming and special events, including: The Classroom, a curated engagement of informal conversations, workshops, readings, and other artist-led interventions, for the eighth year running, as well as The Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference (CABC), in its tenth year, featuring two full days on emerging practices and issues within art-book culture.

Hours and Location: Preview Thursday, September 21, 6-9 pm Friday, September 22, 1-7pm Saturday, September 23, 11am-9pm Sunday, September 24, 11-am-7pm
 MoMA PS1 is located at 22-25 Jackson Avenue on 46th Avenue, Long Island City NY.

HOME TOWN DREAM - A new 40 page bookwork with 38 photographs

 

The photographs included in this bookwork are part of another work that considers the nature of dreams, due for trade publication in 2018. The expanded edition has 91 photographs which were made in 18 cities around the world. 38 of the pictures in that book were made in my home town, Auckland, New Zealand. In this experimental work I simply wanted to see what would happen if I constructed this book only using the Auckland pictures, placing them in the same order that they will appear in the expanded trade edition. This makes for a picture sequence that is totally random and constructed without the use of logic or intuition. Make of it what you will.

This 40 page book, 210 x 148 mm with 38 photographs is in a signed and numbered edition of 50 copies.

Each book comes with a signed and numbered limited edition print, which you can see at the top of this post along with the cover of the book.

Copies can be obtained directly from me at: harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz
Prices are, €21 / £20 / US$25 / NZ$35, the price include packing and postage. For payment you can simply log on to my PayPal account using my email address above.

Below are some of the spreads from the books:

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.