ARLES 2019 - Prix du Livre, the shortlist

La liste des livres sélectionnés pour les Prix du Livre 2019 est désormais disponible :

PRIX DU LIVRE D'AUTEUR 2019
Looking up Ben James, John Gossage, Steidl
Maldicidade, Miguel Rio Branco, Taschen
Es Lo Que Hay, Cronicas Del Llano De La Paciencia, Luis Weinstein, autoédition
Look It's Getting Sunny Outside !!!, Sohrab Hura, Ugly Dog éd.
Let Us Not Fall Asleep While Walking, Denil david, Dewi Lewis Publishing
Piedras, Graciela Iturbide, Editorial RM
San Pedro Garza Garcia, Yvonne Venegas, Editorial RM
Chauvin En Colombie, Guillaume Chauvin, Andre Frère éditions
Y€$U$, Jaszczuk Pawel, Zen Foto Gallery éd.
Arian Christiaens, Xenia, Christiaens Arian, Art paper éd.
Quimera: Antologia De Una Vida Salvaje, Larrondo Borja & Sanchez Diego, The kids are right éd.
Sobre La Resistencia De Los Cuerpos, Cuevas Jose Luis, Chaco éd.
American Winter, Johansson Gerry, Mack
Meat, Pin-Fat Olivier, Void éd.
Ustedes, Los Vivos, Hornillos David, Dalpine éd.
Maria, Maruschak Lesia, Red zet llc éd.
Musas Muxe, Morales Nelson, Inframundo éd.
88 Pedazos, Paladino Frederico, La Balsa ed.
Christopher Street, 1976, Gupta Sunil, Stanley/Barker éd.
Why I Hate Cars, De Blauwer Katrien, Libraryman
Parce Que, Calle Sophie, Xavier Barral éd.
Ocupacion Militar, Ortiz Monasterio, Editorial RM
All Over Cuisine, Septier Laurent, Editions P
Objets Autonomes, Matton Louis, Poursuite éd.
Border Soundscapes, Musi Pino et Rebecchi Marie, Artphilein éd.
Flowers For Franco, Amengual Toni, autoédition
Harmony Of Chaos, D'Agostin Renato et Coppola Theo-Mario, The (m) éd.
Oscurana Special Edition, D'Agata Antoine, Inframundo éd.
Thirty Six Ikea Stores, Anders Pascal, autoédition
Skin Close, Cederlund Magnus, journal
Nearly Every Rose On The Barriers In Front Of The Parliament, Milach Rafal, Jednostka Gallery
Tobias Kruse, Material, Kruse Tobias, Kerber Verlag éd.
Behind The Glass, Catiere Alexandra, Chose Commune
Hiroshima 1965, Kenji Ishiguro, Akio Nagasawa éd.
This World And Others Like It, Nikonowicz Drew et Kupfer Paula, fw:books
Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail The Dark Lioness, Muholi Zanele, Aperture Foundation éd.
The Pillar, Gill Stephen et Knausgard Karl Ove, Nobody Books éd.
Desxeo, Arias Tono, Dispara éd.
Radial Grammar, Suter Batia, Roma publications nieuwe & Le bal éd.
Digger, Chik Oscar, Zen foto gallery éd.

Les lauréats seront annoncés pendant la semaine d’ouverture des Rencontres d’Arles, le mardi 2 juillet à 22h00 au Théâtre Antique.

Harvey Benge - new bookwork NOTHING EVENTUALLY

My new bookwork NOTHING EVENTUALLY from UK publisher Dewi Lewis will be released at Photo London this week. 

Photographed in Tokyo on three visits over a 15 year period Nothing Eventually records the perplexing extremes that exist in this strange and complex mega city, a place that defies comprehension. The city speaks to the traveller in riddles, nothing is what it seems. Its complexity is baffling and full of contradictions. Village-like suburban streets sit quietly alongside the love hotels, the Pachinko parlours, the boy-girl meet up clubs, the Harajuku girls and the endless neon. Cultural cross-overs are the norm with Japanese tradition blending with the Tokyo Hello Kitty version of US teen Pop Culture. The aged shuffle on while youth push the extremes. The city seems all surface and one is left, on departure, feeling none-the-wiser. This leaves the western traveller feeling that despite the depth of the city’s unique Japanese culture there is an aura of impending doom where the brilliance and glitter of Tokyo’s veneer will inevitably lead to an unhappy ending.

Known for his evocative and unsettling images, Harvey Benge’s focus is on picture series realised through the photo-book. With over sixty titles to date, his work has been published in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. His photographs have also been shown in public and private galleries in the UK and throughout Europe as well as in New Zealand. Working in both Auckland and Paris, he explores the nature of reality, investigating the overlooked, the unseen and the insignificant in the First World’s urban environments. A particular interest is the notion of parallel lives, “While something is happening here, something else is happening over there.”

“In his search for the absurd and bizarre in the urban landscape….small moments of everyday life flash with ambiguity and tension, contrasts and conflicts. Part humorous…often he shows disturbing signs of differences, small anarchies… an urban dream at the edges of reality.” - Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.

"One of the few photographers today who does as much for the poetics as for the philosophy of photography." 
- Markus Schaden, Cologne.

“The work reveals a sublime banality, arresting moments that have no retreat. Your scenes in the street seem to push forward… a very fresh strange way of looking.” 
-  Justine Kurland, New York.

You can purchase NOTHING EVENTUALLY direct from the publisher HERE. First 50 copies sold comes with free 5 x 7 print.

SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES - Photography: Art & Visual Culture

Swann Auction Galleries photography sale, running over several sessions from February 14 and presented in 325 lots, offers an abundance of photographic riches. There is something for everyone here and the online catalogue is well worth a look. You can check that out HERE.

Terri Weifenbach - Des Oiseaux, a new bookwork

photo-eye has just announced pre-orders for Terri Weifenbach's new bookwork - Des Oiseaux, published by Editions Xavier Barral. The 8 x 10" book has 96 pages with 44 colour photographs. Terri's book is the third in a series on birds from Xavier Barral, with other titles from Pentti Sammallahti and Bernard Plossu.

Terri Weifenbach has a fresh and authentic voice with photographs that are both beautiful and charged with an existential sense of intrigue and mystery. On that score Des Oiseaux does not disappoint!

photo-eye says this: Terri Weifenbach’s photographs present the secret world of nature, populated by birds. Created in the space of her personal garden, they reveal the life hidden in the tits, sparrows, and various passerines that nest in urban gardens. Oscillating between fantasy and reality, her images seem to be taken on the sly. They show stolen moments: suspended flights, birds dissimulated in the foliage, a loner gallantly perched on a branch, but also aerial ballets of linnets and chases between jays and thrushes. Most often taken at ground level, nose in the grass with the lens lost among the flowers, her photographs appear to substitute the ornithologist’s enthralled eye as it observes another world: that of birds.

The seasons follow in succession; the colours of the garden vary, passing from oranges, to the bright blues and greens of summer, to the immaculate white of winter. Saturated light and colour, plays on blurred and crystal-clear details, and freeze frames depict a “supra-reality”. Terri Weifenbach immerses us in the infinitely small, transporting us into a particularly lively world in which birds race at top speed, dance, or settle, freeze, and gather in parliaments. She reveals the marvels of their world.

Terri Weifenbach was born in New York, and has lived in New Mexico and California before moving to Washington DC. The creation of books, which she designs herself, plays a major role in her photographic practice. She has published many books, including In Yours Dreams, Between Maple and Chestnut and Gift, coproduced with Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi. Her work is regularly presented in international museums and institutions in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

You can see more on the photo-eye site HERE. And on Terri Weifenbach's website HERE.

Photo L.A.- opens today

Photo L.A. opens in Santa Monica CA today and runs until February 3.

With just a touch of hyperbole, they say this: We know what you're thinking, "Been there, done that." We're happy to tell you that Photo L.A. is an entirely different experience. We're bringing the best of the photography world to your doorstep with a collaborative platform that links dealers and collectors with a gamut of galleries from around the globe. Internationally recognized, yet abundantly accessible, Photo L.A. cultivates connections between industry elite and up-and-coming talent alike. The longest running international photographic art fair on the West Coast, Photo L.A. has been in operation for nearly three decades. Photo L.A. received a new home in the historic Barker Hangar this year. The airplane hangar’s soaring vaulted ceilings, arched steel trusses, and sweeping 35,000 square foot event space will host a roster of 50-65 local and international galleries and dealers, individual artists, collectives, leading not-for-profits, museums, art schools, and global booksellers.

You can go to the PHOTOLA website HERE.

Mapplethorpe at the Guggenheim

Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now opened last week at the Guggenheim NYC. The exhibition is split into two iterations - the first running until July 10, 2019 and the second, July 24, 2019 until January 5, 2020.

The Guggenheim says this: In the thirty years since his death, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) has become a cultural icon. One of the most critically acclaimed and controversial American artists of the late twentieth century, Mapplethorpe is widely known for daring imagery that deliberately transgresses social mores, and for the censorship debates that transpired around his work in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet the driving force behind his artistic ethos was an obsession with perfection that he bought to bear on his approach to each of his subjects. 

In 1993, the Guggenheim received a generous gift of approximately two hundred photographs and unique objects from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, initiating the museum’s photography collection. Today, the Guggenheim celebrates the sustained legacy of the artist’s work with a yearlong exhibition program conceived in two sequential parts and presented in the museum’s Mapplethorpe Gallery on Tower Level 4. 

The first part of Implicit Tensions (January 25–July 10, 2019) features highlights from the Guggenheim’s in-depth Mapplethorpe holdings, including early Polaroids, collages, and mixed-media constructions; iconic, classicizing photographs of male and female nudes; floral still lifes; portraits of artists, celebrities, and acquaintances; explicit depictions of New York’s underground S&M scene; and searingly honest self-portraits. 

The second part of Implicit Tensions (July 24, 2019–January 5, 2020) will address Mapplethorpe’s complex legacy in the field of contemporary art. A focused selection of his photographs will be on view alongside works by artists in the Guggenheim’s collection, including Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. 

This exhibition is organized by Lauren Hinkson, Associate Curator, Collections, and Susan Thompson, Associate Curator, with Levi Prombaum, Curatorial Assistant, Collections.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born November 4, 1946, in Floral Park, New York. He left home in 1962 and enrolled at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 1963, where he studied painting and sculpture and received his B.F.A. in 1970. During this time, he met artist, poet, and musician Patti Smith. She encouraged his work and posed for numerous portraits when they lived together in Brooklyn and in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan, a gathering place for artists, writers, and musicians in the early 1970s.

 It was not Mapplethorpe’s original intention to be a photographer, and from 1970 to 1974, he mainly made assemblage constructions that incorporate images of men from pornographic magazines with found objects and painting. In order to create his own images for these collages, Mapplethorpe turned to photography, initially using a Polaroid SX-70 camera. Interested in portraiture, Mapplethorpe worked as a staff photographer for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. He also produced album covers for Smith and the group Television, and at the same time photographed socialites and celebrities such as John Paul Getty III and Carolina Herrera. T

Two of Mapplethorpe’s friends were influential in his continuing exploration of photography as a means of art making. He met John McKendry, Curator of Prints and Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1971. The curator bought Mapplethorpe his first camera and persuaded him to take up photography full-time. Mapplethorpe traveled to Europe for the first time with McKendry, where he was introduced to many of the collectors who later became sitters for portraits. Curator and photography collector Sam Wagstaff, whom he met in 1972, became Mapplethorpe’s friend and eventual lover, encouraging the photographer’s development, gallery associations, and career course. They remained close until Wagstaff’s death in 1986.

Mapplethorpe had his first substantial shows in 1977, both in New York: an exhibition of photographs of flowers at the Holly Solomon Gallery and one of male nudes and sadomasochistic imagery at the Kitchen. Mapplethorpe’s diverse work—homoerotic images, floral still lifes, pictures of children, commissioned portraits, mixed-media sculpture—is united by the constancy of his approach and technique. The surfaces of his prints offer a seemingly endless gradation of blacks and whites, shadow and light, and regardless of subject, his images are both elegant and provocative. In the mid-to-late 1980s, returning to the sculptural use of photography seen in his early assemblages, Mapplethorpe created sensual diptychs and triptychs of photographs printed on fabric and luxurious cloth panels. In 1988, four major exhibitions of his work were organized: by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Mapplethorpe died due to complications from AIDS on March 9, 1989, in Boston. 

The Institute of Contemporary Art’s retrospective continued to travel after Mapplethorpe’s death. Although the exhibition had sparked no controversy at its first two venues, the threat of right-wing objections to the photographs of S/M and homoerotic acts prompted officials at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to cancel the show two weeks before its scheduled opening. The exhibition instead traveled to the Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C., where it received record attendance.

BLOW Photo, Photobook programme

BLOW photo is a creative platform dedicated to fine art photography. BLOW photo magazine is a large format publication conceived, created, printed and published in Dublin, Ireland. the BLOW team are based in d-light studios, an old converted woollen mill that functions as a film/photography studio and event space. First published 5 years ago, the magazine has been awarded ‘print of the year 2010’ by Irish print awards and was nominated for 3 consecutive years as ‘magazine of the year’ by the Lucie Foundation 2013-2015. 

BLOW photo has launched a new mentoring Photo Book Programme: FUSE. This is a genre residency aimed at mentoring an artist through the process of getting their work onto paper and in front of publishers. 
They say this: Since 2010 BLOW Photo has been sharing fine art photography through our large format publication: BLOW Photo Magazine. After publishing 17 issues with work by over 300 photographers, we think we have managed to face every single challenge of publishing and printing. The Photo Book Programme: FUSE It is an amazing opportunity for the artist to collaborate with an editor, a publisher, a designer and a printer. Together with Read That Image, PlusPrint, Unthink Designers and Dewi Lewis we would like to empower a photographer with knowledge and confidence to spark the change between where they are now and where they want to be by giving them a real insight into what it takes to get published. 

BLOW photo are in the last month of an Open Call so if you'd like to find out more about Photo Book Programme: FUSE you can go HERE.

 And some BLOW photo magazine covers below: 

Photographers whose work I like - No35/ Jeffrey Stockbridge

Jeffrey Stockbridge is a photographer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His documentary photography series and self-published book, Kensington Blues, which was released in 2017 has received wide international recognition. And rightly so.

Kensington Blues is a heart-felt confrontational body of work which you can't turn away from. The pictures are superbly seen and crafted with an amazing use of light and a colour palette that is just right for the job. And the chilling portraits are simply stunning. Clearly this series has been a labour of love for Stockbridge, made with persistent hard work over many years and a conviction that this was a story that had to be told.  

Stockbridge says this about Kensington Blues - "Kensington Blues is a portrait photography project of the down and out residents who live along Kensington Avenue in North Philadelphia. During the nineteenth century, Kensington was a strong working-class neighbourhood, a national leader of the textile industry and home to a diverse population of immigrants. Like many rust belt cities, industrial restructuring of the mid twentieth century lead to a sharp economic decline including high unemployment and a significant population loss.

Today, Kensington Avenue is infamous for drug abuse and prostitution. The Ave runs 3 miles through what is now a dangerous and crime-ridden neighbourhood. Women, some as young as twenty years old, and others who’ve been on the Ave for decades, populate the neighbourhood in great numbers. Prostitution has become a social norm. Drugs such as Heroin, Meth, Crack and Xanax are sold out in the open. Addicts sell clean needles for a dollar a piece. Five needles equals a bag of dope.

With the roaring El train overhead, Kensington Avenue is in a state of perpetual hustle. Working with a 4×5 camera, I chose a slow photographic process in order to literally slow down the rapid speed of life as it happens along the Ave. The focus of my work is portraiture. I want to tap into the state of mind of those who are struggling to survive their addiction. I ask those I photograph to share their stories so that others may learn from them. I record the audio conversations or ask participants to write their thoughts in my journal. The goal of my work is to enable people to relate to one-another in a fundamentally human way, in spite of stereotypes and commonly perceived differences. The truth is, addiction can happen to anyone.

In 2017, over 70,000 people died of drug overdose in the United States, approx. half of which were due to Fentanyl. That’s 191 deaths a day. In my home town of Philadelphia, over 1200 people died from overdose in 2017. As a citizen, I am deeply concerned that not enough is being done to help those suffering from substance use disorders.

The work I’ve been doing in Kensington over the past 10 years is in a way a collaboration between myself and those I photograph. Together, through photography, audio recordings, journal entries and videos, we are working to highlight the voices and stories of those who suffer from substance use disorders. By sharing the intimate details of their plight, those I photograph are effectively humanising addiction and challenging the stigma that all drug addicts are morally corrupt."

You can go to Jeffrey Stockbridge's website HERE.

10th Kassel Dummy Award 2019 – Registration now open!

Dieter Neubert and his team are pleased to announce the 2019 10th KASSEL DUMMY AWARD. Again this year invitations go to photographers worldwide to take part and to send them their unpublished photobook mock-up for the KASSEL DUMMY AWARD contest. In the first round, the best 50 books will be shortlisted by a jury at the end of April 2019. These books will be exhibited at several international photo events. From the shortlisted titles, 3 winners will be chosen by an international jury during Photo España in Madrid in June 2019. In cooperation with the Fotobookfestival Kassel, the book that wins will be produced and published by our new festival cooperation partner MAS, the leading Turkish photobook printing and binding house from Istanbul. There is a charge of 36 € per entry and book, with options for sending back the books entered. Entries must be submitted by by 24 April 2019!

You can enter HERE.

The Fotobookfestival Kassel is a charitable foundation that has been engaged with the artistic medium of the photobook and has presented it in all its facets, since 2008, in a festival program of international standing. The annual festival shows works by renowned artists and promotes established and emerging talents, publishers, designers, printers, curators and booksellers on an international platform. It was the first festival of its kind dedicated to the photographic book and has founded two novel book awards: The KASSEL DUMMY AWARD for the best photobook mock-up of the year has awarded emerging talents a complete photobook-production since 2010; the KASSEL PHOTOBOOK AWARD assembles the best photobooks of the previous year nominated by international experts in the field. Books entered for both awards are showcased regularly in travelling exhibitions at international festivals and photography events. These two awards are unique in their formats and have been role models for other international festivals and events. Based on the commitment of the founders of the Kasseler Fotoforum e.V., the Kassel based photographers Michael Wiedemann, Thomas Wiegand and Dieter Neubert, within 10 years a small local initiative has developed into an unequalled institution that receives widespread acclaim. The festival has been managed by Dieter Neubert since 2010 as a non-profit, charitable organization (Kasseler Fotografie Festival gUG). It operates independently of commercial interests and is financed through its admission fees, book sales, and sponsoring, as well as by donations and contributions. The Fotobookfestival Kassel does not receive any regular public funding and pays the standard local rates for its festival venues. Besides its main festival location Kassel, the festival has also been held in cities like Paris (Le Bal) 2012, Beijing (Three Shadows Photography Arts Centre), 2016, Istanbul, Moscow and Lodz, 2017. The festival shows work by internationally distinguished photographers such as Daido Moriyama, David Goldblatt, Martin Parr, John Gossage, Susan Meiselas, Viviane Sassen, Paul Graham and Alec Soth, as well as artist talks, lectures, workshops, reviews, print- and book-exhibitions, special book-events and book markets.

Zoe Leonard at The Museum of Contemporary Art LA

Running until March 25, Zoe Leonard: Survey is the first large-scale overview of the artist’s work in an American museum. The exhibition at MOCA looks across Leonard’s career to highlight her engagement with a range of themes, including gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. More than it focuses on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work slowly and reflectively calibrates vision and form. Using repetition, subtle changes of perspective, and shifts of scale, Leonard draws viewers into an awareness of the meanings behind otherwise familiar images or objects. A counter-example to the speed and disposability of image culture today, Leonard’s photographs, sculptures, and installations ask the viewer to re-engage with how we see. 

New York based,  Zoe Leonard (b. 1961) is among the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Over the past three decades, she has produced work in photography and sculpture that has been celebrated for its lyrical observations of daily life coupled with a rigorous, questioning attention to the politics and conditions of image making and display. 

Leonard has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. She has spent most of her adult life living in New York City, whose built environment has been the subject matter of much of her work such as sidewalks, storefronts, apartment buildings, chain link fences, graffiti, and boarded up windows. From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Leonard's work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. She explains in a recent interview: "Rather than any one subject or genre (landscape, portrait, still life, etc), I was, and remain, interested in engaging a simultaneous questioning of both subject and vantage point, the relation between viewer and world — in short, subjectivity and how it informs our experience of the world."

You can go to the MOCA website HERE.

On November 6 2016, New York's High Line Art hosted an afternoon of readings and performances in response to Zoe Leonard’s "I want a president" (1992), which was on view on the western pillar of The Standard, High Line, through March 2017. 
In the video linked HERE Zoe Leonard reads her text I Want a President (1992).