Paul Graham - 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner

The Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to announce British photographer Paul Graham as the recipient of the 2012 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for SEK 1,000,000 (approximately GBP 95,000, US$150,000), The award ceremony will take place in London on March 8, 2012. An exhibition of his work, Paul Graham – 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner will open on October 26, 2012 at the Hasselblad Center at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, in connection with which, one or more seminars will be arranged with the award winner.
The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2012 prize to Paul Graham is as follows:
Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ″the spirit of the times″ we do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world.

Sean O'Hagan the guardian's photography writer wrote in yesterday's issue, a piece about Paul's win. You can read it HERE.

O'Hagan reminds readers about Graham's comment about his practice, where he said, "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." 

We should all tattoo that last sentence on the back of one hand. Both hands even!

And the Paul Graham Archive is well worth a look HERE.

Websites - it's not hard to make them easy

My friend and photographer Jessica Hines posted this on FB, lamenting the cost and difficulty of designing and running a website that looks great and is easy to change:

I have a website that I like (http://www.jessicahines.com/) and have had for years but it is getting too expensive now to maintain + I must wait for the person who manages it to make changes. I wish I had the skills to create my own website but as I do not, am looking for an easy and inexpensive (ha) new approach. Any suggestions? I hope I don't make a mistake in switching gears...Thank you!

I replied saying that I'd had this problem too and was kindly pointed in a new direction by a well informed friend who suggested I look at virb.com who provide very easy to use templates. This I have done and haven't looked back. I can now add pages to my site in a matter on minutes. It looks good, is easy to use and is not expensive.

You can see my virb originated site harveybenge.com HERE and virb HERE

Andy Adams of Flak Photo Network has given me this link to a previous discussion on websites. The link lists a number of options including virb. See it HERE

As a post-script to the above I was pleased to see that British photographer, writer, blogger and photo educator Colin Pantall has picked up on this post and has quickly, simply and easily made himself a new website. You can have a look at it HERE and I must say it looks great. And I really like Colin's work too!

Gillian Wearing at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Identity project 1992 - 93

 Opening March 28, Whitechapel Gallery will show the films and photographs of British artist Gillian Wearing. Born Birmingham1963, Wearing's work explores our public personas and private lives. This Turner Prize winner’s remarkable works draw on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world.Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves.
The exhibition begins with the artist herself, dancing in a shopping mall, blissfully unaware of her bemused audience. The idea of performance continues with works including Wearing’s 1997 masterpiece, 10–16. Adults lip synch the voices and act out the physical tics of seven children in a captivating  film which moves from the breathless excitement of a ten year old to the existential angst of an adolescent.
Other highlights include Wearing’s iconic 1992 series, Signs that say what you want them to say, and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say where strangers are offered paper and pen to communicate their message. In the upper galleries we enter the inner world of subjectivity. An advert - Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian… (1994) attracted a series of disturbing disclosures. Wearing jettisons her own identity to adopt the guise of family members or artists such as Diane Arbus or Andy Warhol, so revealing her own background and influence.
This comprehensive survey, which also premieres new films and sculptures, shows how Wearing is both political - often focusing on the dispossessed or the traumatised – and poetic, finding the extraordinary in us all.

The Observer's Tim Adams recently interviewed Gillian Wearing, you can read the article HERE 

Identity project 1992 - 93

Joerg Colberg reviews The Auckland Project

Perceptive as usual, Joerg Colberg has just reviewed The Auckland Project on his site Conscientious. The Auckland Project was the bookwork collaboration between John Gossage and Alec Soth when they were my guests in Auckland for the AUT School of Art and Design workshop in January 2009.

Joerg writes:  “Working alongside John [Gossage] was stressful, but it was also life changing. After learning so much from this master of the medium (and friend), I began the process of dismantling my career.” write Alec Soth about his contribution to The Auckland Project. The book, or rather set of books, was “a trip of departures. Gossage has been working in black and white for over 40 years, and this trip yielded one of the first bodies of work he had ever produced in color.” (quoted from the press blurb) Soth, in turn, left behind his 8x10 camera, to bring a digital one. Since I have been ignoring discussions of cameras on this blog for years now, I’ll continue doing that for this review. Instead, I want to talk about the two photographers’ approach to photography - I do believe the books offer an opportunity to do that.

If anything, for me The Auckland Project reflects the differences in these two photographers’ approaches to photography. One, John Gossage, is only too happy to walk around with his camera, looking for (and finding!) chance moments to take photographs of. The other, Alec Soth, essentially is most comfortable doing the exact opposite: Having a plan, or at least a list of things to look for. So one, Gossage, is fine, and shooting in colour essentially makes no difference whatsoever. The other one, Soth, ends up dismantling his career. Now that might be too simple a view. Of course, I don’t know what went on in New Zealand. I only have the words on the blog and this set of books.

You can read the full review on Conscientious HERE

Timemachine - on line photography magazine, Issue 4

Timemachine is a collaborative project by photographers  Lee Grant and Tom Williams. They say this about their project:

Timemachine publishes contemporary photography from Australia and elsewhere in the world.  Our emphasis is on showing new work and longer term projects; and  bringing the concerns of photographers and their colleagues to wider attention.

Do countries or cultures breed different ways of thinking and seeing?  This is a place to look at new Australian image making alongside a selection of what’s emerging from around the globe.

Timemachine was hatched some years ago in the minds of two photographers, strangers at the time.  We were astounded and invigorated by the range of strong, eye-opening work that was being made at a time when the power of the still image, in the midst of an explosion of visual technologies, was thought by many to be in a period of decline.
Far from it:  photography retains its virtue of bold simplicity and continues to be used, in new ways and old, by thoughtful and original practitioners.  It has found ubiquity via the internet – but popularity hasn’t curbed the steady development of fresh voices.
Issues of the magazine are bimonthly and are based around themes, which can be interpreted loosely or strictly.  We’re interested in a diversity of ideas and styles and encourage submissions from everywhere – and from known or unknown photographers, artists and visual journalists.
We also publish writing on photography:  essays, interviews, criticism, notes from the field.  We want to gauge varying opinions, new forays and developing approaches to the medium. 

The theme for issue four is Domesticated  with bodies of work by Sitthixay Ditthavong, Anna Fox, Sam Harris, Raphaela Rosella, Ward Roberts, Robyn Schwartz and Susan Worsham. Plus a selection of poems by Sally Evans and Tara Goegjen. Finally, an interview with Dick Blau discussing his 44 year project documenting his family, Thicker than Water.

You can check out issue four HERE.

Robert Rauschenberg - photographer

I came across a post on FB's Flak Photo Network by a FB friend Marcel Du who interestingly describes himself as a recovering art historian. Marcel has opened up the question as to whether or not Robert Rauschenberg could be described as a photographer. I then discovered this piece from New York Magazine, together with the photographs below.

From the very beginning of his mad, ecstatic, always-experimenting career, Robert Rauschenberg was looking at photographs. His hungry eye absorbed them; then they reappeared in his paintings, sculptures, and prints, and especially in his combines—the new form he invented, neither painting nor sculpture but a visual - material manifestation of abstract poetry. Rauschenberg appropriated photos from books, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, other artists, art-history books, anyplace. He cut them up, used them whole, pieced them back together, whatever. Given his fecundity—and a spate of pesky copyright cases brought against him—it’s no surprise to learn he also took pictures himself. Lots of them.

Yet there are surprises to be found in Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs: 1949–1962, an exhibition and book of 167 images from the years in which the artist invented his point-and-shoot style. Rauschenberg turns out to have been a natural, breezily brilliant with the camera, never more so than when shooting his circle of artist friends. We see Cy Twombly in Rome, dwarfed by an enormous Roman sculpture; a handsome Jasper Johns in his studio in 1955 next to his masterpiece Flag; an otherworldly Merce Cunningham crouched tigerlike in a motion until then unseen. These are closely observed windows into the nascent postwar art world. (The self-portraits of Rauschenberg—he was dashingly handsome, a young rake—with his work are no less revelatory.) There are images of grazing horses, landscapes, furniture, you name it.

He was good enough, even at the beginning, to have been taken seriously by Edward Steichen, who put one of Rauschenberg’s photographs in a MoMA show in 1951. Life ran a series of them the same year. Even after other work began to dominate his career, Rauschenberg once remarked, “I’ve never stopped being a photographer.” These pictures make Rauschenberg’s fearless eye come to new life. 

Merce Cunningham, 1953

Jasper Johns, circa 1955

Self portrait, circa 1954

John Cage, 1952

You can get yourself a copy of  Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs: 1949 - 1962 from Amazon HERE

Alec Soth BROKEN MANUAL frenzy?

Photo book fanatics who lined up outside stores overnight got their first crack Friday at a new cave themed Alec Soth photo book, getting so unruly in some cities that police were called to restore order.


Orange County Sheriff's deputies move the crowd back after an announcement Friday morning that a book sale was canceled at the Book Locker at Florida Mall in Orlando. Photo Joe Burbank/AP
In Orlando, Fla., more than 100 deputies in riot gear quelled a crowd awaiting the release of the $50 Broken Manual. At a mall in Hyattsville, Md., one person was arrested for disorderly conduct. And in Greenwood, Ind., police said they canceled a Soth release after 400-600 people showed up Thursday night at a mall and were "panicking to get to the front of the line." The book's release coincides with the current exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.
The book, part of a cave-themed series, is a draw for so-called "Steidlheads" who collect signature photo books and can resell them online at a marked-up price, sometimes for hundreds more than retail. Among inner city intellectuals in particular, Steidl titles are seen as a badge of honor and often conspicuously displayed.

Malls in Florida, New York and Maryland reported bringing in police to manage fans clamoring for the blank covered manual, which has star-like flecks of black. Some shoppers lucky enough to get their hands on a pair of books immediately posted them for sale on eBay at skyrocketing prices: $1,000 and up.




This story looks pretty much like it has come from the crazy mind and pen of Lester B. Morrison!

Post Script: now with thanks to friend and colleague Tommy Arvidson in Sweden, you can see the original story HERE. It's a shoe in!

Soth's view of Parr

Martin Parr, in borrowed snowmobile suit and boots, photographed last month by Alec Soth

Alec Soth writes: Martin Parr is the Jay-Z of documentary photography. Parr's presence can be felt everywhere in the medium. He is, hands down, the hardest working photographer I know. At 60, Martin continues to crisscross the globe, snapping away like a 20-year-old.

Along the way he's published dozens of books and participated in hundreds of exhibitions. But this relentless enthusiasm stretches well beyond his own lens. Martin is also one of documentary photography's pre-eminent collectors and curators. His two-volume history of photo books has profoundly changed the way these books are valued culturally. Parr has also curated numerous photography exhibitions and has been instrumental in launching the careers of countless artists around the globe, mine included.
I first met Martin Parr when I applied for membership to Magnum Photos, the international photographic cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was an odd fit for Magnum, but Parr saw potential and became a strong advocate for my work. Parr himself is considered a peculiar fit for the cooperative. Magnum made its name documenting wars and unrest in black-and-white. Parr's brightly lit color photographs of middle-class consumers have constantly challenged the idea of what is worthy of documentation.
This subject of class is key to understanding Parr's work and success. Where Jay-Z's universe brings together poverty and superstar bling, Parrworld (as one of his retrospectives was called) is a more ordinary place. Parr holds up a mirror to the fluorescent-lit shopping mall the world has become. But the British Parr doesn't hide from his own reflection. Dressed in a T-shirt and sandals (or in this case a snowmobile suit and boots), Parr allows himself to be seen as a ravenous consumer just like everyone else.

As both a photographer and as a Minnesotan, I was thrilled when I heard that Martin was coming here this winter. Beyond getting a kick out of the idea of him tromping around out in the cold, I was excited by the idea of him showing us ourselves in all of our ordinary glory.

"A Separation" - a step towards togetherness

LOS ANGELES, Feb 26 (Reuters) - "A Separation" won the Oscar for best foreign language film on Sunday, becoming the first Iranian movie to win the honor.
Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, the domestic drama focuses on a couple going through a divorce and touches on traditions, justice, and male-female relationships in modern Iran. "A Separation" was regarded as the front-runner for the foreign language Oscar after sweeping the awards circuit in Europe and the United States. It also garnered an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.It was the second Iranian film to be nominated for an Oscar, and the first to win.

"At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy," director Farhadi said while accepting the Oscar. "At a time of tug of war, intimidation and aggressions exchanged between politicians, the name of their county, Iran, is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics."
"I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, the people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment," he added.

"A Separation" has received almost universal critical acclaim, gracing many top 10 lists for the best movies of 2011.

Two nights before the Oscar ceremony, Israeli and Iranian artists came together in a show of peace, said Lior Ashkenazi, a star of the Israeli foreign language Oscar entry "Footnote". "At the Academy event in hour of the foreign films, we sat, spoke and all the veils came off," Ashkenazi told Israel's Army Radio. "They are warm hearted people. We invited them to Tel Aviv and they invited us to Tehran."

Farhadi, who works and lives in Iran, has been reluctant to entertain theories that his film is a parable for the struggles between Iran's young dissidents and its paternalistic mullahs, saying it is up to audiences to take from the movie what they will. Others have interpreted "A Separation" as a comment on class differences, or as a critique of Iran's justice system, or a clash between modernity and tradition.
Farhadi made the movie under Iranian censors who impose strictures on filmmakers in the name of Islamic morality and national morale. But he has said he was not confronted with censorship.

(Writing by Chris Michaud and Ron Grover; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Sandra Maler)

Dan Fox from frieze on Damien Hirst - art criricism is not dead

'Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings  1986–2011.' Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, Madison Avenue, New York, USA. (Photo by Rob McKeever)

Following my previous posts on art criticism here are a couple of extracts from the frieze blog, Dan Fox's review of Damien Hirst's Gagosian show(s) Complete Spot Paintings 1986 - 2011. Fox has titled the review Bland Ambition and in this instance critical writing is indeed alive and well...

Mostly it was inertia that kept me from Hirst’s show. Every pompous parp of PR trumpeting about it merely reinforced my indifference; the same flat-line reaction I have each time I see Hirst leering at the camera in his press photographs, looking like a fossil from the Britpop era for whom time froze sometime around 1995 in the Groucho Club toilets with Keith Allen and Alex James. The more the artistic significance of Hirst’s spot paintings was asserted – epoch-defining facts about how these works were made over the course of 25 years and lent to Gagosian by more than 150 private individuals and public institutions from 20 countries, and, yes, the inevitable publicity shots of Hirst mugging it up – the heavier my shoulders shrugged.

And....

.....death and money – the perennial themes running through his work. I’m open to the idea that there is a serious argument to be made for such themes in certain pieces. In the case of ‘The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011’, however, it’s true only inasmuch as it makes me aware of how little time I have on this planet and how little of it I wish to spend looking at these works. They appear exhausted, self-absorbed, vain. It’s like watching some over-the-hill but wealthy rock star convinced that he/she still has some relevance when the world around them has moved on. Hirst’s show conjures the world of music industry exploitation captured by The Smiths in their song ‘Paint a Vulgar Picture’: ‘Re-issue! / Re-package! / Re-package! / Re-evaluate the songs / Double pack, with a photograph / Extra track (and a tacky badge).’

You can read the full review on the frieze blog HERE. A great review, a great read.

Is the age of the critic over? the guardian on FB

Following my yesterdays post on art criticism I came across this which is worth a read.

I particularly liked this paragraph from novelist Hari Kunzru, We now live under the hybrid tyranny of middlebrow. No serious person believes the Oscars are a list of the best films, or the Grammys the best music. Charitably one could say they represent a kind of averaging out, an index of the taste of a group of informed people. At worst, critics acting en masse, with one eye on what's popular and one eye on what's good, end up praising work that doesn't upset them. That's why there's so much stuff that looks like art, smells like art, but when you bite into it, it just tastes of cardboard.

Here is the LINK for the article.

Art criticism or art description?

Fortnightly, Sean O'Hagan explores photography, art, photojournalism and everything in between.

Following a round of gallery openings last Tuesday night and several rounds of cold beers last Friday with three well known and venerable painter friends I've been thinking about the business of art criticism. My painter friends and I agreed that so often these days art criticism has devolved into art description where the "critic" does nothing more than describe the work on the walls. Perhaps we've got to this point as gallerists have  become shop keepers and the art on the walls so often nothing more than expensive decoration.

This hasn't always been the case. Robert Hughes, one of my favorite critics,  told it like it was when when it came to dismissing the likes of Warhol, Schnabel, Basquiat, and Koons whom he saw as absurd charlatans. Hughes said of Schnabel, his work is to painting what Stallone's is to acting - a lurching display of oily pectorals. And David Hockney, he saw as the Cole Porter of painting.

Still mulling this over I kept running into artist friends who groaned to me about a show of photography by a young and recent Auckland art school graduate presented by a well known and reputable dealer gallery. I looked at the work on-line as was less than impressed. Then I read a "review", well description of the work and today set off to have a look in the flesh. In my view the work failed on every level. The work was overly derivative, rehashing borrowed concepts already milked dry and done better.  What's more, poorly seen, composed and constructed and the prints themselves were a technical nightmare with either over-saturated cyan or magenta. And the reviewer saw nothing, said nothing of this, but did comment on the mystery they found in the work. To my eye there was as much mystery here as in an Agatha Christie novel translated into Mandarin, with all the good bits taken out!

But relief is at hand. A regular dose of writing and observations from Sean O'Hagan,  the  guardian's photography writer is more than capable of lifting the spirits. You go can go there on this LINK.

And for a complete change of scene I always enjoy reading film reviews where the writers still are prepared to knee-cap a director for crap work. Here are a few choice examples.

BENEATH THE DARKNESS, New York Daily News, Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier, Jan 5, 2012, A dumb thriller starring Dennis Quaid as a weirdo mortician taunted by high school kids into revealing what he did with his wife and her lover years before - and look at the movies it rips off...

THE MEANS WAR, New York Post, Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick, Feb 14, 2012
Nearly totally laugh, chemistry and coherence free, this fiasco from the director of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'' has a script whose sensible parts would fit on a napkin with enough room left over for the Gettysburg Address.

ONE FOR THE MONEY, Rolling Stone, Reviewed by: Peter Travers, Jan 27, 2012
Everything in One for the Money rings cringingly false, from Heigl's absurd Snooki accent to Plum's romance with Joe Morelli, an Italian cop, played by – faith and begorrah – Jason O'Mara. To dismiss Julie Anne Robinson's direction as clueless would be a kindness.

THE DARKEST HOUR, Boxoffice Magazine, Reviewed by: David Ehrlich, Dec 28, 2011
The Darkest Hour isn't just a dark horse contender for the year's biggest joke, it's the darkest.

AFTER FALL WINTER, Time Out New York, Reviewed by: Nick Schager, Jan 24, 2012
While it may make the City of Light look beautiful, ultimately, this insufferable indie auteur's navel-gazer is just another faux-kinky vanity project in which its creator's neuroses are placed on an undeserved pedestal.

Ai Weiwei at Jeu de Paume, Paris.

Ai Weiwei, "Study of Perspective - Eiffel Tower," 1995–2003.*

Ai Weiwei – Interlacing is the first major exhibition of photographs and videos by Ai Weiwei. It foregrounds Ai Weiwei the communicator—the documenting, analyzing, interweaving artist who communicates via many channels. Ai Weiwei already used photography in his New York years, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has incessantly documented the everyday urban and social realities in China, discussing it over blogs and Twitter. Photographs of radical urban transformation, of the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented together with his art photography projects, the documenta project Fairytale, the countless blog and cell phone photographs. A comprehensive book accompanies this exhibition. 
Ai Weiwei is a generalist, a conceptual, socially critical artist dedicated to creating friction with, and forming reality. As an architect, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, blogger, Twitterer, interview artist, and cultural critic, he is a sensitive observer of current topics and social problems: a great communicator and networker who brings life into art and art into life.
Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, the son of the poet Ai Qing. Following his studies at the Beijing Film Academy, he cofounded in 1978 the artists' collective The Stars, which rejected Social Realism and advocated artistic individualism and experimentation in art. In 1981 Ai Weiwei went to the USA and 1983 to New York, where he studied at Parsons School for Design in the class of the painter Sean Scully. In New York he discovered artists like Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and above all, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is important for him because he understood art as part of life. At this time, Ai Weiwei produced his first ready-mades and thousands of photographs documenting his life and friends in the Chinese art community in New York. After his father fell ill, he returned to Beijing in 1993. In 1997 he cofounded the China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW) and began from then on to deal with architecture as well. Ai Weiwei opened his own studio in 1999 in Caochangdi and set up the architecture studio FAKE Design in 2003. In the same year, he played a major role, together with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, in the construction of the Olympic stadium, the so-called Bird's Nest. Following its completion, it became a new symbol of Beijing. In 2007, 1001 Chinese visitors traveled, at his instigation, to documenta 12 in Kassel (Fairytale). In 2010 the world marveled at his large, yet formally minimal carpet of millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern.
Ai Weiwei deliberately confronts social conditions in China and in the world: Through photographically documenting the architectonic clear-cutting of Beijing in the name of progress, with provocative measurements of the world, his personal positionings in the Study of Perspective, with radical cuts in the past (made to found pieces of furniture) in order to create possibilities for the present and the future, and with his tens of thousands of blog entries, blog photographs, and cell phone photographs (along with many other artistic declarations). This first, large exhibition and book project of his photography and videos focuses on Ai Weiwei's diversity, complexity, and connectedness, his "interlacing" and "networking" with hundreds of photographs, blogs, and explanatory essays.
Detained on April 3rd 2011 by the Chinese authorities, released on bail on June 22nd 2011, Ai Weiwei is still today banned from leaving the country.
Curator: Urs Stahel, Exhibition co-produced by Fotomuseum Winterthur and Jeu de Paume, Paris.

Ai Weiwei
Interlacing
Until 29 April 2012
Jeu de Paume 1, Place de la Concorde 75008 Paris
www.jeudepaume.org
lemagazine.jeudepaume.org

Leon Borensztein - American Portraits

A box arrived this morning from Nazraeli Press, in it a copy of Leon Borensztein's wonderful book American Portraits sent to me by Leon at the suggestion of Todd Hido.
Leon Borensztein's American Portraits brings together ten years of portraits by the photographer. Visiting his subjects to make commissioned home portraits against a plain backdrop, with that job done Borensztein would make his own picture, taking a step back to reveal a glimpse into the subject's personal space. The resulting collection of photographs is a playful and heartfelt look into the lives of the everyday "salt-of-the-earth" Americans he encountered.

These photographs are honest pictures of ordinary people made with affection and tenderness. Looking through the book I'm reminded of the importance of both context and chance. Context from the point of view of what's included or not in a picture to influence its reading. And chance, given that Borensztein had little of no control over who he was turning up to photograph nor any control over the location. These two factor make these pictures even more remarkable. So often it is the little things that we find in the frame that make an image sing. For example, the "Magritte eye" just visible on the wall above the photograph of the man with the tattooed swastika on his chest or the veterans of the Canadian Forces image with the man standing on a box to bring him level with the woman he's with. Simple things but loaded.

These are open, uninflected photographs and that increases the quiet sense of mystery and the pleasure to be had looking for the visual clues to aid the reading. The reader is left with unanswered questions, what more can you want from a superb book of photographs.

Father with Son, Bakersfield, California, Leon Borensztein

Leon Borensztein, American Portraits, Nazraeli Press, 2011. Signed book, limited edition of 2,000, 96 pages, clothbound, 13 x 11", 60 duotone reproductions.

You can order a copy directly from Nazraeli Press HERE

Christian Boltanski - STORAGE MEMORY

 

Christian Boltanski has wrangled with questions of memory and the archive for more than three decades with influential works such as Chases School (1986-1987) and Reserve (1989) collecting and exhibiting traces of those who lost their lives in the Holocaust.

More recently, he has taken these questions in a more personal directions with projects like The Life of C.B. (2011) in which he stored thousands of photographs of his studio in a cave in Tasmania.

STORAGE MEMORY, which will begin this month, continues this more introspective exploration of remembering, recording and archiving. For the project, each month Boltanski will produce ten one-minute videos of himself and his life. Anyone interested can sign up on his website, and, for 10 euros, receive monthly video dispatches from the artist. He plans to continue posting these videos for the rest of his life, and taken as a whole they will provide a kind of open-ended self portrait of the artist sent out like a public postcard to all those who subscribe.

By presenting the work on the internet rather than in a gallery or museum, Boltanski hopes to reach an audience beyond the world of contemporary art. As the months and years go by it will be intriguing to see how this ambitious project develops.

You can subscribe to STORAGE MEMORY now by going to: christian-boltanski.com

A memorial to nothing, Christian Boltanski's work at the Grand Palais, Paris, 2010

Auckland, Sunday morning walking

Yesterday was a still and perfect summers day here in Auckland. The sky was an electric blue with few clouds and on my early morning walk through Ponsonby and Grey Lynn the unyielding light cast long, hard shadows. Here are some pictures.

Cindy Sherman at MoMA

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Bringing together more than 170 photographs, this retrospective survey traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking series "Untitled Film Stills" (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman’s recent photographic murals (2010), which will have their American premiere at MoMA.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #58, 1980

The exhibition opens February 26 and runs until June 11.

MoMA has produced a major publication to accompany the exhibition, obtainable now on Amazon. It weighs in at over 2 kilos, with 264 pages and is just US$37.80.

Published to accompany the first major survey of Cindy Sherman's work in the United States in nearly 15 years, this publication presents a stunning range of work from the groundbreaking artist's 35-year career. Showcasing approximately 180 photographs from the mid-1970s to the present, including new works made for the exhibition and never before published, the volume is a vivid exploration of Sherman's sustained investigation into the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation. The book highlights major bodies of work including her seminal Untitled Film Stills (1977-80); centerfolds (1981); history portraits (1989-90); head shots (2000-2002); and two recent series on the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. An essay by curator Eva Respini provides an overview of Sherman's career, weaving together art historical analysis and discussions of the artist's working methods, and a contribution by art historian Johanna Burton offers a critical re-examination of Sherman's work in light of her recent series. A conversation between Cindy Sherman and filmmaker John Waters provides an enlightening view into the creative process.

Duane Michals - the hard work has been done before he picks up his camera

Duane Michals is a photographer whom I've always admired. Not just his photographs but the way he thinks. With his incredible sense of invention he relentlessly questions, himself and society. And it's quite clear that the hard work has been done before he picks up his camera.

He says this about his practice. Photographers walk around with a camera, looking for something that looks like a photograph, to take a picture of. I'm talking about reportage. The point I'm making is that what I did grew out of the need to express something, because what interested me was always life after death. My whole life is preparing myself for my death.
My inquiries, the way I view and question life, is all about the nature of life, but you can't examine the nature of life without wondering about the nature of death. It's yin and yang, you can't separate the one from the other. And, since we spend more time not being than we do being, then I find not being utterly fascinating. In a universe of three trillion million years, we spend 80 years alive, a nanosecond of breath which is our consciousness, and we spend this time unexamined. Most people are not even alive, they're on automatic, totally, with no consciousness of being.

It's the same with photographers. They look but they don't pay attention, and what they see is what they're told it's OK to see by critics or by official bona fide certifiers of photographs. But they're also examining somebody else's life, something they know nothing about. They hardly know anything about their own lives, and it's presumptuous for me to go to Harlem and photograph black people and pretend I know anything about them. But they only see in clichés. We live our lives in terms of clichés. We live very second-hand lives.You know what it's like? It's like reading a hundred love stories, and then falling in love. It's two different things, two different experiences. Photographers are artists reading love stories, they're always looking at other people's emotions, other people's passions without really knowing their own true passions, which is harder to do.

Steidl have just republished Michals 1982 artist's book A Visit with Magritte. Not surprisingly Magritte is an artist that Michals admires and 1965 he photographed the painter in his house in Belgium. Michals comments, "If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was thirty three years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography."

Joerg Colberg and his many sites

German by birth, educated with a doctorate in astrophysics, now residing in the United States Joerg Colberg is today one of the more perceptive critics and writers on contemporary photography. And at last count three active and informative photography related websites to his name.

Colberg's website Conscientious is a site dedicated to contemporary fine-art photography. It offers daily profiles of photographers, in-depth interviews, exhibition and book reviews, and general articles about photography and related issues. More detailed contents – such as the interviews and longer articles, including contributions by guest writers – can be found in the "Extended" section.

The Independent Photobook is a site founded by Colberg and Hester Keijser. Its purpose is to provide a platform for photographers to announces their independently published and/or produced photography books or zines, which are not available via Amazon or other standard outlets.

Joerg Colberg also has a YouTube channel where he presents photobooks by leafing through and talking about them. The YouTube channel is complimentary to his Conscientious site.

If you haven't seen and enjoyed any or all of these sites, they are highly recommended and a must for anybody remotely interested in the now of contemporary art photography.

Two stories from todays news

Bacon portrait fetches $34 million in London sale

A portrait of a female nude by Francis Bacon sold for 21.3 million pounds ($33.7 million) at Christie's on Tuesday, helping bring the total for the post-war and contemporary evening sale in London to 80.6 million pounds ($127.5 million).
"Portrait of Henrietta Moraes", painted in 1963, came toward the lower end of estimates of 18-25 million pounds ($28.5 million-$39.5 million) if the buyer's premium is taken into account. But it was still the highest price paid for a painting in its category at auctioneers Christie's London in four years.

23 million at risk in African drought

The International Federation of the Red Cross says the hunger crisis in the arid, western shoulder of Africa could spread to 23 million people without more immediate aid. The federation - an umbrella group for national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies around the world - estimates 10-14 million people now do not have enough food in the Sahel region due to failed rains, pest attacks and local flooding. IFRC's regional representative for Sahel, Momodou Lamin Fye, told reporters on Tuesday in Geneva that Chad and Mauritania each harvested only half of what was needed.

Not wanting to point out the obvious, but there is a strange and cruel irony in the way the shape of the African woman in the photograph above mirrors the figure in the Bacon painting. We live in a beautiful and sad world!