Palais de Tokyo reopens in Paris

Originally built for the World’s Fair in 1937, the Palais de Tokyo went on to serve as a cinema school, an archival space and, briefly, a squat. Ten months of renovations have brought back into use 14,000 square meters (150,000 square feet) of space left derelict through years of budget constraints and squabbling over whether the Palais was an incubator for young talent or a more conservative, faithful supporter of established French artists. Judging by the first new elements of programming, both demands seem to be catered to, in labyrinthine rooms and corridors that sprawl across four floors that architects Lacaton and Vassal have left under-developed to perfection. It remains to be seen how its new director Jean de Loisy and his curators fare with a Berlin-style industrial concrete site that can be both gracious and unyielding.

The space, which is now Europe's largest centre for contemporary art, opened with fanfair last week with the Paris Triennale - Intense Proximité. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian-born critic and poet, along with four young curators, the Triennale offers a mind boggling inventory of contemporary art at the confluence of the French scene and international centers of creation.

At a few minutes past 6 pm last Thursday, the doors opened to the tuba-like bellows of foghorns from the roof of the Palais, announcing the rebirth — and symbolically, a new maiden voyage — for a several mile radius around Paris. This was a performance, dubbed “Air de Jeu,” by Fouad Bouchoucha, and it is destined to be immortalized through a film featuring recordings that the artist’s assistants made at different historic places while Bouchoucha tooted his horns, which have been reclaimed from decommissioned ships.

The Palais de Tokyo atrium with Maria Loboda’s “Walldrawing”, “Fear Eats The Soul”

Claude Cattelain performing “Armature variable”, at the reopening of the Palais de Tokyo

Ulla von Brandenburg’s site-specific intervention “Death of a King”, at the heart of the Palais de Tokyo

Intense Proximité runs until 26th August. The museum is open everyday (not Monday) noon until midnight.  Métro: Alma-Marceau or Iéna.

Daido Moriyama at LACMA

Shinjuku #11 2000

Photographer Daido Moriyama (Japan, b. 1938) first came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his gritty depictions of Japanese urban life. His highly innovative and intensely personal photographic approach often incorporates high contrast, graininess, and tilted vantages to convey the fragmentary nature of modern realities. Fracture: Daido Moriyama presents a range of the artist’s renowned black-and-white photographs, exemplifying the radical aesthetic of are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus), as well as the debut of recent color work taken in Tokyo. A selection of his photo books—Moriyama has published more than forty to date—highlights the artist’s highly influential experimentation with reproduction media and the transformative possibilities of the printed page.  In total, Moriyama’s achievements convey the artist’s boldly intuitive exploration of urban mystery, memory, and photographic invention.
Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography with Takeji Iwaniya, a professional photographer of architecture and crafts. Moving to Tokyo in 1961, he assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe for three years and became familiar with the trenchant social critiques produced by photographer Shomei Tomatsu. He also drew inspiration from William Klein’s confrontational photographs of New York, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima.

Beauty parlor, Tokyo, c1975

Tokyo, 1981

Kagero (Mayfly) 1972

 Fracture: Daido Moriyama
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
April 7, 2012 - July 31, 2012

Robert Doisneau, 1912 - 2012, would have turned 100 today

Robert Doisneau, one of France's most popular and prolific photographers, was born in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne, Paris on the 14th April 1912. He died on 1st April 1994 at Montrouge, Paris, aged 81. Doisneau is known for his modest, playful images, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of Kertesz, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson, in over 20 books Doisneau has presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments. He wrote: "The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street."

Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville, 1950

In 1950 he created his most recognizable work for Life - Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris, which became an internationally recognised symbol of young love in Paris. The identity of the couple remained a mystery until 1992.

Jean and Denise Lavergne erroneously believed themselves to be the couple in The Kiss, and when Doisneau met them for lunch in the 1980s he "did not want to shatter their dream" so he said nothing. This resulted in them taking him to court for "taking their picture without their knowledge", because under French law an individual owns the rights to their own likeness. The court action forced Doisneau to reveal that he posed the shot using Françoise Delbart and Jacques Carteaud, lovers whom he had just seen kissing but had not initially photographed because of his natural reserve, but he approached them and asked if they would repeat le baiser. He won the court case against the Lavergnes.

The couple in Le baiser were Françoise Delbart, and Jacques Carteaud, 23, both aspiring actors. In 2005 Françoise Bornet (née Delbart) stated that "He told us we were charming, and asked if we could kiss again for the camera. We didn't mind. We were used to kissing. We were doing it all the time then, it was delicious. Monsieur Doisneau was adorable, very low key, very relaxed." They posed at the Place de la Concorde, the Rue de Rivoli and finally the Hôtel de Ville. The photograph was published in the 12 June 1950, issue of Life. The relationship between Delbart and Carteaud only lasted for nine months. Delbart continued her acting career, but Carteaud gave up acting to become a wine producer.

Les Tueurs Melomanes (The Accordionist) 1953

Tableau de Wagner dans la vitrine de la galerie Romi, rue de Seine, 1948

AGAINST FORGETTING

AGAINST FORGETTING  is my autobiographical photo series that I produced in 2010 after revisiting Mount Roskill the Auckland suburb of my childhood. The photobook I made at the time to support this work has long been out of print. I have now produced a second edition, limited to 50 copies, to coincide with a show of the series here in Auckland at the Corban Estate Arts Centre.

The photobook is a 32 page work with 26 photographs in an edition of 50 signed and numbered copies.

I will include a signed and numbered pigment print, of The Snowman image, from an edition of 20, 153 x 115 mm,  with the first 20 copies of  AGAINST FORGETTING sold. 

The Snowman, limited edition print of 20 copies

AGAINST FORGETTING  can be obtained directly from me at: harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz
Prices are, €24 / £20 / US$30 / NZ$36, which include packing and postage. For payment you can simply log on to my PayPal account using my email address above.

Here are some spreads from the book:

While re-looking at my AGAINST FORGETTING work I came across this piece on memory from the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. I really like it.

Memory is our domestic form of time travel.  The invention of photography--in particular, the 'snapshot'--revolutionized human consciousness, for when we claim to "remember" our pasts, we are surely remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a distinct visual immortality.  Just as art provides answers long before we understand the questions, so, too, our relationship with our distant past, in particular our relationship with our parents, is a phenomenon we come to realize only by degrees, as we too age, across the mysterious abyss of time.

Todd Hido - Amsterdam workshop

Todd Hido at work in Auckland, January 2011

Todd Hido is conducting a 6 day intensive workshop in the heart of Amsterdam, starting Monday 4th of June and finishing Saturday 9th of June 2012.
Todd presented a workshop here in Auckland last year and after having seen him work I can highly recommend his Amsterdam workshop. Todd is an inspirational teacher! You can find out more by going to the insightsproject site HERE.

Todd Hido, Untitled #10096, 2011, from Silver Meadows series

Jörg Colberg, in conversation with Christian Patterson

Christian Patterson’s bookwork Redheaded Peckerwood made it onto more "best of" photobook lists last year than any other title. The book works with the tricky balance between fact and fiction and ultimately relies on an engagement with the reader to bring their own feelings, imagination and interpretation to the work.

Jörg Colberg says this, the work is a body of amazing depth and sophistication, it is a shining example of what the contemporary photobook can do.

Jörg has used the occasion of the books second edition as on opportunity to talk to Christian about the book. The conversation is well worth a read and you can do so HERE,  linking to  Jörg Colberg's Conscientious site.

William Eggleston, the lawsuit

Christies's NYC, March 12, Lot 24, untitled 1979, realized $578,500

 Is it possible to create a new photograph from an old negative? That’s the question at the center of a bitter legal dispute between collector Jonathan Sobel and photographer William Eggleston. On April 4, Sobel filed a complaint against the artist in federal court, alleging that Eggleston diluted the value of Sobel’s collection by printing larger, digital versions of some of his best-known works and then selling them for record prices at Christie's. “The commercial value of art is scarcity, and if you make more of something, it becomes less valuable,” said Sobel, who owns 190 Eggleston works worth an estimated $3 to $5 million. “I feel betrayed.” The Whitney Museum trustee and former Goldman Sachs executive is a committed collector of Eggleston’s work: He frequently lends photographs from his collection to museum exhibitions and even helped finance the photographer’s 2008 retrospective. But if he had known Eggleston would someday make digital reprints of works from his collection, he never would have bought them in the first place, he said.
When Eggleston decided to print his photographs in limited editions in the 1970s and 1980s, digital technology didn’t exist yet. But according to Eggleston’s lawyer, John Cahill, the artist has the right to explore this new medium today, even if he is only using it to make larger versions of earlier, limited-edition photographs. “A limited edition is a collection of physical objects, but the artist owns the copyright for the image itself,” Cahill told ARTINFO. “There is no law that prevents an artist from creating additional works with the same image.” Cahill also noted that with few exceptions, Eggleston almost never sold his works as "'limited editions' as such," but rather would print images depending on his resources and artistic inclination at the time. 
The Christie’s sale featured 36 poster-size, digital prints of images that Eggleston had shot in the Mississippi Delta more than 30 years ago. Some, like a wistful image of a car trunk, were created from negatives he had never printed before, while others were based on iconic works, such as the famous “Memphis (Tricycle).” Sobel owns a 17-inch version of that photograph — he told the Wall Street Journal he bought it two years ago from a collector for roughly $250,000. Last month, the 5-foot-wide digital version sold at Christie’s for $578,500, the highest price ever paid at auction for an Eggleston photograph. By the time the sale was over, digital versions accounted for seven of the artist’s top 10 prices.
It is, of course, too soon to determine whether the large-format prints will indeed decrease the value of the original photographs, as Sobel fears. On Thursday, one of the original dye transfer prints of “Untitled (Peaches)”, a 1973 photograph of a painted “Peaches” sign perched on a tin roof,  sold at Christie’s for $242,500, well over the high estimate of $90,000. (The five-foot digital version sold in March for $422,500.) Seven of 15 Eggleston prints in Thursday’s sale, however, were withdrawn before the sale.
This isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of these digital images either. In October, Cheim & Reid will present a selection at the next  Frieze Art Fair in London. Gagosian Beverly Hills is also planning an exhibition of the digital works.
Though it’s too early to discern the market outcome, lawyers say Sobel’s case hinges on a different question: Are the digital works different from the original prints? In a statement, Christie’s called the digitals “a completely new addition” to Eggleston’s oeuvre; the house's photography specialist told PDN they were marketed as works of contemporary art designed to appeal to contemporary art collectors, not photography traditionalists. But Sobel’s lawyer disagrees: “They think making it bigger makes it different, but that’s not true,” said Thomas Danziger.
Photography dealers have a different take. “Clients are cognizant of the difference between dye transfer prints and digital prints. They have a very different appeal,” Julie Saul president of an eponymous photography gallery in Chelsea, told ARTINFO “Eggleston's work is all about color, and the dyes have a richness you don't get in other kinds of prints. It is my understanding that the dye transfer process is the most archival of the color processes.”
Perhaps Sobel’s claim is more interesting as an ontological question than a legal one. What does it mean to create a new work of art in the digital age? According to Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and consultant to Eggleston’s legal counsel, the vintage and digital prints “are entirely different, as objects — viewers experience these prints quite differently, and the market clearly has placed a high value on both experiences.” In today's plugged-in world, audiences frequently see images of artwork reproduced online and believe “they've 'got it,' but that is reducing the artwork to merely an image. These new prints are an affirmation that the particular tangible expression of an idea, the physical life of an artwork, has a unique power."
Article by Julia Halperin, ARTINFO

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker

I watched Andrei Tarkovsky's epic 1979 film Stalker last night prompted by the fact that Geoff Dyer has written a response to the film in his critically acclaimed book Zona.
With a screenplay written by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Stalker is loosely based on their novel Roadside Picnic. It depicts an expedition led by the Stalker to bring his two clients to a site known as the Zone, which has the supposed potential to fulfill a person's innermost desires.

Tarkovsky spent a year shooting a version of the outdoor scenes of Stalker. However, when the crew got back to Moscow, they found that all of the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable. The film had been shot on experimental Kodak stock with which Soviet laboratories were unfamiliar. Even before the film stock problem was discovered, relations between Tarkovsky and Stalker's first cinematographer, Georgy Rerberg, had deteriorated. After seeing the poorly developed material, Rerberg left the first screening session and never came back. By the time the film stock defect was discovered, Tarkovsky had shot all the outdoor scenes and had to burn them. 
After the loss of the film stock, the Soviet film boards wanted to shut the film down, officially writing it off. But Tarkovsky came up with a solution: he asked to make a two-part film, which meant additional deadlines and more funds. Tarkovsky ended up reshooting almost all of the film with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinsky. 
The film mixes sepia and color footage; within the Zone, in the countryside, all is colorful, while the outside, urban world is tinted sepia.

Stalker relies on long takes with slow, subtle camera movement, rejecting the use of rapid montage. Indeed, the film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes. Stalker is remarkable for its haunting vision and existential meditation on time, place and memory, questioning notions of truth and reality. A journey into the meaning of things.
Knyazhinsky's spare photography is compellingly black. Every single shot counts with subtle action evolving, almost floating past in the often locked-off frame. There are recurring images of water, rain and reflections. Here are some of the images:

In his book Zona, Geoff Dyer attempts to unlock the mysteries of Stalker, a film that has haunted him ever since he first saw it thirty years ago. As Dyer guides us into the zone of Tarkovsky’s imagination, we realize that the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live.

Chris Coekin - The Altogether

 
The Altogether is the latest book by London based photographer Chris Coekin. The photographs were produced in a factory that began manufacturing copper wire in 1834. Unfortunately, the factory recently closed and the entire workforce was made redundant. The Altogether is a multi-layered project that investigates the notions of art, work and struggle. The book comprises three series of images and is accompanied by a seven-inch vinyl record that includes two audio tracks: Days at The Factories and CuSO4 Shuffle.

The Altogether are staged portraits of the employees of the factory - the backbone of the production. Coekin found his inspiration in the iconography and theatricality of Trade Union banners. Manufactory Pt I investigates the overlooked industrial space where a collision between nature, toil and the manufacturing process has occurred, resulting in a formation of a geological micro-environment. Manufactory Pt II (aka Made in England) are studies of old manual tools that Coekin found. These actions took on the process of an archaeological dig and the artifacts that he unearthed became metaphors and symbols of a 'lost work force.' Days at the Factories and CuSo4 Shuffle synthesise sounds from the factory and feature recorded spoken word from the factory workers. Collaboration with a music producer has resulted in a more refined melodic and musical interpretation of these sounds.

The photographs are reproduced on hand-folded gatefold pages running concurrently through the book including a text written by Coekin. The cover illustration is foil printed and embossed onto cloth, these processes pay homage to the craftsman.

Chris showed me a copy of The Altogether at last year's Paris Photo. The book is stunningly conceived, exactingly realized and is a superb object in its own right. What's more it is totally authentic and continues Chris's thoughtful examination of the heartland of industrial Britain. This book is certain to be on many of this years  top photobook lists.  You can buy a copy of The Altogether HERE and see more of Chris's work HERE.

Read Colin Pantall's review of The Altogether in photo-eye Magazine. 

If you go to Joerg Colberg's YouTube site, HERE, Joerg has just posted a visual run through of The Altogether, together with his commentary.

            

The Altogether, by Chris Coekin, Walkout, 2012. 124 pp., 28x4 page gatefolds, 27 color illustrations, 8¾x6¾".

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE ART WORLD, a panel discusssion, Saatchi Gallery, London

Photography and its relationship to the art world will be the subject of a panel discussion at the Saatchi Gallery London on Wednesday April 25th. Panelists include Susan Bright, Geoff Dyer, Mitch Epstein and Hannah Starkey.

In 2010 the artist-photographer Paul Graham delivered a blistering presentation to the MoMA Photography Forum in which he said that "there remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography". Intelligence² recently ran a debate on the topic: "Photography will always be a lesser medium than paint." At the 2011 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize there was outrage from certain quarters that the documentary photographer Jim Goldberg should be on the same shortlist as Thomas Demand and Elad Lassry.

So why is it that there is still this complicated, rivalrous relationship between the worlds of art and photography? Why is photography still referred to in a semi-derogatory way? What is it about photography that makes it, for some people, inherently of less worth when held up against other art mediums? Are photographers such as Walker Evans and Diane Arbus really lesser artists than their painter contemporaries, Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly respectively?

This event, organised to launch the Saatchi Gallery's major photography exhibition Out of Focus, comes at a time when the world of photography is going through one of its richest and also most challenging moments. Traditional boundaries between various territories within the world of photography – fashion, documentary, advertising and art – are blurring into one another in unexpected, exciting and not always tension-free ways; in some people's eyes 'straight' photography is being usurped by conceptual photography; and with that, even the labels 'artist' and 'photographer' are the subject of debate.

During the discussion photographers Mitch Epstein and Hannah Starkey will join writer Geoff Dyer and curator Susan Bright to explore the relationship between art and photography. They will attempt to define what it is that is unique about photography and the creative act of making a photograph, and enlarge the way we view the world of visual art.

You can read more here and buy tickets

Hans-Peter Feldmann at Serpentine Gallery, London

Hans-Peter Feldmann (born 1941, Dusseldorf) rose to prominence in the early 1970s, earning worldwide acclaim for his expansive and encyclopaedic photographic series. Often presented in the form of books, posters, postcards and installations, these collections link Feldmann's life-long fascination with collecting elements of visual culture. His exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery will be his first solo presentation in a London public gallery.

For his Serpentine exhibition, Feldmann presents works from throughout his career. Among the earliest works is a series of booklets titled Bilder (Pictures), each consisting of a collection of photographs of everyday subjects or situations. His Time Series, produced during the mid-1970s, expanded upon this, chronicling the most banal events frame by frame, thereby effectively slowing down the passage of time.

Feldmann is a prolific producer of artist's books. His publications have been instrumental in establishing the genre as a recognisable form of artistic practice, influencing generations of artists who have followed him.

Feldmann's appetite for amassing cultural artefacts is demonstrated in a new work presented for the first time at the Serpentine. The artist purchased a number of ladies' handbags along with their entire contents, filling museological vitrines with credit cards, mobile telephones and address books, making passing fashions and lifestyle choices the object of display and public discussion. Also seen for the first time at the Serpentine is Seascapes, a collection of 15 traditional oil paintings in conventional frames shown as a group.

Feldmann's work has been exhibited widely, including recent solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2011), Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), Arnolfini, Bristol (2007) and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1992). His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2003 and Take Me I'm Yours at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995.

The show runs from April 11 until June 5, 2012

Ten Oeuvres Aspiring Photographers Should Ignore

After reading a piece, “The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers.” Bryan Formhals, founder and managing editor of LPV Magazine  wondered whether there could be a list for photographers as well.  Bryan thought about it and then sent his list to blogger Blake Andrews to see if he wanted to contribute and have some fun. It seems some people in the photoworld have neither a sense of irony or humor and have taken exception to the piece. Yes, the list is funny but it also contains an element of truth. Simply this, look at your heroes but don't touch, come up with your own voice not a pale replica of something done before. Here is the list:

Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams created some remarkable images and he wrote the book (literally) on photographic technique. Yet on the whole he’s probably done more harm than good for photography. How many young photographers have fussed over which zone to put the shadows in while the light fades and the photo disappears? More importantly, how many perfectly exposed black and white vistas of snowcapped peaks or rivers snaking into the background do we need to see? Yes, nature is majestic. We get it. Saint Ansel showed us, and he did it better than you ever will, so move on already or we’ll score your performance as a negative.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Cartier-Bresson was a genius but also a Pied Piper. He probably did more to narrow the path of street photography than anyone else. Before HCB, street photography was relatively undefined and wide open. Then HCB came along and showed how it was done. You lurk the streets for hours, breathlessly hunting. Finally you alight on the perfect composition but… It’s missing that crucial element. What is it? You can’t decide. The stage is set. You wait until the the right person comes along. How long? Hours? Days? You wait as long as it takes…Then Snap! Just like that the moment is decided, and unfortunately so are the next 70 years of street photography. Young photographers ever since have tortured themselves waiting forever on picturesque corners for that elusive Decisive Moment, the picture fully formed except for a perfectly postured pedestrian, or maybe just a finger pointing suggestively. Thanks, Henri, but I haven’t got all day. Can I have my life back now?

Robert Frank
Robert Frank was a one-man revolution. Before him pictures for the most part were pretty and clean and pre-visualized, and shot from a tripod. Frank came along and tore a new A-hole in that aesthetic. Fortunately he had something to replace it with: a strong personal vision. Most young photographers who follow in his footsteps don’t. They mistake grain, guts, and verve with substance. Sorry folks, but hitting three out of four doesn’t count. I know it took cajones to shoot that cowboy bar at 1 am pushing your film to 3200, but that doesn’t keep your photo from being boring. Time to shoot something you care about, and don’t try to convince me it’s flags or the underclass.

Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore was the ultimate Nothing photographer. To the untrained eye, or even to the trained one, his photographs seem artless. What’s the subject? Why this scene and not some other? Is this some sort of trick? A test? There’s nothing there. It’s only after repeated viewings that the framing, precision, and subject matter of Shore’s work begin to seem profound. Unfortunately, that’s too late for many young photographers. They’re already off shooting Nothing, hoping to follow Shore’s footsteps. Why, it’s easy. You find a gas station or a parking lot or a wall or something, maybe an antique car. The colors must go together since you found them like that, right? Line them up and…Sorry to disappoint you but you just exposed a big fat 8 x 10 of Nothing.

Nan Goldin
Hey youngsters, just because Nan Goldin is surrounded by glamorous friends leading tragic photogenic lives doesn’t mean your own story is halfway near as interesting. Goldin was in the right place at the right time and was an intuitive genius with the camera. Even when she was in the wrong place at the wrong time she was a genius. Chances are you’re in the wrong place, wrong time, and you’re not a genius, and no amount of postproduction is gonna make your self-inflicted black eye in that snapshot seem like an accident. Get a life and stop your culture slumming, and don’t look now but your MFA is showing.

William Eggleston
William Eggleston is a pioneer of color photography, and a legend. For the last forty years he’s been “at war with the obvious,” working in a “democratic forest” where everything visible is equally viable as subject matter. Trees, dirt, signs, houses, carpet, red ceilings, naked men, old men with guns, tricycles, etc. Working in this manner, he inspired many photographers to look no further than their immediate surroundings for inspiration. Then came digital cameras, and then the internet, and then Flickr. Eggleston may have won the war with the obvious, but now the obvious is getting its revenge in the form of the millions of banal, boring, dull photographs that are being uploaded to the web everyday. We don’t need to go far to find the ‘democratic forest,’ in fact, we may never be able to escape it.

Ryan McGinley
Ryan McGinley burst onto the scene with his photographs of carefree naked young people frolicking in wide open spaces. Arriving in the post 9/11 world, these photographs showed us that the young were resilient, still seeking, still loving, still experimenting. And damn, were they skinny and white, really skinny and white. It made me as a photographer want to rent a van, find some skinny pretty friends and just hit the road and live man, just live. Apparently though, this thought went through just about every young, hip photographer’s mind between the ages of 18-25. The open road impulse, along with a resurgence of the lo-fi film aesthetic has spawned endless blogs, Tumblrs and Flickr streams dedicated to documenting the carefree existence of pretty naked young people who are too busy dreaming to care how boring they look.

Garry Winogrand
When you think about Garry Winogrand, almost immediately, you think about street photography. He was the photographer flaneur of the New York street’s in the ’50s and ’60s, who also took his Leica tilt show on the road in the search of the elusive photograph he’d never seen in his viewfinder before. He was obsessive and devoted, wild and loose with his compositions. ’What tilt?’ he would say in jest. What tilt? No, no, no! Don’t you understand young street photographer that it took him years and years and years to achieve the skill and precision necessary to compose on the fly. What tilt is not a legitimate rationalization for your own sloppy, poorly composed street photographs. You only have one choice in this, you must make it your goal to die with more than 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film.

Alec Soth
Lyrical landscapes, deadpan portraits, ironic interiors, melancholia, beard, 8x10s, epic projects. Thanks Soth, you’ve raised the bar so high I’m afraid all the bearded MFA kids are going to be old and gray before they ever finish their great American photography project. And really, do you have to be so bloody sardonic about contemporary photography? Photographers don’t need any help becoming grumpy and skeptical about photography. How about this, rent a van, buy a Leica M9, invite some 60 something hippies on a road trip to Puerto Vallarta, and document the whole thing on Tumblr. Wait, that’s pretty depressing too. You win Soth.

Diane Arbus
Actually, don’t ignore her work. Absorb it, absorb it all, marvel in her genius and grace. However, when the word ‘freaks’ enters your consciousness put the book down immediately. The characeristics that drew Arbus to her subjects aren’t going to be the same for you. Her famous quote, “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them,” applied to a much different time period. Today with cable TV and the internet, we’re to see just about every type of human, in every form imaginable. What draws photographers to certain people is a mystery. Embrace it, and follow your intuition.

New York, The AIPAD photography show 2012

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) will hold the 32nd edition of The AIPAD Photography Show New York, one of the world’s most important annual photography events, this weekend, March 29 – April 1, 2012, at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street in New York City.
Seventy-five of the world’s leading fine art photography galleries will present a wide range of museum-quality work, including contemporary, modern, and 19th-century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video, and new media. The AIPAD Photography Show New York is the longest running and foremost exhibition of fine art photography. The Show commenced with an opening night gala on March 28, 2012, to benefit inMotion, which provides free legal services to low-income women.
AIPAD 2012 will present four new member exhibitors: David Zwirner, New York; Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York; Paul Cava Fine Art Photographs, Bala Cynwyd, PA; and 798 Photo Gallery, Beijing.

A wide range of the world’s leading fine art photography galleries will exhibit at The AIPAD Photography Show New York. In addition to galleries from New York City and across the country, a number of international galleries will be featured from France, Germany, Great Britain, Argentina, Japan, and China.

Tim Hetherington at Yossi Milo Gallery's booth, AIPAD 2012

The Association of International Photography Art Dealers [AIPAD] was organized in 1979. With members in the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe and Japan, the Association has become a unifying force in the field of photography. AIPAD is dedicated to creating and maintaining high standards in the business of exhibiting, buying and selling photographs as art.

Photography by Kyle Chayka

The Met - Naked before the Camera

André Kertész, Distortion #6, 1932

Since the beginning of art and in every medium, depicting the human body has been among the artist's greatest challenges and supreme achievements, as can so easily be seen by Museum visitors walking through the galleries of Greek and Roman statuary, African and Oceanic art, Old Master paintings, or Indian sculpture. Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have also triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—when a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail.
In the medium's early days—particularly in France, where Victorian notions of propriety held less sway than in England and America, and where life drawing was a central part of artistic training—photographs proved to be a cheap and easy substitute for the live model. While serving painters and sculptors, many nineteenth-century photographic nudes were also intended as works of art in their own right. Still others bore the title "artist's study" merely to evade government censors and legitimize images that were, in fact, more likely intended to stir a gentleman's loins than to enhance his aesthetic endeavors. Outside the realms of art and erotica, photographic nudes were made to aid the study of anatomy, movement, forensics, and ethnography.
In twentieth-century art, the body became a vehicle for surreal and modernist manipulation and for intimate odes to beauty or poems to a muse. Beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, nudity and its representation took on new meanings—as declarations of freedom from societal strictures, as assertions of individual identity, as explorations of sexuality and gender roles, and as responses to AIDS. Naked before the Camera surveys the history of this subject and examines some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its expression.

Naked before the Camera at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 27 to September 9, 2012

Brassaï , L'Academie Julian, 1931

 

Auckland, Autumn light in Sandringham

Sandringham is a suburb 15 minutes or so from downtown Auckland. Californian bungalow style houses on large plots line orderly grids of tree shaded streets. I wandered these quiet streets early yesterday morning in hard Autumn light under an ice blue sky. Here are some photographs.

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

The Guggenheim Museum's 264 page catalogue to Rineke Dijkstra's retrospective is now available. The volume is the first comprehensive monograph on Rineke Dijkstra to be published in the United States. The catalogue accompanies the first U.S. mid-career survey of this important Dutch artist's work in photography and video; it features the Beach Portraits and other early works such as the photographs of new mothers and bullfighters, together with selections from Dijkstra's later work including her most recent video installations. Also included are series that she has been working on continuously for years, such as Almerisa (1994-present), which documents a young immigrant girl as she grows up and adapts to her new environment. The catalogue features essays by exhibition curators Jennifer Blessing (Senior Curator of Photography at the Guggenheim) and Sandra S. Phillips (Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). 

Here is a link to amazon