pjotr berchem

art,photography, film, music and everything else that matters

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Dave Heath- Dialogues with Solitudes

14 September – 23 December 2018

Le BAL (6, Impasse de la Défense, 75018 Paris)

“A Dialogue with Solitude is a self-portrait, the result of a quest for anonymous figures in whom I recognize myself."

- Dave Heath Dave Heath occupies a unique place in the history of American photography. Influenced by W. Eugene Smith and the photographers of the Chicago School, including Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, he cannot, however, be considered as either a documentary or an experimental photographer. His photography is above all a way of bearing witness to his presence in the world by recognizing an alter ego in others absorbed in their inner torment. He was one of the first, in the 1950s, to express the sense of alienation and isolation inherent to modern society in such a radical manner. Abandoned by his parents at the age of four in 1935, Dave Heath had a difficult childhood in Philadelphia, spent in orphanages and foster homes. At fifteen, a photo essay in Life on a young orphan in Seattle, "Bad Boy’s Story" by Ralph Crane, was to have a decisive impact on his future: "I immediately recognized myself in this story and photography as my means of expression." In 1952, when he was twenty-one years old, Dave Heath was enlisted in the army and sent to Korea as a machine gunner. There he captured his first "inner landscapes", photographing fellow soldiers outside the battlefields, in intimate, self-absorbed moments, while striving to grasp "the vulnerability of a consciousness turned inwards." American street scenes in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York (where he settled in 1957), allowed him to refine his search. Rather than simply capturing a scene or an event – almost all of his photographs give no indication of location, date, or action – Dave Heath sought to translate an intimate experience of the world, something lived and felt: tension, in the city streets, between the constrained proximity of bodies and the isolation of individuals, as if they had lost their sense of self. He focused on isolated figures in crowds, and filled his frame with their "absent to the world" presences.

Conceived in 1961 and published in 1965, A Dialogue with Solitude is one of that decade’s most striking books, capturing the zeitgeist in the manner of a photographic protest song. Dave Heath depicted the fractures and feeling of unease in the American post-war society of abundance, prior to the rise of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. After 1970, Dave Heath gave up photography and devoted his time to teaching (in particular at Ryerson University, Toronto) in Canada, where he later became a citizen and died in 2016. 

As the first major presentation of his work in France, this exhibition brings together around 150 contemporary prints and original maquettes.

Dave Heath’s photographs are presented in a dialogue with three American cult films of the 1960’s. Between Direct Cinema and alternative practices, they feature three variations on the theme of solitude:

Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke (1966),Salesman by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Mitchell Zwerin (1968),The Savage Eye by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick (1960).

"THE FACT I NEVER HAD A FAMILY, A PLACE OR A STORY THAT DEFINED ME INSPIRED A NEED IN ME TO JOIN THE COMMUNITY OF MANKIND. I DID SO BY INVENTING A POETIC FORM LINKING THIS COMMUNITY, AT LEAST SYMBOLICALLY, IN MY IMAGINATION, THROUGH THIS FORM."

- Dave Heath

The exhibition will lead to a book co-published by Le BAL and Steidl, and conceived by Pierre Hourquet: Dialogues With Solitudes 

http://www.le-bal.fr/

https://steidl.de/Books/Dialogues-with-Solitudes-1217323650.html

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Belgian photographer Lara Gasparotto (1989) presents her photo-series Ask the Dusk as an intimate journal somewhere between dream and reality. It comprises semi-abstract landscapes, portraits of loved ones and impressions of her surroundings, taken in both colour and black-and-white and shown in a mystical, disorientating context.

At first glance, Lara Gasparotto’s work may seem to be documentary but her aim is something more than just reportage. She uses the fragmentary images that she garners from her own life to create poetic narratives that may or may not correspond to reality. Talking about Ask the Dusk, she herself says, ‘The narrative I’ve created has no set beginning and no definite end, it merely shows eruptions of life in different shades of time.’ She records these ‘eruptions’ in rough black-and-white images or, sometimes, in explosions of colour. The images are sometimes sharply focused and provocative, sometimes blurred moments of intimacy, or strange and disconcerting landscapes. She looks for the beauty of the moment and captures it with great spontaneity. Her photographs are almost never staged. At most, she may ask the friends who appear in them to change position slightly. Together, these fragments of her life form a new story.

Lara Gasparotto (b. 1989) trained at the Saint-Luc École Supérieure des Arts in her home city of Liège. She has had solo shows at the Biënnale de la Photographie de Liège, the Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht, the 3 Shadows Arts Center in Beijing and the OCT Arts Center in Shenzhen. She began photographing her own circle of friends at an early age. Her work is part of the ‘diaristic photography’ trend that emerged with Nan Goldin in the 1980s, and of which major photographs like Nobuyoshi Araki and Anders Petersen are more recent adherents. But Lara Gasparotto’s photographs are more mysterious and dreamlike. They reveal her love of the countryside in which she grew up and to which she frequently returns, even in the course of her travels.

Belgian publishers Ludion have issued a book, also entitled Ask the Dusk, with an introduction by Francesca Alfano Miglietti.

http://www.ludion.be/nl/books/detail/ask-the-dusk

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"Werkstatt für Photographie 1976 – 1986"

A cooperation between C/O Berlin, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and Sprengel Museum Hannover.

This December, C/O Berlin, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and Sprengel Museum Hannover are launching a joint exhibition project as part of their tri-city collaboration. Examined through the lens of Berlin’s Werkstatt für Photographie and Essen’s nascent photography scene, the exhibition takes a fresh look at an important chapter in the history of German photography that has been partly obscured by the success story of the Düsseldorf School.

The working-class district of Kreuzberg at the end of the 1970s on the outer edge of West Berlin – and yet the lively center of a unique transatlantic cultural exchange. In the midst of the Cold War, the newly founded Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography) located near Checkpoint Charlie started an artistic "air lift" in the direction of the USA, a democratic field of experimentation beyond traditional education and political and institutional standards. A special artistic approach emerged from a dialog between renowned photographers and amateurs, between conceptual approaches and documentary narrations, between technical mediation and substantive critique and altered the styles of many photographers over time thanks to its direct access to their reality. The Werkstatt für Photographie reached the highest international standing with its intensive mediation work through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, image reviews, discussions and specialized courses.

In 1976, the Berlin-based photographer Michael Schmidt founded the Werkstatt für Photographie at the adult education center in Kreuzberg. Its course orientation with a focus on a substantive examination of contemporary photography was unique and quickly lead to a profound understanding of the medium as an independent art form. When the institution was closed in 1986, it fell into obscurity.

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Werkstatt für Photographie, C/O Berlin, Museum Folkwang Essen and Sprengel Museum Hannover are presenting a joint exhibition project, which for the first time portrays the history, influences and effects of this institution and its key players divided between three stages. Furthermore, the three stages outline the situation of a changing medium, which focuses on independent, artistic authorship encouraged by consciousness of American photography. As such, they’re designing a lively and multi-perspective presentation of photography in the 1970s and 1980s that adds an additional chapter to the history of West German photography of the time beyond that of the Düsseldorf School.

C/O Berlin is addressing the history of the Werkstatt für Photographie in its contribution entitled Kreuzberg – Amerika (December 10, 2016 – February 12, 2017). Within the context of adult education, a unique forum for contemporary photography emerged. A special focus is placed on the exhibitions of the American photographers that were often presented in the workshop for the first time and had an enormous effect on the development of artistic photography in Germany. The exhibition combines the works of faculty, students and guests into a transatlantic dialogue.

The Museum Folkwang in Essen is exploring the reflection of the general change of those years in its own Folkwang history with its work entitled The Rebellious Image (December 9, 2016 – February 19, 2017). After the death of the influential photography teacher Otto Steinerts in 1978, a completely open and productive situation of uncertainty reigned. Essen became more and more of a bridgehead for the exchange with Berlin and a point of crystallization for early contemporary photography in the Federal Republic. Along with Michael Schmidt, who made provocative points during his time as a lecturer at the GHS Essen, Ute Eskildsen counted among the key players at Museum Folkwang as a curator. Early photography based in Essen addressed urbanity and youth culture, discovered color as a mode of artistic expression, asked questions following new documentarian approaches, authentic images and attitudes and contrasted the objective distance of the Düsseldorf School with a research-based and subjective view.

The Sprengel Museum Hannover complements both exhibitions with a perspective in which the focus rests on publications, institutions and exhibitions that encouraged the transatlantic exchange starting in the mid 1960s. Using outstanding examples And Suddenly this Expanse (December 11, 2016 – March 19, 2017) tells of the development of the infrastructure that laid the foundation for and accompanied the context of the documentarian approach. The photo magazine Camera also takes on an equally central role as the founding of the first German photo galleries such as Galerie Wilde in Cologne, Lichttropfen in Aachen, Galerie Nagel in Berlin and the Spectrum Photogalerie initiative in Hanover. The documenta 6 from 1977 and the photo magazines that emerged in the 1970s, particularly Camera Austria, have separate chapters devoted to them.

For the exhibition Koenig Books is offering the joint publication "Werkstatt für Photographie 1976 – 1986".

https://www.buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de/koenig2/index.php?mode=quick&quickshow=true&art_nr=9783960980438

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JH ENGSTROM October 2016: Fear of Leaving

WAS AVAILABLE FOR 48 Hours

so this post is too late, but I thought it was a great idea.

Mörel Books have worked closely with Engstrom to offer a book that is only available for 48 hours - from midnight (GMT) October 27th until 11:59pm October 28th.

Mörel will only print the amount of copies which are ordered in this time frame - in a sense this book is limited by a time window. No copies will be available from the morning of Saturday October 29th.

Copies will exclusively be sold from our website and the Photographers Gallery  (London) website.

The book plays an integral part of JH Engstrom's practice. His numerous books are developed over a number of maquettes and tend to be fused with energy. This project consists of work from Engstroms archive collaged as well as new work.

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LE BAL presents the first exhibition dedicated to the famous Japanese magazine, which greatly influenced the history of photography through its major figures: Nakahira Takuma, Moriyama Daido, Takanashi Yutaka. Both a manifesto and a collective work, Provoke assigned a new role to photography as a reaction to violent social and political turmoil and echoed the emerging Performance art scene. The exhibition and the accompanying book are the result of three years of research and collaboration between four international museums – Albertina (Austria), Winterthur Fotomuseum (Switzerland), the Art Institute of Chicago (USA) and LE BAL (France) – and more than 40 international lenders, artists, collectors, museums, and galleries Part I : Protest Beginning around 1960, a wave of books appeared in conjunction with the country’s first large-scale protests, mobilized against the 1960 renewal of the United States-Japan alliance. The protest movements, many student-led, grew in the later 1960s, at which point they generated a torrent of photobooks and photographic prints. Many of these books featured innovative graphic design involving photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping, and an alternation of provocatively “poor” materials (rough paper, low-resolution printing) with gatefolds and odd trim sizes. During the years around Provoke, the massively creative protest movement created a riveting photoworld of opposition to corporate malfeasance and the despotism of the neoliberal Japanese state. The members of Provoke - critic Taki Kōji, poet Takahiko Okada, critic/photographer Takuma Nakahira, and photographers Yutaka Takanashi and Moriyama Daido - claimed that protest photography was exhausted, and asserted the impossibility of effecting lasting change through direct political action. Nevertheless, their writing and images are suffused with the tactics developed in Japanese protest photography, as this exhibition will show; they and their colleagues also expressed real sympathy for the protesters as the movement reached its culminating period in 1969-71.

Part II : PROVOKE - the magazine Provoke took place "between protest and performance". It 'brought up for discussion' both the state and its dissenting subjects. The magazine (like the protesters) showed dissatisfaction with consumer capitalism, a society saturated by mass media, and the uncontrolled transformation of urban space, but it also subjected the group dynamics of protest movements - the formation of a community of discussants - to a radical critique, along the lines of the architectural collective Metabolism, the performance group Hi-Red Center, or Terayama Shuji’s Tenjo Sajiki troupe. Its members responded to the precedents set by photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei, as regards the relation of photography to language, and the need to question the subject position of anyone engaged in ‘reporting’ on the times. In magazine and book projects that stretch over roughly a decade - far longer than the quick life of Provoke itself - members of the group acted to take apart subjectivity and to keep photography, and language, in a state of perpetual development: words and images in formation, engaging yet resisting a world dominated by information.

Part III : PERFORMANCE To go beyond mere picturing, photography would need to forsake its claim to be a lasting record, a "mirror with a memory." Instead, photographs and photobooks would become fleeting, contingent things, flaring up into the social landscape.

Moriyama Daido, Nakahira Takuma, and Araki Nobuyoshi are among the photographers who became intensely interested around 1970 in making darkroom activity or other processes of print creation into a visible and active part of photographic creation. They were preceded in these interests by dance performers, such as Hijikata Tatsumi and Terayama Shuji, who had worked with filmmakers and photographers; and by groups such as Hi-Red Center, who blurred the line between photodocumentation and live works involving photography among other media. Architect Arata Isozaki had also importantly used a photosculpture as a site of live intervention for an exhibition in 1962. But the influence did not flow one-way only.

In the early 1970s, following Provoke, Takamatsu Jiro, a member of Hi-Red Center, and Kōji Enokura, who had belonged to the related fine-arts group Mono-Ha, each turned to photoconceptual art expressly after witnessing the work of Provoke photographers.

Publication To coincide with the exhibition, LE BAL and Steidl copublish "Provoke – Between Protest and Performance". The book retraces the history of the short-lived—but cult—avant-garde Japanese photography magazine Provoke. It reproduces the complete photographic works and critical writings showcased in the three issues by its members Taki Kōji, Okada Takahiko, Nakahira Takuma, Takanashi Yutaka, and Moriyama Daido. Positioning "Provoke" within a socio-historical context of major political upheaval, the book analyzes the influence and legacy of this powerful group that broke the boundaries between protest, photography and the performative arts in Japan. The book features full reprints of the three Provoke issues, students' "Protest books", important theoretical texts of the period translated from Japanese for the first time, works from major performative artists/groups and interviews with Moriyama Daido, Araki Nobuyoshi, and Hosoe Eikō, as well as previously unpublished critical and curatorial essays.

Edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser-Book design by Pierre Hourquet Published by Le Bal & Steidl

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In 1993 world renowned photographer Stephen Shore travelled to Luzzara, a comune in the province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Here Shore photographed the town’s people, streets and squares, just as another American master, Paul Strand had done forty years earlier, when he produced the seminal book Un Paese with the Italian screenwriter of The Bicycle Thieves Cesare Zavattini.

Speaking of his purpose Shore said, "There was no way I could approach Luzzara as though I was not familiar with Strand's work. At the same time, even though I was going to Luzzara exactly forty years after Strand, I was not interested in producing a re-photographic survey. In a certain way, Strand's work does not need simple updating, because the kinds of people and farms and landscapes he photographed still exist in very much the same form today. But, they exist side by side with the modern world. A key feature of Italian life, at least to my New World eyes, is the presence of the traditional within the modern. My aim, then, was to produce a companion volume to Un Paese; to produce a group of pictures, which to the limit of the subjectivity of my vision, supplement Strand's work."

get the book here:  http://stanleybarker.co.uk/books/luzzara/

more info here: http://www.bjp-online.com/2016/06/stephen-shores-italy/

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GERARD PETRUS FIERET

26 MAY 2016 - 28 AUGUST 2016

LE BAL-PARIS

WHAT I AIM AT WITH MY PHOTOGRAPHY IS ANARCHY: IN THE CONTEXT OF A CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY, MY PHOTOGRAPHS ARE AGGRESSIVE. INTENSE LIFE, PASSION - A HEALTHY PASSION FOR LIFE - THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE ABOUT”  G. P. FIERET

LE BAL is presenting a monographic exhibition devoted to Dutch artist, poet and photographer Gerard P. Fieret (1924-2009), the first to take place outside Holland. His output included some of the strangest and most subversive works produced in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Fieret was self-taught and, between 1965, the year he acquired his first camera (a Praktiflex) and the end of the 1970s, he was an obsessional and insatiable photographer, taking pictures of anything and everything: women, legs, children, shop windows, street scenes, himself, more women – models, students, young mothers, dancers, strangers, as well as breasts, buttocks, legs, necks and other body parts. Through his photographs, as through unsilvered mirrors, he achieved the paradox of revealing himself and asserting his presence in the world by hiding behind a camera.

He always took black and white photos. Blacks that were thick, sometimes blurred, but always luminous. They were often enlarged to his favourite 60 x 80 cm format, an unusual size for the time. Fieret was transgressive, unconventional and yet timeless; he would disfigure the image and distort reality in search of “something supernatural, a sense of the eternal”. The BAL exhibition presents 200 contemporary prints, rescued from extreme production conditions and a nomad existence between studios and shelters. They were obtained using chemicals and out-of-date photographic paper – sometimes dried and burnt with a candle, deliberately exposed to the wear and tear of everyday life in the form of dust, footprints, scratches, mouse droppings and pigeon shit. Most of them are compulsively signed and stamped by their author. They bear the marks of constant abuse, while at the same time being the ultimate proof of a vanished fervency. 

http://www.le-bal.fr/en/2016/04/gerard-petrus-fieret

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This May sees the release of Al Vandenberg’s ‘On a Good Day’, published by STANLEY / BARKER in partnership with Eric Franck Fine Art.

Perhaps best known as a collaborator on the legendary Beatles album cover for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Al Vandenburg’s first monograph ‘On a Good Day’ brings together his London street portraits from the 1970 — 80’s capturing the decades the style, mood and tone.

On A Good Day is a photo book comprised of 50 black and white images focusing on fascinating portraits with the characters whom Vandenberg has come across in London. With a grainy film appearance, subjects – who are all cast from the streets – stare head-on into the late American photographer’s lens, their expressions leaking emotion into each still that takes on a raw appearance, eyes fixated on the viewer and thus creating a dialogue between the viewer and the immortalised model. 

Order here;  

http://stanleybarker.co.uk/books/on-a-good-day/

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Medphoto Festival is a new initiative in the area of photography in Greece. The first edition will take place in Rethymno, Crete this summer (opening June 6 and running until September) and will host a number of exhibitions, events and workshops that present important works of Greek and foreign photographers.

One of the flagship exhibitions is an impressively varied group show titled "Alien Territory," which will take place in the dramatically situated, Venetian-built Fortezza citadel, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Working on a more symbolic subject, this exhibition endeavors to probe our internal state—a look inside those individuals inside the borders, regardless of their descent, who are trying to find meaning in our uncertain era. "Alien Territory" is the uncharted area of our familiar environment, where our own self has become the stranger.

The exhibition "Alien Territory" has been curated by Yorgos Prinos and Pavlos Fysakis. It will run from June 10 to July 15.                                                       With works of Randa Mirza, Antonis Theodoridis, Giorgos Gavrilakis, Serkan Taycan, Yannis Karpouzis,  Konstantinos Doumpenidis and more.

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MARK COHEN

"CLOSER"

MAY 11 - JUNE 11, 2016

Danziger Gallery - New York

Comprised of works from the early to middle 1970s, many of the prints are unique and being exhibited for the first time.  Focusing largely on pictures of the body, the title “Closer” refers to Cohen’s particular contribution to the medium of photography and his trademark style.  At a time when street photography was finding its place by looking at the harmonic or dissonant intersections of people and their environment Cohen got closer to his subjects than anyone else.

Shooting in the gritty environs of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Cohen’s literal and innovative closeness came from his method of holding the camera at arm's length just a few feet away from his subjects.  He shot without looking through the viewfinder, intuitively finding the perfect moment and composition.  Intrusive but elegant, by turns brutal and sensuous, Cohen’s cropped bodies and faces and the examined texture of skin and clothing reveal a finely tuned aesthetic consistency.  Every picture is printed full frame.  No subject is observed without purpose. "They're not easy pictures. But I guess that's why they're mine." Says Cohen.

Mark Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre, where he lived and photographed for most of his life. (He now lives in Philadelphia.) His work was first exhibited in 1969 at the George Eastman House but came to prominence with his first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1973.

Cohen is the recipient of two Guggenheim Grants and his work is in the collections of major museums from the U.S. to Japan. His most recent retrospective in 2013 at Le Bal in Paris and the accompanying publication “Dark Knees” were singled out by critics around the world as outstanding achievements in photography.


This past year saw the publication of “Frame.  A Retrospective” published by the University of Texas press and containing over 250 images.  Along with several notable museum acquisitions, the Victoria and Albert Museum recently acquired 42 of Cohen’s prints for their permanent collection.

http://www.danzigergallery.com/artists/mark-cohen

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Alec Soth: Gathered Leaves

This exhibition presents his four signature series – Sleeping by the Mississippi (2004), Niagara (2006), Broken Manual (2010) and the most recent, Songbook (2014) – and highlights his remarkable career and distinctive vision.

Gathered Leaves: Photographs by Alec Soth is at National Media Museum (Bradford, UK) from April 22 – June 26, 2016.

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KEN SCHLES JEFFREY SILVERTHORNE MIRON ZOWNIR

The theme of the city, with its subcultures, promises, and dangers, runs through the three photographic oeuvres of Ken Schles, Jeffrey Silverthorne and Miron Zownir, which will be presented in the House of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg from 5 May to 7 August 2016. 

Jeffrey Silverthorne’s (b. 1946) photographic work pointedly poses existential life questions of identity, gender, love, sexuality, and death. His multilayered oeuvre, which oscillates between intimacy and spectacle, has taken shape through an engagement with classical dramas and traditions of painting. Silverthorne’s works reveal a fascination with roleplaying. The transsexual becomes the ultimate symbol. He searches for ways to show his inner world and to deliberately make himself vulnerable.

The exhibition with Ken Schles (b. 1960) centers around two series of works, Invisible City and Night Walk, which the American photographer created in the late 1980s in New York. To this day, Invisible City (1988) remains a cult account of urban life. Originally published by the legendary Twelvetrees Press, it was recently reprinted by Steidl along with Night Walk (2013). The work documents life on the Lower East Side over the course of ten years. It is an enthralling portrayal of a world to which only few have access. Along with Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit and van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, Invisible City is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth-century studies of bohemian nightlife. Twenty-five years after his pioneering book first appeared, in the series Night Walk Ken Schles tells of his lost youth.

For more than thirty years Miron Zownir (b. 1953) has been among the most radical contemporary photographers. His photographs of major Western cities such as Berlin, London, and New York as well as post-communist Eastern Europe have been shown in numerous exhibitions around the world. From the beginning, Zownir has consistently dealt with topics of social criticism and taboos in his work. In his drastic and somber photographic style he depicts the parallel worlds of outsiders in a seemingly timeless shadow world. They are the dark sides of human existence, the gloomy loneliness of the nether regions of society, the existential exceptional states and boundary areas of the human psyche, which Zownir seeks out and makes visible at an uncomfortably close distance. His photographs from New York are the focus of the exhibition in Hamburg.

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TEENAGE SMOKERS 2 Ed Templeton

“ The subject Teenage Smokers has always fascinated me. When I was young, for a very short period I thought it might be “cool” to smoke. I ripped a piece of paper down to the size of a cigarette and pulled some grass from our front lawn and rolled it into the paper and lit it on fire and took a puff. It felt like inhaling shards of glass and I coughed uncontrollably doubled over in pain. My friend’s mother (a smoker herself) said to me, “Yeah, that’s how smoking feels.” And that was enough for me. I was never going to smoke. So when I would see young people smoking I would always marvel at them. They are the ones who wanted to look cool so badly that they overcame the pain of starting smoking. They also overcame the logic of why it’s a bad idea. Since my profession took me all over the world skateboarding, I was always surrounded by young skaters and, inevitably, teenage smokers. This book Teenage Smokers 2 starts off from where the original book ends. Many are images that could not fit into the original book (published in 1999 by Alleged Press) because that book was small, only 36 pages, and many of the images were Polaroid’s. None of the photos from the original Teenage Smokers book are in this book because I wanted to keep the integrity of the original book intact. The idea for this book sprang from finding the original boxes of Polaroid’s that started this whole series, shot in 1994 at my local skateboard park in Huntington Beach, California. I would be skating there when the kids finished school and they would collect there to hang out and smoke. One day I brought a Polaroid camera to the park and started asking all of them for a portrait while smoking. Those first Polaroid’s were the photos that Aaron Rose saw when I did an exhibition at his Alleged Gallery in 1999. With the limited money he had we made the original book Teenage Smokers that sold out immediately and is now a collectors’ item. The photos in this book are a continuation of that series that I have been shooting non-stop since ‘94 to the present. All photos are shot on film.”

Order at: http://www.superlabo.com/catalogue/spl062et/index_en.html

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Gucci releases book by cult photographer Ari Marcopoulos

For this project, the subject was Gucci’s pre-AW16 women’s and men’s collections designed by Alessandro Michele. “For seven days we photographed Alessandro’s collection,” says Marcopoulos in a statement, explaining the process. “As the days went on our surroundings made me feel equally in Roman times of the past and solidly in the present and future. Above all, we were having a good time which would have pleased Dionysus.”

Marcopoulos is the latest in a series of outsider creators that Michele has enlisted to contribute to his vision for Gucci. From photographer and filmmaker Matt Lambert, to photographer and model Petra Collins, graffiti artist GucciGhost and, most recently, Cocteau Twins who soundtracked his pre-AW16 campaign film.

Epiphany, which is being published by  IDEA, will be released as a limited edition of 1,000 copies and be launched on May 5 at Dover Street Market in New York.

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Jack Davison

Revisiting Pictures

29 Apr – 5 Jun 2016

Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam

www.foam.org

His work shows a passion for the discipline’s history, and in it we can see Davison revisiting a diverse range of genres, styles and techniques spanning from early 20th-century avant-garde experiment to objective documentary, and from portraiture to conceptual study. Yet his practice is very contemporary as well, and visibly rooted in the borrowing practices of Internet communities such as Flickr, which laid the basis for today’s social media culture.

Born and raised in Essex, in rural England, Jack Davison subsequently moved to Conventry in the West Midlands, where he studied English literature at Warwick University. As a photographer, he is self-taught. Since the age of fifteen, Davison has always taken his camera with him, constantly photographing his family and friends, strangers, and surroundings. ‘I lived in the countryside and my main access to seeing pictures was via the Internet. So it would be a case of me stumbling into people’s work and collecting things that I saw that struck a chord with me.’

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Book:

Mississippi History - Maude Schuyler Clay

Maude Schuyler Clay started her color portrait series “Mississippi History” in 1975 when she came upon her first Rolleiflex 2¼ camera. At the time, she was living and working in New York and paid frequent visits to her native Mississippi Delta whose landscape and people continued to inspire her. Over the next twenty-five years, the project, which began as “The Mississippians,” evolved into an homage to Julia Margaret Cameron. A definitive pioneer of the art of photography, Cameron lived in Victorian England and began her photographic experiments in 1863, after receiving the gift of a camera. The expressive, allegorical portraits of her friends and family as well as her artful approach to capturing the essence of light are the driving forces behind Clay’s nostalgic recollection of carefree moments of family life and play in Mississippi in the 1980s and ’90s.

https://steidl.de/Books/Mississippi-History-1727373857.html

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Teaming up to counteract a mutual sentiment for displacement and discovery, Miyako Bellizzi and Natalia Mantini have debuted CRAVE, a New York-based publication featuring the work of their friends and creative community. Bellizzi’s career as a stylist and Mantini’s burgeoning work as a photographer have provided the duo with an urge to produce personally fulfilling work the industry often times does not incubate. United by a common theme, the photos in the publication are linked by the colour blue – both in the sense of emotion and visual tone.

With the omnipresent feed readily available at our fingertips, it’s often times one forgets that the digital world is merely a constructed cyber reality. Behind the accounts are real artists and professionals whose work shows for it too. It’s a refreshing and reflective moment when these communities highlight their work in a tangible format, forcing readers to take a moment and reflect on the days of connectivity through printed matter.  

With no shortage of talented photographers and friends to draw upon, the first issue of CRAVE showcases the work of some Internet favorites, including David Brandon Geeting, Niko Karamyan and Tierney Finster, Alexandra Marzella, Carlotta Kohl, Sasha Frovola, Pete Voelker, Jovan Todorovic, Scout Willis and Nate Walton. Who says that loneliness is a solo journey? The duo’s book shows that often times there is strength in blue-toned numbers.

CRAVE launched at NYC’s Objectify, who will feature selected prints by contributors