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Photo London - the best bits

Much has been written about the revised and rebranded Photo London, which took place at London’s Somerset House last weekend (21 - 24 May 2015), so I won’t go over old ground. I would, however, like to share a few personal highlights from the first edition of Candlestar’s Photo London, which will be returning in 2016, more information here.

All images © Gemma Padley, except where stated

Tucked away in one of the many corners of Somerset House was an installation by Sohei Nishino inspired by his Diorama Map London series. Created especially for Photo London, the map offered a fragmentary view of London and was made from thousands of individual images taken by the artist. The installation, measuring around 4 x 2.6 metres, featured 560 removable tiles, (see below), for sale in groups of ten. It was an impressive sight to behold, and highly relevant too, asking visitors to look anew at our capital city.

Prior to Photo London, I’d ear-marked the Discovery section, featuring young and emerging galleries, which was for me a must-see. I found it to be a mixed bag in terms of quality and I was slightly disappointed that there weren’t more galleries represented (there were eight, including four from London). The selection of work was a little on the safe side - to be expected perhaps for the first edition of a fair - but there were exceptions: Edel Assanti, which continues to go from strength to strength, showed new work by Noémie Goudal, and Roman Road, which wowed audiences with huge cyanotypes by French artist, Thomas Mailaender (both below). Goudal’s work will be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery from October.

Image © Noémie Goudal/Edel Assanti

Grandma Thug, 2014, by Thomas Mailaender (above left) sold for £10,000, according to post-fair reports

I’d been fortunate enough to see more of Mailaender’s work earlier in the week during a private event at the East London gallery, hosted by its founder and director, Marisa Bellani. An exhibition that extended from the gallery into every corner of the director’s home, it was one of many off-site events that took place in the run-up to and during Photo London. While there was much to celebrate from the official programme, (read more here), I’d like to pick out a few satellite exhibitions to briefly mention.

Copperfield gallery’s fantastic Abstracts featured work by five artists from the photography collective AM projects: Antony Cairns, Tiane Doan na Champassak, Olivier Pin-Fat, Ester Vonplon and Daisuke Yokota. The show, the first in London by the collective, was created in conjunction with independent publisher Adad Books, which published a book of the work. Standouts included beautiful colour studies by Daisuke Yakota (below), who also won the first John Kobal award at Photo London, given to an emerging photographer. Yakota’s work was also on show at the main fair on the G/P Gallery stand.

In south London, Paris to Peckham: MYOP in London featured work by fifteen photographers from the Paris-based collective, MYOP. Curated by new gallery Seen Fifteen, the exhibition took place across two derelict Victorian terraced houses in the vibrant Copeland Park.

Work by each of the photographers, most of it documentary in nature, was carefully curated within the intimate, tumble-down rooms of the houses. The rough appearance of the walls added to the atmosphere and mostly complemented the images on show.

Above: images from Ed Alcock’s, The Wait

A personal highlight (and possibly because I have a penchant for Polaroids) was Philippe Guionie’s Swimming in the Black Sea (below), a simple but moving installation of Polaroid images taken between 2004 and 2012, of and around the Black Sea.

Also in Peckham’s Copeland Park was Chloe Dewe Matthews’s Congregation at Bosse & Baum gallery. Alongside images from the artist’s Sunday Service, a Tate Modern commission, was a breathtaking multi-channel video installation exploring collective Christian worship in south London.

Another hidden gem was The India Club at Hotel Strand Continental, situated just off The Strand. The site-specific project saw seven artists create work in response to the bar and restaurant, which dates back to 1946 when it was founded by Indian High Commissioner to the UK, V.K. Krishna Menon, Indian president Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Mountbatten.

Together the artists - Leon Chew, Christopher Down, Will Jennings, Katja Mayer, Lee Milne, Ben Cave, and Minna Pöllänen - form the collective Specular Assembly. Among the work on show in what was an intelligent and meticulously conceived exhibition, were exquisite riso prints (below) by German artist Katja Mayer, inspired by the triangles found on the arm badges worn by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

Finally, not to be missed (or rather, impossible to miss due to its size) was the first Offprint London, which saw some 150 independent publishers of photography, art and graphic design take over the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. From 22-25 May, the Hall was buzzing with photobook collectors and enthusiasts, poring over everything from hard-to-find publications to low-fi handmade zines. London’s publishers were out in force, among them Mörel Books, Trolley Books, and Self Publish, Be Happy, while special events programmed by the latter took place in a dedicated Speakers’ Corner during the long weekend.

Innovative photobooks exhibition at London’s Media Space

A delight for photography fans who like their photobooks with a dose of technology, this exhibition, showcasing shortlisted, longlisted and winning entries to the 2015 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and Mack’s First Book Awards, is an example of what can be achieved through intelligent design and thoughtful use of technology.

On display at the Virgin Media Studio, part of Media Space’s gallery complex inside the Science Museum, the exhibition proves that photobooks can be engaging when shown in an exhibition space - they don’t have to be locked away inside vitrines.

As visitors enter the space (see below), they can peruse physical copies of the shortlisted and longlisted titles from this year’s Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards, which include The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip by David Campany (Aperture), Ponte City, by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse (Steidl), and Amc2 Journal Issue 9 - Amore e piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy, edited by Federica Chiocchetti and Roger Hargreaves (AMC), which was named winner of the Best Photography Book category. Two copies of each are on display including one displayed as if it was a sculpture, a piece of art in its own right, which photobooks (or at least the best ones) arguably are.

Further into the exhibition, visitors can enjoy a wall installation of South African photographer David Goldblatt’s published photobooks (below) who was awarded the inaugural Kraszna-Krausz Fellowship. I’ve never seen photobooks exhibited in this way, and it’s refreshing to see publications given the same respect as prints.

Above: A video interview with Goldblatt

Further on from the Goldblatt installation is the First Book Awards display. Now in its fourth year, the prize, run by Mack, recognises and supports photographers who have not yet had a book published by a third party publishing house. On display are prints by the three previous winners and 2015′s winner, Ciarán Óg Arnold, who won with his debut book, I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed. but all I could do was to get drunk again. Images from his series are below.

Above: 2014′s winning book, Frowst by Joanna Piotrowska

Above: a display of images by 2012 winner Anne Sophie Merryman from the series Mrs. Merryman’s Collection

The Kraszna-Krausz and First Book Awards 2015 are on show at Media Space until 28 June 2015.

An exhibition that questions our contemporary culture of surveillance continues at East Wing gallery

It’s something we take for granted and barely notice, but which affects almost every part of our lives; surveillance - the monitoring of an individual or group - is entrenched in our culture whether we like it or not. It’s not often that we stop and think about how or where we are being monitored, but perhaps we should.

An exhibition at Dubai’s East Wing gallery attempts to get beneath the surface of surveillance culture by showcasing a range of interdisciplinary art practices that include drone images courtesy of Tomas van Houtryve, work created using a facial recognition camera by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (below) and a new audiovisual work by Edmund Clark titled Dulce et Decorum Est: Virtue Unmann'd. Created especially for the exhibition, Clark’s installation considers the notions of virtue and sacrifice contextualised within contemporary drone strikes on tribal areas in Pakistan.

Image © Broomberg & Chanarin

Surveillance.02 brings together seven bodies of work in total that probe and pass comment on the methods of state and corporate surveillance and their effects. In addition to the award-winning Blue Sky Days by van Houtryve, and Shtik Fleisch Mit Tzvei Eigen by Broomberg & Chanarin, are works by Massimo Berruti, Yann Mingard, Jenny Odell, and Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon.

Image © Tomas van Houtryve

Surveillance.02 at East Wing gallery, Dubai, continues until 07 May 2015.

IdeasTap and Magnum Photos name winning photographers

Vasantha Yogananthan, Jack Latham and Karolina Jonderko are the recipients of this year’s IdeasTap Photographic Award in association with Magnum Photos.

Each photographer will receive £5000 to continue with the personal project that won them the recognition. In addition, Jonderko and Latham will embark on paid internships with Magnum Photos in New York and London respectively.

All three photographers were present at Dray Walk Gallery in The Old Truman Brewery, just off Brick Lane in east London, on Thursday 16 April to collect their prizes.

Nine photographers were shortlisted across three categories and had already been whittled down from 18 back in September. Images from each of the nine photographers’ series were on display in a temporary exhibition at the gallery.

Image © Gemma Padley

Brighton-based Jack Latham (above) won the 16-25 category with his project Sugar Paper Theories, which he shot in Iceland in December last year (2014). The project takes as its starting point a missing persons case dating back to the early 1970s in which six people were arrested. The suspects were in fact innocent but after much interrogation by police admitted to a crime they did not commit.

Latham weaves his narrative through dreamlike images of the Icelandic landscape, which he combines with folklore about Iceland’s ‘hidden people’ who are believed to be hiding in nature, to create a multifaceted body of work.

Karolina Jonderko is congratulated by photographer Abbie Trayler-Smith. Image © Gemma Padley

In the 26+ category, winner Jonderko explores the phenomenon of ‘reborn’ dolls, which look, smell and feel like real babies, but are in fact made from silicon and other materials.

French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan (pictured below) won the International category with his project, A Myth of Two Souls, which explores the Indian epic, Ramayana. Written in Sanskrit 2000 years’ ago, the famous story has been played out many times since – for example, as a hit TV series, which became a national phenomenon in the late 1980s.

To date, Yogananthan has made four trips to India, where he has photographed in places linked to the Ramayana. The award will enable him to continue the project in the way he had hoped, he says.

“I feel deeply honoured to be awarded this prize. I have been working on A Myth of Two Souls since 2013 and the project is still very much a work in progress. I plan to use the funds to visit towns and villages [in India], and to meet with local artists to engage in a creative dialogue. I want to invite them to paint over my photographs and [in doing so] project their own imagination onto my pictures. By mixing colour, black and white, and hand-painted photographs in the series, I want the viewer to not be able to tell when my pictures were taken to echo the myth that the Ramayana is not fixed in time.”

Image © Gemma Padley

The judging panel featured Harry Hardie of Here Press, Magnum photographer Mark Power, Emily Graham, Cultural and Education Manager at Magnum Photos, and last year’s winner Abbie Trayler-Smith.

The IdeasTap Photographic Award aims to identify and support emerging documentary photographers by helping them to develop a personal body of work. It is uncertain what will happen to the annual prize, which has helped many photographers in its five-year history, now that IdeasTap is set to close.

Shadowland

In this recent series, Swedish artist John Skoog explores former Hollywood film locations in and around Los Angeles, which he presents as a sequence of expansive landscapes, seascapes and geological formations. The locations once served as stand-ins for other parts of the world such as areas of Afghanistan, Tibet and the Sahara Desert. Alongside these Skoog places images shot inside old movie palaces, which possess their own decrepit beauty. Here are a few images from the series, which also includes a film installation.

John Skoog, still from Shadowland, 2014. 16mm to HD - Video, stereo sound, 15 minutes and 15 seconds. © The artist. Courtesy Pilar Corrias Gallery.

John Skoog, Skies, the State, Minneapolis, MN, 2010-2015. Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Baryta, 60.2 x 89.5 x 4.5 cm. © The artist. Courtesy Pilar Corrias.

John Skoog, Women, the Orpheum, Madison, WI, 2010-2015. Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Baryta, 64 x 41 x 4.5 cm. © The artist. Courtesy Pilar Corrias.

John Skoog, Starry Carpet, the Highland, ST Paul, MN (with Nicholas Vargelis), 2010-2015. Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Baryta, 41 x 64 x 4.5 cm. © The artist. Courtesy Pilar Corrias.

We Come From the Water

This gem of a show, hidden away in an artists’ studio complex, just off Broadway Market in east London, features work by Esther Teichmann, Chantal Faust, and Carol Mavor.

Each body of work was created independently but is united by the themes of memory, the sea, rivers, lakes and lagoons, which the artists explore through photographs, painting, moving image and language.

Today is the last day of We Come From the Water at Lychee One Gallery, east London, but there is a special closing event at the gallery, tonight (11 April). For more details, visit the gallery’s website here.

Lychee One Gallery, 38-50 Pritchards Road, E2 9BJ.

All images © Lychee One Gallery/courtesy the artists.

Esther Teichmann, Installation View, 2015.

We Come From the Water, Installation View, 2015.

Chantal Faust, Plantlife Two (flatbed), type C print, 2014-15.

Carol Mavor, Installation View, 2015.

Chantal Faust, Nothing but body (CF jelly), oil and acrylic on canvas, 2015.

Carol Mavor, ‘My mother had a slow, breezy voice, as if it had just blown off the lake. I wanted to float on her. I wanted to drift on her. I was not the only one who felt this way.’ Fibre Print, 2015.

Format 15 - in pictures

Much has been written about the Derby-based international photography festival over the past month so I won’t reiterate what’s been said, but, as the festival enters its final weekend, (it finishes on Sunday 12 April 2015), I wanted to share a few of my highlights through images, a kind of tribute to what has been a fantastic edition of the festival. There is so much more great work than I’m able to show here so the following is meant as a homage rather than a ‘best-of’. These are some of the things I saw that have stayed with me. For more visit: www.formatfestival.com. Images by Gemma Padley.

The festival’s flagship exhibition, Beyond Evidence, was inspired by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s 1977 body of work, Evidence. Featuring more than 20 artists, the exhibition at the city’s art centre, Quad, curated by Louise Clements and Lars Willumeit, asks visitors to question the reliability of imagery, and to consider its different contexts and uses. Featured artists include: Natasha Caruana, Mishka Henner, and Cristina de Middel, among many others. The exhibition runs until 07 June 2015 so there is still time to catch it even after the festival has ended.

Photographs by Mandel and Sultan on show at Beyond Evidence.

Cristina de Middel’s Jan Mayen is a re-staging of a re-staged trip to the island of Jan Mayen in the North Pole.

Giorgio Di Noto’s The Iceberg explores the idea of what’s commonly referred to as the ‘deep web’ - the parts of the internet we don’t have access to. Visitors used special devices that emitted UV light to view the images on the walls of the Italian’s highly original and immersive installation.

Andrea Botto’s on-going project Ka-Boom looks at blasts and explosions through archival images and those taken by Botto, and is part of the Beyond Evidence exhibition.

The photographs in Simon Menner’s Images from the Secret Stasi Archives depict officers in questionable and often darkly humorous guises. Menner discovered the images while researching his book, Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives. Part of Beyond Evidence.

Tiane Doan na Champassak’s Looters features found images of rioters in the 2011 London riots, sourced from the internet. Shown as part of Beyond Evidence.

As part of her involvement in the Beyond Evidence show, Stéphanie Solinas created a 3D paper sculpture of Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer and researcher who worked in biometrics and anthropometry, which is used by police to identify criminals. Bertillon lived from 1853 to 1914.

Sara-Lena Maierhofer’s Dear Clark explores the life of conman Christian Karl, who managed to evade police for many years by adopting various personas

Jana Romanova’s Shvilishvili at The Open Centre looks at the value of family photographs - those from her own family - which she juxtaposes with portraits she has taken of family members in Russia and Georgia. Placed in plastic bags inside handmade boxes, the family photographs become almost like pieces of evidence.

Shannon Jensen’s powerful project A Long Walk as seen through the window of the empty shop where the work was shown. The series depicts the shoes worn by refugees in South Sudan and was on show as part of The Forensic Turn curated by Paul Lowe, which explored alternative ways of looking at conflict.

Photographer David Severn and Federica Chiocchetti of The Photocaptionist in front of Monica Alcazar Duarte’s Red Mist, part of the exhibition Myth & Media, curated by Alcazar Duarte and Lewis Bush, which looks at mass media and the Vietnam War. Do have a look at Chiocchetti’s online exhibition, Amateur Unconcern: A Photo Literary Fantasia, which combines unseen images from Archive of Modern Conflict with quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s modern classic, Heartbreak House.

The Looking Game by M.F.G. Paltrinieri and Mirko Smerdel is a photographic exploration of 1960s American serial killer and amateur photographer Rodney Alcala, who photographed his female victims before killing them.

H. Said He Loved Us by Tommaso Tanini

Tom Stayte’s #selfie was immersive and engaging. He used specially designed software to detect selfies from the web, which were then printed by a receipt printer and covered the floor - a really clever take on the way we consume and use images in what has become something of a throwaway culture.

While chatting to me, Tom Stayte showed me a copy of his brilliant project Face Book, where he used a specially commissioned device to extract the first 500,000 profile pictures from Facebook. Top left is Mark Zuckerberg! The first Facebook user, of course.

One of the strongest installations in the Grade 1 listed Pearson Building was Nicoló Degiorgis’s award-winning Hidden Islam, which included a grid of his images of makeshift and concealed mosques in northeast Italy. Much has been written about this series, read more here.

Elsewhere in the Pearson Building I loved Alex F. Webb’s Blind Landing Experimental Unit (BLEU), in which he combines found images to weave a narrative about Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, the site of a UFO sighting, perhaps Britain’s most famous.

Sputnik Photos’ contribution to the festival on show at the Museum and Art Gallery saw the Eastern European collective remove images from their archive and reposition them on the walls, creating new associations as they have done here. The above seems to evoke a map of sorts, the implication being that these disparate images are now somehow linked to a crime scene.

Sarah Pickering’s Art & Antiquities exhibition at Derby’s Museum and Art Gallery explored the antics of notorious art forger Shaun Greenhalgh.

Zhao Renhui’s A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World. A really wonderful multilayered project, but the space dedicated to it at Derby’s Museum and Art Gallery was a little on the small side. A slightly missed opportunity to do something really fantastic with this work, but great to see it nonetheless.

The exhibition 50 Contemporary Photobooks from China, curated by Yining He gave visitors the chance to look through a huge range of books, some that are incredibly rare.

An installation of items from the collection of Pierre Bessard of Éditions Bessard, on show in St Werburgh’s Church.

Presented as a strip and placed under deliberately harsh lighting, images from Phil Toledano’s moving series, When I was Six, in which the artist looks back on his sister’s death 40 years ago, eerily echo an identity parade.

Lisa Barnard’s Whiplash Transition considers what it means to be on duty in a conflict zone and at home, and is just one of several bodies of work at the University of Derby’s Markeaton Street campus.

Henry E. Iddon’s A Place to Go - Sites of Mountain Misadventure was both thought-provoking and chilling. These idyllic landscapes are in fact places where walkers and hikers have died. A perfect example of how misleading images can be without captions.

I really loved Jiehao Su’s meditative Borderland, which is like a breath of fresh air. Beautiful work.

Elvis, aka David Severn’s dad, dropped in to say hello and treated visitors to a singalong, which was enjoyed by all.

No birthday celebration is complete without a cake, and here, Format’s artistic director Louise Clements gets stuck in. Happy tenth birthday Format, here’s to many more!

Last few days of Staging Disorder at LCC

An exhibition featuring photography, moving image and sound installations that mediates on the representation of contemporary conflict enters its final days.

Staging Disorder, co-curated by Christopher Stewart and Esther Teichmann, features work from seven series that each offers a view on modern conflict and its (sometimes fraught) relationship with representation.

Image: From the series Airside by Richard Mosse

In the exhibition, which is on show at the London College of Communication, artists explore the boundary between the real and the imagined in conflict through the depiction of mock domestic rooms, aircraft, houses, streets, and even fake military and civilian towns that are used to prepare for conflict.

Image: From the series Public Order by Sarah Pickering

Themes that run through the exhibition include: the notion of photographic truth, the phenomenon of constructed reality, and the premeditated nature of modern conflict.

Image: From the series Chicago by Broomberg & Chanarin

The artists whose work is on show are: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, (Chicago), Richard Mosse, (Airside), Sarah Pickering, (Public Order), An-My Lê, (29 Palms), Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, (Personal Kill), Claudio Hils, (Red Land, Blue Land), and Christopher Stewart, (Kill House).

An accompanying book published by Black Dog Publishing and featuring essays by writers that include David Campany is available to buy.

Staging Disorder at London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB. Until 12 March 2015. Admission free.

Opening times: Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm, Saturday, 11am-4pm.

Calogero Cammalleri's poetic portrayal of Lampedusa

The arrival this week [16 February] of more than 2000 migrants on the shores of Lampedusa once again put the Mediterranean island in the spotlight. Frequently smuggled illegally onto boats, these people are prepared to pay any price to escape from their home countries.

The journey to mainland Europe is treacherous and many don’t make it. One of the most serious and tragic incidents took place in October 2013 when more than 350 African migrants died off the coast of Lampedusa, the largest of the Italian Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean Sea.

Image © Calogero Cammalleri/Fabrica

Soon after the disaster, Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research centre, which is based in Treviso, Italy, launched along-term project, titled Sciabica, to collect and publish the stories of survivors of the tragedy, and others who have left their countries for Europe.

Calogero Cammalleri was one of those invited to join the project. The photographer, who was on a year-long research placement with Fabrica at the time, spent nine months photographing Lampedusa and its inhabitants.

A spread from Calogero Cammalleri's Lipadusa, produced by Fabrica

“I was born in Sicily, but when I went back [Cammalleri grew up in Germany after his family emigrated there] – when I went to Lampedusa for this experience – I felt like a foreigner,” says the 23-year-old. “It was hard, very hard, but with the sea and the fishermen and my photography I found a dimension for me. I was a child again in a land that belonged to the sea and to Sicily.”

Cammalleri’s aim was to photograph the everyday lives of the island’s residents, he says, which meant winning their trust (many have become wary of reporters and photographers who have gone to the island since the 2013 tragedy.) Through his evocative black and white images, Cammalleri captures the mystery and rawness of the island and its people.

His book, Lipadusa, produced and published by Fabrica, tells a story of the island through the photographer’s eyes. Through a carefully edited selection of images – many shown full-bleed across double-page spreads – we are immersed in the lives of residents, ushered into their homes, and onto their land. An insert in the book, which resembles the pages of a newspaper but is divided into chapters, is an innovative way of presenting accompanying text - historical details about the island for context, background information to the project, and the photographer's own thoughtful observations.

"The island is one of the gates of Europe," reads the text. "This is an island of very special people... the Lampedusans, forgotten by the state in their primary necessities, have never refused to welcome."

There is a free-spiritedness to Cammalleri’s images, which seem to kick against boundaries and convention. “I always try to search for something emotional,” he says. “I want to explore, to make mistakes and to learn from the people who inspire me.”

Calogero Cammalleri’s work is on show in the exhibition Lipadusa, at the Museo Civico in Castelbuono, near Palermo, Sicily, until 08 March 2015.

Sofia Valiente gives a voice to a group of sex offenders in southern Florida

It’s a taboo subject, says photographer Sofia Valiente, but the perspective of these people is important too. Sofia is talking about the residents of Miracle Village, a community of 100 sex offenders located on the corner of Lake Okeechobee, in the small town of Pahokee, southern Florida.

Image © Sofia Valiente

“As a society, we ostracise these people because of their label,” she says. “Hearing their stories made me realise they are human – full of fears, desires, hopes, and regrets that we all share.”

Sofia heard about the community, which was founded four years ago by a Christian ministry, through a friend – the editor of Pahokee’s local newspaper. Intrigued, she decided to visit Miracle Village. What she found was a group of men (and one woman) from a diverse range of backgrounds and ages, each of whom had a story to tell.

Image © Sofia Valiente

“My intention was to provide an intimate glimpse into these people’s lives, to bring new light on this issue,” she explains. “There's this notion that men with the title of ‘sex offender’ are mentally ill and go around lurking, [looking] for opportunities. But often, the crime was committed inside the home,which brings questions back to the family. I was compelled to tell the storyfrom their perspective in order to understand the roles that were played.”

Over the course of a year-and-a-half, Sofia spenttime in the complex – 52 duplex houses, formerly home to migrant labourers whoworked on nearby sugarcane fields – photographing and getting to know many of the residents.

Image © Sofia Valiente

The outcome is a book, produced and published by Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research centre, which focuses on 12 stories (Sofia spent a year on a scholarship programme at the organisation’s headquarters in Treviso, Italy).

“The people who were most open with me ended up being in the book,” she says. “Thinking back, I’ve realised I spent time with people that demonstrated they had made a mistake and who were trying to move on.”

For Sofia, each story in the book is significant in its own way. For example, she mentions David, whose crime was having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 18. His mother lives with him in the village, and “has stuck by him through it all.”

Then there is Matt, David’s best friend, whose mother turned him into the police in order to save her job, says Sofia. “She worked in the juvenile justice system… you will never see David and Matt apart; they’ve become a family. Matt says he's never had a real family until now.”

Image © Sofia Valiente

The biggest challenge in making the work, says Sofia, was balancing the different voices – of her subjects, society, and her own.

“I often felt restricted as to what I could show or say about this group of people. I felt I needed to be aware of what my subjects wanted to say, but also be conscious of what society thinks of them, and in the cases when there was a victim, how [he or she] would feel about it. Lastly came my voice. It was about finding a balance between all these things.”

The community is five miles from the nearest town, says Sofia, in keeping with restrictions set out by law – although she has reservations about the efficacy of these restrictions. “The laws that keep these people far away do not address the problem and in the end do not find a solution," she says. "I think it's important to understand the context of what led up to these people's crimes and to see them as human beings, instead of just casting them away.”

www.sofiavaliente.samexhibit.com

www.fabrica.it

To buy a copy of Miracle Village, click here

David Severn's on-going series Thanks Maggie explores the landscapes and people of the former mining town, Mansfield

When photographer David Severn moved to Nottingham in 2010, he didn’t expect to revisit his hometown of Mansfield quite so soon. But the offer to be involved in an Arts Council-funded project documenting life in and around the ex-mining town was too good to refuse.

Image © David Severn

“A colleague phoned saying she'd applied to the Arts Council for a grant to work on a series about the Nottinghamshire Coalfield, and would I be interested in making a series of photographs?,” says David. “At the time I had no plans to go back to Mansfield to produce a body of work, but I jumped at the opportunity.

“Although Mansfield is only fifteen minutes down the road from Nottingham it is a totally different place,” he continues. “Ever since the mines closed [in the late 1980s, early 1990s], it has seemed as though something has been lacking. Even when I was growing up there it always felt like an insular place, and quite closed. But things have improved now, and Mansfield is starting to reinvent itself.”

Image © David Severn

David began by photographing at the sites of old mining pits around Mansfield. “There are tens of them,” he says. “They're quite peculiar post-industrial landscapes, and are big too; you can get lost on them. Many have been reclaimed by nature, but at the same time the remnants of their history are still there. Some have been regenerated and look quite beautiful whereas others have not had the same good fortune. I was interested in the transformation of these sites – places that were once the backbone of the British economy but are now sites of recreation, where people walk their dogs and so on.”

In Thanks Maggie, portraits and landscape images offer a contemporary view on a region that has undergone a huge amount of change, socially, politically, and visually. Inspired in part by Simon Roberts’s work, (“and how he photographs people small in the frame to give a sense of how they are using the land”), and traditional paintings, David “chipped away” at the series over several months, making contact prints and pairing up landscape images with portraits to create a narrative.

Image © David Severn

“I’d contact people online and set up meetings to photograph them, or just walk around and meet people that way,” says David. “The image of dog walkers in the snow was completely unplanned. I'd caught the bus to a place that was in the middle of nowhere and noticed these guys playing ball with their dogs. I shouted when to throw the ball so I could take a few shots.”

David has continued the project self-funded and has recently secured new funding from arts organisation City Arts in Nottingham to carry on photographing. “I’ve eight or nine weeks to produce a number of new images, which will go on show in April, so it's all hands on deck with that,” he says. “I want to start photographing in Mansfield town centre, and in village centres of the surrounding areas as there's a lot going on in these old market squares. I'm also interested in employment and the hopes and aspirations of young people.”

www.davidsevern.com

David's work is on show at One Eyed Jacks Gallery in Brighton, until 22 February 2015.

Phil Le Gal photographs Brittany’s ancient Catholic ‘Pardon’ ceremonies

It’s a myth that travelling far from home will lead you to take better images, says photographer Phil Le Gal, whose project Days of Mercy is this week’s featured series. Many photographers (Phil included) have realised the potential of photographing ‘closer to home’, and for the French photographer, who has travelled to Nigeria, South Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), and former Soviet countries with his photography, this meant training his lens on his homeland of Brittany.

Image © Phil Le Gal

Of specific interest to the photographer, who is currently living in London, are the ‘Pardon’ (French for ‘forgiveness’) ceremonies that Catholics from the Breton region of France and from further afield engage in every year. These celebrations, akin to ancient pilgrimage, involve processions and masses, and take place in multiple locations across the region every Sunday from May to September.

Participants dress in beautiful ceremonial gowns and accessories to celebrate and ask for forgiveness from Catholic saints. Sometimes many thousands of people attend, says Phil, but other ceremonies are much smaller with only fifty people. Each Pardon is a heady mix of religious beliefs, rituals and tradition combined with Paganism and even superstition, he adds. “From my research, the Pardons are unique to Brittany,” says the London College of Communication graduate. “I have a Catholic background (although I don’t practise religion anymore), [but] sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on… you see bizarre things such as people crawling on their knees. They're very special.”

Image © Phil Le Gal

The idea came to Phil in the summer of 2012 while he was studying for his Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at LCC. Inspired by a quote from Magnum photographer Harry Gruyaert about the challenges of photographing in one’s own country that appeared in The Guardian, and spurred by curiosity, Phil set about preparing for what he felt had the potential to be a “visually strong” photo essay.

After several months’ preparation, in the summer of 2013 Phil returned to Brittany seven times, and attended ten of these ceremonies throughout the region. Google Maps and Street View became important tools to work out possible vantage points for his images, he explains, but talking to locals was also useful to build a picture of what the Pardons involved.

“Sometimes I was an observer, but I also really liked engaging with people and asking them why they came to the Pardons,” he says. “I met people from over the world as well as local people. I wanted to find out if there were any trends among these ceremonies, and whether they were dying out or becoming more popular,” he adds. “Some of the ceremonies are apparently dying out, although there are not official statistics to support this. While less people seem to be participating, more are attending [as spectators], including, perhaps, tourists.”

Image © Phil Le Gal

Phil agrees there is a danger of the larger ceremonies becoming like performances or re-enactments, but the smaller Pardons are more intimate, he says, where attendees “do what they do for themselves and not for the tourists.”

Days of Mercy is ongoing, and he hopes to present the images as an interactive multimedia map, which people can navigate to see where each image was taken. For now though, Phil’s focus is on a new project that is already a year in the planning. In June, he will embark on an ambitious two-month trip from Calais through Germany to the Baltic States, and then south to Lampedusa to document, with the help of a writer, life in the Schengen Area, (an area comprising 26 European countries that have abolished border control), in the wake of what he describes as a recent push from right-wing political parties in Europe. “When I saw the results of the 2014 European elections, I was angry and upset… in France the far-right party Front National took first place, and in the UK, UKIP took the most votes. To my mind there seemed to be a lot of misperception so I thought I’d travel with my camera and take pictures to show what life is like in Europe – to challenge stereotypes.”

Phil's work is on show at One Eyed Jacks Gallery in Brighton, until 22 February 2015.

www.phillegal.org

A new series of interviews with emerging photographers on TMTM

After a hiatus of several weeks, TMTM is back with an exclusive series of photography features. Every week, we'll post a feature about an emerging photographer that has caught our eye. To kickstart the new year, we speak to Alexandra Lethbridge (see below), who has been making waves with her first self-published book, The Meteorite Hunter. Enjoy!

Alexandra Lethbridge searches for the sublime in the everyday in The Meteorite Hunter

Alexandra Lethbridge. Etch her name into your memory because this girl is going places. Ally, as she is also known, has got industry tongues waggling with her subtly layered project – The Meteorite Hunter, which she recently self-published.

The book – her first publication – was shortlisted for the First PhotoBook category in last year’s [2014] Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, a moment the Southampton-based photographer describes as one she won’t forget in a hurry. “I entered [the competition] on the basis that I was 100 per cent okay with not being shortlisted or winning,” she says when we speak on the phone. “I wanted the book to be out there, to see what might happen. I was shocked when I found out I had made the shortlist.”

Describing the work as a “fictional archive about meteorites and the places they come from,” it is a series that plays with the notion of a meteorite hunter – a person who searches for and collects space rocks. In the book, we are presented with images of all manner of beautiful rocks in an array of shapes and textures, boasting exquisite colours. Some images are by the photographer, while others are found images sourced from places that include NASA. But the work is more than just a collection of spectacular rock images; it is about the hunt for the sublime in the ordinary, Ally explains, where a meteorite becomes a “metaphor for the fantastical, hidden within the everyday.”

The implication is, then, that these rocks are meteorites, and looking at the images you would assume they are; but, while one rock is in fact a real meteorite from space, the others are not, says Ally. They mostly come from museum gift shops, she reveals.

“I bought some [rocks] from a tiny gift shop in Lulworth Cove in Dorset for example, and they are the most beautiful things,” she says. “People have said to me, ‘ah, so that’s what a meteorite looks like’, and I’ve said ‘no, it’s nothing!’ Once you’re aware that one [rock] is 'extra-terrestrial' you start to look at everything [in the series] with the possibility that it could be sublime or fantastical… I hope that the viewer - for a moment - enters into this idea of reconsidering what’s around him or her, and what is 'the norm'.”

In this way, the series (and book) play with the idea of reality and fiction, encouraging the viewer to question what is real and what is not. Hidden captions concealed in panels at the beginning and end of the book reveal the source of each image, but the absence of text throughout (with the exception of chapter headings) helps to keep up the pretence.

“The book is a fictional archive that you walk through,” says Ally. “You have to go looking for the details that tell you what’s true and what isn’t… I’m not necessarily interested in misleading someone or trying to falsify something, it’s more about imaginary realms,” she adds. “I use lots of interventions in my work – ways of disturbing what you presume when you look at a photograph – but my interest lies more in ‘buying into’ this other realm than about trying to fool anyone.”

Ally, who graduated in 2014 from the University of Brighton with a Masters degree in Photography, explains she always wanted the book’s design to incorporate an element of “searching” and “hunting”. In addition to the hidden captions, Ally printed the images on tracing paper as well as on thicker paper stock, exploiting the different qualities of the papers to encourage the reader to look hard at what is being presented.

“The exhibition of the work [at the University of Brighton Gallery] featured tracing paper so I knew I would use it in the book,” she says. “I learnt about tracing paper’s weight, how it feels, how it turns, and what you can see through it… The sequencing and editing had to take into account [the fact that] if you can see through one page, what will be on the other side? So it wasn’t just a case of ‘this image comes after this one’, but about the layering. Producing the book was really complicated in that respect, but it was also enjoyable to make since it was meant to [be revealing], and to allow the viewer to see different things.”

Ally says she made many book dummies before settling on the final design, which uses Japanese binding and comes in four colours. Producing a small edition [of 100 copies] gave her the freedom to “make the book exactly how I wanted it to be,” although she was mindful of staying true to the essence of the work.

“I realise now that all the choices I make have to come back to the work,” she says. “It sounds obvious, but I hadn’t realised how much there is this element of doing what you like or what you tend to veer towards [when making a book], versus whether this actually plays into the integrity of the project. Initially, I wanted to create a hardbound book [and] I had a whole list of different binding techniques and approaches I could use; but these didn’t sit right when I was making the book. So I’ve learnt to stay true to what the book needs to be.”

Indeed, 2014 as a whole “has been a real learning curve,” says Ally, not least in terms of her practice. “For a long time my work has been in two places: half is film photography, landscape, straightforward; the other half is collage, and more experimental. The past year has been a [case of] figuring out how these things can come together.

“Being shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards has given me the confidence to move forward knowing that other people believe in my work as much as I do,” she adds. “I used to be quite shy, but it has made me think: ‘enough is enough – trust your instincts and go for it’.”

www.alexandralethbridge.com

Highlights from Paris [updated]

Almost 60,000 people poured through the doors during this year’s edition of Paris Photo, which took place from 13 to 16 November, and arguably remains one of the most important and relevant art photography fairs in the world.

Dedicated to the late co-founder of Rencontres d’Arles festival, Lucien Clergue, who died last weekend, the fair welcomed 143 galleries from all over the world and saw collectors, curators, journalists, punters and picture editors, not to mention photographers, take in the sights on show.

And, there was a lot to see as ever (participating galleries showed work by more than 1200 artists).

For me, highlights from Paris Photo 2014 included images by Natasha Caruana created during her soon-to-be-completed three-month BMW Residency at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum. A small selection of Caruana’s images (the project is currently a work-in-progress) were on show alongside those by previous winners Mazaccio & Drowilal whose work explores contemporary visual culture, in particular, the representation of animals.

Work by Andrey Bogush at Foam Talent 2014, l’Atelier Néerlandais

Yoshinori Mizutani’s Tokyo Parrots, newly published by Amana/IMA Photobooks, was also a real treat. Tucked away on the Amana/IMA stand in a far corner of the Grand Palais, the book features Mizutani’s beautiful, colourful images of the parakeets that live in the branches and telephone wires above the Japanese capital. A selection of Mizutani’s images were also on display at the l’Atelier Néerlandais (The Dutch Embassy) as part of the Foam Talent 2014 exhibition, which featured some 21 photographers under the age of 35, as chosen by Foam magazine. Other standouts at this exhibition included Andrey Bogush (definitely a 'one to watch'), and rapidly rising star, Hannah Whitaker.

Images by Hannah Whitaker at Foam Talent 2014, l’Atelier Néerlandais

The 26-strong publishers area of the main fair was also not-to-be missed, showcasing photobooks by both established and newer imprints that included RM, Mack, Mörel, Aperture and Steidl, among many others, and countless book signing sessions. Werner Amann’s mediation on the relationship between media culture and reality in Surf Fiction, recently published by White Press, is an inspiring read, the full-bleed images artfully drawing on aspects of the culture of surveillance, urban space, movie culture, and the role of the internet in the way we navigate our world (the ‘surf’ of the title alludes to surfing the net or channel hopping, Amann says, but also how this action could translate into the filtering of real life). RM (Editorial in South America and Verlag in Spain) is also making waves with new books by Iñaki Domingo, Miguel Ángel Tornero, and David Jiménez.

Of particular note was the selection of books shortlisted as part of the third Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards (for a list of winners across the three categories click here.) I especially enjoyed Alberto Lizaralde’s highly moving everything will be okay, (shortlisted in the First Photobook category), and for me a reminder of photography’s power to evoke emotion, and it was great to have the opportunity to look through Rafal Milach’s The Winners, a contender in the Photobook of the Year category. Check out the full shortlist here.

Inside Paris Photo

Clémentine Scheidermann was one of four photographers selected for the SFR Jeunes Talents Laureates 2014, (watch a virtual tour of the exhibition inside the Grand Palais), and is another ‘one to watch’. The recent graduate from the University of South Wales, Newport, showed images from I called her Lisa-Marie, a series about die-hard Elvis fans who flock to Memphis to pay homage to their idol.

Of the many booths at the fair (browse exhibitors here), highlights for me included La galerie du jour agnès b’s stand, which showed work by Richard Billingham, Rinko Kawauchi, Petra Collins, and Larry Clark, among others, (the Paris gallery also has an exhibition L’intime, which runs at its space until 20 December), and Richard Saltoun Gallery’s display of 1970s Feminist works including the likes of Jo Spence, and Valie Export, alongside experimental examples of Russian Avant-Garde photography. Middle East-based galleries East Wing and Silk Road offered strong selections, as did James Hyman, which showed a superb installation of Anna Fox’s work, and images by Jon Tonks. Other artists whose work stood out especially included Akiko Takizawa at Sage Paris, Anna Orlowska at Asymetria, Mayumi Hosokura at Rose Gallery, Noémie Goudal at Les Filles du Calvaire, Ivan Mikhailov at Glaz gallery, and Ester Vonplon at Galerie Vu, who is soon to publish a new book with b.frank books.

Work by Anna Orlowska at Asymetria's stand at the Grand Palais

But 2014 is also a Month of Photography year when the French capital embraces photography outside of the Grand Palais through a jam-packed programme of offsite events. From book signings at parallel fairs in the city, to a book fair on a boat, symposiums, and too many satellite photography exhibitions to name individually, Paris once again demonstrated its commitment to and love of photography.

Leading the month-long photography programme is Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) with an exhibition of Spanish photographer Alberto García-Alix’s wide-ranging and challenging work, while William Eggleston’s black and white work is on display at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson until 21 December. Meanwhile, Jeu de Paume features newly printed photographs by Garry Winogrand, selected from the photographer’s 250,000-strong archive, which will be on show until 08 February 2015.

Matt Wilson’s This Place called Home at Les Filles du Calvaire

Aside from these crowd-pulling shows are many other exhibitions at private galleries, some of which are worth highlighting. Xippas gallery opened its latest show Me and Benjamin during Paris Photo, which features artworks by Phil Chang, Matt Porter, Jessica Eaton, Alex Prager, Mariah Robertson, and Hannah Whitaker, among others. The show's title refers to Los Angeles-based gallery M+B, which co-curated the exhibition. Aside from Xippas, trendy Rue du Vieille Temple in the Marais is also home to Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, which is currently showing images from Mike Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, and upstairs, Matt Wilson’s This Place called Home. Brodie’s US train hopping images are over-familiar and, in my mind at least, far less interesting than Wilson’s ‘photographic wanderings’, a series of lesser known images taken during the photographer’s travels through England, France, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Appearing to be caught on-the-hoof, and blurry as a result, the dream-like portraits, landscapes and street scenes possess a quiet poetry, offering up emotionally charged glimpses into the lives of those depicted.

The work of Toulouse-based photographer Arno Brignon is also worth seeking out. Brignon is showing images from Joséphine - an intimate series of images of his wife and young daughter - at Voz gallery in the capital until 20 December. In addition, recently opened gallery Eric Mouchet showed an excellent selection of landscapes with an architectural bent, many taken at night, by Swiss photographer Matthieu Gafsou.

Inside Polycopies, which welcomed more than 30 publishers

For photobook fans there was plenty to delight, including the second edition of Le Photobookfest, which aims to provide a platform for photographers and artists looking to showcase self-published or DIY photobooks. But by far the best (of what I saw), was Polycopies housed in a boat in Port Solferino and organised by photographer Laurent Chardon and Le Bal’s Sebastian Hau. Featuring some 35 publishers and bookshops, including Éditions Bessard, Here Press, Tartaruga, Akina Books, and Ediciones Anómalas, Polycopies presented a fine selection of books by both emerging talents (Salvi Danés, Federico Clavarino and Tommaso Tanini whose work I cannot recommend highly enough) and more established names (from Institute/Moment’s Knut Egil Wang to Daisuke Yakota, Tod Papageorge, Bill Henson and Joan Fontcuberta, the list goes on). It was thoughtfully-curated, refined, and felt less chaotic than Offprint, which took place again this year at l'École des Beaux-Arts.

Crowds shuffle in and out of Offprint at l'École des Beaux-Arts

The latter included more than 130 art, photography and design-focused publishers, including the odd experimental music label. Among them was Brighton-based Gost which showed Martin Parr’s latest - the fantastic Hong Kong Parr -, Eleanor Macnair’s infamous Photographs Rendered in Playdoh, and Alexandra Lethbridge’s (self-published) The Meteorite Hunter, which was also shortlisted in the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards (we’ll be publishing an interview with Lethbridge on TMTM in the coming days so keep an eye out for that). Other notable imprints included the indomitable Self Publish, Be Happy which showed Johan Rosenmunthe’s Tectonic, and AMC Books, which has just published The Whale’s Eyelash: A Play in Five Acts, a fascinating collection of 19th century microscope slides complied by Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) director Timothy Prus to create a narrative that unfolds as if it were a play. Elsewhere, Boston-based Houseboat Press had an interesting selection of books on display, including Dylan Nelson’s Amber Gamber, Andrew Hammerand’s The New Town, and Eric Ruby’s Stop Private Property Keep Out Means You; an imprint to watch. I also loved Benjamin Mouly’s Orange was the colour of her dress, then silk blues published by Éditions FP&CF, for its simplicity and strong aesthetic. South London’s Jane & Jeremy is also publishing interesting work in the form of beautifully produced handmade books.

I found parallel photography fair Fotofever in the Carrousel du Louvre to be a little disappointing, and left feeling underwhelmed by the quality of work on show (with the exception of Ed Alcock’s Hobbledehoy at the MYOP stand, a body of work about the intimate relationship between his wife and their son). For me, Fotofever lacked a coherent vision and consequently missed the opportunity to offer a credible alternative to Paris Photo. But this was a minor blip in what is, overall, an exhilarating, inspiring Month of Photography in Paris.

Photographers present a personal take on the notion of 'utopia' in an exhibition showing as part of Berlin's Monat der Fotografie-OFF

In just a few days’ time, all eyes in the photography world will be fixed on Paris for the 18th edition of the world’s biggest photography fair; but ahead of Paris Photo, which runs from 13 to 16 November 2014, an exhibition in Berlin kicks off with work by three photographers around the theme of ‘personal utopias’, which serves as a pleasant appetiser ahead of next week’s photography feast.

Bubble & Scrape – Contours of Personal Utopias, organised by German online magazine Actual Colors May Vary (ACMV), features images by photographers Ed Alcock, Jenny Fitz and Tom Griggs, who have been invited to take part in the exhibition as part of the first Monat der Fotografie-OFF – Berlin’s homage to Paris Photo’s Mois de la Photo-OFF.

British photographer Ed Alcock, who is based in Paris, will be showing images from his acclaimed series Hobbledehoy, a highly personal body of work that explores the relationship between his wife and their son over a period of three summers. Themes such as the passing of time, the fleetingness of childhood, and a nostalgia for times past resonate throughout. “When he was six, my son was glued to his mother,” the MYOP collective member tells BJP. “I had no recollection of being like that; it was a case of, ‘was I like that too when I was a little boy?’ Through the images, the boy moves from this fusional relationship towards some sort of desire for independence.” Alcock published Hobbledehoy as a book in 2013, and exhibited the work to much acclaim as part of the MYOP group show at this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles festival. “I think in terms of telling stories, but not like a photojournalist tells stories,” he says. “For me, it’s more a case of being free to allow in the idea of fiction, and giving people space to add their own interpretation of the work. In that way, my work lies in the grey area between documentary and fiction.”

Meanwhile, German photographer Jenny Fitz is showing images from The Other Side, a series that “explores the clash of ideals and everyday life, and the resulting absurdity on a farm in New Zealand,” say the organisers.

American Tom Griggs contributes a selection of images from City of Eternal Spring in which he asks if immigration can be a utopian ideal; the images were shot in his wife’s hometown of Medellín, Colombia, where he emigrated four years ago.

“What connects the works shown in Bubble & Scrape is the curiousity of the photographers to explore the space between the strange and the familiar,” says Oliver Schneider, co-founder of ACMV. “Can everyday life meet the expectations and images that we have in our heads? Utopia should be a place where we can find an ideal way of living together, where we are able to overcome the barriers in our minds that are defined by differences in culture, religion, state, race, sexuality or social standing.”

Bubble & Scrape – Contours of Personal Utopias runs from 07 to 20 November 2014 at Das Gift in Berlin. Alcock and Fitz will be at tonight’s official opening (07 November), with Alcock signing copies of Hobbledehoy, published by Terre Bleue.

A Stephen Shore retrospective in Madrid, featuring both early and recent work, pays homage to a photography master

Many photographers will hold off having a retrospective of their work for as long as possible, often out of fear that looking back on their career will in some way spell the end of it. Stephen Shore – whose work has been exhibited many times in various ways over the years – is one such photographer, but even he has given in to a retrospective, although he is making work as fervently as ever.

Simply titled Stephen Shore, the current exhibition at Madrid’s Fundación Mapfre claims to be the first retrospective of the American photographer’s work. Featuring some 320 photographs, many of them original prints, the exhibition stretches across two levels in the gallery and is loosely divided into themed sections encompassing the photographer’s earliest work, his most famous colour photographs, images from his lesser known black and white, and conceptual periods, right through to his most recent digital colour work shot in Ukraine, and in Winslow, Arizona, some of which has barely been seen.

The show, which continues in Madrid until 24 November 2014, and is due to tour to Arles, Berlin, Turin, and Amsterdam, takes what it refers to as the ‘core concepts’ of the photographer’s work as its starting point – namely, Shore’s fascination with the aesthetic of amateur or ‘snapshot’ photography, his sensitivity to colour, and constant need to innovate and try new photographic approaches.

Curator Marta Dahó, who worked on the exhibition with Victoria del Val and Pedro Benito, opted for a chronological approach as befits a retrospective. Shore’s entry into the world of photography has been well documented, (at the age of 14 he approached MoMA’s Edward Steichen asking to show him his work), and the exhibition begins with Shore’s early photographs, several of which are taken from bold, abstract angles, (peoples’ heads are cut off, or they are photographed from behind), while others – seemingly banal street scenes – hint at the photographer’s later interest in urban landscapes. All of the early works possess a youthful charm and fearlessness – a hunger to try something new – something that has remained with the photographer throughout his career. It’s quite an experience to look at the prints up close and to reflect on the audacious beginnings of what has become (and continues to be) a phenomenal life in photography, and is a great way to begin the show.

The exhibition leads the viewer through Shore’s conceptual period where we see images arranged in grids and series, taken between 1969 and 1971. These large-scale works playfully explore the idea of repetition, and are a welcome reminder that there is far more to Shore than his most famous colour photographs.

The conceptual works cleverly lead the viewer in to what is one of the most impressive parts of the exhibition – the display of photographs from Shore’s American Surfaces (1972-73), and Uncommon Places (1973-81), which are positioned opposite one another in the space to great effect. It’s wonderful to see the images from these canonical series side by side in this way, the smaller 35mm prints contrasting nicely with the later large format work.

We arrive here via the Road Trip Journal work (1973), which saw Shore embark on a month-long trip across America, photographing, and collecting postcards, tickets, and receipts, among other ephemera as he went. In American Surfaces, which stretches out impressively across a long central wall in the gallery, Shore (now famously) used a 35mm camera to explore ordinary scenes, employing a snapshot approach – photographing as an amateur might – but in a very deliberate, neutral way. The work is well-known of course, but it’s nice to be reminded of just how ahead of its time it was, and to savour the intricate details of each photograph on the wall.

Shore’s arguably lesser-known large-scale colour landscapes taken in the 1980s look impressive in the space, but, while pleasant to see, pale in comparison to the aforementioned work. A weak link in the exhibition is the black and white work from the early to mid-1990s shown on the lower level of the gallery. Here, we see bark and boulder studies, images of archeological digs, and street shots taken in New York City, not nearly as engaging as his previous work, but necessary in a retrospective (Shore spent the best part of a decade working in black and white, we are told). The exhibition redeems itself, however, by showing a selection of Shore’s print-on-demand experiments from 2012; Shore published more than eighty books this way, including re-workings of earlier works, and images from more recent travels.

Musya Vainshteyn's Home, Namirov, Ukraine, October 16, 2013

The exhibition finishes with the photographer’s recent work, taken between 2012 and 2013, which includes images of items belonging to Holocaust survivors in the Ukraine. Although shot digitally, these colour images stylistically hark back to Uncommon Places (deadpan, depicting nothing of note yet somehow pregnant with meaning). It’s intriguing to see Shore revisit past visual tropes, and the images neatly bring the exhibition full circle.

Any mid-career exhibition or retrospective cannot of course show every image by a photographer, (and nor should it); rather, a good exhibition will guide the viewer through carefully chosen work in an engaging way. Fundación Mapfre’s offering does this with great skill, intelligently taking visitors through a lifetime’s worth of Shore’s work, and presenting the edited highlights in a thoughtful way. It’s not perfect, but serves as an ideal way into the master photographer’s oeuvre.

An accompanying catalogue with an introduction by the curator, an interview with Stephen Shore by David Campany, and essays by Sandra Phillips and Horacio Fernández, (published in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German), is available to buy.

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