Richard Mosse subverts equipment designed for surveillance in order to challenge documentary tropes and force us to look anew at images we’ve seen again and again
Category Archive: photography
A book that unpacks the notion of the mass image through the lens of affective, representational, political, logistical and material economies
Hannah Fletcher is a photographer without a camera. She combines techniques from the past and experiments to innovate and improve photographic processes
advertising
A fun book that targets an audience of art viewers without the usual arty mumbo jumbo. There’s humour throughout the pages and there’s inventiveness in the categories Cotton chose to classify contemporary photography art
How contemporary photographers of African origin are interrogating ideas of ‘Africanness’
How society archives human DNA in the form of slivers of umbilical cord, dental samples and sperm, DNA of animals already extinct in the wild, plant seeds, vast quantities of digital data…
social
Interview with a photographer, bioartist and biology student whose works make visible the plight of endangered mammals in the Baltic sea, the drop in pollinator populations in the Arctic and other uncomfortable realities
Where i saw VR tapestry, learnt about Russian military deception and discovered that ravens are even smarter than i thought
Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, Helfand examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes
Linke’s exhibition scrutinises seabed mining and other forms of extraction and the effects they might have on marine life and communities
Matthieu Gafsou has spent 4 years researching transhumanism, a movement looking towards science and technology to drastically improve human cognitive, mental and physical performances
The cutting-edge research is given a human face and even if we don’t fully understand the processes at work, the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for
A festival dedicated to art by young talents, independent research, experimentation and unconventional curatorial gestures
Through visual art, photography and video installations, the exhibition ‘Street Dreams: How Hiphop took over Fashion’ show the looks, the codes and the creative force of hip hop
Photographer Salvatore Vitale explores Switzerland’s security measures by focusing on “matter-of-fact” types of instructions, protocols, bureaucracies and clear-cut solutions which he visualizes in photographs, diagrams, and graphical illustrations
Windowless walls, masses of concrete, eroded hills, polluted water sources, etc. The photographer documents the impact that the economic boom is having on urban areas and on the fragile Amazonian ecosystem
The promise of the exhibition is bold: explain to us that incarceration is our shared responsibility because “We too are the punishers”
Paul Lowe managed to cram into one book some 200 years of history, technology, art, society without ever making it look laborious nor indigestible
Whether his locations are far-flung (ranging from the Antarctic to the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia) or closer to home, Goiris makes them look uncannily suspended, as if they came from another planet
Presenting work from the earliest through to the most contemporary of photographers, Making It Up: Photographic Fictions challenges the idea that ‘the camera never lies’
Kinshasa is a megacity with some twelve million inhabitants but barely any art market or art support. Local artists have thus developed creative, DIY solutions to make the best of the materials available around them
Hong Kong Soup: 1826, a selection of the debris which escapes recycling or landfill and ends up in the sea and washed up on beaches
The book documents creative strategies by artists, fashion designers and other media users to become virtually faceless for aesthetic, fetishist or resistance purposes
Using defective photographic material and a bit of photoshop, Barker shot the plastic bits of trash to make them look like plankton in water
The state of suspension is often likened to being paralysed or stunned, but it is actually a constant, relentless, never-ending struggle to adapt
Campeau is fascinated by the history of photography and in particular the disappearance of analog tools and practices. Each of the works exhibited explores a material culture that used to suggest magic and craftmanship: the messy darkrooms with duct tape to fend off the light and wooden pegs to hang the images to dry; the colourful rolls of photo film and the iconic camera models; the amateur developer who gave way to the computer pixel specialist, etc.
Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent
The combination of the qualities of the positive photographic paper and the impossibility to fully control the oddly staged happenings evokes 19th century’s attempts to photographically capture paranormal activities
In 2005, a group of photographers took a stand alongside the people of the small town of Bil’in, and documented their fight to stop the Israeli government building the infamous West Bank Barrier. Inspired by what they had seen in Bil’in, the group went on to form Activestills, a collective whose work has become vital in documenting the struggle against Israeli occupation and everyday life in extraordinary situations
An exhibition at BOZAR in Brussels explores the intersection between photography and surveillance. Employing a dynamic range of approaches—from documentary to conceptual practice, from appropriation to street art—these 10 artists provide a satellite-to-street view of the ways in which surveillance culture blurs the boundaries between the private and public realm
I don’t normally write about art fairs but Artissima usually introduces me to so many new ideas, artists and way of representing the world that i can’t resist sharing some of the images of the event on the blog
“A new perspective on a traumatic chapter in German history.”
Arwed Messmer begins with the various photographs made by police photographers at the time—pictures of demonstrators, crime scene images, and mug shots. He poses the question of how this past search for criminological evidence can be employed artistically
The volume assembles the works of contemporary photographers for the purpose of lending visual evidence to the blatant discrepancy between people’s living conditions, which can be as fascinating as it is shocking
“Every day that I was there I didn’t see anything else but the wall, and I can tell you I couldn’t stand it longer than three weeks. I was so depressed that I needed to go away,” said Koudelka about Wall, a series that documents the wall erected by the state of Israel in the West Bank as well as around Israeli settlements
Because it’s almost 40 degrees this week in Turin and i’m in a murderous mood, i’m going to split my review of the show into two parts. Today, you get the depressing bits and as soon as temperatures have cooled off a little, i’ll be back with the works that speak of solidarity, hope and compassion. It’s not all bad though because 1. i loved that show so much i visited it twice and 2. i’m going to open the quick gallery tour with one of my favourite artists
And Now for Something Completely Different: two photo series by Chris Steele-Perkins: the iconic one that documents the teddy boys and a more recent one that looks at a football competition for Roman Catholic priests
Italian photographer Valerio Spada is interested in the daily existence of Mafia bosses who spend decades on the run. What do you carry with you when you decide to disappear? What do you take along when you are forced to move from one place to another?
This book explores recent and historic artworks in the context of present-day environmental concerns, considering the future consequences of the age of the anthropocene, and humanity’s harsh imprint on our planet
Colonialism is not an era, it is a system of military/police, legal, administrative, social, and cultural system of domination; and, architecture is not (only) an aesthetic vessel, it is an apparatus organizing and hierarchizing bodies in space
Artist Daniel Mayrit (famous for a photo series which presents the portraits of the most powerful people in the City of London as if they were delinquents caught up on CCTV cameras) demonstrates the absurdity of Spain’s gag laws