Ghostlike architecture that comes straight out of the Gomorrah movie, displaced classrooms and cardboard manifestation of gravity
Category Archive: photography
Since the early days of photography, critics have told us that photos of political violence – of torture, mutilation, and death – are exploitative, deceitful, even pornographic. To look at these images is voyeuristic; to turn away is a gesture of respect. With “The Cruel Radiance”, Susie Linfield attacks those ideas head-on, arguing passionately that viewing such photographs – and learning to see the people in them – is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes our capacity for cruelty
Thanks to the symbolic and allegorical power of photography, combined with its documentary potential, we find ourselves faced with an extreme dimension of life that oscillates between the sublime and the horrific. As an activity accessible to all, photography helps us to understand that the toughest ordeals of pain and violence can paradoxically lead us to an existential experience whose outcome is a perception of the sublime
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A few months ago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris decided to ban photographs of the artworks and of the inside of the building, allegedly ‘to preserve the comfort of visitors and the safety of the artworks.’ OrsayCommons is a performance pro-photo, pro-remix and pro-public domain at the Musée d’Orsay that civilly and cheekily protests against what its participants call “a measure not only at odds with our times but also illegitimate since it concerns public heritage.”
There is a stunning photo exhibition right now at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Stunning and disturbing. I had to take a small pause from it after having seen only half of it. Yet, you won’t find any mention of the show on the museum’s website. Nor will you see billboards outside the museum to announce/denounce its existence
The exhibition showcase the work of young photographers, gifted amateurs, alongside that of established professionals. This year’s selection is as heavy as ever with its documentation of prostitution, childhood obesity, prison and hunting
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The exhibition explores portraiture and the representation of political, economical and social power in the contemporary world through the works of contemporary artists. Portraits of famous political figures, investigations into the lifestyle of the social elite, as well as inquiries into the power structures of international institutions
Rineke Dijkstra photographed a 18-year-old legionnaire named Olivier Silva, minutes after he had been accepted into the legion. She photographed him six more times over the course of thirty-six months while he was following the Foreign Legion stern training in Aubagne, near Marseille, and when he was stationed at Castelnaudary and in the Pyrenees
The show is indeed disturbing. Not so much for the images but for the issues they uncover: domestic violence, decaying corpses, mass graves for livestock, post-war trauma, pollution, nonconformist sexual practices, etc. Curators Germano Celant and Melissa Harris have hung on the white walls of the Triennale 260 pictures from 24 contemporary photographers. Each of these images follow the footsteps of the photos which emerged from Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s and were so shocking that they played a crucial role in changing public opinion about the conflict
After the moving and now iconic series The Hyena and Other Men and the stunning
Nollywood, Hugo’s latest work, Permanent Error, portrays the people, animals and landscape of a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste from Europe and the US. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, in Ghana, is a shocking contrast to the better faster shinier life promised by the advances of technology
Some 100 works by photographers as Sibylle Bergemann, Evelyn Richter, Ulrich Wüst, Ute Mahler, Will McBride, Helga Paris and Roger Melis. In black and white, they have documented everyday situations that reflect the more recent history of East-Germany beyond high politics – snapshots that show the professional and private everyday life, political activities, urban landscapes, interiors and nudes
Fifty years after The Americans of Robert Frank, and practically at the same time as the reconstruction of the then pioneering exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape”, FotoMuseum, through the exhibition American Documents, offers a comprehensive overview of the documentary trends in American photography from the 1970 until now
In this series of photos and installations in public space, Mitch Epstein explores and questions the ‘power’ that lays at the core of the United States. ‘Power’ in this case stands for both strength and energy. Over the course of 5 years he traveled through 25 states to photograph nuclear reactors, oil refineries, mines, rigs, abandoned gas pumps, wind parks, pipelines as well as their environs
Meiselas was 26 when she joined Magnum. One of the few women at the agency, she is probably better known for her work covering political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s than for her coverage of the sex scene in the US. I saw both facets of her portfolio in London a few weeks ago
Chris Steele-Perkins unflinchingly records the absurdities, the pleasures and the tragedies of English life, invariably with wit and humour. There is a certain pathos in the image of a crowded beach, complete with donkeys, in which an unobserved dog pisses upon a windbreak: the English are unbelievably stoical holidaymakers
There are few themes that bear the rubber stamp of moral and aesthetic prohibition, even though they find expression in a world where all ideological and ethical limits seem to have been left behind. But domestic eroticism, parental unions and filial love represent a few black holes in the fabric of common morality – uncomfortable voids that do not even dare thinking about
The photo series documents a traditional winter masquerade in Bulgaria that was originally aimed at frightening the evil spirits away but has now become way to welcome the new year. Estelle Hanania observed the scene from a nearby parking lot where participants changed into their costumes and masks
The theme of this edition of the biennale is borders, an issue at heart of many tensions and conversations in Africa.. Some of the photographers embraced the theme very literally, others adopted a more metaphorical approach
On June 30, the Democratic Republic of Congo will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its independence from Belgium. Photographer Carl de Keyzer traveled through the country following the “Guide Du Voyageur du Congo Belge”. Published in 1954, the touristic guide presented Congo as the ideal holiday destination with stunning scenery, brand new roads, musement parks for white people only, missions, factories, etc. These places have now lost much of their former glory, they are either ruins or used for identical or different purposes
The photo exhibition explores how our perception is mediated by and eventually adapts to the images coming from inquisitive medias such as satellites and security cameras. Everywhere around us, screens are showering our retina with information most of us hardly ever take the trouble to cross check. We tend to forget that these images are not first-hand, they are mediated, selected and distributed by media, political or scientific authorities
Overseen by two Berlin curators Dr. Matthias Harder (Helmut Newton Stifftung) and Félix Hoffmann (C/O Berlin), this exhibition is small, impeccably curated and it is also the one that follows most punctiliously the main theme of the exhibition: control and its antithesis
The Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts has invited about a hundred artists to question society’s growing desire for control, surveillance, and regulation. A worrying tendency which leaves space for accident, irrationality, for the unexpected and the absurd
The 7th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts in Liege is one of the most exciting art events i’ve seen in a while. This year’s theme is (Out of) Control. It oscillates between the cheerful and the somber, between the mundane and the extraordinary. I’ll get back to you with a proper report but i couldn’t help singling out a quirky series of photos i discovered at the biennial
The illegal Israeli settlement Har Homa in the West Bank, the interior of the MIR space-station simulator in Moscow, the modernist monument in honour of WW II victims in Kosturnica, the bedsheet serving as an improvised cinema screen in a Chinese village – these are real Science Fiction scenarios, constructed man-made utopias, hurling their absurdities at the viewer
30 black and white pictures from photographers who portrayed life at the time of the GDR, mostly in a way that steered away from the official GDR iconography
The exhibition showcase the work of young photographers, gifted amateurs, alongside that of established professionals. This year’s selection is as heavy as ever with its documentation of prostitution, childhood obesity, prison and hunting
In today’s mass-media society, only what becomes image is considered real. In a process of reversal, the representation of the world comes to replace the world itself, a world in which the user operates digitally
Moira Ricci delves into the photographs of the past following the tracks of her mother, whose dates of birth and death provide the series with its title and indicate the time span covered by the images. Digital processing of old family photographs enables the artist to appear beside and observe her mother while remaining an extraneous figure, a sort of ubiquitous ghost hovering on the edges of the images and events
Look what i didn’t bring you back from Rome! Pieter Hugo (of the Hyena Men fame) ‘fiction documents’ the sets of the flamboyant Nigerian film industry
Since 1955, the World Press Photo Foundation is awarding the most striking and representative images that have documented and illustrated the events of our times in the press. The winners of the photography contest are exhibited this year in 100 cities in 45 countries and is still expanding. The plethora of exhibition venues hardly justify why World Press Photo is so wantonly careless about the way the images are exhibited
Sex Cinema Venus is the oldest sex cinema in the Red Light District of Amsterdam, which will soon disappear as a result of the city council’s regeneration plans. Using a slide show and several single photographs Van der Burg portrays the stories that take place behind the doors of this particular cinema
Xiong Wenyun’s “Moving Rainbow” series incorporates the colors of Tibetan prayer flags into landscape photography, and engages with environmental and social issues related to China’s development in its western provinces
A short selection of the photo works i saw at Turin’s contemporary art fair earlier this month
I first thought Princen’s photograph was fake. How could this be real? Looking online for the location of the photo, Mokattam, i discovered the image is authentic. It’s a suburb of Cairo, called Garbage City. A community of mainly Coptic Christians were allowed to collect and dispose of Cairo’s waste by feeding it to their pigs
Part of Thomas Demand’s show Nationalgalerie, Haltestelle is a large-scale photograph of a paper model resembling a nondescript rural German bus shelter, which happens to be the place just outside of Magdeburg where a teen pop band were waiting for their school bus every morning.
Letizia Battaglia’s pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mafiosi found by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of the mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns
I discovered the work of Edward S. Curtis while i was visiting the Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curtis documented the American West as well as the rites and lives of Native American peoples
It was at the Rijksakademie that she made her first series of animal portraits – five police dogs – which grew from a fascination with the portrayal of controlled aggression
Over the course of two years, Muzi Quawson attempts to uncover the reality of this outlandish, boondocks location. Her camera silently follows Ivar “Duke” T Pederson: an aging cowboy who incarnates the Old American West of our most used and abused cliché.
Most of the works exhibited at the Jeu de Paume date from the 70s and 80s, an era dominated in England by the rule of Margaret Thatcher. Parr doesn’t have fond memories of her reign and the photos he collects attest of the social decline and distress the working class went through at the time