Photography Exhibitions Summer 2013

Daniel Blau announces winners of 5 Under 30 competition

The five winning photographers will exhibit work at the Daniel Blau gallery in Hoxton in July, Daniel Blau has announced the names of the winning photographers in 5 Under 30, its inaugural photography competition for young photographers.The photographers include 27-year-old Marianne Bjørnmyr, 29-year-old Madoka Furuhashi, 26-year-old Andi Schmied, 22-year-old Tereza Cervenova, and 25-year-old Lara Morrell.

For more visit www.danielblau.com

The Photographers Gallery

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013 winners are Broomberg & Chanarin for War Primer 2  19 Apr – 30 Jun 2013

Plate 26, George Bush serves a Thanksgiving turkey to US troops stationed in Baghdad in 2003, 2011

CHRIS KILLIP British born Killip has been taking photographs for nearly five decades.What Happened – Great Britain comprises black and white images of working people in the north of England, taken by Killip in the 1970s and 1980s. After spending months immersed in several communities, Killip documented the disintegration of the industrial past with a poetic and highly personal point of view.

18 Apr – 30 Jun 2013

©Chris Killip

Cristina De Middel (b.1975, Spain) is nominated for her publicationThe Afronauts (self-published, 2011). Until June 30th

In her first book, The Afronauts, De Middel engages with myths and truths, reality and fiction. In 1964, after gaining independence, Zambia started a space programme in order to send the first African astronaut to the moon.

©Cristina de Middel

Sebastião Salgado Genesis

Natural History Museum

11 April – 8 September 2013
Waterhouse Gallery

Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis is the culmination of 8 years work exploring 32 countries. It is Salgado’s 3rd long-term photographic exploration of global issues, following his previously acclaimed collections, Workers and Migrations.

About 216 of Sebastião Salgado’s black-and-white documentary photographs are on show in Genesis. They capture some of the furthest and wildest corners of our world, portraying indigenous communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions, and showing rare insights into their lands.

During the 8 years in which Salgado travelled around the world to produce this collection of images, he often stayed with the people he photographed.

Salgado reflects: ‘Many of us live in cities, cut off completely from the planet. My wish was to experience living with people with real links to nature… For me to go back to nature was a huge pleasure. I wished to present the planet in my language, photography. And so came Genesis.’

The exhibition’s design follows the 5 themes in Genesis: Sanctuaries, Planet South, Africa, Northern Spaces, and Amazonia and Pantanal.

Sebastião and Lelia Salgado © Richard Beliel

Many of the places represented in Salgado’s images are important research areas particularly for studying the variety of species biodiversity.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

This is now on tour and can be found at various locations

Basingstoke
18 May 2013 to 27 July 2013
Willis Museum
Market Place, Basingstoke, RG21 7QD
0845 603 5635

Bedford
22 June 2013 to 15 September 2013
The Higgens Art Gallery and Museum
Castle Lane, Bedford, MK40 3XD
01234 718618

 

EXPOSURES

Julia Martinez: Nude Photography

13th – 29th  June 2013

The photographer, The artist, formerly a photographic model, moves behind the lens

Art Jericho, 6 King Street, Oxford OX2 6DF, Opening hours vary, but are often Wed-Sat 11am – 5pm (or by appointment) and Sun 1-5pm.

ROCK PORTRAITS 90/94 Dean Ryan

4th July – 3rd August 2013

Live music photography at the Jericho Tavern

A first viewing of photographs of The Verve, Pulp and many more at the celebrated Oxford venue.

Art Jericho, 6 King Street, Oxford OX2 6DF, Opening hours vary, but are often Wed-Sat 11am – 5pm (or by appointment) and Sun 1-5pm.

 

 

Our man in Beirut Cairo Damascus Istanbul – Photographer John Wreford

The Forgotten People of Nubia

 

The highs and lows of life as a documentary photographer

In the Guardian…..

On the road for six months of the year, covering everything from the Iraq war to Agent Orange, Ed Kashi writes home to his wife

Taken 13.04.09

Aleppo, Syria (above)

“Today in Aleppo, it’s a brilliant, crisp sunny day, after a night of thunder and rain. I’m always coming and going from home. This constant state of flux creates the sense of being suspended between worlds and always feeling isolated on some level, since I can’t ever get grounded or fully connected either at home or on the road. One of the issues at home is how distracted everyone is, whether from your work or the digital gadgets and friends of the kids. And, of course, you all must live your own lives, so you are not in sync with my rhythms and moods.”

Zululand, Africa

Taken 21.09.97“I am once again facing the demons of a tough fixer, the loneliness of the road and less than perfect conditions. But my problems pale when I think about our new baby on the way. It was a shock when I first got the news but now I’m jumping out of my skin with excitement. Who knows what we’ll have? I know you want a girl this time. I just want a healthy baby.

Today we went out at dusk to photograph the cane fields being burned. It was exciting, and I had a near miss. Hot embers were flying everywhere and they had these Zulu workers armed with big sticks to bat the embers down as they tried to fly to an adjacent field not ready for burning. That would be devastating for the farmers. I was on the fire break road that separates the fields, trying to photograph the worker swinging at the embers, when a bunch of them fell on me. They burned holes in my clothes, caught my forearm and left a small mark.

Every night I go to sleep thinking of your swollen belly and all the magic that’s inside. I can’t wait to meet our new child. Only a few months left.

I love you so dearly and deeply”.…..MORE at the Guardian

 

 

Cairo Divided

An unique text and photo essay explores Egypt’s sprawling metropolis as it undergoes one of the most dramatic transformations in its history. Released as part of a new project bringing writers and photographers together on in-depth works, it is available for free in a one-off newspaper format – order details are below.

For fourteen centuries, Egypt’s capital has risen within a pair of stubbornly-persistent natural boundaries – the Moqattam clifftops to the west, and the Saharan desert to the east. Now for the first time Cairo is bursting its banks, sending boutique villas and water-hungry golf courses tumbling into the sand dunes, and reshaping the political and psychological contours of the largest megacity in Africa and the Middle East.Amid an uncertain tide of political change, the controversial ‘satellite cities’ project is dramatically transforming peripheries into new urban centres and consigning old focal points to a life on the margins. Against the backdrop of national revolution, photographer Jason Larkin and writer Jack Shenker collaborated for two years to produce ‘Cairo Divided’, a free hard-copy publication exploring the capital’s rapidly-mutating urban landscape.

Jason Larkin is a documentary photographer and part of the Panos photo agency in London. Previously based in Cairo, his career has seen him shooting for international periodicals across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the prestigious PDN Arnold Newman Portraiture prize. He is currently based between London and Johannesburg – http://www.jasonlarkin.co.uk.

Jack Shenker is a London-born writer who has reported from across the globe, with work spanning Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Gaza and the Mediterranean. Since 2008, he has been Egypt correspondent for the Guardian, and his coverage of the 2011 Egyptian revolution won the Amnesty International Gaby Rado award for excellence in human rights journalism. He is currently based in London and Cairo – http://www.jackshenker.net.

Hard copies of ‘Cairo Divided’ are available at no cost beyond postage and packaging fees. Full details here

Olivier Laurent writing in the BJP has this to say

Jason Larkin: Cairo Divided

Cairo Divided © Jason Larkin.

Divided is a two-year investigation into Cairo’s social and architectural changes, self-published for the first time in its entirety in newspaper form.

Jason Larkin had been working for two years on Divided when he and journalist Jack Shenker decided to publish it in newspaper format. “We never thought about how it was going to end up,” Larkin tells BJP. “Jack was writing long essays, but when they were published in The Guardian or other titles, they were condensed. We thought it would be nice to publish unabridged essays.”

Divided is the story of how the megacity, Cairo, is turning itself inside out. “The project started when I was living very close to the American University of Cairo,” says Larkin. “I remember when the university announced it would be moving to the outskirts of Cairo, a lot of people were surprised. The university sees a lot of students from abroad thinking they would be studying in Cairo, but instead they’d find themselves in the desert.”

Larkin checked the situation out for himself, visiting the construction sites of these huge, new compounds. “There was a lot going on, but no one was speaking about it in Cairo,” he says. “I started investigating, and found these huge developments.” Quickly he realised that once completed, there would be a massive exodus of people from the city to the outskirts.

But these new cities lacked “all the bits they need to function as normal cities,” he explains. “There are huge compounds, ministries, headquarters, office blocks, but no social housing.” The poorest and working classes wouldn’t be able to move to these new towns, in effect dividing Cairo’s population, he says. “I was alarmed by that. I wondered how Cairo was going to change when people start to move there.”

His images, with Shenker’s essays, have now been released in a 32-page newspaper self-published by Larkin in association with Panos Pictures. “There were many reasons for choosing this format – the first one was because of the elections in Egypt. I really liked the idea of coming out with something free that I’d be able to pass on to universities or people learning the politics or the language of this country. I thought it would be a great way to reach people. Egypt is in a very complicated situation and I think a lot of the time people miss out on the real context of what is going on. They are just hearing the daily news. I thought it would be great if people were able to pick up a copy of Divided and have a better understanding of what is actually going on in Cairo and in Egypt.”  ..….MORE

Cairo Divided © Jason Larkin.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/2127269/jason-larkin-cairo-divided#ixzz1sahvwaok
Subscribe to BJP and save money. Click here to save 29% today.

Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography

Lucy Davies writes an excellent article in the BJP about an exhibition of South African photographers at the V & A

Messina/Musina and Maryna Vermeulen with Timana Phosiwa, 2006 © Pieter Hugo. Courtesy of Michael Stevenson, Cape Town & Yossi Milo, New York.

“South African photographers have caught the world’s attention and are now being recognised as some of the most exciting and inventive artists at work. BJP talks to some of them as the V&A Museum welcomes them in a comprehensive exhibition. The weight of South Africa’s past lies heavy on its present, a burden its photographers cannot ignore. And yet, in their attempt to make sense of post-apartheid society and devise new approaches to its complexities, the dynamism and urgency of these photographers has caught worldwide attention, and they are now being recognised as some of the most exciting and inventive artists at work. Lucy Davies travelled to South Africa to meet a handful of them ahead of the V&A’s exhibition Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography. In Portrait with Keys, Ivan Vladislavic’s collection of loosely stitched, non-fiction encounters with the city of Johannesburg, the narrator imagines a map. At the time he is travelling westwards across the urban grid in a car with his friend Louise, past the house on Isipingo Street in the suburb of Belleville where the writer Herman Charles Bosman murdered his step-brother in 1926. “People should be made aware of this historic site,” says Ivan, and conjures in his mind a palimpsest to represent the city’s history, where “every violent death… above ground and below, by axe and blade and bullet” is marked on a map. It will form, he says, “a title deed to despair… cross-stitched in black, crumpling under the weight of sorrow as you struggle to unfold it on the dining room table”.

There is no question that the weight of South Africa’s past lies heavy on its present. Its collective memory has the butting insistence of the head of an animal that needs to be fed. The public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were first to map the ancient violations and prejudices for a post-apartheid generation, but in recent years these histories – and I use the plural because they are not always concordant – have been inscribed, reinterpreted, reappropriated, veiled and enacted by an exceptional number of photographers.

This month, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London will exhibit a selection of works from this new visual landscape, in a show titled Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (12 April – 17 July). Just 17 photographers were pulled from the stream by co-curators Tamar Garb and Martin Barnes, via a series of stringent criteria designed to illuminate the tense relationship South Africa has had with the depiction of its people. All the work has been produced over the past decade by practitioners living and working in South Africa, and all of it foregrounds a self-conscious engagement with the country’s distinct political and photographic past. Their voices are young and strong, capable, Barnes believes, “of holding their own on the worldwide market”.…….MORE

Figures & Fictions is on show at the V&A until 17 July 2011.
 Visit www.vam.ac.uk.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2036684/figures-fictions-contemporary-south-african-photography#ixzz1rYIm4W6s
Subscribe to BJP and save money. Click here to save 29% today.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2036684/figures-fictions-contemporary-south-african-photography#ixzz1rYHXomva
Subscribe to BJP and save money. Click here to save 29% today.

This Must Be the Place by Pieter Hugo

Sean O’Hagan writes in the Guardian about Pieter Hugo and reviews “This Must Be the Place” Pieter Hugo’s photographic retrospective offers a provocative view of life on the edge of sub-Saharan African society

“Pieter Hugo’s photographs are problematic. That is part of their power and their resonance. He is a white South African who came of age as apartheid crumbled and, though he cites the great David Goldblatt as a formative inspiration, his photographs possess none of the powerful political thrust of an older generation of South African photographers, who had no choice but to deal with the harsh realities of the world around them.”..…..MORE

This is from Pieter Hugo’s website and specifically about this project

“THE DOG’S MASTER

These photographs came about after a friend emailed me an image taken on a cellphone through a car window in Lagos, Nigeria, which depicted a group of men walking down the street with a hyena in chains. A few days later I saw the image reproduced in a South African newspaper with the caption ‘The Streets of Lagos’. Nigerian newspapers reported that these men were bank robbers, bodyguards, drug dealers, debt collectors. Myths surrounded them. The image captivated me.”..….MORE

 

 

Afrikaner Blood – Learning to be racist in South Africa

Afrikaner blood

“This short multimedia film is the first production of Frog in a tent. It looks at how an extreme right-wing group is teaching young white South Africans to eschew Nelson Mandela’s vision of a multicultural rainbow nation. The fringe group Kommandokorps, led by old-apartheid army leader Franz Jooste, organizes camps during school holidays for Afrikaners, white teenagers of mainly Dutch and German descent. He teaches them to defend themselves against crime in South Africa and that black South Africans are their enemy. He tells them they are firstly Afrikaners and should deny their South African identity. We followed them on one of the camps, where in nine days boys who once carried a budding belief in South Africa’s unity become toughened men with racist ideas.”

This short multimedia (stills and video) tells the story of a sort of summer camp you just wouldn’t send your kids to, there are assertions that groups like this are so few that they only represent a lunatic fringe, still scary.

The BBC has some of the still and video on their site here is the link or you can directly to the Frog In A Tent site here

Understanding the light meter in your camera

You may not be fully aware of the metering opportunities your camera offers and how making the right choice can significantly improve your images. This well written article by Gerry van der Walt of Photo Africa gives a simple basic explanation of how you can do better. Gerry runs photography workshops and safaris in Africa so if you are thinking of a trip check out his site

Here is a link to his page with the metering tutorial

The Remarkable Colours of Morocco

Morocco is one of those dream travel destinations for photographers where it seems it’s almost impossible to take a bad photograph. There seems to be no shortage of interesting subjects and the colours shown by photos like these are amazing. So use this collection as inspiration to one day practice your photography in this beautiful country. Gallery here

Wilfred Theisger at The Pitt River’s Museum Oxford

Sir Wilfred Thesiger took nearly 40,000 photographs during his eight decades of travels throughout Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Now, to mark 100 years since his birth, Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum is displaying some of his most striking images.

 

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition
4 June 2010 – 5 June 2011

Marking the centenary of the renowned British traveller and writer Wilfred Thesiger’s birth in Ethiopia, this major new exhibition is the first to explore his lifelong relationship with Africa. Photographs from Ethiopia, Sudan, Morocco, Tanzania and Kenya are accompanied by a selection of objects collected by Thesiger in Ethiopia and later donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a major new publication, Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, which includes a wide selection of his African photographs, and essays by a number of contributors, such as Alexander Maitland and David Attenborough