Night visions: Darren Almond’s full-moon landscapes

Sean O’Hagan writing in The Guardian tells us about landscape taken just by the light of the moon.

Taken over the course of half an hour at night, Darren Almond’s images expose what happens when ‘you give the landscape longer to express itself’.

At least two guiding spirits hover around To Leave a Light Impression, the new show by British artist Darren Almond at White Cube, Bermondsey. The most obvious is Charles Darwin, in whose footsteps Almond followed to make several of his images. The other is the lesser-known Scottish nature writer, Nan Shepherd, whose book, The Living Mountain, provides the exhibition’s epigraph:

“So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust the grumbling, grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, rain and snow – the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.”

Almond is trying to find a way in to a landscape tradition that he belongs to, but stands outside. His preternaturally still photographs evoke all kinds of precedents – from painters of the natural sublime like Caspar David Friedrich to early photographic pioneers like Edward Steichen and more recent ecologically attuned photographers including Robert Adams – but they also evince a kind of beautiful unrealness…..MORE

 

Details of the exhibition can be found here

Darren Almond
To Leave a Light Impression
22 January – 13 April 2014
South Galleries, Bermondsey

 

Portraits of women – by the men who loved them

Sean O’Hagan writes in The Guardian about a new exhibition in Madrid.

Some of the greatest photos ever taken were by men whose muses were their own wives, as two breathtaking shows at PhotoEspaña 2013 prove

Edith, 1963 by Emmet Gowin

The Azca gallery is tucked at the back of a shopping mall opposite Real Madrid’s towering Bernabeu Stadium. It’s the unlikely setting for one of the most interesting shows in this year’s PhotoEspaña festival: the first European retrospective of the American photographer Emmet Gowin. The show includes his later landscapes, the most dramatic of which capture the volcano Mount St Helens in Washington, US, just after it erupted in 1980. But it is his images of home and family that remain his most evocative……Gowin studied under the great Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, another photographer who made his wife his enduring subject. Callahan’s work is paired with that of Edward Weston in an exhibition at PhotoEspaña entitled……

Edward Weston, Untitled. Photograph: Edward Weston / Center for Creative Photography

It is a study in contrasts, with Weston’s formal approach turning every nude female into a study of light, shade and shape, while Callahan’s images of his wife, Eleanor seem more intimate and less rigorously posed……..

Read the full article here

If you are going to Spain then you might like to check out this exhibition

International Festival
of photography and visual arts

 

Deutsche Börse photography prize 2013

It is probably fair to say that amongst photographers I know this prize is the most controversial. The photographers shortlisted almost always reflect the edges of photography where camera skills and traditional subject matter are of little importance. For example one of the short listed artists, Mishka Henner,  for the prize this year presents pictures from the google street view car cameras where he has selected views that include street sex workers.

Mishka Henner, Carretera de Fortuna, Murcia, Spain, 2012

Another, Cristina de Middel, who reimagines the 60s space programme in Zambia. I know it barely warrants thinking about

Cristina De Middel, The Afronauts, 2012

Chris Killip is probably the only name you might recognise and the only one on the shortlist that makes photographs like a photographer.

Chris Killip, Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976

Chris Killip (b. 1946, UK) is nominated for his exhibition What Happened – Great Britain 1970 –1990 at LE BAL, Paris (12 May – 19 August 2012).

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.

The final artists shortlisted for this prize are

Adam Broomberg (b. 1970, South Africa) and Oliver Chanarin (b. 1971, UK) are nominated for their publication War Primer 2 (MACK, 2012).

War Primer 2 is a limited edition book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertold Brecht’s remarkable 1955 publication War Primer. Brecht’s photo-essay comprises 85 images, photographic fragments or collected newspaper clippings, that were placed next to a four-line poem, called ‘photo-epigrams’. Broomberg and Chanarin layered Google search results for the poems over Brecht’s originals.

For full details of the  Deutsche Börse photography prize 2013 There is an exhibition at The Photographers Gallery and much more information here 

For a much more teeth grinding experience have a look at the video on the Guardian website  where the excellent Sean O’Hagen discusses the work with the photographers/artists involved. Sean O’Hagan meets the nominees for the annual Deutsche Börse photography prize: Mishka Henner, who puts Google Street View to imaginative use; Cristina de Middel, who reimagines the 60s space programme in Zambia; Chris Killip, who asks What Happened, Great Britain; and duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who have reworked a Bertolt Brecht book.

It is hard to tell if this prize and exhibition actually does good or bad for photography. Most people seeing the work of these four artists would recognise Chris Killip as a photographer but would struggle with the other three.

further reading on the Guardian website comes courtesy of Adrian Searle

A sociologist by training, Henner presents (or rather, re-presents) the images without comment. Henner annoys me. For other projects, he has digitally removed the figures from Robert Frank’s The Americans, and overlain Gerhard Richter’s blurry, photographically based paintings with words and phrases taken from Ed Ruscha’s work. Ho ho, you say. Real complexity lies elsewhere……….It was never going to get off the ground. De Middel’s photographs, drawings and re-photographed letters conflate original material with her own reconstructions and fantasy. A space camp shelters under a boabab tree; cosmonauts wander through a village of straw huts; a man in a wax-batik patterned spacesuit struggles through a cane field. Yinka Shonibare has presented a family of astronauts in similar garb floating in mid-air. What goes around comes around. All this works better in the little self-published book De Middel made of her project – now out of print and selling, I am told, for more than £1,000.

can you be bothered to learn more about these three artists and one photographer if so go here

What do you think?

The 10 best … photographic self-portraits

OK these are not our choice but that of Sean O’Hagan writing in the Guardian. Sean is a really excellent writer on photography and whenever we feature one of his pieces we get comments both in agreement and opposition. This list is by our consideration controversial and seems to miss some of the obvious and maybe that is the point. We would ask, where is Robert Mapplethorpe or more importantly Cindy Sherman but that is something you might completely disagree with. Do go and have a look and either nod sagely in agreement with Sean or howl at all you think he has missed.

From Andy Warhol in drag and Giles Duley’s ‘broken statue’, to John Coplans’s back and Gillian Wearing as her father

Andy Warhol: Self-portrait in Drag, 1981. Photograph: The Andy Warhol Foundation

Warhol’s pop art depended on photography. He used found photographic images as the basis for many of his silk-screen paintings, but he also took thousands of Polaroids. Some became the source material for his commissioned portraits, but most were filed away in his archive – a kind of intimate visual record of his life. His most famous self-portrait features an exaggerated version of himself in a fright wig, but the series of self-portraits he made of himself in drag in 1981 is both more restrained and more formally accomplished. Here, the persona of celebrity blankness he so carefully cultivated is refined to an almost self-parodic extent: a mask of a mask.

See the other 9 best here

Shortlist announced – Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012

The Taylor Wessing prize for portrait photography is now firmly established as one of the defining awards given to photographers. It would not be unkind to say that it often generates heated debate and bafflement as well as admiration. This year the four shortlisted photographers are : Spencer Murphy, Jennifer Pattison, Jordi Ruiz Cirera and Alma Haser.

This is from TW website:

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize presents the very best in contemporary portrait photography, showcasing the work of talented young photographers and gifted amateurs alongside that of established professionals and photography students.

Through editorial, advertising and fine art images, entrants have explored a range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family.

This year the competition attracted 5,340 submissions by over 2,350 photographers from around the world. The selected sixty works for the exhibition, many of which are on display for the first time, include the four shortlisted images and the winner of the first John Kobal New Work Award. This is the best place to see the shortlisted artists as well as the others selected for exhibition

The Ventriloquists: two of Alma Haser’s friends from south London ©Alma Haser

Maria Teichroeb, by Jordi Ruiz Cirera: Maria is a member of a community of Mennonites in Bolivia ©Jordi Ruiz Cirera

Lynne Brighton, shot by Jennifer Pattison in the bedroom of a derelict house ©Jennifer Pattison

Mark Rylance, by Spencer Murphy ©Spencer Murphy

There are more images from the exhibition in The Guardian here

And also in The Guardian an interesting article by the excellent Sean O’Hagan about being asked to be a judge having been anything but complimentary about last years competition. Last November, I wrote a not altogether positive review of the 2011 Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize headlined Another animal, another girl with red hair. It described my bafflement at the judging process and the general “dullness of the selection”. It was a surprise, then, to be asked to be one of this year’s judges. I jumped at the chance. I think Sean echoed many peoples’ views on the Taylor Wessing Awards. He goes on Last year, I was critical of the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize. This year I helped judge it – and now realise how tough it is to pick a winner. Read what he has to say about judging this year here

The winner will be announced on 5 November, ahead of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which organised the prize, from 8 November-17 February.

So what do you think, dull lifeless, blank stares, odd looking people or vibrant cutting edge creative photography?

 

 

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

 

 

Photographs Not Taken: what makes a photographer freeze?

“The American photographer Christian Patterson was driving along a deserted road in rural Nebraska when he saw a house on fire. He jumped out of his car and ran towards the house, but the intense heat drove him back. As he was about to take a picture of the scene, a truck pulled up and a man jumped out. He fell to his knees, crying. A fire truck arrived but, by then, the house and all its contents were reduced to ash……..These are just two of the 62 stories collected by Will Steacy in a new book, Photographs Not Taken, published by Daylight. In his introduction, Steacy, a photographer himself, describes it as “a collection of essays by photographers about moments that never became a picture”. He writes: “Here, the process of making a photograph has been reversed. Instead of looking out into the world through a camera lens, these essays look directly into the mind’s eye to reveal where photographs come from in their barest and most primitive form – the original idea.” WRITES Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian , more here

This is an interesting idea, I sometimes muse on missed opportunities, I am slightly concerned though that something that was not taken can be called a photograph. If it is a photograph not taken then by definition it cannot be a photograph…enough all too confusing.  As always Sean O’Hagen writes cogently and with interest.

Below is a photograph not taken

Paul Graham wins 2012 Hasselblad award

Self-taught photographer becomes first British winner of international prize for recognition of major achievements, writes Sean O’Hagan in The Guardian.

“Paul Graham has been named as the winner of the 2012 Hasselblad award, which is presented annually to “a photographer recognised for major achievements”. It is the first time a British photographer has won the prestigious international prize. Previous recipients include Robert Adams (2009), Nan Goldin (2007) and William Eggleston (1998).

Graham, who had a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London last year, is a self-taught photographer. He was born in Buckinghamshire and discovered photography through the books of great American pioneers like Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Paul Strand. He has lived in New York since the early 1990s. Graham first garnered critical acclaim with his early documentary work, including A1 – The Great North Road (1983) , a series shot in colour along the British motorway, and Beyond Caring (1985), which was shot in unemployment offices. Back then, Graham was a pioneer of colour in Britain, his work influencing subsequent generations of young photographers.”………MORE

Pittsburgh, 2004 (Lawnmower Man)From the series ‘A Shimmer of Possibilities’. Copyright of the artist, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.The Foundation’s citation regarding the decision to award the 2012 prize to Paul Graham is as follows:

“Paul Graham is one of the most brilliant photographers of his generation. During the course of his nearly 40-year career, he has presented an extremely focused body of work, at once perfectly coherent and never monotonous. In images both sensitive and subtly political, he makes tangible the insignificant traces of ″the spirit of the times″ we do not normally see. With his keen awareness of the photographic medium, he has constantly developed innovative forms of working with all aspects of photography. This makes him a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world.”

More of Graham’s pictures can be seen here

Deutsche Börse prize shortlist

The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize aims to reward a contemporary photographer of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution (exhibition or publication) to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year.

The Prize was originally set up in 1996 by The Photographers’ Gallery in London to promote the best of contemporary photography. Deutsche Börse has sponsored the £30,000 prize since 2005. The Prize showcases new talents and highlights the best of international photography practice. It is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of photography. The Photographers’ Gallery and Deutsche Börse were shortlisted for Arts & Business International Award 2008 for their cooperation in the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012

The four shortlisted artists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012 are Pieter Hugo, Rinko Kawauchi, John Stezaker and Christopher Williams.

Work by the shortlisted photographers will be shown in an exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, Summer 2012, followed by its presentations at C/O Berlin, Forum for visual dialogs and at the Deutsche Börse headquarters in Frankfurt.

Sean O’Hagan writing in The Guardian gives his view of the 4 shortlist photographers/artists or should that be artist/photographers?

“The 2012 Deutsche Börse photography prize shortlist is an intriguing one, not least because of the range of styles and subject matter broached by the four nominees. Interestingly, two of the photographers, Japan’s Rinko Kawauchi and South Africa’s Pieter Hugo, are nominated for work presented in book form, while both of the photographers nominated for their exhibitions, Britain’s John Stezaker and Christopher Williams from the US, are not photographers per se, but conceptual artists who use photography in their practice…………………..Decision time. The judges’ verdict seldom chimes with my wishful thinking – Jim Goldberg’s win, this year, was the exception to that rule – but, for the record, my heart says Kawauchi, but my head says Hugo. As is often the case with the Deutsche Börse prize, I may well be shaking my head in bemusement when the winner is announced next year.” read more here

Detail of Christopher Williams’s Bergische Bauernscheune, Junkersholz, Leichlingen, September 29th, 2009, 2010. Photograph: 1996-98 AccuSoft Inc

Detail of John Stezaker’s Marriage (Film Portrait Collage), XLIII, 2007. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London

Rinko Kawauchi, Untitled, from Illuminance, 2009. Photograph: Rinko Kawauchi

Detail of Pieter Hugo’s Yakubu Al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2009. Photograph: Pieter Hugo/Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Britain’s photographic revolution

Fascinating article in the Guardian/Observer by Sean O’Hagan at the weekend regarding the state of photography as considered as art in Britain. O’Hagen is one of the most impressive writers on photography in Britain and the article absolutely to the point.

“The big art institutions here are finally catching up with their American counterparts, with a new photography gallery at the V&A, increased prominence at the Tate and exciting plans elsewhere. We asked four leading curators about the state of the art……..The September issue of the art magazine Frieze ran a glossary of “keywords” in contemporary art and culture. Under “Photography” the compilers wrote: “The first photograph was produced in 1826. In 2009 Tate advertised the following job for the first time: Curator (Photography and International Art). Discuss.” The question invited was: why had it taken so long for photography to be viewed as a serious art form in Britain? The Museum of Modern Art in New York, for instance, appointed its first curator of photography, Beaumont Newhall, in 1940.”.………….more

 

Snap happy: leading curators (l-r) Martin Barnes (V&A), Brett Rogers (Photographers’ Gallery), Simon Baker (Tate Modern) and Charlotte Cotton (the Media Space). Portrait by Suki Dhanda for Observer New Review