insights into photography
Unique and powerful photographs by the celebrated Tom Stoddart reveal forty years of significant world events
A selection of captivating images from the multi-award winning photojournalist Tom Stoddart will go on display at White Cloth Gallery, Leeds this October. ‘Perspectives’ comprises many of Stoddart’s greatest shots from his distinguished career, featuring some of the most important moments in world history such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black president and the Siege of Sarajevo.
During his distinguished career Tom Stoddart has travelled to more than 50 countries and documented such historic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Siege of Sarajevo and the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black president.
His acclaimed in-depth work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic blighting sub-Saharan Africa won the POY World Understanding Award in 2003. In the same year his pictures of British Royal Marines in combat, during hostilities in Iraq, was awarded the Larry Burrows Award for Exceptional War Photography. A year later his book iWITNESS was honoured as the best photography book published in the USA.
Now established as one of the world’s most respected photojournalists, Stoddart works closely with Reportage by Getty Images to produce photo essays on the serious world issues of our time.
To view more of Tom’s work please go to http://www.tomstoddart.com For more information on Perspectives visit http://www.78perspectives.co.uk
White Cloth Gallery
24-26 Aire Street
Leeds
LS1 4HT
Phone: 0113 218 1923
The Denver Post Pictures of the Week is a photo blog that gathers the strongest photojournalism from around the world. A diver trains on the 3-meter springboard at the FINA Swimming World Championships in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, July 19, 2013. Competition begins Saturday.
A relative mourns the death of her niece, who died after consuming contaminated meals given to children at a school on Tuesday at Chapra district in the eastern Indian state of Bihar July 18, 2013. The Indian government announced on Thursday it would set up an inquiry into the quality of food given to school pupils in a nationwide free meal scheme after at least 23 children died in one of the deadliest outbreaks of mass poisoning in years.
A man accused by the Congolese Army of being a spy of rebels of the M23 movement is tied and taken away on July 16, 2013 in Munigi on the outskirts of Goma in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The army in the Democratic Republic of Congo pursued an offensive against rebels of the M23 movement to protect the North Kivu provincial capital of Goma. M23, a movement launched by Tutsi defectors from the army who accuse the Kinshasa government of reneging on a 2009 peace deal, last year occupied Goma for 10 days before pulling out under international pressure.
A Humpback whale jumps to the surface of the Pacific Ocean at the Uramba Bahia Malaga natural park in Colombia, on July 16, 2013. Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) migrate annually from the Antarctic Peninsula to peek into the Colombian Pacific Ocean coast, with an approximate distance of 8,500 km, to give birth and nurse their young. Humpback whales have a life cycle of 50 years or so and are about 18 meters long. TOPSHOTS/AFP PHOTO/Luis ROBAYO #
A fisherman wades in Chaohu Lake, covered in blue-green algae, in Chaohu city, Anhui province, July 19, 2013. REUTERS/China Daily
An aerial view shows the Zaatari refugee camp, near the Jordanian city of Mafraq July 18, 2013. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spent about 40 minutes with half a dozen refugees who vented their frustration at the international community’s failure to end Syria’s more than two-year-old civil war, while visiting the camp that holds roughly 115,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan about 12 km (eight miles) from the Syrian border. REUTERS/Mandel Ngan/Pool
A young member of the Maitibolo Cultural Troupe, who came to dance for well-wishers in honor of Nelson Mandela, poses for well-wishers in front of a placard of Mandela, outside the entrance to the Mediclinic Heart Hospital where former South African President Nelson Mandela is being treated in Pretoria, South Africa Sunday, July 14, 2013. South Africa’s radio broadcaster Eyewitness News reported on Sunday that former president Thabo Mbeki said on Saturday that he expects Nelson Mandela to soon be discharged from the hospital to recuperate at home. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Revelers are pushed by a bull at the end of last running of the bulls at the San Fermin festival, in Pamplona Spain on Sunday, July 14, 2013. Revelers from around the world arrive to Pamplona every year to take part in some of the eight days of the running of the bulls glorified by Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.” (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)
An Egyptian young girl reacts as she is sprayed water on her face during a rally of supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi outside Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque on July 15, 2013 in Cairo, Egypt. A top US official pressed Egypt’s interim leaders for a return to elected government after the army ousted Morsi, whose supporters massed to rally for his return. AFP PHOTO/GIANLUIGI GUERCIA
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.
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
Staying with the South African theme for a moment, this exhibition looks interesting and if you are near Manchester would be worth some of your time.
Roger Ballen is an American photographer who has been shooting in black-and-white for more than 40 years, mostly in South Africa. Here is a selection of images from his exhibition Shadow Land, taken between 1983 and 2011, which can be seen at the Manchester Art Gallery until 13 May 2012.
“Shadow Land is a major exhibition of work by internationally-acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen whose work offers a powerful social critique and an extreme, uncanny beauty. The exhibition explores three decades of Ballen’s career, charting the evolution of his unique photographic style and demonstrating the contribution he has made to contemporary photography.
One of the most important photographers of his generation, Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. In his work from the early 1980s to mid 90s he gained world recognition and critical acclaim with his powerful and controversial images of those living on the margins of South African society.
Although retaining the same distinctive aesthetic, (all his work is in black and white, square format) in the last decade Ballen’s work has evolved into a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’ where the line between reality and fantasy is deliberately blurred. In doing so, his work enters into a new realm of photography; the images are painterly and sculptural in ways not immediately associated with photography.
Shadow Land will include previously unseen work from his new series Asylum and will be Ballen’s first solo show in a UK public gallery.
Fans of Ballen’s work will be interested in his recent collaboration with Die Antwoord, a futuristic rap-rave crew from South Africa who represent a new style called Zef. Ballen’s photography has had a formative influence on the band and led to him directing their latest video I fink u freeky poised to be a viral sensation and introduce Ballen’s work to an entirely new audience.”
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
“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
Oxford School of Photography 