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
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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.

Tate’s national photographic archive ‘rescued from skip’ after internal tipoff

Dalya Alberge reports in The Guardian today

“An art charity saved the crucial collection after employee’s call, but another archive was dumped by the V&A”

The Tate’s discarded archive, now stored on these shelves, contained photos of art from its collections and beyond, such as these images of two John Hoppner works. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

“Art historians have been disturbed by allegations that the Tate was about to dump its invaluable photographic archive in a skip when another institution realised its importance and rescued it, and that the Victoria & Albert Museum has already destroyed its own thematic archive. Curators, who consider such resources vital, were not consulted.

The archives were full of photographs of artworks from their collections and beyond – crucial visual histories, invaluable for comparative research and for studying any deterioration as a result of time or restoration.”.…MORE

New Photographers Gallery at the V & A

On 24 October 2011, the V&A’s new Photographs Gallery will open to the public. The gallery will have an inaugural  display of works by key figures of photographic history including Victorian portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron and significant works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Afred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn.

The Photographs Gallery will draw upon the  V&A’s internationally renowned collection of photographs, and will chronicle the history of photography from 1839 up to the 1960s. In 1858, the V&A became the first museum to exhibit photographs, and the new Photographs Gallery is able to showcase some of the most technically brilliant and artistically accomplished photographs in its collection. Temporary displays, primarily showcasing contemporary photography, will be shown in the V&A’s existing photographs gallery.

more on this article here

there is also an interesting article in The Guardian by Jonathan Jones

“Photography is a mechanical art. The photographer points a lens at an object, records the image on a plate or film or, today, in digital memory. Therefore all photographs should be similar, the hands of individual photographers unrecognisable. Yet the new Photographs Gallery at the V&A, which opened on Monday to showcase the world’s oldest museum collection of photographs, reveals the apparently limitless variety of the art and the utterly personal genius of great photographers.

A photograph of a steam train taken by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902 hangs near Henri Cartier-Bresson‘s 1932 picture Behind Gare St Lazare, Paris, on the blue-painted wall of the long, elegantly restored, Victorian gallery.” ....more of this here

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Launching Chains of ‘The Great Eastern’

Robert Howlett (1830-58), ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Launching Chains of ‘The Great Eastern”, 1857. Museum no. PH.246-1979

Roslyn Chapel

Roger Fenton (1819-69), ‘Roslyn Chapel’, 1856. Museum no. 290-1935

V&A Inside Out (Victoria and Albert Museum London)

The V&A is one of my favourite places along with the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the last two being places you can still photograph. I love wandering the vast galleries watching the light change, watching the people, just looking and of course photographing. These images are from parts of these museums I have never gained access and must admit to jealousy.

I can’t tell you who these are by as the gallery site where you can see more says multiple owners (what’s wrong with calling them photographers?) anyway go and have a look at the rest

A Flash of Light: The Dance Photography of Chris Nash at the V & A London

Chris Nash

19 March – 29 August 2011

Theatre and Performance Gallery, room 104

Victoria & Albert Museum

 

Free admission

Showcasing Nash’s fascination with movement, light, colour and composition, this dazzling display will feature three decades of the dance photographer’s most significant work. A Flash of Light will explore Nash’s collaboration with the foremost figures in contemporary dance, including the Rambert Dance Company and Javier de Frutos. By including over 60 prints, the display will document 30 years of Contemporary British Dance and the vision behind Nash’s process, combined with a specially commissioned behind-the-scenes film of his work.

Twilight photography

Untitled from the series 'Twilight' 2001

Gregory Crewdson

everything is fashion, well everything has fashion and photography is no different, in recent years the areas of photography that can be considered contemporary art have been often about photography at twilight. As is so often the case what seems at the extreme finds it’s way towards the centre and now advertising, fashion and many other areas of photography are deluged under the weight of images taken at twilight, off camera flash is… well  ‘the new black’ So I was interested when a colleague, Scott Billings, showed me a book from an exhibition at the V & A from 2006. Here is a link to the V & A page about that exhibition. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/photography/past_exhns/twilight/index.html

“This exhibition focuses on eight contemporary artists whose photography and installations are made at, or suggest, the fleeting state of the world at dusk. It explores a time of day and a quality of light that presents technical challenges but also embodies a haunting mood and the possibility of narrative intrigue or psychological tension.

At twilight, the colour and quality of light go through rapid and dramatic changes. For photographers, who are highly attuned to the subtleties of light, this is a particularly significant and poignant time. The artists in the exhibition have all made work that focuses on the end of the day and investigates twilight, as distinct from night.”

If you want to know where the current trend has come from have a look and be sad you were not there.

Here is a link to the book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Twilight-Photography-Magic-Martin-Barnes/dp/1858943531