Quelques exemples de visuels pour la nouvelle collection Adidas Originals – Women 2009. Une conception de l’agence Sid Lee, par le créatif et photographe Rodrigo Braga. A noter le visuel réunissant tout les modèles et formant le logo de la marque.
Des travaux très soignés par le photographe Sam Basset en provenance du New Jersey. Une belle galerie de photos mêlant à la fois des gens étranges et des personnalités, toujours dans des situations très insolites. Plus d’images dans la suite.
Dans le même esprit que l’album Little Planets, Alexandre Duret-Lutz a mis au point une technique photographique permettant de créer des mondes à partir de panorama 360°. A la limite de l’abstraction, il s’agit d’un formidable travail de projection stéréographique.
Une manière très personnelle de photographier les femmes avec de magnifiques mises en situations, par Gilles Alonso. Au milieu de paysages en plein air ou mêlées à la vie urbaine de la ville de Paris, voici quelques exemples dans la suite ainsi qu’une galerie complète.
Portfolio de Gilles Alonso.
A la frontière entre le réel et le surnaturel, les clichés de Chris Scarborough nous projettent dans un monde où ses personnages ont des yeux de mangas. Poétique. La suite en images.
Une très belle série photo intitulé Plastic Life par l’artiste français Vincent Bousserez. Des clichés qui permettent de voir le monde dans de superbes décors, à travers le regard de ces minuscules figurines. Quelques exemples dans la suite.
Coup de coeur pour le style de Dmitry Maximov, un artiste et illustrateur russe en provenance de Moscou extrêmement doué pour les photo-manipulations. Un mélange subtile et des dessins mystérieux, mis en scène dans des décors irréels. Galerie complète disponible dans la suite.
Des personnages ronds, à la fois plein de bonheur et de tristesse.
Le tout dans un monde rempli de poésies.
La photographe Mikel Uribetxeberria a mis en scène des animaux dans des situations très décalées. Une série de 8 images commanditées par Animalia, à découvrir dans la suite.
Une série de photos impressionnante qui mélange les pixels dans un shooting sexy et osé du photographe Jean-Yves Lemoigne. Un excellent travail, commandité pour le numéro 3 du magazine Amusement.
Dans le même esprit : Flowing Pixels
Coup de cœur à propos du travail de Chen Man, cette photographe chinoise de 28 ans. Spécialisée dans la mode, elle utilise de superbes couleurs dans ses clichés, avec une mise en scène et des décors impressionnants.
Une galerie est également disponible sur Maeght.
I saw this photo of Women with Fire Masks a few days ago at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. It was part of a retrospective dedicated to the American photographer, reporter and model Lee Miller . The show closed last week but that doesn’t mean i cannot share this image with you.
Lee Miller, Women with Fire Masks, Downshire Hill, London, 1941 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2008
Des superbes exemples de photographies retouchées par l’agence Saddington and Baynes : des créations d’images depuis 1991 et un studio de post-production spécialisé et complet pour le print, la vidéo et le web-design.
All i knew about Jordi Colomer before entering his solo show at Le Jeu de Paume in Paris was his Anarchitekton series, i was prepared for the absurd. I didn’t know the absurd could make so much sense.
Colomer’s video installations focus on the contemporary city and in particular on the influence of urbanism on human behaviour. They toy with fake actors in real situations, fictions set in barren landscapes, artificial spaces, urban simulacra and architectural narratives. Behind their humour and irony, his productions never fail to reveal us something about the sociological and psychological dimensions of his subjects.
Jordi Colomer, En la Pampa (Cementerio Santa Isabel), 2007-2008. © ADAGP, Paris, 2008
Jordi Colomer, En la Pampa (Cementerio Santa Isabel), 2007-2008. © ADAGP, Paris, 2008
Colomer’s aesthetics and architectural explorations pervade the whole exhibition. The videos are screened onto wooden panels, or in some makeshift structures, there is a battered trailer in the middle of one of the exhibition rooms and a mix-match of what looks like second-hand chairs are aligned against the walls.
Models of the buildings used for the Anarchitekton performances, as displayed at the MACBA in Barcelona
Pozo Almonte, a body of works which was produced for the Paris exhibition, is a moving trip to one of the few surviving mining towns exploiting saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in the Atacama desert in Chile. Instead of documenting what was left of the mining activity, the artist went to the cemetery and photographed its constructions. Each of them looks like a small house that redresses the builders’ meagre resources with inventiveness and personal creativity. Architecture without architects at its best. As Colomer explains: The cemetery is a sort of parallel city, well and truly alive, and full of thoroughly terrestrial little houses. It is an area shared by the living and the dead, where the latter seem to be merely on holiday. And yet this family architecture also looks like the decor of another world…
Jordi Colomer, Pozo Almonte, 2008. Production Jeu de Paume, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris, 2008
Jordi Colomer, Pozo Almonte, 2008. Production Jeu de Paume, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris, 2008
The Pope’s protective vehicle, the Popemobile, is an icon that has traveled all over the world. Says Colomer: I wanted to put this highly meaningful image back into the street ? in three-dimensional form but disencumbered of its Vatican pomp, with the nakedness of a prototype ? so as to record the reactions of passers-by. The Popemobile’s sacred dimension being already somewhat slight, it was chiefly a matter of desecrating its spectacular side and leaving only the bare bones. It was first and foremost a pretext for portraying a heterogeneous group of people, conjuring up a setting, creating a situation and just letting things happen… What kind of people were going past at noon on that summer day in 2005 in the fast-evolving area of Barcelona that lies along Diagonal Avenue in the Poble Nou district?
Jordi Colomer, Papamóvil 2005. Extrait du diaporama. © ADAGP, Paris, 2008
En la Pampa is an attempt to find whether there is a place on earth that can ‘resist fiction’. A man and a woman, chosen because they are not actors, are left free to perform all sorts of activities and discussions in the Atacama desert in Chile. Viewers quickly realize that the mere presence of the camera turns the experiment into a fiction that contaminates the desert itself.
Jordi Colomer, En la Pampa (Vagar en campo raso es…), 2008. © ADAGP, Paris, 2008
Anarchitekton is a series of videos produced over two years and starring a quizzical personage called Idroj Sanicne. The films shows him cavorting around Barcelona, Brasilia, Osaka and Bucharest, brandishing cardboard models of buildings that are visible in the background. By doing so he stretches the boundaries of architecture, highlights its ‘backdrop’ character, drags reality into fiction and gains the attention of passersby in the process. Sanicne’s performance evokes moments of angry protests, popular parades but also religious processions.
Jordi Colomer, Anarchitekton, Brasilia, 2003
Jordi Colomer, Anarchitekton, Brasilia, 2004
The work of Jordi Colomer is on view at Le Jeu de Paume in Paris until January 4, 2009.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lime Kilns: Meppel, 1968, 2005
In the mid ’70s, a group of young photographers were studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Their professors were Bernd and Hiller Becher, a couple who had gained fame for taking sharp b&w photographs of industrial archetypes long before it was fashionable to do so. The Becher took pictures like passionate and determined collectors, treating images of water towers, grain elevators, warehouses and other industrial buildings as if they were butterflies that had to be aligned with the utmost care in a catalog. They portrayed the mundane with an unprejudiced and clinical eye.
Becher, Bernd und Hilla, Wassertu?rme/Cha?teaux d’eau, 1999
You might have heard of some of the students, they are among today’s most successful photographers. Actually one of them is said to be the highest-priced photographer alive. While sharing the same tutors at the department of the photography, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and others have adopted a more personal vision and applied new technical possibilities to the neutral method professed by the Bechers. As a result, their respective artistic paths are exposing greater contrasts than similarities.
An exhibition currently running at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (which has the least modern website a museum of modern art can dream of) retraces the short and inspiring story of what came to be called the Dusseldorf School of Photography . Objectivités: La Photographie à Düsseldorf presents some 160 works that gives a spectacular overview of the breadth of the photography department of the Kunstakademie from the early 1970s to today.
Türken in Deutschland, Rudolfplatz Köln, 1975. Sammlung Deutsche Bank (via)
Before turning her lens to sumptuous interiors devoid of any human life, Candida Höfer portrayed the Turkish community living and working in the Germany of the ’70s. She would photograph them in their shops, street gatherings or enjoying a family picnic in the park, letting them pose as if for a family album. It was one of my favourite body of works but i haven’t been able to find much images online.
It is extremely surprising to see how Höfer broke away from the intimate portrays of the Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to photograph grandiose libraries, museums and other public places, with wow effects, lavish colours but not a single living soul in sight.
Candida Höfer, Goethe-Theater Bad Lauchstädt I, 2006
Laurenz Berges found fame with his photographies of empty constructions as well. First he documented abandoned Russian barracks, back in the early ’90s after the Red Army had left the East of Germany.
Laurenz Berges, Potsdam V (from Räume in Kasernen), 1994
The artist now dedicates his work to the ghost villages of the Rhenish brown coal area, a region between Cologne and Aachen abandoned by whole communities who had to relocate because of the advancing open-cast mining. Berges’ photographs speak of private lives while having a broader, more social relevance.
Laurenz Berges, Vor Vechta, 2008
Petra Wunderlich pays a more direct homage to the neutrality rule set by her tutors Bernd and Hiller Becher. In 1994, she started to document religious buildings in New York. The frontal view makes the buildings even flatter than they already are, the b&w is made more dispassionate by the absence of any human figure and most of the time only the writings on the facade indicate that these are places of worship. In fact, her images reveal that many local synagogues have been converted into Buddhist temples or Baptist churches, while others have been torn down and a few restored (via).
Petra Wunderlich, Brooklyn VI, 2003
Petra Wunderlich, Manhattan X, 1994/2004
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Bus Stops in Armenia (1997 / 2004) pictures dignified people waiting for public transport vehicles to stop by what is often an inadequate shelter.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Bushaltestelle, Armenien: Echiniadzin-Erivan, 2002 © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Bushaltestelle, Armenien: Erewan-Yegnward, 1997 © Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
Thomas Struth gives even more importance to the people in the picture. They become involuntary actors and the setting almost anecdotical. The Museum Photographs series portrays groups of sluggish tourists in shorts, t-shirts and a camera around the neck as they wander around museums. The master pieces behind the visitors are reduced to wallpapers.
Thomas Struth, Museo Del Prado 8-3, Madrid 2005. © 2007 Thomas Struth
Andreas Gursky might be one of the very few artists who, through manipulations, manage to re-invent historical landmarks like the Chartres Cathedral. One of the minuscule silhouettes at the bottom of the photo is none other than movie director Wim Wenders.
Andreas Gursky, Kathedrale I, 2007
To make stunning Kamiokande, the artist traveled to an underground neutrino observatory in Japan. 1000 meters under the surface of the earth, a tank containing 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water and surrounded by over eleven thousands golden photomultiplier tubes keeps watch for supernovas in our galaxy. You could almost miss two tiny figures in lab uniforms standing on their inflatable rafts. Just like the picture of the Chartres Cathedral, Kamiokande is far more impressive in large-format.
Andreas Gursky, Kamiokande, 2007 © Adagp, Paris, 2008 : Andreas Gursky / Courtesy: Monika Spru?th / Philomene Magers
Thomas Ruff leads the genre to more audacious abstractions, in particular with his jpegs series. Over the past decades, we’ve seen pastoral landscapes and tragic disasters alike succumb to digitization. Their passage through a computer leaves its imprint on our collective memory. But no matter how many photos, we don’t get any more critical or conscious of what lays before our eyes.
jpeg ny02, 2004 © Thomas Ruff. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Ruff turns JPEGs culled from the web into abstract works using digital technology. The JPEGs are enlarged to gigantic scale. Seen from close view, the exaggerated pixel patterns leave the image nearly unrecognizable, they acquire an Impressionist patina. The viewer has to stop and take their time to enjoy it, they must watch the images in close-up, mid-range and from far away to fully appreciate them.
On view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through January 4, 2009. They have a tiny photo gallery.
Photo on homepage: Bernd and Hilla Becher, (Blast Furnace) Neuves Maisons, Lorraine, France, 1971.
Conscientious has translated an interview with Hilla Becher .
Repéré en septembre 2007, nouvel article à propos du l’étonnant travail de cet artiste allemand Holger Pooten. Une série incroyable sur la lévitation à découvrir dans la suite.
The continuous withdrawal of mental health funding has turned jails and prisons across the U.S. into the default mental health facilities.
Jenn Ackerman‘s documentary takes us inside the Correctional Psychiatric Treatment Unit of the Kentucky State Reformatory to see how a state is meeting the needs of the mentally ill.
This is a student’s work btw. Jenn answered a few questions about the process of the project in his blog.
Via Inicios.
While in London i went to see a few photography exhibitions. And yes! i realize i wrote a couple of days ago that i’d focus on the RCA show this week but i can’t keep that promise, i’m starting to bore myself. Now one of those photo shows is called freshfacedandwildeyed and it marks the launch of an annual exhibition presenting the most striking work by visual arts graduates from BA and MA courses across the UK. There were 25 photographers selected. Some of them had all my attention:
Dewars being filled. Cryonics facility, Phoenix, Arizona
Murray Ballard‘s Cryonics series explores the practice of preserving dead people or animals by freezing them at extremely low temperatures, in the hope that science will be able to revive them in the future. The photographer traveled to a cryonics lab in Phoenix, Arizona, documenting the facility, the technology used, the scientists working there, met with some prospective patients in the UK, etc. All along, questioning whether he was dedicating his time to a world of ‘farcical fantasies’ or of ‘genuine and innovative scientific experimentation.’
Chinese Opera
Boris Austin‘s Solidified Memories series aims to balance the glossy surface of China promoted by the Olympics and made of swanky stadium and gorgeous swimming pool with what he saw in the north eastern city of Dalian, China’s ‘most habitable city’. He discovered a neighbourhood which remains a world away from the much publicized urban regeneration accompanying the Games. Not that we’re surprised of that fact….
Jan Stradtmann commented on the urbanistic consequences of the Olympics of 2012. In The Manor Garden Allotments series, he documents the small garden plots which had to be eliminated in order “regenerate” the site for the 2012 Olympics in London. He took pictures of the ‘victims’ of the planning of the Olympics as if he’d just arrived on a crime scene. Photographing the huts shortly before their elimination transformed them into symbols of an injustice to come.
Steve Schofield‘s portraits of science-fiction costumers in their homes in Britain, investigate how, through a sub-cultural world of fandom, like-minded people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday.
Michal Honkys went back to his hometown, Ostrava (Czech Republic) to see what was left of a city which had been pride of the Communist era.
freshfacedandwildeyed 08 runs at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through July 6.
Haunch of Venison London is running until July 5 Home Lands, Land Marks, an exhibition presenting works from seven contemporary artists from South Africa. Although i have less opportunity to see (and thus report on) shows of contemporary art from South Africa, what i’ve discovered of their practice over the past couple of years makes me think that we need to see more of their works. Here’s a few reasons to explain why: Anton Kannemeyer – The Alphabet of Democracy, Control of Arrivals, In South African prisons.
David Goldblatt, Incomplete houses, part of a stalled municipal development of 1000 houses. Lady Grey, Eastern Cape, 5 August 2006
The Haunch of Venison show didn’t disappoint at all. Differing from the usual approach to post-apartheid South Africa, the exhibition addresses the complexity of the South African landscape, reflecting upon notions of memory, place and identity, referring to the political context and historical background of South Africa only through the imprint and trace of human experience on the physical landscape.
I couldn’t resist focusing on the photographies of David Goldblatt who has spent the past five decades documenting everyday life in South Africa, from scenes of Apartheid to the advances of AIDS in the country (around one in seven of its citizens is infected with HIV), from scandalous housing development projects to memorial isolated by the side of the road.
David Goldblatt, Miriam Mazibuko watering the garden of her new RDP (Reconstruction and Development Programme) house, Extension 8, Far East Alexandra Township. It has one room. For lack of space, her four children live with her parents-in-law. Johannesburg. 12 September 2006
David Goldblatt, Lavatories on Lansdowne Road, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, in the time of AIDS. 16 May 2007
David Goldblatt, Remains of long-drop lavatories at Frankfort in the former Ciskei bantustan. The people of Mgwali strongly resisted their removal to this resettlement camp and the government eventually allowed them to remain on their farms at Mgwali. The lavatories at Frankfort have been stripped of usable materials by the local populace and all that now remains of the scheme are some 1 500 anatomically shaped holes in the veld. Frankfort, Eastern Cape. 22 February 2006
The gallery website has plenty of pictures and that never prevents me from making my usual lame pics.
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