Aperture's Blog, page 187
October 23, 2013
Robert Cumming in Conversation with Sarah Bay Williams (Video)
On October 1, as part of the Aperture Magazine Live series, photographer Robert Cumming was joined in conversation by writer and curator Sarah Bay Williams on the subject of humor, absurdity, and perceptual play in Cumming’s 1970s photography. Currently working on a book about Cumming’s photography and art, Williams wrote on the subject for the “Curiosity”-themed Summer 2013 issue of Aperture magazine.
Cumming shared a slideshow of his 1970s work that played with visual perception. He would present a photograph followed by a second photograph of the same scene—but with a wider frame that revealed the behind-the-scenes deception of the previous image. These images showcased Cumming’s ability to manipulate the physical world and trick the eye into believing his fantastic environments were reality.
With the ability to illuminate the absurd through photography, Cumming kept his audience amused and intrigued. In creating these images, Cumming found photography to be the perfect medium through which to exercise his fascination with and the tension between reality and fiction, and between the commonplace and the fantasy.
View “Robert Cumming in Conversation with Sarah Bay Williams, Part 2” on Vimeo.
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Aperture magazine issue #211 is now available.
Aperture 211$19.95
October 22, 2013
Recap: Workshop with Richard Renaldi
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© Michael Joseph
© Oliver Parini
© Robin Odland
© Morgan Sloan
© Bill Kotsatos
© Ahmer Inam
© Jo Wayman
Richard Renaldi led an energetic workshop at Aperture on October 5 and 6 called Strangers in New York: Photographing People. He shared methods for photographing strangers—a focus in his own practice, such as in his series Touching Strangers. In the classroom, Renaldi provided students with subtle strategies for engaging with members of the public. Students then traveled to Herald Square, where they had the opportunity to work closely alongside Renaldi as they made portraits of people in the street. The course continued with the review of each student’s work and a discussion of techniques for improvement. The workshop was a valuable lesson in a fundamental photographic paradigm, the street portrait.
From the students:
“Loved this workshop. Richard was a great instructor and provided a lot of useful advice for making better portraits.”
“The one-on-one time that Richard spent with each of us on location was incredibly valuable.”
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To find out more about workshops and classes at Aperture, click here.
Figure and Ground
$45.00
Christine, 2003
$600.00
October 21, 2013
1/1 Preview: Todd Hido, Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows
Todd Hido, Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows, 2013.
Todd Hido’s Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows (2013) is a single work comprised of individual pictures, ranging from Hido’s signature suburban street views to sultry portraits and atmospheric landscapes. The prints in Study, which is available as part of Aperture’s 1/1 Auction, were drawn from Hido’s recent book Excerpts From Silver Meadows (2013), a highly personal, extended photo-essay about the artist’s hometown. Now mounted on board, they have been treated like snapshots; held, touched, bent, burned, and looked at. Text enters the array through pictures of signs reading, “WELCOME HOME,” “EXIT,” and “The End.” The loose grid of images, intuitively arranged, sketches scenes lifted from a rural American novel: furrows in a snowy field are set alongside a child’s-eye-view of a woman leaning through a car window; a phone left off its hook on a carpeted living-room floor is coupled with a portrait of a football player from a high-school yearbook; a nude reclining within the bare confines of a motel room is contrasted with an intricate study of a lakeside exterior.
These pairings draw a photographic cartography heading west, specifically midwest—Silver Meadows is in fact the name of a street in Hido’s hometown of Kent, Ohio. As one’s eyes glance over the pictures, making hazy, dreamlike associations, the bits of text affirm both nostalgic yearning as well as bereavement. Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows reveals the concept of home to be a highly personal referent: it eludes definition, dissolving the very moment we come to find and appreciate it, only to be replaced by the new and unfamiliar. Musing photographically on his own origins, Hido alludes to the nostalgia and eroticism inherent in the process of outgrowing and leaving one’s childhood home.
Sarah McNear, Deputy Director of Public Programs and External Affairs
Schuyler Duffy, Education and Public Programs Assistant
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Todd Hido’s Study for Excerpts from Silver Meadows will be available as part of the Aperture 1/1 Benefit & Auction on Monday, October 28. Pre-bidding has started online at Artspace. Find out more about the 1/1 Benefit & Auction and buy tickets here.
October 17, 2013
Protected: Todd Hido: Sources & Influences
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Protected: Todd Hido: Sources & Influences Workshop
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Protected: Bruno Ceschel The Self-Published Photobook
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Protected: Bruno Ceschel The Self-Published Photobook Workshop
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1/1 Preview: Lesley A. Martin on Mickalene Thomas
Mickalene Thomas, Liz and Chair with Zebra, 2013.
Mickalene Thomas is best known for her large-scale, multi-textured and rhinestone-bedecked paintings of domestic interiors and portraits. However, the Brooklyn-based artist has also identified the photographic image as an important touchstone for her work, both as source material and as a medium for creating work. In an interview in the catalog for her solo show at the Brooklyn Museum last year, Thomas described photography as something that “defines [her] practice. It provides a connection between all the works.” As a student at Yale, she took classes with photographer David Hilliard, who encouraged her to photograph herself and her mother—an experience that Thomas sees as an important pivot point for her as an artist.
Liz and Chair with Zebra (2013), available as part of Aperture’s 1/1 Auction, draws together several of Thomas’s foremost concerns and reference points. The work seems to draw equally from 1970s-glam, black-is-beautiful images of women such as Beverly Johnson, one of the first black supermodels, and actress Vonetta McGee (Shaft’s love interest in Shaft in Africa), in combination with Édouard Manet’s odalisque figures and the mise-en-scène studio portraiture of James Van Der Zee and Malick Sidibé. The interior space (including the titular “chair” and “zebra”) takes on as much of a performative role as does Liz, who is draped languorously across the image and adorned primarily with a large, Egyptian-style necklace. This corner of Thomas’s studio is an ongoing, palimpsest creation, a reappearing character in many of her photographs and echoed in her paintings; it is a site of physical collage, of the appropriation of textures, objects, and patterns. The space exudes a thick, cozy physicality from its layers of fur, rugs, wood paneling, and multi-patterned linoleum tiles—all of which are richly laden with sense-memory triggers of 1970s American rumpus-room semiotics.
Lesley A. Martin, Publisher, Books
Mickalene Thomas’s photograph Liz and Chair with Zebra will be available as part of the Aperture 1/1 Benefit & Auction on Monday, October 28. Pre-bidding has started online at Artspace. Find out more about the 1/1 Benefit & Auction and buy tickets here.
October 16, 2013
1/1 Preview: Denise Wolff on Aperture’s Instagram Silent Auction
Christopher Anderson, Untitled, 2012.
David Guttenfelder, DPRK Hairstyles, 2013.
Shane Lavalette, Black Raspberries, 2013.
Amy Elkins, Untitled, Drawing Breath, 2013.
Christina de Middel, Antipodes, 2013.
Barney Kulok, Queen Benazir, 2013.
Sara Cwynar, Studio Detritus, 2013.
Tierney Gearon, Untitled, 2013.
Massimo Vitali, The End of the Beach, 2013.
Stephen Shore, 3rd Street & Apache Avenue, Winslow, Arizona, September 19, 2013.
Vik Muniz, Full Moon, Rio de Janeiro, 2013.
Robin Schwartz, Dillie Coming Out From Her Bedroom, 2012.
Maria Robledo, Cornilius , 2013.
It’s been exciting to see the images coming into the office from photographers all over the world for Aperture’s Instagram Silent Auction, part of the 1/1 Benefit & Auction taking place Monday, October 28. There will be nearly a hundred pieces available, all of which use—and transcend—Instagram’s familiar square format. The selection was curated by Kathy Ryan, avid Instagrammer and director of photography at the New York Times Magazine, and it includes a wonderful range of work: subjects and themes range from still lifes to animals, documentary to collage, personal to conceptual. Ryan has used her expert eye to hone a collection of photographs that feels unified but still attuned to each individual photographer’s aesthetic. The Instagram pieces start at an accessible price point, and bidding on them is a fun way to support Aperture’s education and visual literacy programs. Above is a selection of work I’m looking to bid on.
Denise Wolff, Senior Editor, Books
The above selection will be available as part of the Aperture’s Instagram Silent Auction at the Aperture 1/1 Benefit Auction on Monday, October 28, alongside work from more than eighty other artists. Aperture’s Instagram Silent Auction is curated by Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography, New York Times Magazine. Pre-bidding starts online on October 15 at 11:00 am. Find out more about the 1/1 Benefit & Auction and buy tickets here.
October 15, 2013
1/1 Preview: Annette Booth on Rinko Kawauchi
Untitled, 2013.
I first encountered the work of Rinko Kawauchi at Paris Photo in 2006. My mentor at the time had given me an assignment: to go around the fair and come back with just one artist’s name, just one body of work that moved me. It was a smart way to manage the endless maze of artworks. The bombardment of imagery meant I saw a lot but remembered little—until I discovered Rinko’s work.
The mystical beauty of her photographs struck me like nothing else I saw at the fair. With every deceptively simple image, Rinko accomplishes something all great photographers strive to do: she captures the universal and says something about the world as a whole with a single photograph.
Untitled (2013) is no different. In this divine image, pastel-pink flower petals curve gently inward to form soft sumptuous spheres, just barely open. Just outside of the frame, an ethereal white light bathes the bouquet in a heavenly glow. As always, Rinko’s genius lies in the way she can make a picture of a child, an egg, or a bouquet of flowers speak to wider experiences of childhood, nature, and the essence of life.
Annette Booth, Exhibitions Manager
Rinko Kawauchi’s photograph Untitled will be available as part of the Aperture Instagram Silent Auction at the Aperture 1/1 Benefit & Auction on Monday, October 28, alongside work from more than eighty other artists. The Aperture Instagram Silent Auction is curated by Kathy Ryan, Director of Photography, New York Times Magazine. Pre-bidding starts online on October 15 at 11:00 am. Find out more about the 1/1 Benefit & Auction and buy tickets here.
Ametsuchi , photographs by Rinko Kawauchi, is now available. An exhibition of photographs from the book is on view at Aperture Gallery until November 21.
Ametsuchi$80.00
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