Aperture's Blog, page 203

Harold Feinstein Book Party and Benefit

 

Join Harold Feinstein for a book party and celebration at Aperture Gallery and bookstore on Monday, December 17, 2012 from 6-9PM.

 

Harold will share memories from a lifetime of photography with gathered friends, fans, former students and colleagues, including historian and photo critic A.D. Coleman. Following the informal conversation there will be a party during which Feinstein will sign copies of his new book, Harold Feinstein: A Retrospective, which was just selected for the Photo-Eye Magazine’s list of best photography books in 2012.

 

Also at this event signed limited edition archival inkjet photographic posters of Feinstein’s iconic Coney Island images will be on display and for sale at a special one night only price. Additional unlimited edition offset printed posters will also be available. All proceeds will go towards the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts of North Star Fund and #ConeyRecovers.

 

Visit the website for more information on the Harold Feinstein Book Party and Benefit Sale. The event is free and open to the general public. Please RSVP by email.

Daido Moriyama: The Shock From Outside

Interview with Ivan Vartanian, first published in the issue 203 of Aperture magazine (Summer 2011). Moriyama’s latest volume, Labyrinth (Aperture, 2012), is now available.

Japanese master-photographer Daido Moriyama has been at the forefront of the medium for more than fifty years. He has published dozens of volumes of photographs, including Japanese Theatre (1968), Farewell, Photography (1972), Daidohysteric (1993), and Hokkaido (2008), as well as numerous collections of essays. On the occasion of his upcoming retrospective at Osaka’s National Museum of Art, Ivan Vartanian spoke with the photographer about vision and motivation, context and information, color and black and white, and the unending newness of photographs.

IVAN VARTANIAN: Could you speak about your thoughts on the connection between image and language?

DAIDO MORIYAMA: Language is a direct medium and communicates meaning and intention straight. A photograph, on the other hand, is subject to the viewer’s memory, aesthetics, and feelings—all of which affect how the photograph is seen. It isn’t conclusive the way language is. But that’s what makes photography interesting. There’s no point in taking photographs that use language in an expository way. Taking photographs for the purpose of language is for the most part meaningless for me. Rather, photography provokes language. It recasts language; within it, various gradations outline a new language. It provokes the world of language: looking at images leads to the discovery of a new language. That is what I am about. Certainly, photographers—in particular photographers like me, who take street snaps—don’t shuttle back to words with each shot. The outside world is suffused with language. I don’t carry language and apply it to the outside world; instead, messages come in from the outside. That is what provokes me and what I react to. That is the nature of the connection, I think.

That said, I cannot explain every image that I have taken. If I tried to, it would be a sham and boring; it would come across as trivial. That’s not the intention. Each photograph is felt, but there isn’t just one reason for releasing the shutter—there are several reasons, even with a single exposure. The act of photographing is a physiological and concrete response but there is definitely some awareness present. When I take snapshots, I am always guided by feeling, so even in that moment when I’m taking a photograph it is impossible to explain the reason for the exposure. Something might, for example, seem erotic to me. That in itself is a gradation that contains a multiplicity of elements.

IV: In your early magazine work, your photographs are often accompanied by texts you’ve written in an “editorial voice” of sorts.

DM: When I was young, I used to write accompanying texts for my images. Those writings had something of a didactic relationship with the images. In the end, the language with which the viewer sees the photograph changes the image’s content. Even if I chose a word or language with which to take an image, it would be impossible to have everyone feel the same way. Perhaps by chance, a viewer may have a similar feeling.

In working with my older photographs, I treat them as if they are something new—if I didn’t, presenting older work would be pointless. What I photographed at a certain point may have been vivid at the time, but with the passage of years, its luster weathers with it. All work is subject to format, ways of looking, editorial style—all of which influence and alter the work.

That process of alteration is one of the things I love about photography. In essence, through the process of recomposing the work, the photograph is revitalized as something that is contemporary—now. This can be done countless times with any image. In a way, this is like saying that within each image, there is a multitude of possibilities. A single photograph contains different images.

I happen to have produced many books of photographs. I work with others on them—people I trust to a certain extent—and I leave it to them to do the recomposition (as, for example, with Shashin yo, Sayonara [Farewell, Photography; 1972]). The work becomes more vivid than when I do it myself. If I do it myself, I cannot avoid being influenced by memory; I strain to stave off that impulse and inadvertently create a palpable tension—and the outcome is often odd! Whereas when I work with a third party—or even someone more removed—filtering the images through their eyes, the photographs come alive, I think. Photographs that I’ve taken ten years ago even now seem vivid. If an image is good, it is brought back to life by the feelings of the viewer.

IV: What about the function of the photograph as information? Your work, especially from the 1970s, had so much to do with destabilizing this aspect of photography.

DM: Photographs of any generation are in a basic sense, at that moment, information. Photography is underpinned by information. No matter how conceptual a photograph may be, it contains information at its most fundamental level. But the means by which information is communicated is specific to each generation. A recently shot photograph is just as viable to me as one shot ten years ago.

IV: Do you make a distinction between the different media in which your work appears—magazines and books, exhibitions?

DM: I don’t generally make a distinction between them. A magazine has a particular objective, namely it is about the now. In that sense, it uses the information aspects of photographs. And depending on the editorial direction, the photographs may radically change. So if the editorial direction of a particular magazine doesn’t sit well with me, I don’t allow my photographs to be used in it. But in principle, whether a photograph is framed and mounted as part of an exhibition or shown in a photo-book or magazine—these are just different modalities of the same image. Each is interesting in its way. For that reason, I don’t place a lower ranking on magazines. At times, in fact, the magazine reproduction has been the best format for an image, trumping other forms. Again, what interests me is seeing my photographs in a manner that makes them seem different. And in the magazine context, if the photograph doesn’t come alive, it doesn’t necessarily mean there was something wrong with the editorial direction; it probably means the photographs aren’t that strong. There are two sides of a coin.

All images Untitled, 2010, © Daido Moriyama

Documenting Tragedy – on NPR.org

Following the New York Post‘s controversial Tuesday cover photograph, a discussion on NPR’s Talk of the Nation considered the ethics of documenting tragedy. In addition to Stephen Mayes, managing director at VII Photo Agency, and Kelly McBride, senior faculty in ethics, reporting, and writing at the Poynter Institute, a number of photojournalists called in to talk about their own experiences documenting difficult situations. Definitely worth a listen, at NPR.org.

Stephen Mayes and others joined Aperture for a panel discussion on the ethics of conflict photojournalism back in September. More on that here.

Paris Photo In Pictures Vol. 2: The Patrons’ Eye

Fotomuseum Winterthur with curator Thomas Seelig. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Photo courtesy Anne Stark.

Photo courtesy Celso Gonzalez-Falla.

Stéphane Couturier studio visit. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Stéphane Couturier with Aperture Trustee Anne Stark. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Photo courtesy Celso Gonzalez-Falla.

Annette Friedland, Trustee. Photo courtesy Celso Gonzalez-Falla.

Corinne Planche, Aperture Patron. Photo courtesy Anne Stark.

Corinne Planche, Anne Stark, and Jessica Nagle. Photo courtesy Anne Stark.

Lise Sarfati studio visit. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Lise Sarfati studio visit. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Philippe Halsman exhibition at Magnum Gallery, with Irene Halsman. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Oliver Halsman Rosenberg with work of his grandfather Philippe Halsman. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

David Yu and Robert Delpire at Magnum Gallery. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Sarah Moon and Trustee Jessica Nagle at Magnum Gallery reception. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Chairman Celso Gonzales-Falla and Patrons at Le Meurice. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Kellie McLaughlin, dinner at Le Meurice. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Chris Boot and Elliott Erwitt, dinner at Le Meurice. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

Dinner at Le Meurice. Photo courtesy Christian Gapp.

A photo diary chronicling the Paris Photo Patron Trip 2012.

Patrons and Trustees joined Aperture in Paris for VIP Access to Paris Photo and all VIP activities organized by the fair, announcement of the first Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, and guided tours of special exhibitions at Paris Photo.

David Galjaard: On Concresco

In 2009, David Galjaard began photographing the landscape of Albania, which is dotted with over 700,000 abandoned concrete bunkers built during the Communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Galjaard’s work in Albania culminated in a self-published photobook, Concresco, which won the First PhotoBook Award in this year’s Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. Thomas Bollier spoke with the Dutch photographer about his work.

Thomas Bollier: Can you tell me a little about your history as a photographer, when you got started, how you got started, and what’s brought you to here?



David Galjaard: To go way back, it feels like I got started as a photographer when I was 15. My father gave me a copy of the book Amsterdam by Ed van der Elsken, and as soon as I saw that book I knew I wanted to be a photographer and that never changed. I studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and while I was there I mainly worked the way van der Elsken did – with small film, really close to my subject, producing sort of emotional, social documentaries. As soon as I finished school, though, I found that that approach didn’t work for me anymore. I still love looking at those pictures but I wanted to do something else.

Around this time I got my own page in a national newspaper, called NRC Next, which had just started and hadn’t yet developed their visual vocabulary. They asked me if I wanted to work for them as a freelance photographer, and that’s where I feel my work as a photographer really began. We had an agreement that I would do a piece, and if they didn’t like it they would just tell me. But they never did. I could experiment while working, which was a big luxury. After three years at the paper, though, I felt the urge to work on a longer documentary project.

Around this time I also became interested in representing physical space in my photographs, exploring what environments without people can express. I had made a small series, When the siren goes, where I wanted to see if I could capture, in photographs, what I felt when I entered a space myself. I had explored Cold War bunkers in The Netherlands, in which I always felt a sort of ominous, uncanny feeling. I was wondering if it was possible to somehow capture that feeling…to take a photograph and show it to other people, and have them experience that place the same way. It was just a small experiment, but coming from the social documentary I was doing on the street, it was completely new to me.

One of the journalists from the newspaper saw my pictures from this series, and he asked me if I’d heard of the bunkers in Albania. I had traveled a lot through Eastern Europe, but never to Albania, and knew nothing of the history of the country. So I started reading about it, and bells started ringing when I read about the 750,000-1 million aboveground bunkers that were built in such a small country. I then traveled to Albania, just to look around. My first plan was to research how those bunkers have influenced the landscape and to see how, to the people who were still living there, those bunkers were still a reminder of a dictatorship that had lasted for almost fifty years. I traveled around Albania for a month, and took some good pictures, but it wasn’t much more than a small series, like something that would work in a magazine. I wanted to do more, but didn’t know what exactly. I kept reading and thinking about it, and after a couple of months realized that I wasn’t going to figure out what I wanted to do in Holland, so in October 2009 I traveled back to Albania. It was then that I decided that I should make a book.

TB: Albania, over the course of the past century, has been hindered by hardship and set-backs, and is still today finding its place in modern Europe. Were you daunted by the task of representing the complicated history and current problems of a country that is not your own?

DG: Yes, there were two big questions for me: can I use the bunkers as a visual metaphor in the telling of a larger social story? And, can I tell a story about a country that I don’t live in? I read a lot and spoke to a lot of people, and I tried to work as closely to facts as I could. But in the end every text, from The Pillbox Effect by Slavenka Drakulić, to the interviews, to my pictures, are all personal impressions. There are even texts in the book that are in contradiction. My mission was not to say, “This is truth. This is Albania.” It’s just an impression of a country, as close to a truth as possible, but perhaps just one of many truths. I hope I found a way to not approach the country in an arrogant way, coming in and telling everybody, “This is Albania,” because that is not what I intended to do.

TB: The texts in Concresco are important for contextualizing the photographs, and I found that reading the intermittent booklets of personal testimonials heightened my interest in the images–the more I read, the more I wanted to see. Was it always your intention to include texts in the book, or did you ever consider Concresco exclusively as a book of photographs? How important for you is the interaction of words and images?

DG: I read [Drakulić’s] essay The Pillbox Effect during my second trip to Albania, and that really helped me decide that this project had to become a book. I was working with all this information I had about the country, and I was trying to put as much information as possible into my pictures. But I knew even without seeing my pictures yet that they would not be enough to tell the whole story. I wanted to do the best I could, but at a certain point you hit a wall, and need something more to really explain the story. I make my images with a lot of information in them, but you also need other information to understand them.

On my second trip, I was approached by a Dutch documentary filmmaker who was making a movie about the bunkers and we made a deal that I could use the raw material of his interviews and I would show him all the locations he needed. So the interviews of the [older] Albanians came from him. I did the interviews with the younger people myself, because I wanted to know more about the present and future [of Albania], and I could speak English with those people. The older people, who built the bunkers, or were trained in them, were done by Sarah Haaij and Martijn Payens. You can find texts from my book in their film Mushrooms of Concrete, and they used one of my pictures for the film poster, and my designer did the design of the poster, so there were some other crossovers too.

I knew quite early in the process that I needed text, so I also wrote to Drakulić and asked if I could use this essay from her book, and she said yes. So there are two different kinds of text in the book, the two longer stories [from Drakulić and Jaap Scholten] and the short interviews with Albanian people.

Regarding the different sizes of paper, first it started off as a solution to a practical problem, because I wanted to use as little text as possible. I’m a photographer, so of course I want to tell as much as possible with images, and only use text when I must. In the end we only had short pieces of interviews, and it just didn’t work out in the design to put them on a big page. So, we put them on a smaller page, and it was at that moment that I found out that it was a really great way to play in the editing, and things got exciting from there. It turned out to be a great way to make new connetions between the images and the text, and it gave me a lot more room to play, and that felt amazing. It really added another dimension to the book.

At Home with the Fotohof

by Amanda Hopkinson

Fotohof. Zhe Cehen installation view and exterior section.

Photography galleries no longer survive simply as rooms with framed pictures on the walls. Many are yet to assimilate this premise, with predictable—and often lamentable—results. A pioneering reinvention of one venue is the Fotohof that opened in Salzburg, Austria, in February 2012. It is an airy and alterable space that the innovative designers transparadiso describe as “open transparent architecture.” The Fotohof tempts passersby with an outward-facing panel of plasma screens of with scrolling images, beyond which they can see a changing spread of indoor exhibitions and activities integrating the social, educational, and cultural.

 

Even the name is suggestive: originally, a hof was a farmstead or a courtyard; today the term is most often applied to an inn or a pub. Somewhere homely, in short, and indeed the gallery was formerly located in the picturesque Nonntal district at the foot of a mountain. The new Fotohof retains an emphasis on warmth and welcomeness, without the chintzy associations. In the words of Fotohof  photographer and collective member Kurt Kaindl, the new building was planned from scratch “by all of us working together with the architecture firm transparadiso. We all agreed on a lot of glass so you can look from outside into every single room (except the bathroom) and allow those inside to see what’s going on in the library, or the offices, or outdoors on the street.” As an example, the library’s more than ten thousand core volumes, a remarkable resource, are available for both research purposes and for presentation in exhibitions alongside photographic prints, affording an insight into how content alters with context.

Fotohof. Installation view.

This is the Fotohof ­‘s fourth home in forty years. The organization was created and is run by a remarkably consistent photographic collective of around twenty members. The first gallery was in someone’s living room; the second was a couple of tiny rooms in a shared flat. What persists is a group of photographers who continually reach out to new audiences without being impelled by either commercialism or self-promotion. The new space may be more formal, but the motivation remains to present fine-art photography at the highest level. The institutionalization resides in the Fotohof’s newest aspects, which are paradoxically also the most traditional: in the library; the pedagogical remit; and the homage to Inge Morath (whose work is on regular display in a number of curated exhibitions). The innovation lies in the continual (re)discovery of new talent, from home and abroad; the flexible spaces in which photography can be shown; and in extending the book library to the new Artothek print-lending library. Visitors are encouraged to rent framed prints they like (for €4 per month and for up to one year) and so become accustomed to living with fine original artwork on their walls—whether or not they finally decide to purchase them, and with no pressure to do so.

The combination of high artistic standards and collective commitment is evidenced by the new premises. The building is sited in the working-class district of Lehen, where dilapidated 1960s-era apartment blocks were demolished and rebuilt as low-rises flanking a new square. Named Inge Morath Platz, after the seminal photographer who was an early member of Magnum Photos and wife of American playwright Arthur Miller, it is intended as at once an homage and a celebration. The name is reinforced by a new, annual Inge Morath award for female photographers under the age of thirty. Throughout the summer, the Fotohof screened work by recent finalists—Olivia Arthur, Lurdes R. Basoli, Zhe Chen, and Emily Schiffer—alongside Morath’s own early work from Spain.

Fotohof. Main gallery. (top) Fotohof. Dirk Braeckman installation view. (bottom)

 

Across and around the square original residents have been re-housed in ecologically sensitive buildings. All were invited to the opening, where they were greeted by the mayor of Salzburg, the Minister for Education, Arts and Culture, local City councillors, and Belgian photographer Dirk Braeckman, who spoke with Jeffrey Ladd about his work, which inaugurated the new galleries. To mark the festive occasion, new work by contemporary Austrian artists was presented on-screen and Fotohof staff provided tours of the different areas of the gallery.

Such a high-profile launch demonstrates the commitment, at municipal and federal level, to the project, which necessitated ten years of discussion and planning among officials, photography practitioners, and activists. The importance of the state in making this happen can hardly be over-estimated. Under a scheme to support cultural and social institutions the City of Salzburg negotiated a fifty-percent rent reduction on commercial rates with the property developers, adding a grant of €600,000 for furniture and equipment. Overall the Ministry of Culture now provides fifty percent of the Fotohof’s operating costs, while the city and county of Salzburg each provide an additional twenty-five percent. According to Fotohof member Kurt Kaindl: “We have remained a non-profit organisation since we started in 1981, and we are not employers. All those who work on our projects are remunerated according to the tasks they do. Roughly fifteen people who work in the gallery on a regular basis are on the executive committee, deciding on exhibitions, book projects, and the overall strategy of the gallery.”

Fotohof. Bookstore.

For government at both national and local level to back such a scheme is exceptional in modern Europe, even in a country whose contribution to the field of photography is as important as Austria’s. For the past decade, governments across Europe have increasingly assumed that the private sector should provide funding for culture, whether it actually does or not. Culture is subsumed within a changing grab-bag of ministerial portfolios, including leisure, tourism, women, media, or sport: at best it is an optional add-on. Within Austria, the Fotohof is regarded as a trailblazer, the first element in a cultural hub that will include the new Galerie der Stadt Salzburg; the Literaturhaus; the Galerie Eboran, and the City of Salzburg Library.

Andrew Phelps, an American photographer and Fotohof collective member since the early 1990s, embeds the national enterprise within a wider tradition. “The Fotohof was founded a decade after the British Photographers’ Gallery. Both London and Cardiff [where Ffotogallery was directed by American Bill Messer] were early models. And our first exhibitions included several that travelled from there.” While we can all do with state support to make things happen, the arts are everywhere at home.

Fotohof. Exterior view.

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Amanda Hopkinson is Visiting Professor of both City (of London) and Manchester Universities. She has written and translated numerous books of both literature and photography, mainly from Latin America and Europe. Most recently she curated an exhibition and compiled the catalog of the work of her mother, Gerti Deutsch. Hopkinson wrote on London’s revamped Photographers’ Gallery for Aperture’s Summer 2012 issue. 

With an Eye Toward the Future: On the 2012 Johannesburg Art Fair

By Daniel M. Leers

 

This year’s FNB Johannesburg Art Fair (FNB stands for First National Bank, the primary sponsor), the fifth iteration of the event begun in 2008, was a surprising mix of modern and contemporary art shown by galleries from both Africa and Europe. With the disappearance of the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, there is palpable hunger in this country for artwork with global ambitions. The FNB fair does not provide exactly that, but it’s not too far off.

In terms of quality of work the fair was on par with other art events on the continent, such as the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal and the Rencontres de Bamako photography festival in Mali. With twenty-four galleries from England, France, Germany, Nigeria, and South Africa, the fair included a diverse array of work by artists predominantly from Africa (though some were European). This diversity stems, in part, from the makeup of the Johannesburg population itself; the city is a melting pot of immigrants from all over the continent, a place where Zimbabwean, Malawian, and South African people share culture and space.

© Bridget Baker, Only-Half-Taken, 1959/2011-2012, 16-mm colour and 16-mm black-and-white expanded film installation. Image by Daniel Isherwood

Some of the highlights were found in booths not directly associated with a gallery, such as a large-scale installation of Deborah Poynton’s Arcadia paintings, or Bridget Baker’s film Only Half Taken (1959/2011–12). Kudzanai Chiurai won this year’s FNB art prize, granting him a small solo show of videos, photos, and sculptures from his State of the Nation series. Printed materials were available through Clarke’s Bookshop and Jacana Publishing, and sales of limited-edition prints from Art South Africa and Art Throb, two of the most important critical resources in the country, helped raise money to support their programming. Finally, a series of presentations called Arts Alive Art Talks, featuring twenty-minute lectures by curators and artists alike, provided more depth and nuance for the general audience in attendance.

© Kudzanai Chiurai, Untitled III, 2011 (top); Revelations II, 2011 (bottom), both from the series State of the Nation

Stevenson Gallery stood out from the other commercial enterprises by presenting a single work, Michael MacGarry’s monumental sculpture Future Proof, 2012, a cement mixer studded with nails and bolts in the vein of an African fetish figure. WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery showed a variety of work from a new wave of up-and-coming artists emerging from the Cape Town scene, including Julia Rosa-Clark, Dan Halter, and Athi Patra-Ruga. Goodman showcased its strong stable of artists, and its booth’s high points were works by William Kentridge and pieces from Mikhael Subotzky’s series Retinal Shift, which explores the act of looking. Two videos from the series used security-camera footage publicly available from the Johannesburg police that shows violent crimes between black South Africans; they end with each arrested person forced to look up into the security camera for the purposes of identification. One crowd favorite was a work by Ed Young, in the Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary Gallery booth, of a lifelike miniature of the artist hanging naked from a nail in the wall. It was fittingly titled My Gallerist Made Me Do It, 2012.

That the FNB Johannesburg Art Fair was a professionally executed and commercially successful event—every gallerist I spoke with reported strong sales—is no small feat in a country where the arts are tragically underfunded. The fair also received significant media attention. Judging by the crowds of curators, collectors, dealers, and the general public, there is a desire in South Africa to have more such events take place in the future. Hopefully, that desire can translate into exhibitions propelled out of the commercial sphere and into the daily workings of one of the most bustling cities on the continent.

Unfortunately, the Sandton area of Johannesburg, where the fair took place, is a giant mall, isolated from any of the surrounding townships and lacking the vitality that courses through other parts of the metropolis. Relocation to one of the more vibrant, up-and-coming parts of downtown such as Braamfontein or the Arts-on-Main district would provide a welcome shot in the arm. Braamfontein, centered on the University of the Witwatersrand, is home to the new Wits Art Museum, which is located in a former 1970s-era car showroom. Galleries and cutting-edge design stores have begun popping up in the area. Main Street, a central artery of downtown, cuts through neighborhoods such as Milpark, with its industrial buildings repurposed to house restaurants and shops, and the newly christened Maboneng (“place of light,” in the local Sotho dialect), which features a compound of renovated buildings with cafes, lofts, and performance spaces.

© Julia Rosa Clark, Coordinates of Gains & Sorrows, 2012

Moving the fair to a more centralized, diverse neighborhood—or, even better, bringing back the Johannesburg Biennale—would provide opportunities to expand the presence of art on the continent and beyond. Moreover, it could further the existing desire among young people in Johannesburg to create a new form of culture that participates in the greater global context while maintaining unique South African qualities. The philosophy behind this movement is one of Ubuntu (literally translated from the Xhosa as “I am because you are”), a bracingly fresh collectivist philosophy that looks back at South African history with an eye toward the future.

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Daniel M. Leers is an independent curator based in New York City. Leers graduated with a BA in Art History from Lawrence University and an MA in Art History/Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. From 2007-2011 he was the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. During his tenure at MoMA, Leers worked on a variety of exhibitions, including New Photography 2011: Moyra Davey, George Georgiou, Deana Lawson, Doug Rickard, Viviane Sassen, Zhang Dali. Currently, Leers is acting as a Curatorial Advisor to the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Chris Buck – Artist Talk and Signing

 

Tomorrow evening at Aperture Gallery, join Chris Buck for an artist talk about his first photobook, Presence: The Invisible Portrait.

 

Presence brings a counterintuitive and conceptual take on the desire to behold fame. A successful editorial portrait photographer, Buck ingeniously set up these shots so that, even without digital manipulation, no human figure can be seen. From the super-famous (Robert De Niro, Jay Leno, Snoop Dogg) to the legendary (Günter Grass, Chuck Close, Archbishop Desmond Tutu) to the notorious (Nick Cave, David Lynch, Sarah Silverman), the range of subjects and collaborators blurs the line between the indulgence of pop culture and the obliqueness of art photography. A book signing will follow the discussion.

 

For more on Presence: The Invisible Portrait, see:

· Cool Hunting

· Huffington Post

· GQ



Chris Buck Presence: The Invisible Portrait Talk and Signing

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

6:30 pm

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore

547 West 27th Street, New York

Trisha Ziff Discusses 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides

“There’s a huge contradiction for me between publishing and looking at these images, and how in the street—just in ordinary life—I respond to something gruesome that happens.”

Now available from Aperture, 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides is Metinides’s choice of the 101 key images from his life photographing crime scenes and accidents in Mexico for local newspapers and the nota roja (or “red pages,” for their bloody content) crime press. Alongside each image, extended captions give his account of the situation depicted, describing the characters and life of the streets, the sadness of families, the criminals, and the heroism of emergency workers—revealing much about himself in the process. Here, in conversation with Aperture Foundation executive director Chris Boot, editor, filmmaker and curator Trisha Ziff discusses her relationship to the images compiled with Metinides for 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides.

101 Tragedies of Enrique MetinidesPrice: $50.00

Taryn Simon and Lisa Hostetler – In Conversation

Listen to Taryn Simon present and discuss her work with Lisa Hostetler, McEvoy Family Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in this audiocast recorded Tuesday, November 27, at Aperture Gallery.

Simon is a contemporary photographer known for several bodies of work, including The Innocents (2003), Nonfiction (2006) An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), Contraband (2010), Image Atlas, and, most recently, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I – XVIII (2011), which was exhibited last spring at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Presented by the Aperture Foundation and the photography program at the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design.