Photography Collection

El Periodico: Iconic Capa War Photo was staged

2009-07-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

A Spanish Civil War photo by Robert Capa that shows a Republican soldier at the apparent moment he was fatally hit in the back by a bullet was in fact staged, a Spanish newspaper claimed on Friday. "Capa photographed his soldier at a location where there was no fighting," wrote Barcelona-based newspaper El Periodico which carried out a study of the photograph taken in September 1936, the third month of the war. The so-called "falling soldier" photo was not taken near Cerro Muriano in the southern Andalusia region, as has long been claimed, but about 50 kilometres (30 miles) away near the town of Espejo, the newspaper said. To back its claim it published Capa's photo and others taken at the same location as well as photos taken recently near Espejo which show that the landscape corresponds to that of the 1936 photo. The photo, one of the most emblematic war photographs of all time, has long sparked controversy, with Capa supporters defending it as authentic but some critics saying it was too perfect not to have been staged. El Periodico said it based its study on an exhibition, launched in New York in 2007 and now in Barcelona, of 150 photographs taken by Capa in conflicts around the world during the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Budapest in 1913, Capa went on to become of one of the most famous photojournalists of the 20th century. He was killed in 1954 by a landmine in Vietnam. (AFP)

Memories of a Publisher

2009-07-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

Julius Shulman was one of the greatest photographers and image makers of the 20th century. Even in a biblical age he was an inspiration for generations of admirers, fans and friends. His house was open for everyone and thousands of pilgrims from all over the world came to see him, the man who created the visual memory of Modernism. He was a generous, kind and caring human being with a memory sharp as the latest generation of computers, recalling every trip he made and every photograph he took. I loved this man and I was blessed to have him as my friend.

Benedikt Taschen

The Living Memory of Modernism

I first saw Julius Shulman�s photographs, almost half a century after they had been taken, in one of our own books, Architecture of the 20th Century. This book was published at the beginning of the 1990s and soon became one of our most important titles. The Shulman photographs�though diverse in their subject matter�stood out so clearly from all the others that I had only to flip through the book a second time to immediately identify them. I was fascinated by the clarity of the composition in his pictures. The exposure was perfect and the staging dramatic�like in a Hollywood movie�with the architecture itself playing the leading role. It became the object of desire and the projection of a better world. Moreover, unlike most architectural photography until then, some of Shulman�s best photographs featured �real� human beings. This was big news.

Back to Hollywood and the year 1994: I thought, this is a man I would like to meet, and so one morning I gave him a call. A friendly voice answered the phone. I introduced myself and he invited me to his studio. Julius Shulman, 84 years old at the time, sat at a desk piled high with letters and magazines. He gave me the warmest welcome and showed me around his archives in the back of the studio. Suddenly the term �vintage� acquired a whole new dimension for me, epitomized by the personality of this man. I asked what he was working on and he produced an extensive manuscript: his autobiography. I inquired whether he had already found the right publisher and when his reply was no I suggested that now he had.

One year later, we published Julius�s hugely successful autobiography and followed up with monographs on Neutra, the Case Study Houses, and a volume on forgotten masters of modern architecture, Modernism Rediscovered. Meanwhile I also became Julius�s neighbor in the Hollywood Hills (his beautiful steel and beam house built by Soriano is right on the other side of the hills where my own house is located). I began to systematically work my way through his archives, looking at every single contact sheet, photograph, slide, and transparency, the output of over 6,000 assignments since the year 1936. His archive, totally undigitized, was in perfect order, and it was extremely easy to find what I was looking for. But what was even more interesting for me was to find buildings I was not looking for, for the simple reason that I did not even know they existed. And Julius, from his studio next door, was perfectly able to give me detailed answers to all my questions about the buildings, the architects, designers, clients, and even the people in the pictures. It didn�t make a difference if the photograph was from Palm Springs in 1945, Tel Aviv in 1961, or Puerto Vallarta in 1975. Julius�s memory was just extraordinary: It was as precise as a computer of gigantic proportions.

It took almost five years until I had dug out the last picture from his archive, with Julius giving detailed comments on my selection. Not only did I have the unique privilege to work with unequaled photographic material, which, for the most part, was in mint condition and offered pristine color. I also had the pleasure of receiving first-hand information on every single image. Working on this set of books�which actually was more fun, than work�seemed like taking a time capsule back to the beginnings of modernism in the 1930s through the 1970s, with Julius being the commander in chief Captain Kirk. I am profoundly grateful for his input and his tireless support, but most of all for his friendship. I hope that these three volumes will contribute to getting the numerous architects and designers, unknown to the masses and working in shadows of their famous colleagues, the recognition they deserve.

�Benedikt Taschen, Publisher
Excerpted from Modernism Rediscovered, 3 Volumes

Architectural Photographer Shulman dies at 98

2009-07-17T07:58:00.000-07:00

Julius Shulman, Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960, Architect: Pierre Koening, Gelatin Silver Print � Julius Shulman/ J. Paul Getty Trust

Photographer Julius Shulman, who turned photos of Modernist buildings into works of art, has died, colleagues said Thursday. He was 98. Shulman died Wednesday night at his home in the Hollywood Hills and had been in declining health, said gallery owner Craig Krull, who represented him. "He, in my opinion and the opinions of many, is the most important architectural photographer in history. He elevated what you might consider a commercial genre to a fine art," Krull said. The Getty Center bought Shulman's archive of 260,000 photos in 1995. Shulman then teamed up with collaborator Juergen Nogai and worked into his 90s to build another library of photos. Shulman's pictures at one time sold for less than $50 each, but in later years would bring between $2,000 and $20,000.
His most famous work was a black-and-white photo taken of a glass and steel frame home built by architect Pierre Koenig in the Hollywood Hills above Laurel Canyon Boulevard as the sun was setting on May 9, 1960. It was No. 22 in John Entenza's Arts & Architecture magazine's Case Study housing program. The picture from outside the cantilevered house was shot through its glass walls toward a sea of sparkling city lights below. Two women seem to be chatting in the living room, and the horizontal pattern of the ceiling above them extends outside to the house's overhang. It was a lifestyle statement that made Shulman's career. It was also a last-minute job for the photographer known as one-shot Shulman because he never used a light meter and seldom had to take more than one shot. For No. 22, though, he took two photos at once � one of the view below with a 7.5-minute time exposure and a 4-by-5 camera, and the other of the house, with a flash. Critics hailed it as a photo that was both time specific and timeless. "He may not have considered himself an artist, but his work has been reviewed in all the important art magazines of the day," said Krull, who has represented Shulman for 20 years. An exhibit of Shulman's latest work has been on display at Krull's gallery in Santa Monica from July 4 through Aug. 8. When asked how Shulman's photos of houses differed from others, Krull said: "Modernism is characterized by an optimistic spirit, a belief that the future holds great promise and technology will improve civilization. Julius was perfectly suited to translate the tenets of optimism."
Over the past 20 years, Krull said he learned a lot about architecture from Shulman. "But he would engage in a conversation about any subject," he said. "He always had a spark in his eye and vitality. He was somewhat of a naturalist, that was one of the reasons for his longevity. He was a nature boy, did a lot of hiking, a lot of skiing." Shulman was born in October of 1910 in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His family soon moved to a farm in Connecticut. Shulman said that's where he learned about lights and shadows and developed a love of nature. When Shulman was 10, his family moved to Los Angeles and opened a dry goods store. His father died of tuberculosis in 1923, leaving his mother with five children and the business. Shulman attended Roosevelt High School, where he took his lone photography class. He spent the next several years soul searching and earning his rent money by taking photos with an Eastman box camera. One picture of a bridge won first place in a national magazine contest. It was a casual meeting with architect Richard Neutra in 1936 that launched his career. Neutra became the most important collector of Shulman's works. Over the years, other clients included Koenig, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolf M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Charles Eames, Raphael S. Soriano, John Lautner, Eero Saarinen, Albert Frey and Harwell Harris. (AP)

Gerda Taro behind the lines

2009-07-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Gerda Taro, Republican militiawomen training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936 � International Center of Photography.

The Museu Nacional d�Art de Catalunya, jointly with the International Center of Photography, New York (ICP), presents the first retrospective exhibition of the work of Gerda Taro, a pioneer of war photojournalism. The exhibition brings together a hundred photographs and an assortment of documentary material that shows Gerda Taro�s sensitivity, capturing the human face of the war, both behind the lines and on the battlefield and in the trenches, next to the soldiers.
This exhibition places Taro�s work in its context and highlights the figure of a photographer who has remained in the shadow of the man who was her lover and professional collaborator, Robert Capa. Together they travelled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, where Taro lost her life after gaining enormous international professional prestige. Proof of this prestige is the fact that her photographs of this war illustrated the reports of the most outstanding publications, such as Vu, Regards, Voil� or Match. The show presents images of all the episodes and scenes in the Civil War photographed by Gerda Taro, from her arrival with Capa in Barcelona on August 5th 1936, just a few weeks after the war broke out. In Madrid, Taro immediately joined the international community of artistes and intellectuals supporting the Republic, among whom were Rafael Albert�, Mar�a Teresa Le�n, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos or Martha Gellhorn. With the sensitivity that characterizes her work, Taro captured the atmosphere in the cities she visited and the everyday nature of the war: the training of the militiamen, daily life at the front, the victims of the bombing etc. She witnessed and photographed some of the main episodes, like the struggle on the Aragon front or that of C�rdoba (the scene of Capa�s famous photo Death of a Militiaman), the resistance in Madrid, the republican offensive in Segovia (that her friend Hemingway immortalised later in For Whom the Bell Tolls) or the battle for Brunete, where she was killed. Her photographs reflect the grief on the faces of the inhabitants of the cities destroyed by the bombing raids, the desperation of the refugees who have been attacked on their retreat or the horror experienced by soldiers and civilians.

Gerda Taro, Boy wearing cap of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), Barcelona, August 1936 � International Center of Photography

Born in Stuttgart, Gerda Taro�s real name was Gerda Pohorylle. In 1934, she and her partner Endre Ern� Friedmann invented the fictitious figure of an American reporter, Robert Capa, under whose name they could sell photographs at a price three times the usual one. She became Gerda Taro, the American photographer�s secretary, while Endre passed himself off as the reporter�s darkroom assistant. They thus created a brand under which they would sell photographs taken at times by him or by both of them. Once the ruse was discovered, he took the name Robert Capa and she kept that of Gerda Taro. The close personal and professional relationship between the little blond girl, as everyone on the Spanish front knew her, and Robert Capa made it enormously difficult to establish the authorship of many of the photographs taken by Taro, as some were attributed to Capa and others were stamped �REPORTAGE CAPA & TARO�. Only in 1937, months before she died, did she sign the photographs published in the prestigious French newspaper Ce Soir with the independent signature PHOTO TARO. Years of work by Richard Whelan and Irme Schaber have made it possible to at last exhibit Taro�s work free of the shadow of Capa in this retrospective. Gerda Taro was a pioneer of war photography, and the first graphic reporter to be killed at the front. She died at El Escorial on July 26th 1937, after being crushed by a tank at the battle for Brunete, on her way back from the front. On the day she was buried in Paris, with all honours, she would have been 27 years old. Despite the fact that Taro was acclaimed as an anti-fascist martyr, the importance and singular nature of her work fell into oblivion after the Second World War, and Taro began to be remembered as Robert Capa�s lover rather than the exceptional, committed photographer she had been. It was not until the 1980s, once the anti-communist hysteria that characterised the Cold War years had died down, that it was possible to vindicate her outstanding role in the history of photography.
Starting with the Second World War, many photographers followed in Taro�s footsteps as graphic war reporters. The role of women photojournalists began to be consolidated in the Second World War and after Taro other great figures emerged, like Lee Miller (Poughkeepsie [New York], 1907 � Chiddingly [East Sussex], 1977), who had learnt the trade next to Man Ray and had taken an active part in the Surrealist movement. Miller left the world of fashion behind to cover the Second World War. Margaret Bourke-White (New York, 1904 � Connecticut, 1971) also photographed this same war, this time from the Russian front.

Gerda Taro
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya
- September 27th 2009
Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.;
Sundays and public holidays, 10 a.m. to 2.30 p.m.;
Mondays not public holidays, closed.

Palau Nacional, Parc de Montju�c
Barcelona, Spain

Robert Capa at Work

2009-07-15T23:26:00.000-07:00

Robert Capa, American soldier landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day, Normandy, France, June 6, 1944 � Estate of Cornell Capa

The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), jointly with the International Center of Photography, New York (ICP), presents the exhibition This is War! Robert Capa at Work, which brings together more than two hundred photographs taken by Capa in conflicts that he covered as a war correspondent during the 1930s and 40s, and which made him one of the most outstanding photographers of the 20th century. After the MNAC, the show which has been on in New York, London and Milan, will close in Rotterdam.
Endre Ern� Friedmann, the real name of Robert Capa (Budapest, 1913 � Tyhai Binh, Indochina, 1954), was committed from an early age to a left-wing ideology opposed to authoritarianism. His political militancy and his Jewish origins forced him to flee from some of the many conflicts that took place in Europe during the upheavals of the 1930s. Thus, in 1931 he was forced to leave his native Hungary and go to Berlin, after being arrested for demonstrating against the regime of the dictator Mikl�s Horthy. In the capital of Germany he studied journalism and tried to make a living as a photographer, as it was �the closest thing to journalism for someone who did not master any languages�, until Hitler�s rise to power forced him to leave for Paris, in 1933, as a precaution due to his Jewish origins. In France things were not easy because of the Great Depression, which had forced the government to prohibit the employment of foreigners. In order to overcome their financial hardships in Paris, he and his partner Gerda Pohorylle (Gerda Taro) invented the figure of an American photographer, supposedly rich and very successful, called Robert Capa. Endre Enr� passed himself off as the darkroom assistant and Gerda had the job of selling the photographs as if they were the work of the American, at a price that trebled the official rate. Eventually, and despite the fact that the ruse had been discovered, Endre Ern� Friedmann became Robert Capa through selling photographs under the name of this invented character. As he himself explained in 1935, �I now go by the name of Robert Capa. You could almost say that I have been reborn, but this time without causing anyone any pain�. Capa supported the Spanish Republic right from the start, as it was governed by a formula that fitted in perfectly with his political ideas: a non-Stalinist left, not dependent on the USSR. On August 5th 1936, just a few weeks after the Civil War broke out, Capa was already in Barcelona to cover a conflict that was to cost Gerda Taro, his lover and professional collaborator, her life, and to which he showed his commitment right to the end.

Robert Capa, American soldiers landing on Omaha Beach, D-Day, Normandy, France, June 6, 1944 � Estate of Cornell Capa

The Spanish Civil War witnessed the birth of photojournalism, as it was the first war covered on a day-to-day basis by a corps of professional photographers, whose work was published immediately in the main newspapers and the new illustrated magazines, national and international, that were just then beginning to use photography to complement their reports. From then on, all the wars were followed on the pages of the most important publications, like the French Vu, Regards, Match and Ce Soir, the British Picture Post and Weekly Illustrated or the American Life, and they printed many of the photographs taken by Capa that have become icons of some of the most important moments of the first half of the 20th century. Capa produced some of the most famous images of the Spanish Civil War, like Death of a Militiaman (The Falling Soldier), one of the most emblematic war photographs in history, which captures the precise moment when a republican militiaman falls dead at Cerro Muriano (C�rdoba). The international recognition that Capa gained in this war allowed him to be given assignments and permission to cover the Japanese occupation of China (1938), the Second World War (1941-1945), with his outstanding photographs of the D-Day landings, the First Arab-Israeli War (1948) and the First Indochina War (1954). Robert Capa once said that his most fervent wish was to have nothing to cover as a war photographer, but the truth is that during his career there were precious few moments of peace. During those brief periods he photographed the society of the time, the life in the caf�s of Paris, sporting events like the Tour de France, and he portrayed some of his many friends: Ernest Hemingway, Ingrid Bergman, John Huston, John Steinbeck or Pablo Picasso.

Robert Capa, American soldier killed by German snipers, Leipzig, Germany, April 18, 1945 � Estate of Cornell Capa

In Paris, in 1947, Capa founded the Magnum photo agency along with Henri Cartier Bresson, David Seymour �Chim� and George Rodger. On May 25th 1954, aged forty, he was killed when he stepped on a landmine while in Vietnam doing a report for Life magazine. The exhibition This is War! Robert Capa at Work is completed with a sizeable assortment of documents (magazines and letters) that help to contextualize his work and to understand the echo it had in the press of the time. At the same time, the MNAC also presents Gerda Taro, an exhibition that highlights this photographer�s outstanding role in the history of war photography and shows the influence she exerted over the work of her lover, Robert Capa.

The Mexican Suitcase
Robert Capa left Paris in 1939, leaving behind him the war and a suitcase containing 126 rolls of film negatives. These contained thousands of photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour �Chim� from May 1936 to March 1939, and a few that Fred Stein had taken in the French capital. The material was regarded as lost until it resurfaced in Mexico in 1995 and, after numerous ups and downs, the negatives reached the ICP in New York in 2007. Some of the material from the �Mexican Suitcase� is now being presented at the MNAC. It includes an unpublished image and 3 contact sheets of one of Capa�s most dramatic and famous series, taken at the Battle of the River Segre in November 1938. The most prestigious magazines of the time, like Life, Regards or Picture Post, devoted many pages and much praise to these photographs. Also on show are two new images of Gerda Taro taken near Segovia, a few weeks before she was killed, during the republican offensive that their friend Hemingway was later to immortalize in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

This is War! Robert Capa at Work
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya
- September 27th 2009
Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.;
Sundays and public holidays, 10 a.m. to 2.30 p.m.;
Mondays not public holidays, closed.

Palau Nacional, Parc de Montju�c
Barcelona, Spain

Spaces in modern Cities

2009-07-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

Axel H�tte, Borzano/Citadella, Italy, 1996, � Axel H�tte, 2009, C-Print. 205 x 162 cm c/u, Artist's Collection

Until the end of August, the Fundaci�n Proa in Buenos Aires presents the exhibition Urban Spaces: Andreas Gursky, Candida H�fer, Axel H�tte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth. The show analyzes the evolution on the concept of the city in contemporary culture through the ideas and images produced by five members of the so called D�sseldorf School of Photography: Andreas Gursky, Candida H�fer, Axel H�tte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth. Curated by Ludovico Pratesi, researcher and specialist in photography, in collaboration with Benedetta Carpi De Resmini, the exhibition is composed by 45 works produced from the early eighties until recent times. It is designed to take the visitor first through the artists� early works �those produced during their formative years� and continuing with their most recent body of work, in which an individual selection from each artist emphasizes their stylistic differences and personal characteristics.

Candida H�fer, Congreso Buenos Aires I, 2006, � Candida H�fer/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/ SAVA, Buenos Aires 2009, C-Print. 200 x 251 cm, Artist's Collection

This is the first time Gursky, H�fer, H�tte, Ruff and Struth are invited to reflect of a common theme �the city�. The works exhibited at Fundaci�n Proa are the result of the close dialogue between the artists and the curator, and depicts the different interpretations and relation each artist has with the urban space. �The exhibition includes some of the artists� master works, such as May Day IV by Andreas Gursky, the m.d.p.n. series by Thomas Ruff and the photos of Louvre by Candida H�fer. At the same time, in the selection made with H�fer there are some important shots taken in Buenos Aires �where the exhibition is displayed�, a city which fascinated and interested her in a very special way�, explains the curator Pratesi. During the 1980s, their teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher conveyed the city theme as an important artistic reference. Subsequently, each one of them developed a unique and personal style, following the drastic changes caused by the rapid globalization of urban cultures. Their images depicting different sites around the world combine the local details with the usual feelings and experiences of contemporary societies. Each piece recreates a unique and defined universe that concentrates in the interrelation that exists between man and his surroundings, together with all its anthropological and sociocultural implications. �This exhibition is part of the cultural program of Fundaci�n Proa, in which we present different disciplines of current contemporary art. In the same way that we once organized exhibitions of photographers Andr�s Serrano or Sebasti�n Selgado, we now considered that bringing works of these five artists of the D�sseldorf School was practically inevitable within the international contemporary context�, explains Adriana Rosenberg, director of Proa.

Andreas Gursky, Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park, 1994, � Andreas Gursky/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/ SAVA, Buenos Aires 2009, C-print. 210 x 170,5 cm, Colecci�n privada. Tur�n, Italia, Lia Rumma Gallery

The exhibition catalogue, a bilingual publication with large prints of the exhibited works and referential images, becomes one of the first Spanish catalogues for the joint group. The critical essays by curator Pratesi and acclaimed art critics such as Armin Zweite, Pablo Perulli and Valeria Gonz�lez give clear evidence not only of the contradictions of the contemporary city, but also of the history behind the D�sseldorf School and the artists' influence on artistic expression, together with their revolutionary input on the photographic medium within the global context.

Fundaci�n Proa is a contemporary art centre located in the traditional neighbourhood of La Boca, in the city of Buenos Aires. Since 1996, it has carried out temporary exhibitions of national and foreign artists, and organized educational and exchange programmes with other cultural institutions.

Urban Spaces
- 27.07.2009
From Tuesdays to Sundays
11 - 19 hrs.
Mondays closed.

Fundaci�n PROA
Av. Pedro de Mendoza 1929
La Boca, Caminito
Buenos Aires

Urban Spaces - Artists

2009-07-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Andreas Gursky
born 1955, Leipzig, Germany; lives and works in D�sseldorf: He started working in commercial with his father. In the early 80�s he attends Bernd Becher photography class, although he almost immediately leaves behind black and white and starts working in colour. In the mid 80`s explores the contrasts between natural landscapes and industrial areas, and takes photographs of groups of people in recreational activities embedded into landscape. In the early 90`s Gursky adopts a monumental format and in the mid 90`s he focuses his work on large buildings. His photographs are inhabited by people tingling in the spaces. He reproduces a world that is opening up to a global dimension. His photographs are taken from on the highs, from cranes or helicopters, digitally tweaked. A retrospective of his work is held in Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and at the Stichting De Appel in Amsterdam. In 1998, at Kunsthalle, D�sseldorf, an exhibition of his work from 1994 to 1998 is held, and in 2001 an important retrospective is held at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 2001 he also wins the Infinity Award for Art given by the New York International Centre of Photography. Since 2007 until today there were many exhibitions of his work held, for example at the Kunstmuseum, Basilea, and in at Monaco Haus der Kunst. The latest exhibition, Werke 80-08, was held at the Stockholm Modern Museet and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Interview with Andreas Gursky
Fragment of the interview published in the cultural supplement of the S�ddeutsche Zeitung, Bavaria, Germany, Munich, on Tuesday March 26, 2002, pg. 19. Translated to English: Daniela Guti�rrez.

SZ: What is actually causing so much fascination in the people looping at your photographs?
AG: Let�s take the photo EM Arena Amsterdam �as an example

SZ:...where we can see, on a green playing field, many football players, small as little toys.
AG: On one hand, the presence of football as a mass phenomenon, a profane topic that is well known by all of us. This is an aspect that any person can establish a relationship with even without having any notion of what art is. This is something that can be seen in many of my images. And in addition, from an area of grass which is so green, emanates an aura, as that of a monochrome image.

SZ: So, at the beginning there is the popular. And after that, you monumentalize what is to be seen, transforming it into something archetypal, universal. That is something that has been quite criticized: the coldness, that great distance from the facts, which in your work translates into petty dimensions. It is the gaze of strategist from the mountain.
AG: The masses interest me: the relationship between the body and space, abstraction of the distance and the experience of the lack of space when one is there, in the middle of everything. As for the coldness, may be so, to the extent that the interpretative gaze could not be recognized in the first time. Everything seems to be as it is. If my photographs were stained by a subjective look, they would lose the timeless nature. My images use a visual vocabulary that must be explored first and that is guided by different rules than those of linguistic thought. in addition, the influence of the Becher: reality should be left to speak by itself, because it is so creative than man cannot be but left behind. It is a maximum that I have incorporated into my approach, which is why I work this way.

Andreas Gursky: The Dizziness of Space
Extract from the text A view onto the city, by Ludovico Pratesi, exhibition curator. Written especially forthe edition of the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

Andreas Gursky first separates himself from the lessons of his masters, pursuing since the early 1980s a process that focuses on the structural aspects of the image, emphasizing the ability to catch the eye. His formal artistic research focuses on the concentration on a single photogramme, printed large scale and with an almost maniacal attention to detail. Conceptually, his works grip the spectator physically and emotionally, recalling the experience of German painting from the Renaissance to Romanticism. The composition of the image, as Martin Hentschel (1) points out, refers to the structure of the natural landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Caspar David Friedrich, where the monumental dimension of the subject, a beach on the Rhine (Rhein, Oberkassel, 1985), a pass in the Dolomites (Dolomites, Klausen Pass, 1984), the interior of a cathedral (Cathedral, 2007) or the main hall of an international airport (Frankfurt, 2007) is amplified by the human presence intentionally overpowered by the surroundings. On one hand, this provokes in the spectator the same sense of dizziness experienced when viewing the space of frescoes in Baroque churches, and on the other hand gives him or her the sensation of living a collective experience with the figures in the work. In sum, a type of shared view, provoked by the artist through the extension of the work, always attentive to the acute precision of each detail, with results similar to those of the 18th century vedute painters such as Canaletto or Bellotto. Indeed, as Emmanuel de L�Ecotais points out, an objective approach characterizes German painting since the Renaissance, citing as an example the works of Albrecht Aldorfer (1480-1583), the more famous student of Albrecht D�rer, as a possible illustrious precedent of Gursky. (2) Beate Sontgen claims that "Gursky�s images speak of structures of perception and of the relationships that vision establishes between figures, objects and space, to compose a new world architecture." (3) Gursky captures this architecture, where the contemporary city is protagonist, with a precision and a farsighted vision that never ceases to amaze.

1 Cfr. M. Henstchel, The Totality of the World, viewed in its component forms. Andreas Gursky�s photographs 1980 to 2008, published in Andreas Gursky Works 80-08, exhibition catalog, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Moderna Museet Stockolm, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008-2009, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, Germany, 2008, pp. 22-23.
2 Cfr. E. de l�Ecotais, Une certaine tradition objective, in the catalog Objectivit�s, pp. 65-68.
3 Cfr. B. Sontgen, Le vertige de sens. Les images photographiques d�Andreas Gursky, in the catalog Objectivit�s, p. 285.

Candida H�fer
Born 1944, Eberswalde, Germany; lives and Works in Cologne: She begins to work as photographer in the mid `60s focusing her gaze on waiting rooms, stations and public spaces. Hofer takes photographs in small-format devoted to show, with a simple and direct language, everyday life. From 1976 to 1982 she attends the Academy of Dusseldorf, where she learned from the Becher a certain kind of coldness when looking, but especially the use of photography as a rigorous instrument of inquiry. In 1990 began her Zoo Project, understood as a museum, in which the animals are represented as sculptures. At the end of the `90s begins to use a larger format, with which she gets to print greater force to the image. Among Hofer individual exhibitions, the following can be mentioned: Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1991; Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992; St. Louis Art Museum and Sonnabend Gallery at New York in 1997; retrospective exhibition Orte Jahre 1968-1999 at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur Cologne and the Kunsthalle at Nuremberg in 1999; Architecture of Absence at University Art Museum, Long Beach, California and at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2005; Mus�e du Louvre, Paris, in 2006 and Palais des Beaux Arts at Brussels in 2007. In 2002 represented Germany at the 50th Venice Biennial.

Interview with Candida H�fer
By Ludovico Pratesi. Published in the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

L.P.: No persons are ever visible in your works. Is your idea of a city empty and deserted?
C.H.: It is about interior spaces rather than city spaces. As regards interior spaces it started as a practical consideration: I simply did not want to disturb people with my work. But it also turned out to be revealing: With their absence, paradoxically, people become more present in the pictures because it is now clearly to be seen what expectations spaces have with regard to the people using them.

L.P.: The choice of representing cultural places as theatres, libraries and museums: is it to underline the traces of memory over architecture?
C.H.: Not in such a fundamentalist way. To some extent these particular building types do represent social habits which, although very slowly, seem to go out of use or at least change fundamentally in the way they are used: Presence in the theatre is being replaced by tele-presence, books in libraries become virtual, and also museums seem are changing in the way they present objects. At the same time, however, to me these spaces have their own character and vitality revealing in their displays the layers of time and experiences through which they have come to the present and they seem to resist such changes.

L.P.: Shelley Rice has written that �Candida Hofer's photographs render homage to the concept of the human community as historically limited, fragile and always in negotiation�. Is it your intention to capture the emptiness and make it visible through the perception of this fragility? C.H.: From my previous answers you may deduct that indeed I probably emphasize a sort of "permanent process of negotiation" between space and its uses over time, but also more basically between light and space. But it is less about fragility I tend to think it is more about a hidden strength.

L.P.: What is the city of today for you?
C.H.: A vital time space.

L.P.: When you worked in Buenos Aires, what was your perception of the city?
C.H.: The sensual presence of layers of time, and enormous vitality, and even if I get suspected of flattery - together with St. Petersburg - although totally different - the most beautiful city I have ever been to.

Candida H�fer: The Presence of Absence
Extract from the text A view onto the city, by Ludovico Pratesi, exhibition curator. Written especially for the edition of the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

"I do not want to disturb the public with my work", declares Candida H�fer. Following the cycle of works on the Turkish community in Germany, the artist abandons black and white photography in favour of colour, she begins to use a large format, and above all, she definitively eliminates the human presence in her work, concentrating instead on public urban spaces for culture, such as libraries, theatres and museums. She selects spaces that have been enriched by the presence of thousands of people, transforming these places into �spaces in which every object has an intrinsic meaning, tied to the passage of time and to memory�(4). H�fer points out that these spaces are slowly but surely losing their primary function: the spectators of a theatre are replaced by television-spectators, books in libraries are becoming virtual, and museums are visited by Internet. By means of large-scale images, the artist invites the spectator to look again, to consider every detail. "The wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, bookshelves filled with books, floor tiles, heavy theatre curtains give the spectator the feeling of being enveloped by these rigorously empty rooms" (5). The artist brings us on a Grand Tour of absence from Weimar to Bologna, to Seoul, to Buenos Aires, to Lisbon, to Paris, in order to �capture the empty space, immobilize it, and make it visible� points out the Portuguese writer Jos� Saramago. (6)
Involved in a continuous process of negotiation with her subjects, the artist bases her ideas on the theatricality of architecture, in order to reveal the most hidden identity, the genius loci. Thus the city that emerges from the art of Candida H�fer is an extensive vital space, where the absence of human beings only serves to emphasize their presence in time, rooted in a collective memory. (4)

4 Cfr. L. Pratesi, Genius Loci. Riflessioni sull�opera di Candida H�fer, published in Candida H�fer. Bologna Series, catalog of the show at the Centro de Artes Visuales Pescheria di Pesaro, Hopefulmonster, Turin, 2007, p. 55.
5 Cfr. F. Maggia, Candida H�fer, Bologna, published in Candida H�fer, Bologna Series, p. 63.
6 J. Saramago, Emptiness, Silence, in J. Saramago, S. Rice, Candida H�fer em Portugal, Schirmer/Mosel, Munchen, 2006, p. 10.

Axel H�tte
Born 1951, Essen, Germany; lives and works in D�sseldorf: Between 1973 and 1981 attends Bernd Becher�s photography class. Influenced by his teacher he begins photographing the postwar German architecture with a sober and objective gaze. In 1982 Hutte wins a grant to study in London, where his work focuses on domestic interiors and industrial buildings, devoid of any human presence. In the mid �80s he took a series of black and white portraits, unrelated to any external reference, and landscape images in a large format, which foreground topic is an architectural element, the cusp of a top, the fog or mist. Far from attempting a definition for a space, he tries to turn it anonymous, devoid of geographical coordinates. Toward the end of the �90�s H�tte starts to represent urban landscapes by night in extreme visibility conditions. In more recent years he takes up again the portrait topic, this time confronting the human being with the grandeur of nature. His individual exhibitions were held in the Rotterdamse Kunststichting, Rotterdam, in 1989; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, in 1993; Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, in 1995; Fotomuseum Winterthur, in 1997 and Foundation for Photography, Amsterdam, in 2001, at the Henie Onstad Art Centre, H�vikodden, in 2006. Recently an important retrospective exhibition of his work has been held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof�a, Madrid, 2004.

Interview with Axel H�tte
By Ludovico Pratesi. Published in the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

L.P.: What is the city of today for you?
A.H.: Still a place like in the last century where you can feel the vibrations of modern times; food for the brain, exhausting nightlife and linked to other cities and countries via airports.

L.P.: In your first black and white images the influence of Bernd Becher, your professor at the
D�sseldorf Academy is visible. Was it he who suggested a conceptual vision of architectonic space?
A.H.: Although Bernd and Hilla Becher are coming from a background where �subject matters� Bernd never made any topic proposals to his students. But the method of working in series supported a work ethic and the idea of selection by comparing the different variations of a theme. You see the city as swift and nocturnal, like that of a traveller who has arrived by night with no particular purpose. Is the city therefore a distant space to be rapidly crossed in order to arrive at nature? After an architecture series in the 80� showing hallways, underground stations or in general empty public spaces interior but also exterior (like street corner scenes in Venice and London) I started the night series titled �As dark as light� 1998. Mysterious illumination in the landscape and later urban views from skyscrapers towards the darkness or partial illuminated architecture were the focus of my work.

L.P.: Bridges, subways, abandoned factories: contemporary ruins or spaces to lose your identity in?
A.H.: As important as the reality you can recognize are the invisible parts that are hiding through darkness or behind the structure of a bridge or a factory window. The imagination - what we would like to see - depending on what we can see and what we don�t see is the focus of all my architecture, landscape and portrait work.

L.P.: The urban districts underlining your works are marginal and anonymous like the stages of a purposeless wandering. Must one get lost in the city of today?
A.H.: One must get lost in ones dreams, in nature and in the city.

Axel H�tte: Spaces of Hallucination
Extract from the text A view onto the city, by Ludovico Pratesi, exhibition curator. Written especially for the edition of the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

The photographs that Axel H�tte took at the underground subway stations in Germany in the late 1970s, and the works realized in London in the early 1980s, represent dismal and empty spaces, illuminated by the cold, dim lights of the abandoned parking lots. These works reveal the artist�s interest in the first years following his graduation from the D�sseldorf Academy, in a disquieting and night view of the city, dominated by an underground aesthetic, also present in the films of German filmmakers of those years such as Wim Wenders and Rainer Fassbinder and described in the novels of Peter Handke or Heinrich Boll. For example, the series As dark as light, from 1998, focuses on a solitary and lunar image, nurtured by cinematographic and literary sources, which over the years evolves into the study of the gradations in luminosity present in the night views of large American cities. These works represent panoramic aerial views of buildings in Atlanta, Seattle and Las Vegas, transformed by the artist into mysterious webs of light that present a dreamlike and unfocused abstraction. This tendency has intensified in his works of the last decade, often through the use of the lens to capture glimmers of light on reflecting surfaces, such as Berlin, Nationalgalerie (1991): the museum designed by Mies Van der Rohe becomes an unrecognizable place, a hypnotic and surreal landscape; a space of hallucination, vividly defined by Rudolf Schmitz, who notes the artist�s ability to explore the limits of visibility, although always remaining faithful to reality. Schmitz states, �The origin of latent images, pending their revelation, is offered to the imagination of the spectator, where an aura of mystery rife with promise is offered to the austere and sober compositions.� (7) By means of a gradual elimination of recognizable and visual points of reference, the artist leads us into hallucinatory landscapes, where urban reality is transfigured into a pure territory of vision.

7 Cfr. R. Schmitz, Le concept de l�objectivit� hallucinatoire ou: comment Axel H�tte se repr�sente l�eveil des consciences, published in the catalog Objectivit�s, p. 223.

Thomas Ruff
Born 1959, Harmersbach, Germany; lives and works in D�sseldorf: In 1977 he attends Bernd Becher photography class, where he shows his interest in the documentary photography. Ruff makes dozens of portraits, first in small-format, and in 1986 he starts working in larger dimensions. Toward the end of the 80`s he represents postwar Germany anonymous buildings. In 1993 Ruff works on images obtained through a procedure used by the police to make identikits, and also he intervenes manually a series of small portraits extracted from medicine books. In 2001 he starts teaching at the Academy of Dusseldorf. Personal exhibitions of his work had been held at: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1989; Centre National de la Photographie, Par�s, in 1997 and Chabot Museum, Rotterdam, in 2001. In 2002 a first important retrospective exhibition of his work is held at the Kunsthalle, Baden Baden. Also an itinerant exhibition is shown in many European countries, Tate Gallery at Liverpool in 2003 and the Museo de Arte Contempor�nea Serralves, Oporto, in 2003. In 2006 a retrospective exhibition is held at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venecia. That same year he receives the Infinity Award from the New York International Center of Photography for the The Grammar of Photography. In 2007 Ruff is invited to show his work in dialogue with the Sprengel Museum Collection at Hannover. Early this year an interesting individual exhibition was held at the a Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy.

Interview with Thomas Ruff
By Ludovico Pratesi. Published in the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

L.P.: What does the contemporary city mean for you?
T.R.: There is no contemporary city. All cities are a mix of a lot of different architectural periods.

L.P.: Inside your works there is an important interest in architecture. For what reason?
T.R.: Besides nature, architecture is the biggest thing that surrounds us. We move around it and we move inside of it.

L.P.: Often you photograph isolated buildings, with shapes that reminds you of rationalism. Is this a reference to your own life?
T.R.: I would say that there exists no rationalism, there exists only subjectivity that is dreaming for objectivity or rationalism.

L.P.: In your research do you see the architecture as formal, symbolic or historic attitude?
T.R.: Only formal, but formal also includes symbols and history.

L.P.: Recently you�ve dedicated your work to architecture destroyed. Is this an explicit reference to the collapse of the Twin Towers or to a symbolic decadence of the western civilization?
T.R.: Architecture is build by man and is destroyed by man. So it was just natural to include work about destroyed buildings.

The main interest of Thomas Ruff is the use of photography to investigate individual or collective
perception through the constant flow of images of contemporary society generated by the media. His themes are many and varied, from Portraits (portraits of common people) to Nudes (pornographic images taken from Internet) to Jpegs (enlarged digital images), where the theme of the city is represented in its many social and political aspects. While still a student at the D�sseldorf Academy in the 1970s, Ruff developed an interest in anonymous domestic interiors filled with the accessories of German daily life, as seen in the series Interiors (1979-1983). Unlike the Bechers, Ruff abandons black and white photography, to deal with colour photography, which offers a less rigorous but certainly more intimate and sensitive pictorial dimension. In the following series, Houses (1987-1991), Ruff abandons architectural interiors for
exteriors of buildings, analysed with an eye to the historical tradition of Rationalism and the Bauhaus, and appropriating the visual codes of German postcards of the 1950s. (8) This approach of revisiting modernist tradition finds its peak in the series l.m.v.d.r., begun in 1999: a cycle of historical photographs of buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, re-elaborated by the artist. This desire to re-write the guidelines of the cultural and semantic value of the image is evident in the recent series of Jpegs, begun in 2004, which can be considered a reflection on the city as a platform populated by buildings that carry a social and political meaning, made accessible through Internet. Matthias Winzen points out that �the Jpegs of Ruff reveal the irritating quality of a world experience that has become collective, or more precisely, a reduction of that experience.� (9) It is not surprising that the destruction of the Twin Towers is one of his most representative subjects: the first tragedy lived throughout the world in first person, and icon of a society governed by the mass media.

8 Cfr. M. Winzen, Regarder et discerner, in Objectivit�s, pp. 267-270.
9 Cfr. M. Winzen, ibid., p. 269.

Thomas Struth
Born 1954, Gelden, Germany; lives and works in D�sseldorf: Begins to study painting in the Kunstakademie of Dusseldorf and later he signs for Bernd Becher`s photography class. In 1978 Struth got a grant from the Academy to go to New York, where he produces his first photographs in black and white without any human presence. Later he adopts both colour and a larger format. In the mid 80`s in a series of portraits, he tackles the relationship between human and space. Those images show, above all, domestic environments. Later he captures crowds and anonymous characters in chambers of museums, exploring the dialog between the public and the work of art. In recent years Struth has extended his language to include tropical landscapes in his work. Individual exhibitions of his work has been held at Kunsthalle, Bern and at the Yamaguchi Museum in 198; Frankfort Portikus, Chicago Renaissance Society in 1990. In 1992 at the Washington Hirschhron Museum. In 1993 at Hamburg Kunsthalle, in 1994 at Boston ICA and London ICA. In 1995 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and Bonn Kunstmuseum. In 1997 at the Pek�n International Art Palace. In 1998 at the Carr� d�Art in N�mes and at the �msterdam Stedelijk Museum. In year 2000 an exhibitions were held at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art and the New York Metropolitan Museum. At the Dallas Museum and The Moca, Los �ngeles, in 2002. In 2007 at the Prado Museum in Madrid and in 2008 at the Naples Museo Madre.

Interview with Thomas Struth
By Ludovico Pratesi. Published in the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

L.P.: What is the city of today for you?
T.S.: Ah! Cities! Once founded as trade posts on the banks of rivers, as harbors and fortresses. Cities are still exciting conglomerates of information and possibility. However, life in cities has become increasingly difficult: The dependence on the automobile as the means of individual transport dominates the quality of space in an unbearable and destructive manner. It is surprising that the idea of the urban utopia, which came up in the beginning of the 20th century and promised leisure and happiness in an environment of large-scale apartment blocks connected by multistory superhighways, has not been recasted or reinvisioned in an era of ecological awareness. Cities all around the world have ignored the upcoming collapse of their infrastructures because of the greed, ruthlessness and incompetence of some real estate developers, who have often destroyed important historical sites and, more generally, the human scale in urban environment. Politicians and city planners have often failed to keep a cautious eye on the interests of the private sector and a vision of their city�s future. The old downtowns of many big cities in the United States are destroyed, China and Russia follow this model and give up their urban history�but people want to be in Paris, London and New York which represent the dream of the old city on a human scale.

L.P.: What is the meaning of urban architecture in your work?
T.S.: Understanding and representing architecture was the beginning and occasionally returns to be the foundation of my work. Architecture manifests a society�s will and self expression. In the cities, the gestalt of a mentality can culminate in a peak intensity. The history of a society, its common unconsciousness (�Unconscious Places� was the title of my first publication, Kunsthalle Bern/Verlag Walther K�nig 1987) is often truthfully expressed in the dynamic of normal, everyday architecture. This goes beyond individual buildings, which can be more easily traced and documented.

L.P.: In the works exposed you have chosen historic cities, like Naples or Venice, and contemporary megalopolis, like Shanghai,Tokyo and Hong Kong. Why this dualism?
T.S.: Because it represents two developments, two solutions to an urban mechanism. Dualism is the most basic notion of analysis. You need to look at two different versions of a solution to be able to compare; in this comparison, it becomes clear that human-scale architecture is necessary for existence.

L.P.: When you are working on the image of a city which elements are you more interested in?
T.S.: To get to know the place and to scout what represents an unmistakable narrative. I�m mostly interested in the dynamic of conjunctions of buildings. This means streets, larger perspectives; I prefer dense urban structures that have a revelatory potential. For example, when I first photographed in the Shin-juku neighborhood of Tokyo, I was looking for what defined that place as different from everything else I�d seen before. I learned, through the photographs, something about the Japanese conception of space and the temporality of architecture there.

L.P.: In developing your research you moved from more intimate images, like Vico dei Monti in Naples (1988), to panoramic views of more anonymous places. Does this reflect the development of your visible relationship with urban architecture?
T.S.: After photographing the jungle for several years (�New Pictures from Paradise� was the title of this group of works, which I published around the turn of the millennium. Schirmer/Mosel, Munich 1999), I felt curious to return to the city and trace locations where a so-called globalization had become visible. Similarities of modern building styles between Inner Mongolia and Las Vegas, Sao Paolo and Palermo etc. struck me and allowed me to question mechanisms of thought, memory and self-representation.

Thomas Struth: Unconscious Places
Extract from the text A view onto the city, by Ludovico Pratesi, exhibition curator. Written especially for the edition of the exhibition catalog.
� Fundaci�n Proa and Ediciones Larivi�re, Buenos Aires, 2009.

"Understanding and representing architecture is the point of departure and the basis of my work. Architecture expresses the desire of society to represent itself" (10). In this way, Thomas Struth explains the constant presence of urban architecture in his work, beginning with the first black and white series of urban views that represent deserted streets seen from the pedestrian�s perspective, with particular attention to the urban stratification. (11) His view looks towards the city in order to analyse the cultural coordinates of its evolution, seeking to capture the most secret and less evident traces. For this reason, when the artist looks at the metropolis, ancient or modern (he has photographed the small alleys of Naples and the streets of Tokyo), he never seeks out the most representative places, such as monuments or museums, but concentrates on the spaces between buildings. He is interested in insignificant streets or public squares, which he considers repositories of an anonymous and unconscious memory. Unlike Candida H�fer, he looks towards the stratification of banal daily life, interpreted as would an anthropologist, and focuses on the subtle relations that link man to his social environment. This interest began in the late 1970s and culminated in the exhibition Unconscious Places at the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1987; (12) shortly after the artist shifted towards large-scale colour photographs of the metropolis of the future such as Shanghai or Seoul. This triggered a reflection on the evolution of the city and the intimate cultural nature of the area. The artist states, "Recently, I have begun looking at the city with a different eye in order to find areas where the so called globalization is more visible. The stylistic similarities between modern buildings in places such as the centre of Mongolia, Las Vegas, S�o Paulo or Palermo deeply affected me and led me to reflect on the mechanisms of collective thought, memory and its representation". (13)

10 Quote extracted from the interview with Ludovico Pratesi and published in this catalog.
11 An interesting analysis of this artist�s work can be found in L. Derenthal, Appr�hender le monde entier: � propos de photographies de Thomas Struth, in Objectivit�s, op. cit., pp. 251-265.
12 U. Loock, Unconscious Places, exhibition catalog, Bern Kunsthalle, 1987.

Spencer Tunick�s Art Project at Barney Castle online today

2009-06-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

More than 1100 people were models for Spencer Tunicks photo art project at Barney Castle, Ireland, for the Midsummer Festival 2008 in Cork.

By Barry Roche

Everybody who stripped off for American photo artist Spencer Tunick at Blarney Castle as part of last year�s Cork Midsummer Festival will discover today what their endeavours have produced when the work goes on display in Cork and on a new website. Cork Midsummer Festival Director William Galinsky confirmed Tunick�s work from Blarney will be on display on the artist�s website from today.Those who took part in the project will be able to collect their copies of the work at the Triskel Arts Centre. Those who participated in Tunick�s Dublin installation last year will also receive souvenir photographs from today.The Dublin Docklands Development Authority said it would post limited edition photographs of the installations at South Wall and the Treasury Holdings Alto Vetro Building to all who took part in the photo shoots in the capital.Every participant, both in Cork and Dublin, would receive two prints, the docklands authority said.Mr Galinsky said: �Spencer Tunick is world renowned, so for a festival like the Cork Midsummer Festival to secure him to do an installation here was a great coup � we were punching well above our weight and everyone who participated in the project can, I think, be very proud . . . It was a very euphoric sort of moment where people celebrated the shared humanity of the naked body because very often the only photographs we see of large groups of people naked are photographs of famine victims or of people in concentration camps.�

Auction of classic and contemporary photography in Cologne, Germany

2009-05-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

As in the past, the auction house Lempertz in Cologne, Germany, has divided the photography auction. The 19th century and classic photography as well as contemporary photographs with estimates up to 2,000 Euro will be auctioned on Wednesday, 27 May at 6 p.m. Amongst the 19th century photography are two portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron depicting Charles Darwin and Alfred Lord Tennyson and his circle respectively. Highlights of the classic photography are works by August Sander (10,000�15,000), Dorothea Lange (10,000�12,000), Ansel Adams (18,000�20,000, and Irving Penn (10,000). A contact print of Moholy-Nagy�s famous Bauhaus balconies at Dessau will be offered for 3,000. Contemporary Photography will be offerend in the Contemporary art auction on 28 May. Three works by Hiroshi Sugimoto (estimates between 10,000 and 22,000) and a portfolio with 60 gelatin silver prints by Rudolf Schwarzkogler are the top lots of the offer (14,000�16,000). The Helsinki school is represented by works of Tiina Itkonen (5,000) and Ola Kohlemainen (7,000).

The relation between photography and literature

2009-05-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

Photo: Ferdinando Scianna

The Spanish Ministry of Culture and PHotoEspa�a open Encuentros PHE: VII Debates on Photography, which will take place at the Ministry of Culture�s Auditorium (C/ San Marcos 40, Madrid) from 4 to 6 June. In this edition, the programme will be run by photographer Ferdinando Scianna (Italy, 1943) and the writer Antonio Anson (Spain, 1960) and it will tackle the relationship between photography and literature.

The objective of this edition is to show the way that images and texts interact from a creation point of view, having a bearing on the crucial roll of photography in the formation of modern literature voices. The XX Century has been the age of image and photography is, without doubts, the medium of expression that best embodies contemporary modernity. A lot has been written on the relation of the cinema with the literature and its mutual influence, and very little on the key role of photography in the configuration of the modern world. Not a single medium of expression has been more present in the art and, above all, from portrait to the family album, the books of trips, the medicine, the politics or the police control, all they linked to the literary fiction. Photography implied a new vision of the world, transformed the art and modified the literary styles feeding new kinds as the poem in prose, or stylistic resources like the monolog or the narrative fragmentation. Contrary to what it comes being repeated, photography shares with the word more communicative resources that with the remainder of the visual arts.

Encuentros PHE will gather international experts like Claude Ambroise, professor, critic and translator; Roberto Ando, writer and cinema, opera and theater director; Antonio Anson, writer; Jan Baetens; poet and researcher of the Universite Catholique de Louvain; Alberto Bianda, graphic designer and image/text specialist; Federico Campbell, writer; Paul Edwards, researcher of the Universite Paris VII; Alberto Garcia-Alix, photographer; Marianne Hirsch, researcher of the Columbia University; Gerard Mace, poet; Philippe Ortel, researcher of the Universite de Toulouse; Jane M. Rabb, researcher of The New School; Ferdinando Scianna, photographer; and Silvana Turzio, specialist in criminology speech and professor of the Universita di Milano.

Further information in www.mcu.es/promoArte/ and www.phe.es/encuentros

PHotoEspa�a 2009

2009-05-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

Ed van der Elsken, Couple making love, Edam, 1970, Courtesy: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam/ Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

PHotoEspa�a 2009 will take place from 3 June to 26 July in Madrid. The Festival of Photography and Visual Arts will offer at this twelfth edition a proposal comprising 74 exhibitions, 31 in the Official Section, 7 in other venues and 35 in the Off Festival, spread in a total of 60 exhibition spaces such as museums, art galleries, art centres and exhibition rooms. 259 artists and creators of 40 nationalities will participate at the Festival.

The Official Section of PHE09 will develop the concept of The everyday. The Festival will include exhibitions by artists belonging to different generations, geographic origins and artistic and conceptual tendencies. It will preferably focus on recent productions, but will also try to reveal historic times where connection between photography and the everyday has acquired special importance. The Official Section will be completed by Historical exhibitions and Grand Masters, and it will also open its doors to invited projects. Meanwhile the Off Festival will bring together the best exhibition projects by the main art galleries in Madrid.

This new edition of PHotoEspa�a consolidates Madrid, Lisbon and Cuenca as host cities. In this edition, the Museu Colec��o Berardo in Lisbon will participate in the Festival with two exhibitions; Cuenca, PHotoEspa�a host city by its third consecutive year, will host OpenPHoto, an exhibition programme consisting of proposals coming from embassies and foreign institutions of 8 countries; and for the fist time this year, Alcala de Henares will join the Festival hosting photography workshops of Campus PHE. Fundaci�n Canal will organized the contest El Agua de Madrid (Water of Madrid) and workshops for children and youths.

PHE09 will deepen into programmes with pedagogical and professional aims. A novelty in this edition will be Festival Campus PHE Edici�n de Libros, a programme devoted to publishing projects which will take place at the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, in Mostoles (Madrid), joining Campus PHE Grand Masters, photography workshops and master classes that will be held in Alcal� de Henares. Besides, Descubrimientos PHE expands its scope and organizes portfolio reviews in Lima and Mexico City. For the first time, PHotoEspa�a and the Banco Santander Foundation will organize an educational programme for the youth, in which 198 students of 6 Madrid's high schools will participate. The programmes for general public, which are addressed to people of every age and education level with an interest in photography, will include guided tours of the Festival exhibitions, workshops for children and young people as well as family programmes to allow families to enjoy PHotoEspa�a all together.

PHotoEspa�a faces a new challenge in 2009: the international promotion of the Festival as per PHotoEspa�a International. This ambitious project, which will not be carried out during June and July, the regular dates of PHotoEspa�a, promotes the spread of exhibitions and professional programs of PHotoEspa�a beyond Spanish boundaries. The exhibition programme of PHE09 will include two exhibition venues outside Spain: Portugal will host again some of the exhibitions of the Official Section of the Festival and, for the fist time, Italy will also be international venue. The Italian programme, created with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Regional Government of Madrid as part of the Made in Mad programme, will be carried out in Milan starting in October. The internationalization of the Festival will be also applied to programmes with pedagogical and professional aims. PHotoEspa�a will allow the viewing of portfolios Descubrimientos PHE Madrid, Lima and Mexico City with the support of the Cervantes Institute and the AECID (Agencia Espa�ola de Cooperaci�n Internacional para el Desarrollo, the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation).

Ugo Mulas, Bar Giamaica, Mil�n, 1953-54, Courtesy: Archivo Ugo Mulas

The Everyday as material for photography
S�rgio Mah, general curator of PHE09, suggests an exhibition programme which will focus on the idea of The Everyday, presenting artists and visual works that keep a special relation with the experience and perception of daily life, with that which occurs around us and marks us, our life experiences, our most common and intimate gestures. The Official Section will also be curated by Alejandro Castellote, Jean-Fran�ois Chevrier, Fran�ois Delvoye, Mar�a Iovino, Charlotta Kotik, Claudia K�ssel, Vangelis Ioakimidis, Markus Heinzelmann, Oliva Maria Rubio, Jan Mlcoch, Rodrigo Moura, Emilia Tavares, Thomas Seelig, Enrica Vigano and Paul Wombell.

Various are the reasons for the election of the main theme. In first place, the intention of answering and questioning some of the contemporary art and culture current tendencies, which focus on images that reproduce and give a new shape to everyday reality. During last years, photography, film, video art, television and, in a more heterodox way, Internet, experience visual suggestions that explore the banal and routine movement of the everyday. Documentary images, instant photography aesthetics, recycling of public and private files, sequence shots and real time images... These are some of the tendencies that start to be noted in the art and current communication world. They are the symptoms of a new interest for something authentically banal, recognizable and real.

On the other hand, and due to these last tendencies, which fix its attention on the world and the others, there are new movements that pay attention to documentary models and style. In this context, it is of great importance the persistence and updating of an image culture that, along the modern and contemporary history, defined a close relation with the simple gestures, events, experiences and routine objects of our daily life. This is a photography's characteristic, the link with the everyday by means of documentary and metaphorical attitude.

The PHotoEspa�a programme gathers authors and visual projects that base their work on all these topics in relation to the everyday, which more than a theme is, above all, a starting point for some of the most crucial matters of our times. PHE09 suggests turning back to the basics, unaware of the most spectacular art, and looking for themes that are closer to the individual and the world around him.

Photographic interpretations of The Everyday
The Fernan-Gomez Theatre. The Art Centre / Banco Santander Foundation will present the exhibition The 70's. Photography and everyday life, an exhibition that intends to draw a retrospective look over some twenty authors who contributed to define this decade like one of the most important and most fruitful periods over photography most recent history. Works of artists like David Goldblatt, Christian Boltanski, Anders Petersen, Cindy Sherman, Malick Sidib�, Eugene Richards or Sophie Calle among others, make us think about aesthetic approaches of a period where art and life are very much related. A decade where a special concern about the everyday was awoken, the personal poetical, the intimate landscape, and non conventional documentary approaches.

Telefonica Foundation will show for the first time in Spain the photography artwork of the German photographer Gerhard Richter. Overpainted photographs is a series produced over more than 20 years that gathers more than 400 images belonging to private collectors and to the artist's own collection. Richter uses pictures that aren't welcome in his personal album and he covers them with paint to create new images, establishing a fruitful dialogue between paint and photography.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid will host The Atlas Group (1989-2004). A Walid Raad's project which documents the contemporary history of Lebanon. Collection of documents comprising The Atlas Group archive is a mixture of ceded, found or created samples by the group, whose authenticity, authorship and date are always in doubt. In the exhibition, by means of pictures, films, videos and a sculpture, Raad creates and produces real and fictitious documents of the daily life in Lebanon, all this with humour and creativity.

At the Royal Botanical Gardens, Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel present for the first time in Spain Evidence, and artistic project consisting on a compilation of documentary photographs, among which it is worth mentioning numerous crime, forensic and legal material, whose aim was purely practical and documental as pieces of evidence. Also, PHotoEspa�a presents the work of the young Spanish artist Sara Ramo, a series of videos and photographs produced recently in which the artist performs apparently banal actions but full of meaning in the domestic space or in sceneries created by her.

The Circulo de Bellas Artes will exhibit at the Sala Picasso a selection of works developed by Patrick Faigenbaum. Photographs 1974-2008 gathers works ranging from his debut's portraits of the Italian aristocracy to his photography series of European cities as Prague, Bremen or Barcelona, where city history is shown as well as the link between past and present. Sala Minerva will show the work of Zhao Liang. This Chinese artist presents the video City Scenes, which is a detailed observation or social reality of his country throughout scenes taking place in Beijing's streets.

In gallery Abierto X Obras, at Matadero Madrid, there will be an installation created by Spanish artist living in the US, I�igo Manglano-Ovalle. The project comprises two videos where, with the use of a night vision cameras, the artist introduces brutal elements, close to security tools, in sensual and tender situations, confronting beauty and danger. Also in Matadero Madrid, Back Home. Video Works, the audiovisual work of Pedro Costa, a rapprochement to reality without concessions, getting close to its most heartbreaking and marginal elements.

The Sala Canal de Isabel II will present Glory Days, an exhibition of Russian photographer Sergey Bratkov organized by the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Regional Government of Madrid. 140 photographs and 4 videos showing the work that this critical and committed artist has been performing from 1990, portraying a historic crucial stage of the XX Century: the fall of the Soviet Union.

In Sala Alcala 31 the exposition by Annie Leibovitz. A Photographer�s life 1990-2005, organized by the Brooklyn Museum of New York in October 2006, with the sponsorship of American Express and collaboration of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Regional Government of Madrid. The exhibition comprises 220 works, of which it is worth mentioning portraits of famous people like Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt or Demi Moore, tailor-made works, like the one on Sarajevo in the 90's and photographs of moments of this private life.

The Casa de America will present Mirante, an exhibition of 35 pictures of some of the most recent series of Mauro Restiffe like Inauguration (2009), Vertigem (2008) or Red Light Portraits (2006). In his black and white, wide format photographs he develops, with documentary view, themes like urban life, space and architecture.

The Filmoteca Espa�ola will host Cine PHE, a film cycle sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Regional Government of Madrid, and devoted to Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. The cycle reviews the fundamental filmography of the director, considered a pioneer after having destroyed limits between documental and fiction. A sangue (The Blood) (1989), Casa de lava (Down to Earth) (1994), Ossos (Bones) (1997), or No cuarto de Vanda (In Vanda's Room) (2000), are some of the titles which will be shown in the Cine Dor�.

Everyday life in Grand Master's photography
The ICO Collection Museum will house the exhibition of Dorothea Lange, The Crucial Years. The exposition has been produced by Fundacion ICO and is organized by the foundation and PHotoEspa�a. It offers nearly 140 photographs of an essential stage for Lange, from the 30's to the 40's, period in which she documented projects of the Farm Security Administration portraying the difficult situation of her country at that time, which turned into the prelude to the prosperous 50's. Exhibition will also gather photographs from the project War Relocation Authority carry out in the Japanese American internments during World War II and urban scenes of San Francisco and New York. In every stage, her photography is humanist. It has a mature style, she knows how to frame important figures among the crowd, using resources of the New Vision to create powerful images, many of them are much prettier than what could be expected given it documentary nature.

Sala Goya of Circulo de Bellas Artes will host the work of the Czech prolific artist Jindrich Styrsky, On the Needles of these Days. Nearly 60 pictures of the creative phase of the artist, developed in the 30s, considered a great surrealism's contribution to modern photography.

The BBVA will house in Sala de Exposiciones Azca Ugo Mulas's work: about a hundred black and white images showing innovation fine skills of an artist known as an excellent portraitist who has taken pictures to important art figures in New York during a period of artistic explosion, the 70's.

The Museo de Arte Contemporaneo will host the anthological exhibition of Bartolome Ros, Borders of Africa, presenting pictures taken in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco. Visitors will be able to see photographs of Alfonso XIII and his family in the protectorate, also of Franco and Spanish Legion founder, Millan Astray, as well as images of the ordinary life in the army during the time immediately before the revolt of the Spanish army against the Second Republic.

PHotoEspa�a in Portugal: Mabel Palacin and Cristobal Hara PHotoEspa�a will have again Lisbon as venue of two exhibitions of the Official Section. The Museu Colec��o Berardo will have an anthological exhibition of Cristobal Hara gathering about a hundred images making clear author's relation with the concept of the everyday during all his professional trajectory. The exposition includes images of series like Lances de aldea (Village Lances) (1992), Vanitas (1998) and Contranatura (Against Nature) (2006), as well as works of recent production. Meanwhile, Mabel Palacin will present a photography series and a video, Hinterland, produced specifically for the Festival, and where she stresses in image's double nature and reconsideration of photography, due to his new condition within the digital universe. The exhibition will be completed by La distancia correcta (The right distance) (2002-2003).

OpenPHoto in Cuenca
Cuenca will be PHotoEspa�a host city by its third consecutive year and this occasion the city will be the venue of OpenPHoto, a selection of suggested exhibitions coming from embassies and foreign institutions. This initiative is sponsored by Cuenca's City Council, Cuenca's Provincial Deputation, Consorcio Ciudad de Cuenca, Cuenca Capital Cultural Europea 2016 and Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha. It will turn Cuenca in an international meeting point, opening a section completely oriented to foreign countries. 8 will be the countries participating at this edition: Colombia, Belgium, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and United Kingdom.

The Escuela de Arte Jose Maria Cruz Novillo will show the proposal of the British Council, Clasroom Portraits, by Julian Germain. A group of collective portrays made up in schools of around the world.

The Fundacion Antonio Perez will host BlowUp. An image collective, on behalf of Le Botanique. Community Wallonia-Brussels Cultural Centre. The exhibition, compounded of photographs, projections and documents of the Belgian photographers group, Blowup, has as objective to create a discussion and position space with respect the practice of photography, aesthetics and rigor. It will be shown, as well, the proposal from Istituto Italiano di Cultura called, Confronted Territories, by photographer Franco Fontana, an artist who has worked with photography aesthetics properties creating abstract compositions. He has also photographed the urban and human landscape of the metropolises.

The Fundacion Antonio Saura. Casa Zavala will host Joshua Benoliel (1873-1932). Press Photographer, an anthological exhibition presented by the Instituto Camoes and Portuguese Embassy, which discovers the work of one of the pioneers in Portuguese photojournalism of the beginning of the XX century. In the same venue Contratexts will be shown. This is an exhibition organized by Colombian Embassy in Spain and it connects for the first time four of the most significant contemporary artists of this country: Oscar Munoz, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Miguel Angel Rojas and Fernell Franco. Finally, the proposal of the Royal Netherlands Embassy: Pages, A new generation of photo books from The Netherlands, a new exhibition presenting a revitalization of photography books, that are not longer reserved to acclaimed photographers after Internet arrival and phenomena like desktop publishing.

The Museo de Semana Santa will host the exposition Reconstruction by the Romanian artist Iosif Kir�ly, thanks to the initiative of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Madrid. In this project the author researches about how he remembers and forget persons, places and events by means of photography compounded by different perspectives.

As per the Aula Cultural UCLM, it will host Topos: Nuances of Spaces by Nikos Markou. The exhibition, produced and run by the Photography Museum of Thessaloniki, participates at OpenPHoto with the support of the Greece Embassy in Spain and presents a vision of Greece which is far from traditional stereotypes.

Besides, Cuenca will gather simultaneous activities as workshops, meetings and conferences where photographers as well as curators of OpenPHoto Cuenca's exhibitions will participate.

The Best Photography Books of the Year at Matadero Madrid
Matadero Madrid will show the exhibition The Best Photography Books of the Year, a collection by which the Festival remarks the important function of the publishing industry as a means to promote photography. It will gather nearly 100 books selected as finalists for the twelfth edition of this prize.

Emerging photography in The Aguila Complex and Instituto Cervantes
The Aguila Complex will be again the focal point for emerging photography with the viewing of Descubrimientos PHE Madrid portfolios. Besides, it will host the collective exhibition Descubrimientos PHE09, with works of 70 finalists of the viewing in Madrid and the individual exhibition of the winner of the last edition of the contest, Yann Gross. His work Horizonville analyses the theme of identity by means of inhabitants of an industrial town of the Swiss Rhone river valley, where they are fascinated by the American way of life.

For the first time, the Instituto Cervantes will host Resilence, a selection of participating works of the reviewings performed in Mexico and Lima. Only 10 artist among the participants of Descubrimientos PHE Lima, Mexico have been selected by curator Claudi Carreras. The exhibition turns into a tour through the current photographic in Latin America and it will route during 2010 through the different centres of the Cervantes Institute outside Spain.

Encuentros PHE: Relation between photography and literature
Encuentros PHE: VII Debates on Photography, organized by PHotoEspa�a and the Ministry of Culture, will be directed by photographer Ferdinando Scianna and writer Antonio Anson. During three days, from 4 to 6 June, the auditorium of the Ministry of Culture will gather about twenty experts who will analyse relation between photography and literature: how images and texts interact from the creative point of view, stressing on the decisive role that photography has performed in modern literature.

Campus PHE Comunidad de Madrid in M�stoles and Alcal� de Henares
PHotoEspa�a and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Regional Government of Madrid will run Campus PHE Edici�n de libros and Campus PHE Grand Masters. Campus PHE Edici�n de Libros, programme for editorial projects, will take place at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Mostoles) from 23 April to 25 April 2009 and intends to advise professionals on edition, design and general concept of his book projects. Participants will receive assessment on behalf of editor Michael Mack, designer Fernando Gutierrez, graphic editor Chema Conesa and photographer Martin Parr. Meanwhile, from 16 to 24 June Campus PHE Grand Masters will gather Roger Ballen, Patrick Faigenbaum, Jim Goldberg, Angel Marcos, Rosangela Renno, Stefan Ruiz, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Stephen Shore and Neil Stewart. Each of them will be the professor of photography workshops comprised of 15 students in each group.

Educative Programme The 70's. Photography and everyday life
To mark the occasion of exhibition The 70's. Photography and everyday life PHotoEspa�a and Banco Santander Foundation started an educative programme in February. This programme is addressed to school groups of students from 16 to 18 years old. Six educative centres in Madrid will participate in an initiative that pretends approach the youth to contemporary photography. The programme will welcome 200 students of schools such as American School of Madrid, British Council School, Colegio Nuestra Se�ora de Montserrat, Colegio Lourdes Fuhem, IES Grande Covian and IES Ramiro de Maeztu.

Photography workshops and contest in the Fundacion Canal
Fundacion Canal and PHotoEspa�a will organize the photography contest El agua de Madrid (Water of Madrid). The announcement of the contest is open to everyone and it welcomes participants to send their water pictures through www.phe.es. A committee will make a selection that will be exposed from 12 June in the gardens of the Fundacion Canal. Besides, the last weekend in May, Fundacion Canal will host photography workshops for children and young people so that they get familiarised with concept and principles of photography. The programme will include the participation of photographers Rosa Mu�oz, Laura Torrado and Ciuco Gutierrez.

Recorridos Camper: guided tours and family workshops
PHotoEspa�a and Camper allow PHotoEspa�a visitors to discover some of the most representative expositions of this edition of the Festival. Guided visits are free and take 90 minutes approximately. They will take place on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 5 to 27 June. The Festival will offer the possibility to organize tailor-made tours and also for school groups. Besides, PHotoEspa�a extend its programmes for families. During four Sundays of June, families will be able to go through exhibitions of the Festival and complete the visit with small activities and workshops.

PHotoEspa�a is also held in the street
The street programme of PHotoEspa�a will have its peak point on 19 June, a day with a very long activity programme starting at 18.00h. until early morning. One more year, PHotoMaraton Canon will start in Fundacion Canal and will give the go to La noche de la fotograf�a, a festive night which will continue in squares of the Barrio de las Letras with showings in public spaces, music, DJs and alive performances. At midnight, in the Plaza de Santa Ana, presenter, actor and scripwriter Antonio Mu�oz de Mesa will present the prize-giving ceremony of PHotoMaraton Canon. Besides, photography lovers will have a unique opportunity to acquire the most significant publications of national and international publishing houses in the Feria del Libro de Fotografia, which will be out of the Fernan-Gomez Theatre. The specialized publications available will be of publishing houses as Steidl, Phaidon, Aperture or Trolley Books, among others.

Official PHE09 Awards
Each PHotoEspa�a edition highlights some of best careers and contributions to photography world, as well as the best exhibitions of the festival, with 8 awards. PHotoEspa�a Baume & Mercier Award, consisting of 12,000 euros for the purchase of works and an exclusive trophy by Eduardo Arroyo; Bartolome Ros Award for the most brilliant professional career in photography, consisting of 12,000 euros; Descubrimientos PHE Epson Award, whose winner will have another chance to exhibit at the next PHotoEspa�a edition; Room Mate Hotels Revelation Award, consisting of 8.000� for the acquisition of work, to a young photographer under 35; Best Photography Book of the Year Award (for both national and international categories) and the Outstanding Publishing House of the Year Award; Off Festival Saab Award, for the best organized exhibition by an Art Gallery consisting of 8.000 euros for the acquisition of works; and People's Choice M2-El Mundo Award, judged by the visitors to the Festival for the best exhibition; and the PHotoEspa�a OjodePez Award for Human Values, awarded to the best photo-documentary report submitted to the contest highlighting solidarity, ethics, justice or effort.
PHE.es, one space for photography all year around
PHE.es increases its contents to improve its reputation as a communication space open to new stories and photography and audiovisual approaches. PHotoEspa�a web portal provides photography updates and analysing the various disciplines, like fashion photography or photojournalism, and looking into great photographers, those belonging to photography history and those emerging talents. PHETV broadcasts exclusive interviews with photographers and professionals of the medium; Portfolio shows exclusive image galleries; Dossier contains unpublished texts by authors such as Graciela Iturbide, Anders Petersen or Joan Fontcuberta; and a guest firm writes monthly its opinions and experiences in the Blog, which has already been used by Nicolas Combarro or Jamie Isaia. The PHotoBlog contest completes the offer of PHE.es. PHotoBlog is an interactive space where photography amateurs can upload photos opting for various prizes.

Master PHotoEspa�a
PHotoEspa�a and the Universidad Europea de Madrid have joined forces (both experience and infrastructures) to set up a programme aimed to train professionals in cultural industries. The Master PHotoEspa�a en Fotografia: Teoria y Proyectos Artisticos is divided in theoretical and technical modules of more than 500 hours. Lessons will be given by an international staff of professionals and lecturers specialized in cultural administration, university training, politics, public administrations, private company, design, audiovisual communication, publicity and marketing as well as art, critique and creation. The Master PHotoEspa�a en Fotografia will provide photographers and professionals with the fundamental knowledge for the comprehension of image. All the necessary last-generation photographic and audiovisual material. The programme will be completed by professional traineeships in companies of the industry and outstanding public and private institutions.

PHE Publications
PHotoEspa�a 2009 publishes the catalogue The Everyday, containing the most relevant issues of the theme of the Festival based on a selection of images of the participating artists, as well as a group of texts signed by general curator of PHE09, Sergio Mah and authors like David Campany, Christoph Ribbat and Jose Manuel Cuesta Abad. To mark the occasion of PHotoEspa�a exhibitions, 4 art centres will accompany their exhibitions with a catalogue that gathers the most highlighted images as well as essays and reference texts. These are Overpainted photographs, Gerhard Richter; The 70's. Photography and everyday life; Dorothea Lange. The Crucial Years and Bartolom� Ros. PHotoEspa�a also publishes three volumes that are a very useful tool to better follow the Festival: the Guides PHE09, Descubrimientos PHE and OpenPhoto Cuenca. These publications will be available at bookshops and official selling points of the Festival.

Download detailed information about PHotoespana_2009

Sale of Photographic Literature and Photographs at Swann Galleries

2009-05-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

Preliminary results of sale 2180, May 14, 2009:

Sale total: $1,030,176 with Buyer�s Premium
Hammer total: $858,480
Estimates for sale as a whole: $1,527,750 - $2,213,200
We offered 411 lots; 262 sold (36% buy-in rate by lot)

Top lots, Prices with buyer�s premium

212 Edward Weston, Dunes at Oceano, silver print, 1936, $72,000 C
296 Roy De Carava, Roy De Carava, portfolio with 12 dust-grain photogravures, 1991, $57,600 D
266* Minor White, Windowsill Daydreaming, silver print, 1958, printed mid 1960s, $26,400 D
173 Edward S. Curtis, Three Chiefs, Piegan, unique, mural-size toned print, 1900, $24,000 D
172 Curtis, The Vanishing Race, oversize platinum print, 1904, $16,800 D
182 Curtis, Chief Joseph, Nez Perc�, photogravure on Van Gelder paper, 1903, $16,800 C
284 Horst P. Horst, Lillian Marcuson, platinum print, 1950, printed 1980s, $16,800 C
328 Garry Winogrand, select group of 19 photographs, silver prints, 1965-77, printed early 1980s, $16,800 C
90A Edward Ruscha, Various Small Fires and Milk, first edition, signed and inscribed by Ruscha to Andy Warhol, Los Angeles, 1964, $15,600 D
285 Horst, Nina de Voogh (for Vogue), platinum print, 1951, printed 1980s, $13,200 C
165 Curtis, Three Chiefs, Piegan, platinum print, 1900, $12,000 C
327 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sifnos, Greece, silver print, 1961, printed 1980s, $12,000 D
379 Horst, Round the Clock I, New York, silver print, 1987, printed 1990s, $11,400 C
391 Robert Adams, Pawnee National Grassland, Colorado, silver print, 1984, printed 1988, $11,400 D
68 Nobuyoshi Araki, ABCD, four volumes, one of 20 copies signed and numbered by Araki, New York, 2003, $10,800 C
324 Moneta J. Sleet, Jr., Pulitzer-prize winning photo of Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. comforting her daughter Bernice, age 5, during her husband�s funeral . . ., silver print, 1968-69, $10,800 C
382 William Eggleston, Winston, chromogenic print, circa 1983-86, $10,200 C
239 Brett Weston, group of six photographs from his Ten Photographs portfolio, silver prints, 1945-55, printed 1963, $9,600 C
240 Eliot Porter, choice group of three cloud studies, silver prints, 1940s, $9,600 C
333 George Tice, Petit�s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, oversize selenium-toned silver print, 1974, printed 1980, $9,600 C
399 Joel-Peter Witkin, The History of Commercial Photography in South America, silver print, with a preparatorypencil sketch for the photograph, 1984, $9,600 C
206 Kurt Schwitters, Die Kultpumpe [The Cult Pump], silver print, circa 1919, $9,600 C

KEY: C=Collector, D=Dealer; *=Record

Corbis opens Sygma Photography Preservation Facility near Paris

2009-05-18T21:18:00.000-07:00

Corbis, widely believed to be the world�s 2nd largest stock licensing company, has announced that it has opened the Sygma Preservation and Access Facility in order to Preserve Sygma�s Photography Collection of 50 million negatives, prints, color transparencies, and contact prints, while Making Images Accessible for Photographers, Researchers, Iconographers, Historians and Creatives Worldwide. �The Sygma Preservation and Access Facility is a testament to our commitment to preserving the profoundly important Sygma collection,� said Gary Shenk, CEO, Corbis. �So many talented photographers have contributed to Sygma, and we are honored to safeguard and make accessible these treasures for today and the future.� �If the collection had remained in the uncontrolled, room-temperature conditions where it had been kept for so many years, it would have perished before the end of this century,� explains Henry Wilhelm. �The new Sygma facility will preserve and make accessible the extraordinary legacy of the work of the Sygma photographers for the people of France � and for the world � for more than a thousand years into the future.�
Since Corbis began the initiative in 2004, a dedicated team of Corbis archivists have been reorganizing the collection to classify pictures by photographer rather than by theme, and editors have been selecting new images to digitize and promote more extensively. Corbis also contacted more than 10,000 contributors to confirm that they wished to participate in the initiative. Meanwhile, Corbis identified a suitable location for the new facility and undertook construction. �Corbis has invested in a world-class facility that was specially designed for the long-term preservation of the Sygma collection,� said Pierre Fonlupt, President, Locarchives. �The photographic heritage conserved here is awe-inspiring, and we are proud to be part of the project.�

Selected Photographs. From Brassa� to Cindy Sherman

2009-05-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

Annie Leibovitz, (*1949) Karen Finley, Nyack. 1992.

For a number of years the gallery owner Joerg Maass been collecting photographs which have evolved into a substantial group, but have never been shown publicly. A selection of them are now presented in the exhibition Selected photographs. From Brassa� to Cindy Sherman. The intentions are to provide a wide and representative cross section of the inventory, beginning in the late 1920s and continuing up to the present day. Mass focuses on American and European photography; black and white, as well as color. The works have been chosen � in addition to the significance of the individual artists according to certain central themes: the nude, landscapes, portraits and architecture, to name the most prominent. Brassa� and Cindy Sherman are representative of the chronology of the selection, the content of their work creating important points of reference. While the European photographer Brassa� stands for the most important period in photography between the two world wars, the American photographer Cindy Sherman is part of the radical change which took place in contemporary photography.
At the beginning of the 1930s, Europe, in particular, Paris, was the undisputed center of modern art. At this time, photography had already established itself as an important medium in the arts, and individual photographers had begun to elevate the theme of everyday life to a valid subject matter. Photographers began to stroll through the cities and critically observe political and social developments through the lenses of their cameras. Brassa�s image of a streetwalker in the Quartier Italie in Paris is a notable example of social documentation, and of his interest in the various strata of society. This type of subject matter is also a focal point for the gallery program and of this exhibition. Corresponding to stylistic pluralism in art, photography at this time embraced the modern and experimental techniques which took Europe by storm between the two world wars, displaying influences from the Bauhaus, Surrealism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movements. Some examples of artists who were proponents of the Neues Sehen or New Vision Photography are represented in the exhibition. After the Second World War, the center of modern art moved from Europe to the United States, where photography had been developing in a different direction. In the States, photography was less dependent on the fine arts and can be seen as a personal reaction to the trivial in everyday life � Street Photography und New Topographics being logical consequences of this development. This �Americanism� or a type of �American way of Seeing� is at the center of the interest from this point onwards.

Cindy Sherman, (*1954) Untitled Film Still #33. 1979

Cindy Sherman sets a new example with her staged photography, creating a transition to a series of postmodern and contemporary images in the exhibition. Sherman�s legendary Film Stills are ideally suited to this transition and made a significant contribution to the stature contemporary photography enjoys today. Her stagings focus on the contemporary image of women and its aesthetic, a theme taken up by numerous other artists in a variety of ways. The juxta position of elaborately staged star portraits on one hand, and the presentation of celebrities in intimate compositions on the other, is yet another focal point of the exhibition, followed by a vision of photography at the turn of the millenium. With the younger generation of inter national artists a return towards a social documentary narrative appears to be taking place. The works of highly regarded photographers Alec Soth and Esko M�nnikk� for instance present images of their countrymens� loneliness and hopelessness in very similar ways.

Selected Photographs. From Brassa� to Cindy Sherman.
- June 26
Kunsthandel J�rg Maa�
Rankestra�e 24, Berlin

The Art of Caring

2009-05-15T23:28:00.000-07:00

W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978), Tomoko in Her Bath, 1972, Gelatin silver print, 11 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches

The New Orleans Museum of Art presents The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography, a major exhibition of more than 200 works exploring the moments that shape our being, from intimate memories to historic tragedies. Renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz
sets the tone with a preface comprised of images hand-picked from her archive to illustrate the exhibition�s seven thematic components: Children and Family, Love, Wellness, Disaster, Caregiving and Healing, Aging, and Remembering. The Art of Caring showcases several works from Time & LIFE Pictures, including recognizable classics by such legendary photographers as Alfred Eisenstaedt and W. Eugene Smith. Contemporary artists include other established photographers such as Tina Barney, Nan Goldin, Chester Higgins, Sally Mann, Nicholas Nixon, Tatsumi Orimoto, Robert Polidori, Dona Schwartz, Neal Slavin and Larry Sultan. The exhibition features as well the work of emerging artists Elinor Carucci, Jeff Charbonneau, Eliza French, Peter Granser, Jessica Todd Harper and Misty Keasler.

Larry Sultan (American, born 1946), Untitled, (My Mom Posing for Me, Palm Springs), 1989, Chromogenic color print, 17 3/4 x 21 1/2 inches, edition of 25

A series of corresponding HBO Films will further illustrate the seven themes. For example, Spike Lee�s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts will complement the still photography of the �Disaster� segment. �With its Katrina experience in mind, the New Orleans Museum of Art felt that this exhibition could serve as an important reminder of the essential elements of the human experience and how they need to be nurtured and sustained,� said New Orleans Museum
of Art Director E. John Bullard. �The arts are not luxuries but necessities in troubled times�a source of solace, comfort and rejuvenation.� Beginning at the conclusion of World War II, the slightly more than 60-year time span encompassed by the photographs in this exhibition allows the viewer to witness many of the great events that shaped the last half-century, as well as those that are shaping the new millennium. The stage was set during World War II for photography to take on an unprecedented role as chronicler, consciousness raiser and educator. Throughout the war, new magazines like Life, as well as Vu in France and the Picture Post in Britain, were credited with turning �documentary photographers into photojournalists and photojournalists like�W. Eugene Smith into heroes.� After the World War II, photo-essays by photographers like Smith and Gordon Parks in Life were credited with helping to stoke �the �can-do� energy of the times.� By the 1970s, many of the same established photo-journalists, whose images stirred a nation and world, saw their professional lives evolve from careers replete with opportunities to have work published in Life, Look and other magazines, to earning a livelihood from less constant sources upon the demise of these same publications. At the same time, the advent of color photography and its acceptance as a legitimate artistic medium closed the gap between fine art and commercial work in new ways.
The people of New Orleans are critically aware of how desperately help can be needed in order to survive, and how a timely, caring hand, gesture or other assistance can determine one�s very survival. In organizing this exhibition the New Orleans Museum of Art has reached out and invited to participate as our community partners a number of organizations that played and continue to play a role not only in the recovery of New Orleans after Katrina, but also New York after September 11, Indonesia after the tsunami in 2004, in the Sudan today, as well as in innumerable disasters around the globe over the time span covered by the photographs on display.

The Art of Caring: A Look at Life through Photography
New Orleans Museum of Art
One Collins C. Diboll Circle, City Park
May 16 to Oct. 11
Wednesday 12 - 8 p.m.
Thursday through Sunday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Artists complain about Future of Ottawa Photo Museum

2009-05-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

A group of Canadian photographers is objecting to the way a consultation on the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) is being conducted.The consultation process is neither open nor public, they say, and leaves out too many of the stakeholders who care about the future of the Ottawa museum, which exhibits the best of Canadian photography.The museum closed three years ago because leaks were discovered in the building on Rideau Street where the museum is housed. Since then, its collection has been stored and exhibited by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa.In April, the NGC announced it would consult with the photography community across Canada on the long-term future of the photo museum. But it turns out the consultation process only involves photographers who have exhibited there in the last five years. A group of 53 photographers and visual artists have signed an open letter to NGC chair Michael Audain and the board of trustees requesting a public consultation."We believe that a public consultation has to involve more than the artists/photographers whose work has been exhibited at the gallery over the past five years," the group said in its letter. "A national consultation of the photographic community also has to include other professionals in the field: curators, collectors, dealers, researchers, educators, critics and the large public that has an interest in the CMCP."Artists such as Benoit Aquin, William Eakin, Susan McEachern and Vera Frenkel have signed the letter. The concern is that a decision will be made behind closed doors without the wider community having a chance to comment, says former CMCP curator Martha Langford. She believes the National Gallery plans to absorb the photography collection and use it as an excuse to lobby for an expansion.

The consultation is already underway, with National Gallery staff contacting about 80 photographers who have exhibited over the last five years, whether in group or solo shows, according to NGC spokeswoman Jos�e-Britanie Mallet.They have been invited to respond by phone or email, she told CBC News. Mallet said the discussion is open-ended, with photographers invited to weigh in in any manner they want.The ideas that come out of the consultation will be put in a report and given to the NGC bard of trustees, she said."Our mandate of consultation is to consult with the photographers who have exhibited with the National Gallery and Photography Gallery. They are our primary clients. What happens after that, I don't know," she said.She said it would be up to the board to determine whether the results of the consultation or any decisions that come out of it would be made public,Asked why the NGC did not appeal to the wider community of photographers, Mallet said, "Because we have to eventually make a selection, and we selected those who have worked with us."Some of the artists who signed the letter were invited to participate in the consultation, but they say they will boycott the process. The CMCP, with a collection of more than 17,700 photographic works and 144,000 negatives and transparencies, has been in existence since 1992.

International Center of Photography honors Annie Leibovitz

2009-05-13T22:42:00.000-07:00

By Holly Stuart Hughes

In accepting the Lifetime Achievement award at the International Center of Photography Infinity Awards last night in New York, Annie Leibovitz thanked by name practically every editor, photo editor and art director she has worked with from Rolling Stone to Vogue to Vanity Fair. She acknowledged that the award came at a time when she has made more news for her financial troubles than for her photography. �This is really a big deal, especially now,� said Leibovitz. �I�m having some difficult times right now.� Leibovitz has been named in two lawsuits for non payment of bills, and had taken out a large mortgage on a building she owns in New York City.The 25th annual ICP Infinity Awards drew a crowd of 700 people to the Pier 60 event space in New York last night. Leibovitz told the audience that when she first heard she was receiving the award, �I thought, I�m too young,� but noted that many of the past recipients, including Irving Penn, who turns 92 later this month, are still working. �Photography isn�t something you retire from,� she said. Writer and editor Gloria Steinem presented Leibovitz�s award. Steinem had hired Leibovitz to shoot for Ms magazine at a time when few women photographers had the equipment or studio space to shoot magazine covers. She called Leibovitz �the photographer of my time� who has photographed everyone from politicians to entrepreneurs to showgirls.The Cornell Capa award went to Letizia Battaglia for her unflinching coverage of Mafia violence in Palermo, Sicily. In announcing the award, ICP director Willis "Buzz" Hartshorn said Battaglia exemplified what ICP founder Cornell Capa called "the concerned photographer."This year's awards ceremony had a distinctly international flavor. Battaglia gave her acceptance speech through a translator. Rinko Kawauchi, who won for Art photography, delivered her speech first in Japanese and then in English.

Leiko Shiga, the Young Photographer of the year, was accompanied by several family members who had flown from Japan for the occasion. Aveek Sen, who writes for the Calcutta edition of The Telegraph and won the award for Writing, said this was his first trip to New York. �I�ve bought so many books, I don�t think I can get on a plane and go back to India,� he said. Dutch photojournalist Geert van Kesteren received the Photojournalism Award for Baghdad Calling, a book of his photos of Iraqi refugees and an exhibition of snapshots that refugees emailed to him. Van Kesteren said the Infinity Award honors his work and theirs. British fashion photographer Tim Walker, whose book Tim Walker Pictures was published by Te Neues last year, won for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. The Publication award went to Desert Cities by Austrian-born photographer Aglaia Konrad. ICP board member Gayle Greenhill received this year's ICP Trustee Award. Several past Infinity Award winners were in the audience, including photographers Nathan Lyons, Joyce Tenneson, Craig McDean, Sylvia Plachy and Elinor Carucci and critic Vince Aletti. This was the first ICP Infinity Awards since the death of ICP founder Cornell Capa, who died last year. The evening began with a video interview with Capa in which he described the recounting the founding of the museum. Hartshorn said he was proud that so many people attended the awards, and welcomed Hearst as the new sponsor for the evening. Getty Images had sponsored the last three Infinity Award.

Exhibitions of the New York Photo Festival

2009-05-08T22:24:00.000-07:00

The New York Photo Festival is designed to be an American counterpart and thematic precedent to the prestigious European photo festivals Rencontres d�Arles, PhotoEspana, and Visa Pour l�Image and concentrates on contemporary photography. The exhibition All over the place! features the work of historical figures Ernst Haas, Jacob Holdt, Edward Steichen, and contemporary photographers Manolis Baboussis, Matthieu Gafsou, Oliver Godow, Tiina Itkonen, Anna Lehmann-Brauns, Juraj Lipscher, Virginie Otth, Philipp Schaerer, Joni Sternbach, Robert Walker, and Patrick Weidmann. What could possibly unite Edward Steichen�s seminal, if controversial exhibition, The Family of Man, with Jacob Holdt�s unblinking, unsparing view of American life a decade or two later? What are the lessons to be learned from unearthing early Ernst Haas color imagery? What do Haas, Holdt, and Steichen have to do with younger talents on our roster? The more experience William A. Ewing accumulates as a curator, the more he is astonished to see the narrowness of our shared focus. So much fine work slips through our fingers; so much of the past remains unexplored; so much of what is banal today absorbs our attention. Yet here and there discoveries are made, surprising work from the past is uncovered, new visions emerge, simplistic ideas overturned. All over the place! has, therefore, two meanings: it aims to celebrate photography�s unruly nature, its rich diversity, and its refusal to fit into neat categories; it is also intended to remind people of the fact that fabulous work can come out of the Arctic as easily as it can come out of metropolitan chaos. Furthermore, the title applies to the dimension of time; �new discoveries� aren�t always of contemporary work.

Chris Boot is an editor and photobook publisher based in London, whose titles include two ICP Infinity Award winners � Lodz Ghetto Album (2004) and Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context Since 1955 (2005). He has worked in photography for 25 years, including as Director of Magnum Photos in London and New York, and Editorial Director at Phaidon Press. He started publishing books independently in 2003, and his most recent titles include The World from My Front Porch by Larry Towell, Parrworld by Martin Parr and Beaufort West by Mikhael Subotzky. He is also the author of Magnum Stories (Phaidon, 2004). In his exhibition and a series of related panel discussions, Boot explores the theme Gay Men Play � the contemporary photographic representation of gay sex and gay recreational sexual identities. In an article to be published in the forthcoming summer 2009 issue of Aperture magazine, Boot argues, �The use of photography by gay men early in the 20th century is among the most interesting aspects of the phenomenon of photography now,� and his exhibition mixes the work of established photographers and artists with that of non-professional photographers. The main exhibition feature is a series of portraits by Stefan Ruiz of gay men geared up for play, shot during gay party weekends, in a mobile studio on the streets of San Francisco and Berlin. The exhibition also features an installation of photographs collected from gay networking websites by Christopher Clary, with projects by another 10 photographers shown on digital screens.

Jody Quon is Photography Director at New York magazine. Prior to that she was Deputy Photo Editor at The New York Times Magazine. In her exhibition I am not sure I know what kind of girl I am, Jody Quon has assembled a gallery of portraits that expose, depict, and assemble the essence, features, and virtues of women as subjects. The show will feature the work of Edith Maybin, Val�rie Belin, Rene & Radka, Grant Worth, Mondongo, Hank Willis Thomas, Katy Grannan, Sam Samore, Carlos Ranc, and David Sherry.

Jon Levy is the Director of Foto8, the London-based photography publishing company responsible for 8 Magazine and Foto8.com. The founder of HOST Gallery, Levy has forged alliances with photographers and editors and engaged an ever-growing audience for photojournalism. The work of Foto8 online, in print, and on display, has brought about its own forum of discussion that explores the realms of photography that exist at the intersection of art and journalism. 2008 marks the 10th anniversary of Foto8. Home For Good, the exhibition curated by Jon Levy and Foto8, celebrates photography�s ability to communicate, describe, and explain, while also remaining open to interpretation. The show features the work of Lorraine Gruppe, Tim Hetherington, Simon Roberts, Chris Killip, Venetia Dearden, Seba Kurtis, Louie Palu, and David Gray. The basic premise for Home For Good is, as the title suggests, home, the place we receive and experience much of our everyday photography. Newspapers, magazines, slideshows, and scrapbooks; these are the points of reference for the works we have chosen to exhibit. The title Home For Good also suggests its inverse, the world outside�presented here as work concerning international conflict. The exhibition explores the ways that photographs have been, and continue to be, used to connect people with issues, emotions, and events. The photographers chosen to represent this theme and the formats they have employed�from keepsakes in a family photo album to a modern, multimedia short film�embody the wide range of tools and ideas photography uses in its dual purpose of communicating public fact and personal feeling.

The New York Photo Festival
2nd Edition, May 13-17, 2009
DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass)
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, New York

Photographs by Spencer Tunick online for the first time

2009-05-08T22:16:00.000-07:00

By Clodagh Sheehy
A new website is set to lay bare Irish art -- quite literally. The website will be the first to display the works of American photo artist Spencer Tunick, who specialises in producing photographs of naked volunteers gathered in large groups in public places. And Tunick's Irish endeavours are set to be among those which will be displayed to the world online. One such picture where 1,000 Cork volunteers posed lying naked along the slopes in front of Blarney Castle is part of the web collection. The Tunick-dedicated website has been commissioned by the Cork Midsummer Festival and the Dublin Docklands' Development Authority and will feature a selection of photographic images from Cork and Dublin as well as video works created by the artist. It will go live for four months from June 8 at a web address to be announced the week before. "This is the first time Tunick's work will be available exclusively through a website," says William Galinsky, the artistic director of the Cork Midsummer Festival. "We looked at different ways of showing his photographs and settled on this as a way that gives ownership to the participants and is as democratic as the installations themselves were. "Anyone can go online, anywhere in this country and beyond and see the photographs rather than having to travel to Dublin or Cork to do so."
In the same week that the website goes live, the Docklands Authority will post limited edition photographs for the Dublin installations to all those who participated. In Cork the participants will be invited to pick up their photographs at the Cork Midsummer Festival Box Office, based at the Triskel Arts Centre on Tobin Street. The Blarney Castle photograph was taken on June 17 last when the artists was a guest of the Midsummer Festival. The following morning Tunick photographed a smaller group of female volunteers in a Cork city car park before taking pictures of several hundred more participants at two locations in Dublin for the Docklands Authority. "The project was a one-off but it has been brilliant for us," says Mr Galinsky. "It's given us a much bigger punch at international level. We're now recognised as a serious -- but fun -- international arts festival."

In Flagrante

2009-05-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

By Elizabeth Monaghan
Ardent lovers of photography books cringe when they see the objects of their affection reduced to decoration. Think of all the interior design magazines filled with pictures of stiff-spined volumes carefully arranged on coffee tables. Such wasted pleasure! Photography books are meant to be read and shared, to wear smudges and fingerprints and signs of use. It�s bad enough to witness the neglect of an average monograph or exhibition catalog, but a deep ache arises upon seeing an underappreciated book of pictures that the photographer selected and sequenced himself. The best of these books involve complex narratives and distinct voices. They tell stories as evocative and affecting as anything written in words. Reading photographs isn�t hard: just open the cover. Consider the title page and study the first image. What does the photographer show? Turn the page and trace the picture with your finger. See the plot unfold. See it, that is, if you are able to find (and afford) a copy of that masterwork. Few editions exceed six or seven thousand copies and most are priced beyond the budgets of public libraries and casual enthusiasts.
Earlier this year, Errata Editions took up the mission of reprinting seminal photography books at a price that will get them into the hands of those who have coveted their neighbors� copies ($39.95). Most exciting of the four initial offerings is Chris Killip�s In Flagrante, a book that established new ground between the zones of art and social documentary photography. In Flagrante, originally published in 1988, is a fierce keen for the working class communities of the North of England. Killip, a native of the Isle of Man, began the project in 1976 as England�s economic policies debilitated its shipbuilding and coal-mining industries. He shot most of the pictures in the fishing village of Skinningrove and in Lynemouth, on the edge of Newcastle, where residents collected the waste coal that washed up on the beach. On one hand, the pictures are unrelenting. Rugged-faced women bundled in wool coats take tea around a burning beach chair. Young men sniff glue in the gray midday light. Police line up behind riot shields. In a moment of levity, Killip includes a little boy gripping a toad in his grubby fists. But the weight bears down on a young girl with an eerily aged face. She plays alone on a trash-strewn beach. In this world, moments of pleasure break down into pain, like in the photograph of skinheads whose dance turns into a brawl. But Killip�s photographs are something more remarkable than standard issue reportage. By shooting his subjects with a large format camera, taking time to frame them and focus, he injects each image with gravitas. Each careful detail shades the picture�s significance. The silvery gray tones of the black-and-white images elevate his subjects, and their prominence within the borders collapses the psychological distance among them, the photographer, and the reader. Every one of Killip�s pictures is graceful and refined, down to the balletic image of a man scavenging around a burning heap of refuse. These scenes, the protagonists within them, and the issues with which they contend, are real. While the book can be read as a parable of the Thatcher era, Killip never set out to make an overtly political, social documentary-style account. �The book is a fiction about metaphor,� he writes in an introductory paragraph. It is a narrative of his invention. He repeats this point visually, starting and ending the book with a photograph in which his and his camera�s shadows are as prominent as the woman crumpled on the sidewalk next to them. This is Killip�s story, Killip�s view of England. It may be fiction, but don�t assume this precludes the truth.
Unfortunately, Errata�s edition of In Flagrante wrecks the scale, rhythm, and detail that contributed to the original book�s success. The book, while handsomely bound, is a couple of inches smaller than the original. Inside, the pages haven�t exactly been reprinted: they�ve been photographed from an existing copy of the book and reproduced as numbered plates. Rather than look at Killip�s photographs, a reader effectively looks at photographs of In Flagrante. In some instances, four original spreads occupy a single new one, sequenced in an awkward Z across the pages. The images are too small to catch the vivid details. You can make out the smokestacks in the distance, but you�ll miss the child peeking out from a lace curtain. Reading this version is like studying a specimen through a glass jar. It is clinical where the original pulsed. A supplementary essay by Gerry Badger casts light on the circumstances around Killip�s project, and the edition might suffice a reader who is new to Killip�s photographs. But to those who vividly remember the original, it is a tease. For all their good intentions, Errata�s editors have checked the satisfaction of experiencing In Flagrante. Their book will take a place on a reference shelf, but it won�t win hearts, or even a place on the table.

New York Public Library has acquired Portfolios by contemporary Photographers

2009-05-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

The New York Public Library recently acquired two important portfolios by contemporary photographers for its Photography Collection, one showcasing a extensive sample of American teenagers throughout the country, and the other focusing on the modest charm of New York boroughs often dwarfed in fame and glamour by Manhattan. Robin Bowman�s The American Teenager, a remarkable five-year project consisting of 263 images of 419 teenagers along with full text of all interviews Bowman conducted with her subjects. In these candid and intimate photographs, Bowman charts the coming of age of the largest generation in America since the baby boomer generation in every region of the country and every socioeconomic group: from a Texas debutante to teenage gang members in New York City, from a drag queen in Georgia to a coal miner in West Virginia. Bowman�s photographs are remarkable for conveying not only a profound understanding of her subject and the various social issues facing today�s teens, but also for her technical proficiency in producing formally beautiful and arresting images. �There are many photographers who do documentary work, but something on this scale�a cross-section of an entire segment of the American population�is uncommon,� says Stephen Pinson, Assistant Director of Art, Prints and Photographs and Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library. �Her project is truly unusual in this day and time. In terms of its depth and breadth, it is comparable to the Depression-era documentary work of the Farm SecurityAdministration.� For this project, Bowman used a large format Polaroid 110B Pathfinder camera from the 1950s which gave her both a positive image she could show the teens the images immediately, and a negative from which she printed. (The library has also acquired digital scans of all the portraits.)
The process was entirely collaborative: Bowman would find and introduce herself to teenagers, photograph them, and would invite them into the process of shaping the image before they made a final portrait. Bowman also asked each teenager a predetermined list of questions about their lives. The artistic process enabled the teenagers to trust her and generated a trust that facilitated unusually candid conversations.
Robin Bowman, a 2005 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fellow, is a photojournalist devoted to documenting the poignant social and political issues of our age. It�s Complicated: The American Teenager, a book of photographs and interviews was published in 2007 by Umbrage Editions and is about to go into its second printing. It won the Best Photography Book of the 2008 Independent Book Publishers Awards; was named as one of the top ten books for young people by the YALSA, a division of the American Library Association; and was selected as a 2009 Nautilus Silver Award winner. Robin Bowman has been working as a freelance photojournalist for 26 years, documenting the most poignant international social and political issues of our time.
Her photographs have appeared in publications worldwide, including The New Yorker, Life, Time, and Newsweek. Her coverage has included: The Fate of the Missing in Guatemala, The Fight Against Child Abuse in America, Scars of War in Uganda. Bowman spent six years covering the Zapatista National Liberation Army�s fight for the rights of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Mexico.
William Meyers�s Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan, is a series of 86 black and white prints of rarely photographed neighborhoods in the less celebrated boroughs of Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. Through compelling streetscapes and cityscapes, evocative pictures of structures, objects, interiors, group shots, and candid portraits of individuals, Meyers pays tribute to the outer boroughs and fills an important and veritable void in photography of the changing city. Historical photographs of New York City are almost exclusively of landmarks, buildings, and streets in Manhattan. Among the names likely to be thought of as New York City street photographers, Berenice Abbott, Arthur Fellig, and Helen Levitt solely worked in Manhattan. William Meyers�s photography explores unsung sections in the outer boroughs that are not extensions of Manhattan or part of the aura of Manhattan. They represent the quotidian, unsung places where most of the city inhabitants live and work. In Meyers�s words, �they are the outer boroughs of the spirit as well as of the physical city." "This is a terrain that is more distant from Manhattan than are certain sections of London or Paris or Rome.� All the photographs share characteristic spontaneity and frankness. Some scenes include a striking image of a woman on a bus in Glendale, Queens looking out the window onto a silent graveyard; a beautiful portrait of two houses, ivy creeping up their walls, in Riverdale, Bronx, with the river and a common garden nestled between them in the frame; fresh bread stacked solemnly at a bakery in the Belmont section of the Bronx; a woman forging through a snowstorm on a deserted street in the Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn; a young boy riding his bike on a street of cracked pavement staring inquiringly into the camera in Seaside, Queens, large apartment buildings looming behind him; and the curious sight of fourteen portable toilets standing side by side on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. By hand, Meyers notes on each portrait the date and the location of each photograph. �Even though New York City has long been a favored subject of photography, the outer boroughs have remained relatively unexplored,� says Stephen Pinson, Assistant Director of Art, Prints and Photographs and Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library. �William Meyers at once updates and extends the essential tradition of street photography by taking it beyond Manhattan and into the mostly anonymous streets of the larger city.� William Meyers spent much of the last decade tromping around the less-visited neighborhoods of Queens, Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island taking photographs for Outer Boroughs: New York beyond Manhattan. Work from the project was included in the New York Now 2000 exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, and the Jews of Brooklyn exhibition that was displayed in several city venues.
The Water�s Edge, a solo exhibition featuring work from the Outer Boroughs project, is on display at the Alice Austen House Museum on Staten Island until May 1. Meyers�s photographs have been published in The New York Times, the New York Sun, the New York Press, ARTnews, City Journal, and elsewhere. One of his photographs is on permanent display at Ansche Chesed in New York where it serves as a memorial to the dead of 1939-1945. From 2002-2008 he was the regular photography critic for the New York Sun. His writing on photography has also been published by the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary Magazine, and Nextbook. Meyers is presently working on a new project, Alternate Manhattan.

Richard Avedon and the Icons of Fashion

2009-05-07T22:06:00.000-07:00

Richard Avedon, Naty Abascal and Ana-Maria Abascal with Helio Guerreiro, bathing suit by Brigance, Ibiza, Spain, September 1964 � 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation

The centerpiece of ICP�s Year of Fashion, Avedon Fashion 1944�2000 will be on view at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) from May 15 through September 6, 2009. The first exhibition devoted exclusively to Richard Avedon�s fashion work, it will occupy the main galleries of the museum and include some 175 photographs from throughout his productive career, as well as original magazines showing his work in context, and material demonstrating his creative process. The exhibition has been organized by ICP Curator Carol Squiers and Adjunct Curator Vince Aletti, with the cooperation of The Richard Avedon Foundation, and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Richard Avedon is the most significant and influential photographer to have taken fashion as one of his subjects. He began working for Harper�s Bazaar in 1944, when he was only twenty-one, and revolutionized fashion photography, dispensing with its prevailing mannered and statically posed formulas and introducing a more youthful, spirited, and distinctly American style. Inspired by Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi and encouraged by legendary Harper�s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, he took models out of the studio and photographed them in motion to exhilarating effect. His collaborative efforts with Brodovitch allowed Avedon a great deal of freedom in composing his photographs, as well as a great degree of Harper�s Bazaar editorial control over the use of his images. Working in Paris in the 1950s, he spun a cinematic narrative around the couture collections with his revolutionary outdoor images, evoking a vision of Paris at its most glamorous and intoxicating in what was still a grim postwar city. The extended narrative was one of his most imitated innovations. He was as inventive as he was prolific, constantly pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable in fashion photography, such as his inclusion of models who were Asian and African American, and his avant-garde pop culture references. His two decades at Harper�s Bazaar are remarkable for their inventiveness and originality, as well as their breathtakingly hectic pace.

Richard Avedon, Veruschka, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967 � 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation

By 1957, little more than a decade into his career, the unmistakable hyperkinetic sensitivity of his work had become well known, as had the growing myth of Avedon himself. He was the inspiration and visual consultant for Stanley Donen�s film Funny Face, with the Avedon role played by Fred Astaire, and his reluctant model played by Audrey Hepburn. Avedon was the epitome of the modern fashion photographer�charming, sophisticated. and suddenly as famous as his celebrity portrait subjects. More so than any other fashion photographer, Avedon reflected the mood of the moment through his work, from postwar optimism to Pop exuberance. He was sensitive and responsive to the new sense of power, determination, and freedom gained by women during the mid twentieth century. His favorite models had character and a collaborative spirit, and he not only encouraged them to express it, but he made them famous for it. While at Harper�s Bazaar, he helped Suzy Parker achieve a level of renown rare for models, and after following former Harper�s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland to Vogue in 1966 (where she was editor in chief from 1963�1971), many more previously anonymous models were given prominent credits and fame through his images. A new cult of celebrity bloomed for Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Twiggy, Penelope Tree, and Veruschka, ushering in the age of the supermodel and raising the profile of fashion photography within popular culture.
Avedon�s work at Vogue became more provocative in response to the sexual revolution of the late Sixties and Seventies, but his most memorable and exciting images from this period are of models in motion�sprinting across the page on a headlong rush into the future with the trademark �Avedon blur,� where fast shutter speeds captured figures mid-motion. Although Avedon remained at Vogue until 1988, he did little editorial photography in his final years there, only picking it up again for extended sequences in Ego�ste magazine and, later, features in The New Yorker as their first staff photographer, including �In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort,� a sensational 1995 color portfolio set in post-apocalyptic ruins. Avedon�s last major narrative, this portfolio will be included in the exhibition in abbreviated form, along with key examples of his witty advertising work for Versace and Dior. Throughout his nearly seven decade career, Avedon�s images were infused with an undeniable sense of personal style and a unique take on the importance of fashion in our lives.

Six of the last Photos of Marilyn Monroe on sale at Ebay

2009-05-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

Jazz pianist and composer Buddy Greco is making his memorabilia collection available for sale on eBay. Included in the auction are 6 of the last photos of Marilyn Monroe alive, taken during the controversial and infamous weekend at the Cal Neva Lodge, just 5 days before her death."I've been collecting memorabilia throughout my career," said Buddy Greco, preparing for the night's show in Buddy Greco's Dinner Club near Palm Springs, California. "I've enjoyed my collection and these rare photos for over 40 years, taken by my manager and my then wife during that last weekend in Cal Neva, Nevada. Imagine my surprise and dismay when I heard the news about my dear friend Marilyn a few short days later."The photos were part of a 36-shot roll, of which only 6 remain, and are the last known photos of Marilyn Monroe alive. Buddy received 6 of the photos after separating from his wife. In one of them, you see one of the most influential hairstylists' of the stars; Jay Sebring, cutting Buddy's hair at the lodge that day. Mr. Sebring was eventually murdered by the Manson Family in the Sharon Tate murders in 1969. The other 30 photos were stored in an office at the World Trade Center, and were lost forever as they met their own shocking end when the Twin Towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001. The Presence Group will be representing Mr. Greco in his mission to sell his extensive collection.

Beautiful to work with

2009-05-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz has opened up about shooting US First Lady Michelle Obama for the cover of US style bible Vogue, claiming Michelle was 'beautiful' to work with. Annie Leibovitz says Michelle Obama was a dream to work with. The famed photographer - who shot the US First Lady for the March cover of US style bible Vogue - claims Michelle's beauty and professionalism made her the perfect subject.Annie said: 'The most extraordinary thing that she does is she lets you be yourself, there's no airs. It's great - she's smart, she's beautiful.'I've known them since the beginning when President Barack Obama was still running for senate. What's so great is we have worked with these people for a period of time. So it's almost like you feel more comfortable with them.'The 59-year-old portrait artist refuses to take full responsibility for the success of the magazine piece, insisting Vogue's editor-in-chief Andre Leon Talley's input was vitally important.Annie explained: "Talley said it better than I could ever say it. I pretty much let him do all the talking because he really did such a beautiful job. I was just pulled along." The photographer has also spoken about her heavily-criticised Vanity Fair photo shoot with 'Hannah Montana' star Miley Cyrus, in which the actress - then aged 15 - posed semi-naked.The pictures sparked outrage among Miley's fans and their parents, and although the actress was quick to apologise for them Annie - who has not spoken to the teenage star since the images were published - has not. She explained to Us Weekly magazine: 'The truth is, we had a great, great time on the shoot, and I love the pictures. I thought they were beautiful and strong. I stood behind the pictures, and I love them, so it was a young girl sort of coming of age. "Maybe the mistake was she shouldn't have sat for Vanity Fair. She was ready, but her audience wasn't."

Photos of Mexican Suitcase scanned

2009-05-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

Robert Capa, Wrapping hand at aid station, Rio Segre, Arag�n front, near Fraga, Spain, November 7, 1938

In December 2007, three cardboard boxes were delivered to the International Center of Photography in New York. It was widely reported that this �Mexican Suitcase� contained long-lost negatives of the Spanish Civil War taken by Robert Capa, Chim (David Seymour), and Gerda Taro, three leading twentieth century wartime photographers. Left behind when Capa and Chim were forced to flee Paris for America in 1939, it was presumed lost until it resurfaced in Mexico in 1995. All of the Mexican Suitcase negatives have been scanned using state-of-the-art processes. Their contents reveal surprising new discoveries, leading to a more thorough understanding of the work of these important photographers. Of the approximately 4,300 frames in 126 rolls of 35mm film, roughly a third are attributed to each Chim (46 rolls), Capa (45 rolls), and Taro (32 rolls), and three rolls are currently jointly attributed to Capa and Taro. Additionally, the suitcase contains two rolls of portraits of Capa, Taro, and their friends attributable to the photographer Fred Stein. Taken between May 1936 and March 1939, almost all of the images are from the Spanish Civil War with the exception of Stein�s film taken in Paris in 1935, and two rolls from Capa�s trip to Belgium in May 1939. Previously unknown photographs of Capa and Taro have also been found. ICP continues research on the negatives in preparation for an exhibition and publication planned for the fall of 2010.
The number of previously unknown images by Chim is perhaps the greatest revelation from the discovery of the suitcase. Until this identification, the known number of vintage prints and contact books created by Chim were far fewer than those of Capa and Taro. The completion of the scanning of the Mexican Suitcase allows us to further appreciate the career of this celebrated photographer, whose images included pictures of daily life and Republican parades, as well as still lifes and portraits taken prior to the arrival of Capa and Taro in Spain. Many of these never-before-seen images will be in ICP�s upcoming exhibition of Chim�s work scheduled for the fall of 2010. The Chim rolls provide a greater picture of his coverage of the Basque area where he visited in January 1937 (14 rolls). Other negatives by Chim show portraits of important political personalities of the Spanish Republican cause including President Manuel Aza�a, Federico Garc�a Lorca, Dolores �La Pasionaria� Ib�rruri, Basque politician and later Basque President Jos� Aguirre, and Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero. Another story that Chim covered in depth is that of refugees in the Monjuich refugee center in Barcelona at the end of 1936 (5 rolls). Many negatives shed new light on some of the most important stories shot by Capa and Taro. Though no negatives for Capa�s �Falling Soldier,� or any photographs relating to that story from September 5, 1936 were found in the suitcase, negatives for other important events were found. Two of the largest stories by Capa are the Battle of Teruel from late December 1937 through early January 1938 (14 rolls), and the internment camps for Spanish refugees in Argel�s-sur-Mer, Le Bacar�s, and Bram in the south of France (10 rolls), where Capa photographed in March 1939. Both of these stories were previously known through vintage prints, but now these rolls allow us to sequence his images and see the full extent of his documentation. Another little-known story by Capa is the arrival of the US ship SS Erica Reed to Barcelona in November 1938 to distribute clothing and food to its citizens, particularly children (4 rolls).

Gerda Taro, Two Republican soldiers with a soldier on a stretcher, Navacerrada Pass, Segovia front, Spain, late May�early June 1937

In the Taro film, there are three rolls of her final days shooting in Spain before she was killed by a tank during the Battle of Brunete in July 1937. There are also her dramatic images of the training of the new People�s army in the fields and stadium in Valencia in March 1937 (4 rolls), as well as her macabre images of the morgue following the deadly attack in Valencia in May of that same year. With the complete rolls of film of these and other stories, we can now more accurately identify vintage prints in the Taro collection that were formerly identified only as having been shot in Spain. Most of the rolls in the suitcase can be identified through handwritten names or initials on the actual film leader, or through cross-referencing with vintage prints and published sources. Negatives in fifty-six rolls have a direct correlation to contact notebooks made by Capa, Taro, and Chim. These small notebooks of tiny contact prints pasted on the page are now understood to function as contact sheets or, in some cases, the photographer�s edits, and were used by the studio in Paris or sent to the agencies or magazines to show the extent of the reportage. One of these notebooks is in the ICP collection, while eight additional notebooks�confiscated just before World War II�are held at the Archives nationales in Paris. The cut, flat film was scanned using a Nikon film scanner, while the uncut rolled negatives were digitally photographed with a Canon digital camera using the Planar Film Duplicating Devise 2 (PFD2), designed by a team led by Grant Romer at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. The PFD2 gently holds small sections of the film for digital capture, allowing researchers to view and preserve the images contained in the delicate nitrate-based film, a combination of Agfa, Agfa Isopan, Kodak Super X, Kodak Pancro, Kodak Panchromatic, and Gevaert film stock. Selected images are on view on the ICP website, with more images to be uploaded in the coming months.