November 2009 Archives

A surprise act of art market anarchy took place just outside the entrance to the exclusive gala VIP opening night at Paris Photo 2009 last week. While the crowd of well-dressed international art collectors began to enter the giant hall at the Louvre, dozens of pranksters quickly dumped thousands and thousands of anonymous vintage photos into a giant heap, and tossed handfuls of photographs in the air. "Free, free, free!"

Even in this art-loving socialist capital, this act caused a momentary cognitive disconnect:

Inside, a single rare photograph could fetch a price of 40,000 euros ($60,000) or more. Outside this heap of interesting (and potentially) precious gems were free for the taking. You just had to get down on your hands and knees and shuffle through the stack to find something that spoke to you. Nobody else assigned a value to any of these photos.

It was like a feeding frenzy. And it was quite evident that some people were torn between spending all evening crawling on the floor in search of some personal treasures -- or going inside to sip champagne and look at some of the best work available in today's official international art market.

The gleeful perpetrators recorded their "happening" for YouTube. Vive la France!

Anthropographia is an international platform, open to all photographers and multimedia artists, to show work devoted to human rights issues. Submissions for the 2010 edition will be accepted only until Dec 1, 2009. For more details, see the Anthropographia website: www.anthropographia.org.

One of the joys of Paris Photo is the many opportunities the fair offers to meet face-to-face photographers whose work you've admired for years.

Here's a selection of the events we at Lens Culture are most looking forward to, plus a link to each artist's work on our site.

• Marie Docher will be showing new work at Gallery 127, booth D34, Wednesday 18 November @ 17h30 and Thursday 19 November @ 18h00.

• Michael Wolf will be signing copies of his book The Transparent City (2008) at Aperture, booth A36, Thursday 19 November @ 16h00. He'll sign copies of Hong Kong Inside Outside (2009) on Friday 20 November at Fifty One Fine Art Photography, booth B31, from 16h00 and at Robert Koch Gallery, booth B26, from 17h00.

• Harvey Benge will sign copies of his book Small Anarchies from Home at Schaden.com, booth C10, Friday 20 November @ 16h00.

• Aline Diépois and Thomas Gizolme will be signing copies of Dust book at Steidl, booth E30, Friday 20 November @ 16h00.

• Simon Roberts will be signing copies of We English at Schaden.com, booth C10, Friday 20 November @ 16h00.

• Scarlett Coten will be signing copies of her book Still Alive at Gallery 127, booth D34, Friday 20 Novembre @ 19h00.

• There'll be a presentation and books signing of the fantastic East - West books at Schaden.com, booth C10, Saturday, November 21, 2009 @ 1pm, with artists including Paolo Woods, Reiner Riedler, Philipp Horak, Simone Casetta and Gianmaria Gava.

• Roger Ballen will give a talk in the Project Room, Saturday, November 21 from 16h00-18h00, then sign copies of his books Outland, Shadow Center and Boarding House at Phaidon, booth B29 from 18h00.

• Elaine Ling will be signing copies of Mongolia: Land of the Deer Stone at Schaden.com, booth C10, Sunday November 22 @ 12h00.

Plus, if you're in Paris, why not check out some other great events around and about the city, too:

• Meet artist Klavdij Sluban on 21 November from 18h00 to 21h00 at Galerie Taiss, Hôtel Dassault, 7 rond-point des Champs Elysées 75008. His accompanying exhibition, Transsibériades, runs from 16 to 30 November.

• Eric Tabuchi has a new exhbition, HyperTrophy, opening at the Galerie HeLo, 9 Rue de Thorigny, 75003 – it runs from 17 to 28 November, with a vernissage on 19 November.

We're such big fans of publishing on demand with Blurb that we decided to use their service to make our own photobook showcasing the winners of the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards. Click below to see a preview (hint: click on full screen in the preview page) — and to buy a copy!

Our friends at Blurb have come up with an offer to make your own custom-made books more affordable this holiday season: free shipping on up to five books!*

The offer is available to everyone, so it's good news whether you're a newcomer to Blurb or you’ve already made a book and would like more copies for a truly personalized festive gift this year.

Be quick though — the offer ends on November 24, 2009 to allow time for holiday shipping. You can use this offer for any size book, and the codes vary according to whether you're paying in USD, GBP, EUR or AUD — see below for the different codes, as well as some terms and conditions.

CODES:
BLURBCHEER (USD)
BLURBCHEER2 (GBP)
BLURBCHEER3 (EUR)
BLURBCHEER4 (AUD)

Ts and cs: *Offer valid through 11/24/09 (11:59 p.m. PST). Offer extends to any Blurb user and covers shipping costs up to $7.99, £3.99, or €5.99 or AUD $12 for up to five books, made by you, shipped to one address. Offer is valid for transactions in USD, EU, GBP, or AUD only. This offer is good for one-time use and cannot be combined with any other offer.

Vee Speers, Untitled #3, from the series The Birthday Party, 2007

Recognized Internationally for its discovery, support and presentation of talented photographers, FotoFest Houston last week opened a new exhibition: International Discoveries II.

The show highlights exceptional work from all over the globe that the curators of Fotofest have seen in the last 15 months, both at photo fairs and as a result of their work as internationally in-demand portfolio reviewers.

The featured artists are Wei Bi, Alejandro Cartagena, Minstrel Kuik Ching Chieh, Christine Laptuta, Rizwan Mirza, Takeshi Shikama, Kurt Tong, Vee Speers and MiMi Youn, and they hail from countries including China, Malaysia, Mexico, Canada, England, Japan, Australia and Korea.

Curator Wendy Watriss said, “This deeply multi-cultural exhibition celebrates the beauty of the still image. International Discoveries II reflects a simultaneous turning to the past and the future, which characterizes so much of contemporary photo-based art.”

The show features more than 100 prints and is located at FotoFest, on Vine Street in downtown Houston. Entry is free to the public — so if you live in Houston, or you're travelling there, don't miss this opportunity to view some of the world's most engaging contemporary photography.

Three of the featured artists have also appeared in Lens Culture, so for those of you a long way from Texas, here's a selection of their work:

Vee Speers
Kurt Tong
Mimi Youn

Click here to download a pdf about the exhibition.

We were thrilled to hear about this new exhibition, Three Concerned Women, opening this week at the Griffin Photography Museum in Massachusetts.

Susan S. Bank, Stella Johnson and Rania Matar share an interest in a humanist approach to photography. Their long-term projects have taken them to Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Susan Bank's self-published book, Cuba: Campo Adentro drew praise from Robert Frank, and was named one of the year's best photobooks at Photo España 2009. Both Stella Johnson and Rania Matar won prizes in our recent Lens Culture International Exposure Awards.

The exhibition kicks off on November 12 in a panel discussion with the womens' mentor, photographer and curator Constantine Manos, who says, "What these three women share is a devotion to a kind of photography which celebrates the dignity of the human condition, no matter what the circumstances might be. Each, in her own way, has found people and situations which have moved her to make photographic statements which reflect love and compassion."

Read a fascinating essay (in English and Spanish) about Susan Bank's work, plus 24 photos.

Wow, we just redecorated our editorial offices with these three outrageously cool photographs by Polish photographer Andrzej Kramarz, and they look so great!

The prints are big, and the colors are crisp and vibrant. Everyone who wanders in wants to get up close to examine the multitude of bizarre and wonderful details in each one. You might want to buy one or all three of these while they last. Signed, limited editions are available through Lens Culture Editions.

“Things” ("Rzeczy" in Polish) are nearly life-size photographs of wildly disparate displays found at flea markets in Krakow Poland in 2008. The big sizes of these prints, and their vibrant colors, create dizzying, pseudo-scientific maps of contemporary Polish anthropology — with a Pop Art sensibility. The richness of detail, and the bizarre juxtapositions and odd combinations of these left-over objects lead to many musings about the stories and personal connections that each piece carries with it. Each photograph seems loaded with metaphor and dream-like meaning to be interpreted personally by each and every viewer. How and why are all of these “things” heaped together, right here, right now?

Click on each image to see a larger version. For more details, see this feature in Lens Culture, which includes a high-resolution slideshow of 16 photos.

Klavdij Sluban won the European Publishers Award for Photography 2009, for his book Transsibériades. The book, from publishers ActesSud, appeared simultaneously in five European countries in October. An exhibition of photographs from the new book is showing at Galerie Taiss, 5 rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris, from 6 November until 23 December 2009. See a preview of the work here in Lens Culture. A poetic, philiopsophical essay about the work is provided in French, plus an English translation.


Sluban is also the subject of our first video interview with photographers, in which he talks about another long-term project of his, conducting workshops with teenagers imprisoned in jails around the world.

We’re very excited to announce this all-new issue of Lens Culture. It’s online now, and filled with an eclectic, global hit of some of the best photography that is happening around the world.

All of the winners of our first International Exposure Awards are presented in this issue. These 29 photographers were selected as the best from work submitted by photographers in 48 countries on six continents!

Also in this issue: a preview of 167 photos from the upcoming Paris Photo, (perhaps the world’s largest yearly international photography fair and marketplace). Plus, work from the 12 finalists of this year’s Prix Pictet, and the 20 finalists for the BMW prize for photography.

In addition to our archive of over 40 audio conversations with contemporary photographers, we’ve just completed our first video interview with French photographer Klavdij Sluban, who has conducted photography workshops for more than 15 years with teenage prisoners in juvenile jails in the ex-USSR, France, Ireland, Guatemala and Salvador. His story is passionate and powerful, as are his own photos from inside these prison walls.

Photographer Laura Sackett has been exploring the phenomenon of ambient visual interactions via the internet (with programs like iChat) as she observes her own three teenagers and their friends in everyday virtual interactions. Her Liminal Portraits capture a particularly pointed 21st century sensibility of intimacy, technology, identity and art.

Russian photographer Lucia Ganieva has documented the last-standing textile factories in a small town in Russia, by creating photographic triptychs of machinery, printed fabrics, and the women who have been working there for generations.

Han Sungpil provides our first-ever essay in the Korean language (with an English translation, too) to accompany his diptychs of Eiffel Tower(s) from around the world.

You’ll also discover reviews of some great new photobooks, exhibition notes, some fantastic new (very affordable) original photographic prints for sale, and lots more.

So dig in, and enjoy! And if you like what you find, please tell your friends.

Cheers,

Jim Casper, editor