September 2011 Archives

An international and eclectic crowd converged at Galerie Spéos for a warm and cloudless evening in Paris Wednesday, celebrating Lens Culture's final exhibition of 31 Contemporary Photographers—a group show of last year's International Exposure Awards winners and honorable mentions.

The Paris show, which was already featured at Gallery 291 in San Francisco and VII Gallery in New York, marks the conclusion of the tour, but its end could not have been a greater success.

A special thank you to our partners and friends, Spéos Paris International Institute of Photography, which helped tremendously in making the evening so lovely, and Pictopia for the museum-quality prints.

Be sure to watch a slideshow of snapshots from last night's event.

The latest issue of Lens Culture (www.lensculture.com) is filled with exciting new discoveries:

• Exciting new contemporary photography from Russia (3 articles)
• A special high-resolution preview of Paris Photo 2011
• Award-winning photography from Japan, The Netherlands, Turkey, and the USA
• Photos made and used as inspiration by painters Edvard Munch and Cy Twombly
• Photo book reviews, including a book about Patti Smith by REM's Michael Stipe
• A video-essay about female military training camps
• Behind the scenes intimate and candid photographs of body-builders
• Collodion wet-plate and photogram diptych portraits — of hands
• Black-and-white photographs of monster storm systems
• Exhibition reviews, audio interviews, and much more!
• Plus more than 6 years of Archives, featuring hundreds of interesting photographers.

Please check it out, and tell your friends, too. Enjoy!

Special thanks to our hard-working, dedicated editorial and production team for this issue: Christian André Strand, Catherine Rierson, Samantha Pribish, and Millie Casper. And thanks to you, our readers, for keeping us going!

Please join us for a glass of wine, and see the award-winning work of 31 great contemporary photographers (all winners from Lens Culture International Exposure Awards 2010). The show is on display now at Spéos Gallery, 7 rue Jules Vallès, 75011 Paris (nearest Metro: Charonne). The party is on Wednesday 28 September, from 5 pm to 9 pm. Don't miss it!

More info on our Facebook page. And please tell all of your friends. It's going to be a very international art crowd, and lots of fun and inspiration.

An exhibition of this year's HSBC Award winners, Alinka Echeverria and Zhang Xiao, recently opened at Galerie Baudoin Lebon in Paris. Echeverria's The Road to Tepeyac, a series on the ubiquitous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe, and Xiao's Coastline, a series on the mass exodus of Chinese emigrants from the city to the coast, will be at Galerie Baudoin Lebon until September 23. You can read excerpts about the series in French and English by Agnès Sire, artistic adviser, HSBC Award for Photography, below.

« Chaque année, six millions de pèlerins cheminent vers la basilique de la Guadalupe près de Mexico. Lors de ce pèlerinage, les fidèles décrochent la représentation de cette Vierge qu’ils ont chez eux, quel que soit le support, et la transportent sur le lieu saint pour qu’elle y soit bénie (…) 300 pèlerins ont été photographiés cheminant avec leur trophée pour que ne reste qu’une silhouette de dos avec son précieux fardeau. L’accumulation de personnages, la beauté et l’étrangeté de leur harnachement, constituent une série exceptionnelle qui permet de visualiser la démesure de cette croyance ».
"Every year, six million pilgrims journey towards the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. During the pilgrimage, the faithful bring some representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe from home, whatever the medium, and carry it on their backs to the holy place for it to be blessed (...) The accumulation of characters, and the beauty and strangeness of the items they carry, create an exceptional series that helps us to visualize the intensity of this belief."


«Coastline, son projet, illustre les bords de mer qui «sont l’objet d’un rêve pour de nombreux chinois qui quittent les campagnes pour y arriver en masse, pensant y trouver du travail et une vie plus facile. Ces rivages sont les « fenêtres de la Chine » sur le monde extérieur. Xiao Zhang nous livre une dérive étonnante le long de la côte. Il la décrit comme « belle et douloureuse ». Une Chine intime et contemporaine sans aucune facilité exotique».

"Coastline illustrates how the coast is a part of a dream for the many Chinese who leave the countryside hoping to find work and an easier life by the sea. For the Chinese, the shore is like looking through 'windows' to the outside world. Zhang sets us adrift along the coast. Describing it as both beautiful and painful, the photographer presents us with an intimate view of contemporary China, without any expression of the exotic."

Try to see the exhibition if you are in Paris.

We've been receiving a flurry of anxious, worried messages via email from people who are uploading their photographs and multimedia for the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards 2011. They are worried because the upload system is unusually slow. Seems like our online system is experiencing a bit of overload, and that is creating unnecessary stress for a lot of talented people. Absolutely, the upload system is slower than usual today -- especially for you multimedia artists with large files.

Sorry. But please don't worry.

If you REGISTER and BEGIN you submission before 11:59 PM Pacific time today (September 17), you will be able to complete your submission for an additional 24 hours beyond the deadline, and your work will be included in the competition. BUT, you must register and begin the process before 11:59 PM Pacific time, to be able to continue beyond the deadline for the additional 24 hours.

Hope that helps. Don't worry. Be happy. Visualize worldwide appreciation for your hard-earned work and art. :-)

There are lots and lots of people out there who would LOVE to discover you and your work (including all of us at Lens Culture).

The world has been battered by outrageous storms and acts of nature so far this year. Photographer Mitch Dobrowner seeks out extreme nature and makes exquisite photographs documenting some amazing storms and storm systems.

Discover 20 remarkable photographs, and read his interesting text, Storms, in the latest issue of Lens Culture.

Editor's note: This unsolicited email just came in today from photographer Jessica Hines, who won the Grand Prize last year, in the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards. She asked us to pass it along to you, our readers:

Entering the Lens Culture International Exposure Awards competition was the
single best thing I ever did for my career.

I am *forever* grateful to Lens Culture for the wonderful exhibitions and opportunities they provided me -- all were absolutely superb.

Let me also say that winning the Grand Prize was a shocker for me. I almost did not enter and waited until the final half hour before the deadline to upload my images. It scares me to think of how close I came to missing out.

© Jessica Hines, from the series, My Brother's War

Winning the competition brought more exposure and attention to my work than just about anything else I've ever done. It has, without a doubt brought the most traffic to my website. People visit daily who have come from the Lens Culture link.

It has been a remarkable year for me with invitations to exhibit in the New York Photo Festival among other exhibitions and speaking opportunities. My work was published in magazines in China, Denmark, Korea, Spain, Russia, The Netherlands, Taiwan, France, and was blogged about in the New Yorker and reviewed in The New York Times. The Brooklyn Museum purchased three of my works and I donated a fourth. Anne Wilkes-Tucker also purchased an image through the Aftermath Project Grant for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Don't hesitate to enter your best work. Someone will win these awards and it could be you.

You can see Jessica's winning portfolio here in Lens Culture. Congratulations, Jessica, and thanks for the words of encouragement.

And be sure to check out her own professional website: www.jessicahines.com

Then, enter your best work today! Deadline is September 17, midnight, Pacific Time.

Bande annonce : Images sans fin... par centrepompidou


Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi was a visionary artist who delighted in the play of light on form, shape, volume. What many people don't know is that he was also an avid photographer (which makes perfect sense), and he made movies with a hand-held 35 mm movie camera!

The Centre Pompidou in Paris has pulled together a remarkable exhibition of the photographs and movies -- and Brancusi's studio itself was moved intact to the site, offering an amazing opportunity to see an artist's creative work environment. The studio installation is permanent, however the exhibition of photos and movies ends tomorrow. If you can't make it in person, you can enjoy the excellent book and/or a DVD of his short films, both available at the Centre's bookstore.

Something unprecedented and amazing happened in the art world last week in Moscow. For the first time ever, 185 photographers — from more than 30 provinces, cities and towns throughout Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — came together for a week-long conference about contemporary Russian photography.

Lens Culture is delighted to be able to present samples of 43 photographers we discovered there. Enjoy!

The history of VII Photo Agency is inextricably linked to the attack on the U.S. on September 11. VII was created on September 9, 2001; two days later VII was photographing the twin towers crashing to the ground in New York. As the ten year anniversary approaches, the photographers of VII remain committed to covering the broader conflict - in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere - and the political, social and economic turmoil it has unleashed worldwide.

VII Photo Agency prepared this short multimedia as a reverent visual and audio memory of those terrible days.