Photo50 is London Art Fair’s annual exhibition of contemporary photography. The 2023 edition "Beautiful Experiments" will bring together the work of a group of multigenerational women photographers whose practice engages with their diasporic heritage.
“Fashion” is a concept that represents what is trending at the moment. Paul Kooiker’s fashion photography, on the other hand, is characterised by its timelessness. The artist portrays the biggest fashion brands and today’s most famous faces, but transports them to a world of their own. Disconnected from time and place, his surreal images feel like film stills with stories we can only guess.
It is for this reason that Paul Kooiker is currently a much sought-after photographer in the world of fashion and beauty. With his fashion commissions, Paul Kooiker breaks free from the dominant beauty paradigms in a seemingly effortless way. He creates an unmanageable kind of beauty that is not superficial, but almost Freudian in the way it plays on dark desires, fetishisms and subconscious dreams. Furthermore, his photography transcends classic gender roles: his models adopt unusual poses and their faces are often left out of frame, obscuring their identity. At times, it is not even clear whether the subject is human or a doll. In order to capture the extravagance of luxury objects, Kooiker magnifies its means of presentation, like for example mannequins and displays, to such a degree that it is ultimately our desire itself that is captured by his camera.
All works in the exhibition are created with an iPhone. At a time when everyone photographs with their smartphone, Paul Kooiker uses precisely this tool to create a parallel world that is apparently detached from it and that cannot be copied. His exhibition, FASHION, brings together a large variety of images from his fashion commissions to create an encompassing installation that works much like a hall of mirrors: it freezes the breakneck speed of the fashion industry and reveals the absurdity of human va…
Anyone looking at Agterberg's work can sense a dark history, but what exactly lies at its core is not immediately clear. This is what makes her images fascinating: she not only investigates the malleability of memories but also how people, willingly or unintentionally, try to fill the voids within. Politics, media and citizens play the leading role in her work: they are inextricably linked, but they also find themselves in a continuous power struggle.
Agterber's inspiration
Like an optical illusion, a memory can also be manipulated or distorted: by your own brain, but in some cases also by external factors. An example is the Spanish amnesty law of 1977, which introduced the Pact of Forgetting . After the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the government took the decision to officially forget the 40-year dictatorship. Legally, that meant crimes under Franco's dictatorship were not prosecuted. In public spaces, it meant that visible remnants of these crimes were obscured. Thus the Spanish collective memory before the Pact was fragmented, distorted and blurred.
This history forms the starting point for Bebe Blanco Agterberg's (Netherlands, 1995) images where a visual tension is felt that Agterberg manages to capture in an almost surreal and sometimes apocalyptic way.
Florentine Riem Vis Grant recipent
Bebe Blanco Agterberg is the sixth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis Grant. Established in memory of Florentine Riem Vis (1959-2016), the grant is awarded each year with the aim of enabling young artists to further develop their artistic careers. The previous recipients of the grant were Karolina Wojtas (2022), Gilleam Trapenberg (2020), Solène Gün (2019), Rebecca Sampson (2018), Stefanie Moshammer (2016/17).
Gregor Sailer (b. 1980 in Austria), known for his complex, long-term projects, spent the past five years focusing extensively on the Arctic. He took analogue photographs in Canada, Norway, Greenland, and Iceland, but also in Great Britain, working in temperatures as low as -55 °C. A large part of the photographs was even taken in restricted areas, to which he was finally granted access after months of organization and approval procedures, some of which lasted for years. Sailer’s new series of works, The Polar Silk Road, takes up climatic changes in the Arctic regions, how these are exploited economically, as well as the territorial aspirations of bordering countries.
First coined by China, the term Polar Silk Road alludes to the myth of the Silk Road. The opening of a new North Pole trade route would have massive economic advantages for any great power that succeeds in imposing its agenda there. Such geopolitical tensions dictate the expansion of military structures and research stations with a variety of different research focuses including climate change, the Aurora Borealis, or space climate. However, global warming is and remains the main driver behind all current North Pole developments: ice is retreating, borders, including those previously established by nature for mankind, are shifting, additional shipping routes such as the Polar Silk Road are emerging, and new sources of raw materials are becoming accessible.
As politically explosive as this topic may be, Sailer sees himself first and foremost as a photographer and artist who focuses on narrative and on image aesthetics and composition. The muted colors and pared-down nature of his images convey the ostensible calm of an icy world—one that a storm has brewi…
Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present EAT FLOWERS, a solo exhibition by renowned New England-based photographer Cig Harvey, showcasing a selection of her latest photographs from her recent monograph Blue Violet. This will be Cig Harvey’s fifth solo exhibition at Robert Klein Gallery.
Cig Harvey’s photographs in Blue Violet are a celebration of the natural world and the senses. With her magical use of color and wonder found in everyday life Harvey says, “I want my photographs to be sensory, like edible flowers, a visual taste. Color and flowers act as symbol and metaphor to access our senses.” One of the most extraordinary color photographers working today, Cig Harvey’s Blue Violet is a meditation on the procession of the seasons and sensory abundance. Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique body of work together. Exploring the five senses, Blue Violet takes the reader on a personal journey through nature and the range of human emotions.
Throughout her twenty-five-year career, Harvey’s work “has always incited a jolt, eliciting a reflexive gasp of awe, triggered by memory and emotion,” writes Jacoba Urist in the book’s afterword. “In this regard, Blue Violet is no exception,” she continues, “and readers may be forgiven for assuming this, her fourth monograph, is about botanicals.” Yet further viewing of the works reveals that Harvey’s photographs “despite being of flora, are about something else: something deeper and less tangible, more saddening and celebratory, something all-encompassing and inescapable, like color.
Tony O’Shea Artist In-Conversation Event : 5pm Thursday 12 January
Join Photo Museum Ireland for an in-conversation talk with legendary photographer Tony O’Shea and Daniel Scully, Digital Arts Manager at Photo Museum Ireland. Admission is free, all are welcome.
Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present The Light of Day - the first retrospective exhibition of acclaimed Irish artist Tony O’Shea. A legendary figure in the context of Irish photography, O’Shea’s work occupies a pivotal role in the history of documentary practice in Ireland. Curated and produced by Photo Museum Ireland, this retrospective exhibition brings together for the first time his seminal bodies of work - The Hill,Dubliners , Bird Men, Turkey Markets, Drag Hunts, Border Roads, Ways of the Cross, Italia 90 and Never Forget series together with his more personal images of his late father.
O’Shea combines the approach of a poetic European documentary tradition – an empathetic, if at times almost Beckettian sense of the absurd – with an anthropologist’s eye for social realities. In these hard-hitting, eloquent pictures he has captured the many complexities of a country undergoing profound change, at the same time, securing for himself a key place in the canon of Irish photography.
"A retrospective book of his life’s work to date, The Light of Day, is full of natural wonders and human struggles that surface from the borderlands during the Troubles and in the rituals and recreation of his city. Each image wants to be a short story."- …
In a solo exhibition the gallery for the first time presents various series by the Dutch-Hungarian artist Satijn Panyigay.
Satijn Panyigay photographs empty exhibition spaces in museums and their depots, as well as interiors of newly constructed homes and buildings undergoing renovation. During solitary, meditative explorations of the void spaces awaiting use, images emerge that create a balance between light and darkness, serenity and gloom, resilience and vulnerability. "Inland" is Satijn Panyigay's first solo exhibition outside the Netherlands.
"(…) time slows down and even seems to pause for a moment. A new space is created, a space of silence, tranquillity, where the viewer can let go. A space for contemplation. It is a personal experience, but at the same time, one with universal value." (Cathy Jacob in her catalogue essay)
Satijn Panyigay (b. 1988 in Nijmegen, Netherlands) studied photography at the Utrecht School of Art, where she continues to live and work. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the Netherlands, including Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam); Fotomuseum Den Haag; Museum Tot Zover (Amsterdam); Villa Mondriaan (Winterswijk). Her works are in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museum Tot Zover, Museum Van Bommel Van Dam and Museum W., among others, as well as in numerous private collections.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with photographs by Satijn Panyigay and an essay by Cathy Jacob (English/German).
The conflict in Ukraine has received unprecedented visual and media coverage. Many reporters are actively working in the field to make their images accessible to the public. In addition to artists who use photography as their means of expression, inhabitants, civilians and soldiers also produce and share images that they post daily on different platforms. A tiny part of this production reaches us through our contacts, social networks, and the media.
In everyday life, propaganda, journalism, or artistic production, photography is an essential part of this conflict. From the very beginning, we have seen state-of-the-art media campaigns, perfectly mastering the codes of digital communication. Their creators know how to take advantage of the different online networks to export the war effort. These uninhibited campaigns are also encouragement to create and share without restraint. These extraordinarily creative visual narratives invade our space, to the extent that we can wonder if press images still dominate our representations of events. The images circulating by electronic messaging and on the networks, whether produced by amateurs or professionals, offer a plethora of contrasting views. We must therefore ask ourselves whether this profusion of images is just noise or, on the contrary, whether it contributes to establishing the facts.
Heidi Harsieber (*1948) is one of the most important Austrian photographers of recent decades. The Francisco Carolinum honors her work with a retrospective that focuses on the (self-)portrait.
At the beginning of her career, Heidi Harsieber - after an apprenticeship as a photographer and training at the Grafische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna - was the youngest professional photographer in Austria. In addition to commercial photography for the tableware sector and industry, she began to establish an artistic oeuvre independent of this as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s. Harsieber's technical savvy is characteristic of her work; she works analog, often with a medium-format camera, and enlarges and develops her black-and-white images herself.
Thematically, over the years, people and the human body increasingly become the focus of her interest. Harsieber's portraits revolve around the human condition: beauty, tenderness, desire, eroticism and love as well as pain, age, loneliness and death can be found in them. Especially with her unsparing self-portraits, the artist breaks with taboos. The staging of her own body in performative self-portraits anchors her photographs in the context of the international feminist avant-garde of the 1960s - 1970s.
It is not often that one discovers artistic works whose visual originality and spiritual substance catch the eye as abruptly as the works in Joachim Schmeisser's new "Side Effects" series. They are color-intensive images that show the Munich-based artist from a new side.
This series is dedicated to “magic traces” that have fascinated the artist for many years. They can occur during the initial exposure of analogue film material, capturing the transition to the light-sensitive film emulsion.
Usually overexposed or underexposed, they reveal pastel or blood-red colored areas that emerge from the still black, uncoated film surface. With certain types of film and development processes, the traces take the form of remarkable shapes that sometimes resemble cosmic or microcosmic structures.
His basic material comprises exposed first clips of films, produced between 1975 and 2006, which the artist collected over many years.
The artistic process begins with scanning the individual film clips that have been significantly enlarged in size. By means of a complicated digital process, which does not alter the original quality of the individual clips, the artist develops a hybrid analogue–digital artwork, which takes us back to the essence of the photographic image. With this group of works he has succeeded in creating something truly new, surprising and solitary.
ADRIÁN FERNÁNDEZ UNTITLED NO. 16, 2018 Inkjet Print with Archival Pigment Ink on Epson Glossy 260gsm with Matte Laminate on Dibond 99.1 x 99.1 x 2.5 cm
TANYA MARCUSE Chastity Belt Higgins Armory Museum, Worcerster, Massachusetts, USA Archival pigment print 14x11 inch / 35x28 cm
TANYA MARCUSE Collapsible Bustle 1880’s, American The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA Archival pigment print 14x11 inch / 35x28 cm
Galerie Miranda is delighted to present, for the first time in France, the beautiful and fascinating series Undergarments & Armor by NYC-based artist Tanya Marcuse, made in 2002-3 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The artist anchors the project in typological foundations, formally expressed with highly precise yet sensual black & white pigment prints. The complete series of Undergarments & Armor was first exhibited in Northern Ireland at Belfast Exposed gallery. The series has also featured at the triennial of photography and video called Dress Codes at the International Center for Photography (New York) and in Love and War at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York). A lavish 3-volume slipcased monograph of the series was published by Nazraeli Press in 2005 with an essay by Valerie Steele, chief curator and acting director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Tanya Marcuse (b.1964) began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She went on to study Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. Her photographs are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments & Armor. In 2005, she embarked on a three part, fourteen year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Tanya’s books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012), Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019) and INK (Fall Line Press, 2021). She teaches Photography at Bard College, NY.
151 Third Street, CA 94103 - 3159 San Francisco www.sfmoma.org
The renowned German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015) changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era. Their seemingly objective style recalled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine art photography.
Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks with precision, elegance, and passion. Their rigorous, standardized practice allowed for comparative analyses of structures that they exhibited in grids of between four and thirty photographs. They described these formal arrangements as “typologies” and the buildings themselves as “anonymous sculpture.”
Featuring some 200 works of art, this posthumous retrospective celebrates the Bechers’ remarkable achievement and is the first ever organized with full access to the artists’ personal collection of working materials and their comprehensive archive. The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.
For its fifth session of exhibitions, Images Vevey has given free rein to the Italian-Swiss collective Riverboom that has been based in an apartment in Vevey for the past twenty years.
Riverboom was founded in 2002 by a small group of aspiring war journalists in a valley in north-west Afghanistan, through which the river Boom flows. Over the past twenty years, Riverboom has published books, created exhibitions, produced films, and organised parties, while predominantly being a stage for inner struggles. The Riverboomers, Claude Baechtold, Edoardo Delille, Gabriele Galimberti, Serge Michel, Alexandre Tzonis and Paolo Woods are photographers, filmmakers, graphic designers, journalists, and writers. Having surrendered their youthful vitality for the banal obligations that come with age, they are making the most of the invitation extended by L'Appartement to flaunt, as most ageing stars do, their soon to be long-gone 'Greatest Hits' and the five founding principles of their (dys)functioning.
Founded in 1994, the Bamako Encounters – African Biennial of Photography is organized by the Ministry of Culture of Mali with the support of the Institut Français. The Biennale is the first and principal event dedicated to contemporary photography and new imagery in Africa. Internationally renowned, the Bamako Encounters is a platform for discoveries, exchanges, and visibility. It is an essential venue for the revelation of African photographers and those of the Diaspora, a time of exchange with the Malian public and the professionals from around the world.
New dates Exhibition 08.12.2022 – 08.02.2023 Professional days 08.12.2022 – 16.12.2022
