Check out the latest in exhibitions, competitions and cool links.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Yousef Karshat the National Portrait Gallery, Room 33 Until 6 July 2008 Entrance free
This display marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yousuf Karsh, one of the most important portrait photographers of the twentieth century. Fascinated by 'greatness', Karsh photographed many eminent public figures, from world leaders to Hollywood stars, during a career that spanned seven decades.
"My main mission as landscape photographer is to see the beauty of wild places (and to advocate their preservation).I pursue that task on coast, moor and mountain through a search for what Romantic philosophers would have called the Sublime." Joe Cornish
Kentucky Yard Sale Yields a Trove of Weegee Images
“Lovers at the Palace Theater (3-D Glasses),” around 1945.
As letters go, they aren’t exactly the stuff of literature. One from 1959 asks that the recipient phone Con Edison and complain about an unusually high electric bill ($54.92). Another requests a shipment of beloved New York cigars because of apparent dissatisfaction with the options available in Europe. At least one, written from the Regina-Palast Hotel in Munich, Room 551, starts to provide a hint of the sender.
“Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time,” the letter explains. “It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks.”
The letters, along with 210 vintage black-and-white photographic prints, were found in 2003 in a zebra-stripe trunk that was bought at a yard sale in Kentucky by two Indiana women who were on their way back from a camping trip. One of the women simply liked the look of the trunk, and when she found old clothes, yellowed papers and pictures inside, she thought about throwing the contents away.
But she took them instead to an Indianapolis rare-documents dealer. And this week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work and correspondence by Weegee, the crepuscular, stogie-smoking New York photographer whose visceral pictures became a template not only for artists like Diane Arbus but also for much of the uncomfortably close tabloid imagery that exists today. The museum described the acquisition as a partial gift and partial purchase from the dealer.
The trunk is assumed to have once been the possession of Wilma Wilcox, a social worker who was Weegee’s companion and lived with him from 1957 until his death in 1968. Upon her death in 1993, she bequeathed the bulk of his work — thousands of prints and negatives — to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. How the trunk full of prints and 62 letters to Ms. Wilcox from Weegee (born Usher Fellig in what is now Ukraine, and later known as Arthur Fellig) ended up in Kentucky is a mystery that neither the Indianapolis Museum nor the dealer, Steve H. Nowlin, has solved.
“We’re just lucky that it all survived,” said Martin Krause, the museum’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “The woman who found them thought maybe these were just old family snapshots or something — though how you could mistake a Weegee for a family photograph, I don’t know.”
The size of the newly discovered collection pales in comparison with the holdings of the International Center of Photography, and Mr. Krause said that no previously unknown work had been found among the prints. But for a museum that began collecting photography seriously only 15 years ago, the work is an important addition — especially because the trunk contained a surprisingly broad survey of Weegee’s career, with the only weak spot being fewer prints from his early years of crime and murder-scene coverage in the 1930s.
Maxwell Anderson, the museum’s director, said the institution’s young collection has notable 19th-century work and a concentration of contemporary photography. “So this will serve as a great bridge between those traditions,” he said, adding, of the discovery of the prints and letters, that it was “like the last keystroke of a life of accidental purpose.”
Weegee — whose nickname, according to one story he told, was a transliteration of Ouija, a reference to his almost psychic ability to find a fresh crime scene — was the archetype of a tabloid photographer, working mostly at night in the lower-rent parts of New York City.
“People who work in the daytime are suckers,” he once said. Before the publication of his first book, “Naked City,” made him famous in 1945, he lived in a cheap room near police headquarters and was said to be so accustomed to working on the run that he once developed a picture of a prizefight in a subway motorman’s cab while rushing back to a newspaper office.
As his star rose in the 1950s and 1960s, he began to travel extensively, make experimental films and worked for other directors, some as illustrious as Stanley Kubrick, for whom he served as a consultant during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.”
But as many of the newly discovered letters to Ms. Wilcox show, much of his film career was on a lower plane. The letter from Munich refers to his work on a 1958 quasi-documentary called “Windjammer,” the story of an epic sea journey filmed in something called Cinemiracle, a short-lived widescreen format. (In fact, very short-lived: “Windjammer” was the only movie to be shot with that method.) Given Weegee’s influence on Arbus, Andy Warhol and even contemporary photographers, Mr. Krause said the museum was extremely lucky to come into such a body of work all at once. But he added that the heavily flashed, high-contrast pictures — of corpses, movie-house lovers, jazz clubs, celebrities, bums and oddball street scenes — were also simply as entertaining as the man who took them.
“This gives our collection a certain personality,” he said. “And what a personality to get.”
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Photography Symposium Dramatic Reality:
Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Today
On April 25th 2008 the National Media Museum presented a day of talks from photographers and photography scholars exploring how global events and concerns are accurately documented in an age of increasing globalisation, centralisation and commercialism.
Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography
MUST SEE EXHIBITION!!!
At Tate Modern until 31st August Entrance fee applies. For info -click here.
Street & Studio is a magnificent exhibition of international photography. It presents a fascinating history of photographic portraiture taken on the street or in the photographer’s studio, looking at the differences between these two key locations in which photographers work.
Over 350 striking works are gathered in this stylish exhibition, by some of the world’s most famous and important photographers including Francis Alÿs, Diane Arbus, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rineke Dijkstra, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Norman Parkinson, August Sander, Cindy Sherman, Malick Sidibé, Paul Strand, James Van der Zee, Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans. Focusing on photos taken in buzzing cities, with their cosmopolitan cast of hipsters, businessmen, beauties and criminals, Street & Studio builds an engrossing urban history of photography, ranging from early black-and-white pictures from the late 1800s, to elegant fashion photography from the mid twentieth century, to cutting-edge portraiture by contemporary artists.
Norman Parkinson, "Wanda, Times Square NYC" September 1949
Structural forerunner to both the photo essay and the television news segment which succeeded it, contact sheets, like the ones shown here, encourage a meditation on what will be lost without them. More than an editor’s tool, a presentation of sequential frames, they are in fact a cinema, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of unfolding events and a record of the photographer’s mental process. Some record a wandering eye; others an eye “zeroing in.” Some are fluid in narrative, others — owing to the photographer’s alternating use of several cameras—disjointed. Most are black and white, some color. But whether shot in 35mm, medium, or panoramic format, all offer an increasingly rare commodity: unvarnished, unmanipulated, and unrepeatable truth.
17 May - 14 June 2008 Locations around Hereford Entrance free
This year’s festival develops from a focus on international work from South Africa that was initiated last October, but is also linked to work that looks at life in and around Herefordshire itself. It looks at the theme of rural change and disruption in a globalising world: work from Africa will be shown alongside projects developed with local groups.
For an image by our own Mary Weinberger click here.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Leaf image sparks rewrite of photographic history
One of the earliest photographic images attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot - a leaf photogram is to come up for sale at Sotheby's. Recent investigations however propose that the image is actually much older then previously thought and dates from the 1790s. For the full story click here.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
London Skyline Time-Slip Photos
This is very cool! At the South Bank over the weekend and then travels to Edinburgh and Liverpool. Watch the story by clicking here.
Landscape Photographer of the Year 2008 Enter by July 12 2008. There are several categories including one for images from a mobile phone - so there is no excuse not to enter!
Lens Culture Photo Magazine available online For those of you who have not already discovered it - Lens Culture is well worth checking out. Check out: http://www.lensculture.com/index.html
Make sure you sign up for the newsletter so you get every issue!
Current issue features some great work: World Press Photo winners Deutsche Photo Prize nonimees
Work by Saul Leiter
And lots more ...
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Mark Power: Signs Exhibition at Churchill College, Cambridge From 10th April - 18th May 2008 Entrance free For more info click here.
Steve McCurry: Asia Exhibition at Magnum Print Room, Gee Street, London Entrance free Until 16th May 2008 For more details click here.
How to Take Good Photos Tutorials on BBC Website by Tom Ang
There is an informative series of tutorials on the Photography section of the BBC website. Some top tips are given so well worth browsing through if you wish to update your skills or need a refresher course.
Click here for a link to a blog where you can see Simon Norfolk discussing his work and influences.
Essential if you are a fan of his work - his influences are wide ranging and his work does require further explanation.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Philip Jones Griffithsdies
Philip Jones Griffiths, the Magnum photographer whose images of the Vietnam War helped turn the tide of public opinion in the US, died at home in London on Wednesday (19 March), following a long illness from cancer.
His 1971 book, Vietnam Inc, included harrowing images of a blackened burn victim, a woman's frail body splattered with blood and a South Vietnamese boy in army fatigues, showing the brutal and devastating effects of the war on the Vietnamese people and culture. But it also captured rural life and village collectivism away from the war zones, in an attempt to show why America's campaign was bound to fail.
'All journalists share two concerns: first, for the truth; second for the suffering of innocents,' he stated in aninterview earlier this year. 'No man can see what I've seen and not be moved to tell others about it.'
Griffiths was born in Rhuddlan, Wales in 1936, and became a photographer after a short career in pharmacy. He started working for The Guardian whilst working nights at a London chemist, becoming a full-time freelance for The Observer in 1961. 'When I look back on my work there, more than half the articles were projects I suggested myself,' he told BJP in May 2007. 'There is nothing an editor likes better than a photographer coming in and saying, "I've got these pics" or "I've got this idea".'
Influenced early on by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Griffiths became an associate member of Magnum Photos in 1966 and a full member in 1971. In 1980 he moved to New York to become president of the agency, a post he held for a record five years.
In his latter years he criticised the 'triviality' which he believed had crept into Magnum, but he remained committed to photojournalism to the end. 'I am not depressed by the state of photojournalism today,' he told BJP in May 2007. 'It is obvious that photography is more powerful than ever before. The Abu Graib pictures, for example, did enormous damage to America's intentions in Iraq.'
In one of his last interviews, for The Independent this January, he added: 'Journalism is about obliterating distances, bringing far away things closer home and impressing it on peoples' senses. You excite your humanity every time you take a photo; lose your humanity and you stop being able to judge, to know, to see.'
Griffiths is survived by two daughters, Katherine Holden of London and Fenella Ferrato of New York and Damascus. He never married, reportedly because he 'would never let bourgeois society dictate my behaviour'.
No - not making this one up!! The United Nations has launched an international photography contest celebrating the UN Year of the Potato.
Photographers are asked to submit images relating to potatoes and potato production to highlight the vegetable's role as a source of food, employment and income in developing countries. The competition is being run by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and Nikon.
Photographers can enter separate professional and amateur categories and submit single digital images or photo stories of four to eight related images, in black-and-white or colour. Participants can submit files by uploading them directly via internet or sending them by normal post on a CD.
The winning photographs will be chosen by a judging panel including Lucy Conticello, Adrian Evans, Steve McCurry, Maria Wood and Francesco Zizola. Winners in the professional and amateur categories will be awarded cash prizes of up to £2000.
New exhibition at National Media Museum, Bradford - until 1 June 2008. Entrance free.
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook exhibition contains over 300 exquisite, small photographs taken by Cartier-Bresson between 1932 – 46.
The photographs, some of the last that he printed himself, represent the most richly creative period in his career and the exhibition contains some of his most familiar and enduring images.
For Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about his work - see links below.
Monday, March 03, 2008
New at The Photographers Gallery Deutsche Borse Photography Prize On until 6th April. Free entrance.
Featuring work by: Esko Mannikko - WINNER
Fazel Sheikh
Jacob Hodlt
John Davies
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Wild East by Chris Gomersall at University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology on Downing Street. Until 17th March.
The show will be a personal account of wildest East Anglia, depicting birds and wildlife from the murkiest mudflats of the Wash to the manicured fields of cereal city.
