New Russian photography on FotoDepartament’s Attention Hub
“The way the international audience perceives Russian photography is often based on ‘exoticism’, that builds a pernicious stereotyping around Russian art,” say the makers of Attention Hub. “We show the artists who speak an intercultural and international language, pushing imaginary boundaries.” Put together by FotoDepartament, the respected St Petersburg gallery, publisher, and arts centre, Attention Hub’s premise is simple – to harness the international reach of the internet to promote a hand-picked selection of emerging Russian photographers.
A hundred photographic heroines
What do Sophie Calle, Rineke Dijkstra, Susan Meiselas, and Hannah Starkey all have in common? They’re all on the list of 100 contemporary women photographers picked out by the UK’s Royal Photographic Society, after an open call for nominations. Over 1300 photographers were recommended to the organisation by the general public, which was slimmed down by a judging panel headed up by photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg in a bid to highlight women working in what is still a male-dominated industry.
Claudio Majorana’s Head of the Lion
As a medical student specialising in youth and cognitive neuroscience, Claudio Majorana is not a typical documentary photographer. Having grown up with a mother in fine arts and a father in medicine, his attraction to the symbiosis between art and science was initiated at a young age, and his interest in photography – an artistic medium rooted in scientific process – came to him naturally. When Majorana was accepted into medical school at 19, he also began photographing voraciously. In the summer of 2011, he encountered a group of kids in the suburbs of Catania, his hometown in Sicily, and began documenting moments in their daily life, rooted in skateboarding culture and the general struggles and raucous habits that colour adolescent life.
John Myers’ Looking at the Overlooked
John Myers is back with new book called Looking at the Overlooked – a good title for a photographer who specialises in images of the unremarkable, and who himself nearly fell from photographic history. Working in Britain’s post-industrial Midlands from 1973-1981, Myers created an archive of the unspectacular that attracted attention at the time but then lay undisturbed for 30 years until a chance meeting with a curator. Looking at the Overlooked is a glorious compendium of “the claustrophobia of the suburban landscape in the 1970s”, focusing in on substations, shops, houses, televisions, and so-called “landscapes without incident” – or as Myers puts it, “boring photographs”.
Feast for the Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography on show at FOAM
“The way food is photographed says a tremendous amount about significant aspects of our culture,” says Susan Bright, co-curator of Feast For The Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography, which is on show at FOAM, Amsterdam from 21 December-03 March 2019. The exhibition, co-curated with Aperture’s senior photography editor, Denise Wolff, covers the many ways in which food has been imaged and imagined, and includes image-makers such as Daniel Gordon, Jo Ann Callis, Harold Edgerton, Nobuyoshi Araki, Martin Parr, Rinko Kawauchi, and Lorenzo Vitturi, as well as vernacular photographers from the history of the medium.
Jamie Hawkesworth’s a blue painted fence
In 2010, when BJP first came across Jamie Hawkesworth, he was a recent graduate who had just been shooting in Preston Bus Station along with Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson from the Preston is my Paris zine. Fast-forward to 2018 and Hawkesworth is a celebrated fashion photographer, who’s shot ad campaigns for Alexander McQueen and Marni, and editorial for publications such as Vogue Italia, W, and Purple. He’s also got an exhibition on show in London, a blue painted fence, which shows off his film, drawings, and writing, as well as new photographs from Kenya, Louisiana and Romania.
La Vertigine by Federico Clavarino
Images from Federico Clavarino’s La Vertigine [“Vertigo’] were first published in 2010 in a zine in a project with Madrid’s respected Blank Paper school; now Witty Kiwi has published a new edition, giving Clavarino the chance to go back and produce a more comprehensive edit of his early work. Made between 2008-2010 all over Madrid, as well as in the south of Spain, Berlin, Italy, and in Lisbon, where Clavarino is now based, La Vertigine is an appealing, visually-led insight into a way of looking. “It was very instinctive. It was only later on that I understood, saw, noticed that there was a series of themes,” he says.
