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The Temps Zero experience hits Foto Wien 2019

Since 2012, Temps Zero has matched emerging photographers and cutting-edge music, creative “a sonic and visual experience” that has popped up in Paris, Berlin, Athens, Rome, and many more. No two performances are alike, but the project is overseen by Stéphane Charpentier, a French photographer currently based in Athens.

Temps Zero’s next outing is in Vienna during Foto Wien 2019, with a photo projection in the Schikaneder Kino on 23 March, 24 March and 13 April accompanied by a soundtrack record by Alyssa Moxley, plus a photography show in the cinema. Guest-curated by Damien Daufresne and Kunstnetzwerk, the show includes images by French photographers Gaël Bonnefon and Gabrielle Duplantier, Italian photographers Marco Marzocchi and Lorenzo Castore, and Swedish photographers Theo Elias and Martin Bogren

18 February 2019

The Pink and Blue Projects by JeongMee Yoon

“The Pink and Blue Projects were initiated by my five-year-old daughter, who loved the colour pink so much that she wanted to wear only pink clothes and play with only pink toys and objects,” writes JeongMee Yoon. “I discovered that my daughter’s case was not unusual.

“In the United States, South Korea and elsewhere, most young girls love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon is widespread among children of various ethnic groups regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Perhaps it is the influence of pervasive commercial advertisements aimed at little girls and their parents, such as the universally popular Barbie and Hello Kitty merchandise that has developed into a modern trend. Girls train subconsciously and unconsciously to wear the colour pink in order to look feminine.”

31 January 2019

Contemporary identity at Mundo Latinx

“We were fascinated by the rich diversity of Latin America and the Latinx diaspora experience and wanted to address expectations of what Latinx means,” say the organisers behind Mundo Latinx, an exhibition of Latin American work going on show in London. “This exhibition coincides with challenging times in the global political climate when it is particularly important to highlight identity politics and diverse representation.”

A multimedia show, featuring work by film-makers, illustrators, and fashion designers as well as photographers, Mundo Latinx includes work by contemporary image-makers such as Diego Moreno from Mexico and Brecho Replay from Brazil, whose projects challenge notions of Latin American identity and beauty. Mundo Latinx is on show at the Fashion Space Gallery at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and is organised by White Line Projects, a group of London College of Fashion, UAL MA Fashion Curation alumni which was founded by Fiona McKay and Xenia Capacete Caballero.

28 January 2019

Gabriela Morawetz’s Imponderables

Born in Poland, educated in Switzerland, resident in Caracas, Venezuela from 1975-83, and now living in Paris, Gabriela Morawetz is a truly global citizen and artist, who has exhibited in galleries and museums across North and South America and Europe, including the Chicago Cultural Center, the Gallery of Modern Art in Lodz, Poland, The Recanaty Foundation Museum in Israel, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Caracas.

Even so, she creates her own worlds in her photography, microcosms in which most of the elements are literally made by her. Her latest show, Unwägbarkeiten / Imponderables, features a series of images using painting, canvas, glass, metal, and reflections, drawing on her background in painting, sculpture, and engraving, which she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow before moving into photography.

21 January 2019

Isabella Hunts – on hunters and their prey

Born in Amsterdam in 1983, Isabella Rozendaal has been photographing animals since her student days at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. Her book Animalia Amsterdam: Pet Portraits features over 100 images, and her new book and exhibition, Isabella Hunts: Photographing Hunting Cultures, shows images of hunters and prey from around the world shot over the last 12 years. 

Focusing in on the Nukini people in the Brazilian Amazon (for whom hunting is as mundane as going to the supermarket), to European hunting rites (traditions which are a product of old aristocratic rituals), to American enthusiasts (shaped by the Romantic, pioneer wilderness ideal but supported by a vast commercial hunting industry), her images seek to question our concept of nature and our place in the food chain.

18 January 2019

Then They Came for Me

On 19 February, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, setting in motion a process in which all Americans of Japanese ancestry living on or near the West Coast were imprisoned. In total, 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes, moving into detention camps in which they were sometimes literally held behind barbed wire, without recourse to due process or other constitutional protections to which they were entitled.

It was, argues a forthcoming exhibition in San Francisco, a “dark chapter” in American history, motivated by “fear-mongering and racism at the highest levels of the US government”. Titled Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties, the exhibition features work by both noted American documentary photographers such has Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams and incarcerated Japanese American artists Toyo Mityatake and Miné Okubo. Drawing out “parallels to tactics chillingly resurgent today”, the exhibition is accompanied by a full programme of events, including a discussion on 02 March titled The Realities of Othering:​ Islamophobia and the Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration.

15 January 2019

Emerging Europeans at Paris’ Circulation(s) festival

The Circulation(s) festival returns to Paris from 20 April – 30 June, featuring work by photographers based in or originally from Europe. This year the festival has been directed by Francois Cheval and Audrey Hoareau, who used to work together at France’s respected Musée Nicéphore-Niépce but left to set up The Red Eye project. As they’re at pains to explain, though the festival is pitched as a festival of “young photography”, it actually promotes emerging work, whatever the photographer’s age.

“There isn’t really an age limit, the only “true” condition is to come from Europe or to reside in a European country,” they say. “Another criterion is to not have been shown very much in France and Europe. We know that the term ‘young photography’ is ambiguous… Circulation(s)’ desire is simply to offer emerging photographers, regardless of their age, a springboard.”

They add that the festival was one of the first to question the overrepresentation of male photographers, and also to pay its exhibitors; in addition, this year’s edition includes photographers from “countries whose state of contemporary photography is insufficiently known”, such has Georgia or Estonia. It also includes Romania, which this year has a special focus as part of the French Institute’s France-Romania Season.

14 January 2019

World Press Photo Foundation’s 6×6 talents from North and Central America

The World Press Photo Foundation has announced the six talents from North and Central America in its ongoing 6×6 Global Talent Program. Aimed at picking out under-recognised visual story-tellers from around the world, the 6×6 programme is now on its fifth region, out of the six identified around the world. This time, the talents picked out were: Dylan Hausthor, USA; Ian Willms, Canada; Mariceu Erthal García, Mexico; Nydia Blas, USA; Tomas Ayuso, Honduras; and Yael Esteban Martínez Velázquez, Mexico.

Each talent has been picked out for two stories: Hausthor, for example, submitting a project called Past The Pond, Setting Fires, about arson in small-town America; and Wood Grain Lick, a documentary and fictional look at life on the edges. Willms’ projects are As long as the sun shines, a story about oil sands extraction in northern Alberta, Canada, and its effect on the local community; and We shall see, about the death of his biker father. Mariceu Erthal García’s projects are Iriana, shot on a holiday in Cuba; and Letters to Gemma, about a young Mexican woman who disappeared seven years ago.

7 January 2019

FORMAT Festival returns to Derby, UK from 15 March-14 April

Derby is a small British city but once every two years it hosts a big event – the FORMAT Festival. Directed by the well-respected photography specialist Louise Fedotov-Clements and running since 2004, FORMAT has established a firm reputation for interesting international work, and FORMAT19 looks set to continue the good work with exhibitions spread across both Derby and another neighbouring city, Nottingham. Taking place next spring, FORMAT19 is themed FOREVER/NOW and takes on an interesting contemporary question – the role of documentary photography.

“In 2007, while the photography world was still grappling with the idea of photography as an interpretive, non-narrative, non-representational medium, writer Lucy Soutter wrote about the ‘expressive’ versus the ‘straight’ documentary photograph, insightfully characterising the then two sides of the debate,” runs the FORMAT19 press material.

“Since then photography has grown to encompass many manifestations of the ‘crooked’ image through hybrid forms and visual practises and no longer worries about narrative versus abstraction, expressive versus objective. The new generation of photographic artists rush towards the new, embracing the rapid transformation that technology and cultural exchanges bring to it.”

17 December 2018

Feast for the Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography on show at FOAM

When William Henry Fox Talbot pioneered the salted paper and calotype processes in 1841, he soon turned his new inventions to food, capturing two baskets overflowing with fruit. Creating an image designed to mimic the paintings of the time, and to contrast the colours and textures of the pineapple and peaches, he also made an image rife with welcoming symbolism – the pineapple a sign of hospitality, the peach a sign of fecundity.

“Fox Talbot’s photograph was copying the traditions of painting and its attendant symbolism,” says photography curator and writer Susan Bright. “But it was also concerned with the role of photography, and elevating its status to that of art. In this respect it resonates nicely with artists such as Daniel Gordon, whose work also deals with the medium of photography. But his constructed pineapple has nothing to do with symbolism, or striving to be understood as art. It is art. He is questioning the role of visual perception, what is real and what is not.

“The way food is photographed says a tremendous amount about significant aspects of our culture,” Bright continues. “It is often about fantasy, be that national, sexual or historical. Photographs of food are the carrier for so many things – desire, consumption, taste, immigration and feminism, for example. It has been a major part of the development of fine art, editorial, fashion, marketing and product photography throughout the 20th and 21st century.”

12 December 2018