Reading Time: 4 minutes As photography festivals innovate and restructure, questions surrounding the purpose and functionality of the gallery have been raised.
Tag: Photoworks
Reading Time: 2 minutes When Covid-19 hit, the Brighton-based organisation had to rethink the model of the traditional festival. The result was a “Covid-proof” outdoor exhibition, and the opportunity to experience it at home
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Brighton-based organisation remodel their biennale festival and annual magazine, with the aim of widening access and passing on power
Reading Time: < 1 minute Directors of leading London institutions Fiona Rogers, Hannah Watson and Shoair Mavlian go live to discuss the photography industry’s response to COVID-19
Reading Time: 2 minutes Italian-Togolaise artist Silvia Rosi looks back on her family history and explores her heritage through the tradition of head-carrying
Reading Time: 3 minutes Silvia Rosi and Theo Simpson have won the UK’s Jerwood/Photoworks Awards for emerging photographers. Each receives £10,000 to make new work plus an additional fund of £5000 and print support from Spectrum Photographic, plus high-profile mentoring and a two-person exhibition that will start at the Jerwood Space in January 2020 and travel throughout the UK.
Born in 1992 in Scandiano, Italy, Rosi is a Togolaise/Italian artist living and working in London. Graduating from the London College of Communication in 2016 with a BA in Photography, she makes work that references the West African studio portrait to explore her family and its experience of migration. Born in 1986 in Doncaster, Theo Simpson lives and works in Lincolnshire, UK, and has shown his work at institutions such as FOAM in Amsterdam, and Webber Gallery, London. His work considers the long game and the transformations of the globalising world, and has previously been published on bjp-online www.1854.photography/2017/02/theosimpson/
Reading Time: 2 minutes Dr Yasufumi Nakamori has been appointed new senior curator, International Art (Photography) based at Tate Modern, heading up the development of Tate’s collection of photography and programme of photography exhibitions and displays. He’s taking up the post in October, filling the gap left by Simon Baker back in January (when he became director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris).
For the last two years, Nakamori headed up the photography and new media department at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, staging exhibitions with image-makers such as Omer Fast, and making key acquisitions “which transformed and diversified the museum’s photography collection”. From 2008-2016 he was curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he created exhibitions such as Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (which won the 2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums), and For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968-1979.
Reading Time: 11 minutes Interviewing Nigel Shafran is a circuitous, informal affair. Meeting him at his North London home, I immediately recognise Ruth, his partner and the subject of many of his photographs. I also meet his son Lev, who, though somewhat older, is also still easily discernible from his father’s pictures. The interview takes place in the kitchen familiar from Flowers for ____. Every now and then a friend calls round or phones, with plans made to throw a boomerang around in the park that afternoon, or play ping pong in the evening. Lev occasionally interjects from the living room with his take on the interview process, or on “nattering on about photography” as he puts it. “Sorry. Oh my God!” says Shafran, as the phone rings for the second time. “No worries,” I say. “You’re a busy man.” “A busy family man!” he replies. It doesn’t always make for an easy interview, but it feels appropriate for a photographer who focuses on the everyday, the domestic and the personal.
Reading Time: 2 minutes When he joined Tate Modern in 2009 he was Tate’s very first photography curator – but now Simon Baker is on the move, succeeding Jean-Luc Monterosso as the director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. Monterosso, who founded the MEP back in 1996, will leave the institution on 31 March. The news comes just weeks after Shoair Mavlian, assistant curator at Tate Modern, announced she was leaving the institution to become Photoworks’ new director. In October 2017 Kate Bush joined Tate Britain as its adjunct curator of photography, however, responsible for “researching and building the collection of British photography and curating exhibitions and displays”. In September 2017, Tate announced that it had acquired Martin Parr’s 12,000-strong photobook collection, making it one of the leading institutional collectors in this field.
Reading Time: 2 minutes “I’m thrilled to be given the opportunity to lead an organisation I have admired for so many years,” says Shoair Mavlian of her new role, director of Photoworks. “I look forward to working with the team, developing partnerships and supporting artists at local, national and international levels to connect new audiences with photography.”