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Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Sony World Photography Awards 2012
Posted on May 14th, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Last week, i visited the Sony World Photography Awards 2012 at Somerset House. I object to paying £7.50 to see and exhibition which title starts with the name of a brand. I feel cheated when the show closes with a shop selling goods manufactured by the above-mentioned brand and i don’t look kindly to being forbidden to take pictures (which i do mostly because it helps me document an exhibition i plan writing about) because that would mean that i won’t shell out more ££ to buy the booklet of the exhibition. That said, the photos selected and exhibited are so remarkable that i still feel like recommending that you go and see the World Photography Awards if you’re in London.
Here’s some of my favourite images.
Starting with the ones i’d buy if i could afford it.
Cristina De Middel, The Afronauts series 10, 2012
Cristina de Middel‘s The Afronauts won 2nd prize in the Conceptual category. The series pay homage to Zambian school teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso, who started an unofficial space program in his home country in 1964. His ambition was not only to beat the Americans and Russians to the moon but also to send a rocket with twelve astronauts and ten cats to Mars. Fundings for the Zambian space programme never materialized.
Cristina De Middel, The Afronauts series 10, 2012
Cristina De Middel, The Afronauts series 10, 2012
Cristina De Middel, The Afronauts series 10, 2012
Next on my list is the 3rd prize in the Sport category because you don’t often see politics and social issues covered in a winning Sport photo series:
Andrew McConnell reports on Gaza Surf Club. Under Israeli blockade, the Gaza Strip is regularly referred as ‘the largest open-air prison on earth’. With no recreational space to speak of, the Mediterranean, alluring in spite of the sewage, is an immense source of release for the local population. Surf is still a fledging sport, numbers being kept low by a dearth of equipment.
Andrew McConnell. From the series Leaving Gaza
Andrew McConnell. From the series Leaving Gaza
I was quite taken by the Winner of the Nature and Wildlife category:
Jacek Kusz, Burmese Peacock Softshell Turtle. Zoo Wroclaw, Poland
And now in no particular order:
Alejandro Cartagena‘s Car Poolers won the 3rd prize in the People category for the images he took between 7 and 9:30 AM on one of the busiest highways in Monterrey, Mexico. They offer an intimate view on how car-pooling is practiced by workers in Mexico but also reflect the excessive growth in Mexico where suburbs are being built far from the urban centers, leading to greater commutes and consumption of fossil fuels.
Alejandro Cartagena, Untitled Car Pooler #3
Alejandro Cartagena, Untitled Car Pooler #13
Donald Weber was one of the first photographer allowed to enter the exclusion zone that surrounds the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. He’s the winner of the Current Affairs category. “Odaka lies on the north-eastern coast of Japan. It was once home to 13,000 people, but today it is almost a ghost town. When the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March (2011) triggered blasts at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, a 20km radius exclusion zone was imposed by the Japanese government.”
Donald Weber, Life in the Exclusion Zone, Fukushima, Japan
Donald Weber, Life in the Exclusion Zone, Fukushima, Japan
Weber’s shots find a sad echo in the 3rd prize of the Still Life category. Rena Effendi met some of the people who, 25 years since the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, still inhabit the restricted area around Reactor 4, named the Zone of Alienation. They are mostly elderly women who chose, just days after the accident, to return home. They live alone, harvesting contaminated food and berries known to absorb radiation, having outlived their husbands and children.
Hanna Zavorotnya butchered a pig for the New Year holidays in Kapavati village. Chernobyl, Ukraine
Gas masks scattered on the floor of a school lobby in the abandoned city of Prypiats. Chernobyl, Ukraine
Horns of deer in Galina Konyushok’s shed, hunted and consumed in the Zone. Hunting and farming is forbidden due to high radioactive contamination levels in local vegetation. Chernobyl, Ukraine
Alessandro Grassani (3rd prize in contemporary issues) spent part of a Winter in Mongolia, a country of 3.000.000 inhabitants, almost half of them living on top of each other in the capital, Ulaan Baator. With the Dzud, the hard Mongolian winter, becoming longer and snowier, thousands of nomad herdsmen, who saw their animals die of cold, were forced to move their Gher to migrate towards Ulaan Baator, in the slum which has developed around the city known as “Gher District”.
Alessandro Grassani, Environmental migrants: the last illusion. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Alessandro Grassani, Environmental migrants: the last illusion. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
3rd in the Nature and Wildlife category is Palani Mohan‘s work following the world’s last remaining eagle hunters. For centuries, Kazakh nomads have roamed the steppe. When the modern borders were drawn, the Kazakhs found themselves cut off from their homeland, forced to settle on the arid, wind=scoured plains and foothills of the Altai mountains of western Mongolia.
Palani Mohan, Kazakh Eagle Hunters
Palani Mohan, Kazakh Eagle Hunters
I should stop going to these photo exhibitions, they’ve made me obsessed with Mongolia.
Nature and Wildlife was a very strong category. The 2nd prize went to:
David Chancellor, Safari Club, Dallas, Texas, from the series Hunters
Mitch Dobrowner won the Iris Photographer of the year with a series that portrays storm systems in Tornado Alley.
Mitch Dobrowner, Rope Out. Regan, North Dakota
The Sony World Photography Awards 2012 can be seen at Somerset House, London, until 20 May 2012.
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Photography Calling!
Posted on January 15th, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments
I’ve seen a number of photo exhibitions over the past few days. I might try and find time to write about Arctic Convoys, 1941-1945 which i saw at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. In the meantime this post is going to be about some of the photo exhibitions i saw in Hannover this week. There is a solo show of Alice Springs’ work at the Kestnergesellschaft. She was Helmut Newton’s wife. The works on view are competent, a bit too Newton-esque for my taste and rigorously black and white. Mostly fashion shots, and shots of fashion designers. She did make a wonderful series of portraits of members of the Hell’s Angels though. I wish i could reproduce on the blog every single image from that series. Sadly, i cannot find any trace of it online (please, please, drop me a line if you’ve spotted them.) So i’ll leave that one aside.
Gerhard Gronefeld, Junge Stockenten auf Holzente geprägt, Seewiesen, Germany, ca. 1958
And i’ll go ahead with the two images that got stuck in my head during my trip to Germany. The first one shows Ducklings conditioned to follow a wooden duck. It’s by Gerhard Gronefel, photographer of poignant moments in the Germany of World War II. And then of course i almost had a heart attack when i saw the Cheshire cat grin of Dieter Bohlen from the Modern Talking (the Modern Talking!) was plastered on all over the bus stops i walked by. Germany, I love you!
Still, the magnet that got me to Hannover wasn’t a piece of musical (and fashion) history but Photography Calling!, an exhibition at the Sprengel Museum that explores ‘documentary style’ photography from the 1960s to the present day.
The work of 31 photographers are part of the show. You can never go wrong with the likes of Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lee Friedlander, Martin Parr, Thomas Struth Tobias Zielony, Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Wolfgang Tillmans and Jeff Wall. Most of the works exhibited are jaw-dropping. However, i now have the feeling that i have seen this kind of exhibition one time too many.
Laura Bielau, Carte de visite – Lab Girls (from the series COLOR LAB CLUB), 2008
Zielony followed young people hanging around the desert city Trona outside Los Angeles.
Tobias Zielony, Lighter from the series “Trona – Armpit of America,” 2008
Tobias Zielony, Ramshackle, from the series: Trona – Armpit of America, 2008
Tobias Zielony, Dirt Field, from the series: Trona – Armpit of America, 2008
Tobias Zielony, 13 Ball, from the series Trona – Armpit of America, 2008
Thomas Struth, South Lake Street Apartments IV, Chicago, 1990
Diane Arbus, A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970
Diane Arbus, The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C.
Diane Arbus, Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J, 1963
Diane Arbus, A Young Brooklyn Family going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C., 1966
William Eggleston, Untitled (Memphis-Tennessee), 1972 from 14 Pictures, 1974
Nicholas Nixon, Hyde Park Avenue, Boston, 1982, From Photographs from One Year, 1981-82
Martin Parr, St Moritz. St Moritz polo world cup on snow. Spectators at the event. 2011.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Onion, 2010
Wolfgang Tillmans, Tukan, 2008
Stephen Gill, Untitled – From Coming up for Air, 2008-09
Stephen Gill, Untitled – From Coming up for Air, 2008-09
Lee Friedlander, Philadelphia, 1965
Photography Calling! remains open through 15. January 2012 at Sprengel Museum Hannover.
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Holga iPhone Lens = awesomeness for your phone
Posted on December 23rd, 2011 • Filed under Do, Look, Play • No Comments
Photographing the Dead: The History of Postmortem Photography from The Burns Collection and Archive, Monday December 5th, Observatory
Posted on December 6th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments
Tomorrow night at Observatory! Be sure to arrive early, as this one is sure to sell out! Above are a few more of the hundreds of images that will be discussed.
Full details follow; hope to see you there!
Photographing the Dead: The History of Postmortem Photography from The Burns Collection and Archive
Illustrated Lecture and book signing with Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS of the Burns Collection and Archive
Date: Monday, December 5th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
*** Books will be available for sale and signing; see bottom of this page for complete list of books availablePostmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs, from the beginning of the practice until now, are special mementos that hold deep meaning for mourners through visually “embalming” the dead. Although postmortem photographs make up the largest group of nineteenth-century American genre photographs, until recent years they were largely unseen and unknown. Dr. Burns recognized the importance of this phenomenon in his early collecting when he bought his first postmortem photographs in 1976. Since that time he has amassed the most comprehensive collection of postmortem photography in the world and has curated several exhibits and published three books on the subject: the Sleeping Beauty series. Tonight, Dr. Burns will speak about the practice of postmortem photography from the 19th century until today and share hundreds of images from his collection.
About Sleeping Beauty: Dr. Burns’ first book on postmortem photography, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (1990) has been widely recognized as one of the most important photography books of all time. Sleeping Beauty has influenced an eclectic array of fields, from bereavement counseling and education to cultural anthropology, history, medicine, philosophy, religion and spirituality (not to mention pop music) and has been cited in debates on the death penalty, euthanasia and abortion. It has been the subject of numerous scholarly papers as well as seminars and exhibitions at notable institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The New Museum of Contemporary Art. A decade later the Archive published Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement & The Family in Memorial Photography American & European Traditions in conjunction with an exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay. Sleeping Beauty III Memorial Photography: The Children, the third installment in this series was released this year to accompany a traveling exhibition.
About the Burns Collection and Archive: The Burns Collection, founded in 1975 hosts the nation’s largest collection of early medical photography and has been generally recognized as one the most important private comprehensive collections of early photography (over one million photographs). The Collection is best known for images of the dark side of life: death, disease, disaster, mayhem, crime, racism, revolution, riots and war. Dr. Burns has authored forty-three photo-historical texts and curated more than fifty photographic exhibitions. He is a founding donor of several museum photography collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. In addition to being an internationally distinguished author, curator, historian, collector, publisher, and archivist, Dr. Burns is a New York City ophthalmologist and Clinical Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. The Burns Archive produces publications, exhibitions, and manages image licensing for the Burns Collection. To find out more, you can visit the Burns Archive Blog, website, or press website.
These Burns Archive titles will be available for sale and signing:
Sleeping Beauty III Memorial Photography: The Children $36
Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement & The Family in Memorial Photography… $85
Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R.B. Bontecou $50
News Art: Manipulated Photographs from the Burns Archive $50
Deadly Intent, Crime & Punishment: Photographs from the Burns Archive $75
Seeing Insanity: Photography & The Depiction of Mental Illness $40
More on Observatory can be found here. To sign up for events on Facebook, join our group by clicking here. To sign up for our weekly mailer, click here. Directions to Observatory can be found here.
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