Posts Tagged ‘World’

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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Morbid Anatomy Coming to Chicago: “A Journey into the Curious World of the Medical Museum,” The Chicago Cultural Center, Thursday, May 3, 6 PM

Posted on May 6th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

For those of you in and about Chicago, I would love to see you this Thursday, May 3, at The Chicago Cultural Center where I will be giving a lecture entitled “A Journey into the Curious World of the Medical Museum” as part of a series of events supplementing the amazing looking  Morbid Curiosity exhibition. The images above–drawn from my exhibitions The Secret Museum and Anatomical Theatre–constitute a tiny sampling of the many images I will be showing in the presentation.

Full details follow; very much hope very much to see you there.

You can find out more by clicking here.

Images top to bottom, as drawn from my recent photo exhibitions The Secret Museum and Anatomical Theatre:

1. “Anatomical Venus” Wax wodel with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case, “La Specola” (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy, Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)
2. “Slashed Beauty” Wax wodel with human hair and pearls in rosewood and Venetian glass case, “La Specola” (Museo di Storia Naturale), Florence, Italy, Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790)
3. “Anatomical Venuses,” Wax Models with human hair in rosewood and Venetian glass cases,The Josephinum, Workshop of Clemente Susini of Florence circa 1780s, Vienna, Austria
4. The Mütter Museum : Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pathological model; 19th Century?
5. Wax Model of Eye Surgery, Musée Orfila, Paris. Courtesy Université Paris Descartes
6. Wax Anatomical Models in Rosewood and Venetian Glass Boxes, The Josephinum, Workshop of Clemente Susini of Florence circa 1780s, Vienna, Austria
7. Wax moulages; Probably by Carl Henning (1860-1917) or Theodor Henning (1897-1946); Early 20th Century; Federal Pathologic-Anatomical Museum (Pathologisch-anatomisches Bundesmuseum): Vienna, Austria, Austria
8. Plaster Models in Pathological Cabinet, The Museum of the Faculty of Medicine at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow
9. Skeleton and hand models for “la médecine opératoire” Musée Orfila, Paris. Courtesy Université Paris Descartes

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World Map Onesie

Posted on May 3rd, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Here’s how you dress a future world traveler: world map onesie.

Read the original post on swissmiss

 

The day I didn’t turn with the world

Posted on April 2nd, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

On Tuesday i was in Amsterdam for a conference titled “I’m not a Barbarian, I’m an Alien’ at the Dirty Art Department of the Sandberg Institute (with titles like that how could i refuse the invitation?) but i also found some time to visit Sonic Acts – Travelling Time at the NIMK, an exhibition of artworks that explore different modalities of time. What i might not find is the time to blog the whole show before it closes on 15 April 2012. But it’s so good i should at least make space for a quick mention of one of the participating pieces:

GUIDO van der WERVE, Nummer Negen, 2007

Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world is a time-lapse photography showing the artist standing alone on a barren, icebound plain. Guido van der Werve spent 24 hours in almost complete immobility on the axis of the world at the geographic North Pole. His only movements consisted in turning slowly clockwise as the planet under his feet turned counterclockwise.

This means that in these 24 hours, he didn’t indeed “turn with the world” but let the Earth rotate around him.

The physical tour de force would be enough to make anyone admire the work. But the images are as stunning as the performance. The solitary silhouette, the shadow moving around the artist, the slowly changing sky, the unsympathetic landscape. And then there’s that quiet, dream-like piano piece composed by van der Werve.

Behind the scene of the shooting. Photo by Ben Geraerts

In Nummer negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world, time and Copernican system seem to be suspended. It’s an absurd, poetical and almost heroic work.

Sonic Acts – Travelling Time remains open at NIMK (the Netherlands Media Art Institute) in Amsterdam until 15 April, 2012. Don’t miss it if you’re in or around Amsterdam!

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