PARIS CITY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In the early 1920s Paris emerged as a new centre of avant-garde art and, without a doubt, as the hub for the new photography in Europe. If the French capital became a forum for photographers from so many different countries and backgrounds, this was because it stood as a model of modernity and a beacon of economic hope in the aftermath of the First World War, but also because it was a haven of political and religious freedom for those forced into exile. This is the first exhibition on this scale of work from this decisive period. It brings together more than 200 vintage prints by some forty-odd photographers who worked in Paris between 1920 and 1939 as well as original documents from the time (magazines, books, etc.). It offers an informed and passionate perspective on the formal richness of this “New Photographic Vision in France.”

http://www.hotels-paris-rive-gauche.com/blog/2009/02/06/paris-city-photography-1920-1940-christian-bouqueret-collection-jeu-paume/

RAYOGRAPHS

Man Ray is considered as one of the most important pioneers in the contemporary photography, he took his first important photo in 1918. Together with Lee Miller created Ray experimental trailblazing work, they developed together the solarisation; melting the positive in the negative. His rayographs gave a new important creative impulse to the photography world.

http://www.clubcultura.com/clubfoto/expovalencia/prensa.htm

LAYERED SOCIETY

Michael Karcz' early fascinations of painting and photography were combined into one piece, with use of digital tools. This digital photography and software gave him the opportunity to generate unique realities that are impossible to create with ordinary dark room techniques. There's always a dark layer in his work, a dark layer about our society.

http://afhakers.nl/media.asp?x=8232

COLORING

Jan Saudek's best-known work is noted for its hand-tinted portrayal of painterly dream worlds, often inhabited by nude or semi-nude figures surrounded by bare plaster walls or painted backdrops, frequently re-using identical elements (for instance, a clouded sky or a view of Prague's Charles Bridge). In this they echo the studio and tableaux works of mid nineteenth century erotic photographers, as well as the works of the painter Balthus, and the work of Faucon. His early art photography is noted for its evocation of childhood. Later his works often portrayed the evolution from child to adult (re-photographing the same composition/pose, and with the same subjects, over many years).

http://www.saudek.com/

TONK

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, alias Tonk, have taken American Landscape and all of its vast array of interlinked details and massive wide open spaces and trompe l'oeil'ed them into a spider web of connected submission. They have turned the landscape inside out and let you see what-it-is-that-couldn't-be. They have constructed a network of elements that lead you gently and forcefully down a path that leads to somewhere and nowhere, to everywhere and anywhere. Handmade photoshop.

http://www.tonk.ch/main_einzeln.php?n=4

COMPOSED PAST

Memories of the past rely on life in the present to become the memories of the future, created by Jackie Cytrynbaum. Thus memory, life, and death are interdependent: the continuance- the Eternal Continuum. Those structures that are composed of tiny grains of sand, hardened into form and shape, imperceptibly change in response to their environment, to our being. We become one with the past. 

http://www.jackiecytrynbaum.com

STROBOSCOPICS

Harold Edgerton is generally credited with pioneering the use of the stroboscope to freeze fast motionStroboscope photography refers to the technique of photographing a moving subject with camera’s shutter open to yield multiple stationary exposures of successive movement phases, with pulsed flash illumination or mechanical devices that intermittently allow the light passing into the camera. The old fashioned way of the technigue we use nowadays in studio photography.

http://www.joseflebovicgallery.com/Catalogue/Archive/Cat-122-2006/Pages/pg16.html

IL DUCE

These 2 posters make brilliant use of photomontage to combine Il Duce with the Italian masses. Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. He centralized all power in himself as the leader (Il Duce) of the Facsist party and attempted to create an Italian empire, ultimately in alliance with Hitler's Germany. In their directness and memorable simplicity, they are way ahead of graphic design anywhere else in the world at the time. Ironically, they were influenced by early Soviet graphic design. 

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11956&page=1725

CONTROL

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c2_B_cWK_M

Shoot Me Film Festival in The Hague organized an extraordinary retrospective with the Dutch photographer and film maker Anton Corbijn, wellknown from his music videos for big names like Nirvana, Depeche Mode, Johnny Cash and Coldplay. His last movie The American was mainly in the publicity, but "Control" is the first film he made in 2007, it's clear Corbijn is a visual artist, the style is like his Kodak Tri-x photographs. It's a biography of Ian Curtis, and his life in the band Joy Division. From a little town boy he changed in a tortured soul with epilepsy and depression. He's lost control.

dvd: Control, directed by Anton Corbijn

INVICIBLE INFRA

Making invicible light vicible, it sounds impossible, but it excists in the infra red photography. For a project I visited the gallery the Dubbelde Palmboom in Rotterdam, an exhibition by Hilde Maassen "A Shiny Neighbourhood". Analog Infra red photographs of the green that turns into white, persons who transform into an angellike object, surreal visualisations of a real world we can't see made by just a thin filter.

art newspaper: Historisch Schielandhuis Museum Dubbelde Palmboom

PIXELATE

Lon Robe is not just a ordinary photograper, her photographic work is sized in meters. Closely it seems like your in a digital pixel world, if you take a look again from a few steps to the back you'll find out this composition of dots, stripes, triangles and rectangles out of the hard computer world, is just a few steps away from the poetic one. Reconize the known in the unknown.

art newspaper: De Kantlijn nr.15

LAPTOPOGRAM

Laptopograms are images made by pressing photosensitive paper onto a laptop screen and briefly flashing an image onto the paper before development in a darkroom.

http://laptopogram.tumblr.com/

OBEY

Last year the Famous Shepard Fairy a.k.a. Obey blessed a wooden wall in front of the Central Station in Amsterdam with some of his work. He was DJ'ing somewhere in September 2009 and he left some of his political provocating work in Amsterdam to make us concious about the world around us, the world we obey.

http://obeygiant.com/

SOMETIMES IT MAKES ME THINK

To come across Anne McAulay’s work in a world awash in images, is a revelation. It immediately catches your eye, engages your mind, and evokes an emotional response. Whether it’s a photo taken in the metro, of an art lover admiring a classical painting, or a child playing in the street, through her eyes these common sights evoke a photographic response that cuts through, and demolishes the clichés one is usually presented with. Her visual quickness and intelligence is so acute that, when looking at her work, I sense that she has a ‘third eye’ - a camera eye that is directly connected to her quirky brain, and thus able to give me a thought provoking new, and unexpected interpretation of everyday life. Sometimes her work makes me smile, sometimes it makes me contemplative, often it makes me laugh, and invariable it makes me think. 

http://annemcaulay.com/

VINTAGE ATOM

Haunting imagery from 1945 to 1962, when the US military was detonating hundreds of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere; photographers struggled to document the destructive effects of the explosions. George Yoshitake, 82, is one of the few cameraman who is still alive. With a special camera with a shutter that worked incredibly fast he captured some close up explosions of a nuclear bomb.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/09/14/science/20100914_atom.html

AESTHETIC TERROR

"I have been a witness, and these pictures are

my testimony. The events I have recorded should

not be forgotten and must not be repeated."

Check Ted Talk with James Nachtwey: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_nachtwey_s_searing_pictures_of_war.html

 

http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/

NFF: SON OF BABYLON

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbNfnnKEDmg

The last day of the Nederlands Film Festival I visited the closing film “Son of Babylon,” in Arabic and Kurdish with English subtitles, opens a few weeks after Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003. Following his capture, many Kurds went on journeys to try to find their loved ones who had disappeared during his regime in a genocide that claimed more than 1 million lives. The story opens as 12-year old Ahmed, beautifully played by Yasser Talib, begrudgingly follows his grandmother (played with the perfect balance of stoicism and anguish by Shazda Hussein) from Kurdistan to Nasiriya and beyond in search of Ahmed’s father who went missing in 1991. During their road trip, they encounter all sorts of characters, including a former Baathist soldier who perpetrated atrocities on Kurds. Through his character, the movie explores redemption and, in a way that is touching yet unsentimental, examines the damage done to those committing the horrific crimes as well. Director Mohamed Al-Daradji was part of the audience during the film and closed the night with an amazing touching speech.

http://www.cinema.nl/artikelen/6623251/son-of-babylon-slotfilm-nederlands-film-festival