The 20 portfolios are also on view in the digital exhibition Foam Talent Digital. Discover the work in a truly multi-medial way, inviting you to look, listen and interact with the inspiring stories of Foam Talent 2024-2025. www.foam.org/talent-2024 »
Foam is excited to present twenty exceptional artists in the Talent 2024 - 2025 group exhibition. The artists’ works signify a bold, new direction in photographic art. The talents were selected during the biennial Foam Talent Call, for which an astounding 2,500 photographers from over 106 countries submitted their work. The exhibition emphasizes the role of photography as a powerful medium for storytelling, cultural critique, and personal expression. In a time of increasing polarization, this year’s talents challenge the viewer to reflect on the viewpoints of others and invite empathy.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the exploration of urgent societal issues, where artists introspectively examine both themselves and the world. The topics of interest range from migration to the danger of internet algorithms, and from questioning gender roles to a reflection on the impact of colonialism. Looking to broaden the medium of photography, this year’s talents present us with innovative approaches, from embroideries on photos and the use of photogrammetry to the use of Artificial Intelligence. The selection celebrates photographers who dare to push the boundaries of creative expression.
In addition to the physical exhibition, Talent 2024-2025 is accompanied by a digital exhibition on the online platform Foam Explore, as well as Foam Magazine #65 TALENT which will be entirely devoted to this new generation of talents. In 2025, the exhibition will travel internationally. As part of the Talent program, the selected artists are invited to participate in various networking activities, mentoring, with the opportunity to have their work added to the prestigious collection of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation.
The way the light refracts - it passes through the leaves of a tree, dances over waves, makes shadows darker and the moon a little brighter. Anyone watching the new, Oscar-nominated film 'Perfect Days' by Wim Wenders these days may also feel it, the recurring wish throughout the evening that the film should stand still for a moment so that we can spend a few more seconds in dialogue with individual images. And this despite the fact that the film about the life of Mr Hirayama - a toilet attendant in Tokyo and an unparalleled observer of everyday life - is told with a poetic slowness that stands out in the film world of the visually powerful, high-spirited 21st century. In 'Perfect Days', the Wenders couple only need a few seconds to hint at an entire universe. "There are many worlds in this world," says Wim Wenders to his protagonist. Donata Wenders consistently accompanies the work with her condensed perceptions of the world. Whenever Mr Hirayama lies down to rest, her black and white overlays appear on the cinema screen; like a small haiku, a dream sequence, a delicate space between yesterday and tomorrow.
In Donata Wenders' art, everything has always been in motion - even when one of her film sequences is paused and a film second is transformed into a static photograph. Johanna Breede does us a favour and pauses the film, or at least she shows twelve film stills from Donata Wenders' camera alongside the original film sequences. If you let your attention wander over the gallery walls in Berlin's Fasanenstraße, you soon find yourself in the middle of a dialogue with the images, both moving and still. They are small fleeting moments that the artist preserves on film as well as on handmade Japanese Tesuki Washi…
The Helmut Newton Foundation and Pinault Collection proudly present CHRONORAMA. Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century. Following its highly successful premiere at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the collaborative project will be shown at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin starting 15 February 2024. "CHRONORAMA" marks the latest partnership between the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin and leading international collections. In 2018, it hosted "Between Art & Fashion", with 223 works by 85 photographers from the collection of Carla Sozzani, former editor-in-chief of the Italian Elle and Vogue.
Now, the foundation unveils François Pinault’s recently acquired collection of exceptional photographs, including portraits, fashion, still lifes, architecture, photojournalism, as well as early illustrations from the legendary Condé Nast Archive. Showcasing nearly 250 works created between 1910 and the late-1970s for Condé Nast’s style-defining magazines, this chronological presentation traces the evolution of the fashion industry against the backdrop of radical changes in western culture, spanning subjects from the sophisticated to the sublime. Naturally, Helmut Newton’s works are also part of this remarkable collection, as he contributed extensively to Condé Nast magazines like Vogue and Vanity Fair from the 1950s onward. Most of Newton’s fashion photographs featured in this show have not been previously exhibited in Berlin.
Furthermore, the exhibition brings together an impressive array of Helmut Newton’s contemporaries and predecessors, including trailblazing photographers like Diane …
With vibrant colours and an extraordinary visual language, the artist Aïda Muluneh advocates awareness for currently urgent issues such as the unequal distribution of access to water, food and education, the abuse of power and the empowerment of women. Under the title AÏDA MULUNEH. ON THE EDGE OF PAST FUTURE, the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt is showing seven series of works by the Ethiopian photo artist from the past ten years.
Aïda Muluneh expresses her critical concerns with artistic vitality, surreal nuances and thought-provoking soul-searching. Her pictures are visual narratives; they have a cinematic character in that she constructs sceneries on location in real landscapes or unique interiors. The models in Muluneh's settings are global and at the same time African ensemble –people with multiple identities and cultural origins. Enchanting figures might appear in business suits or traditional costumery, messengers are equipped with a shepherd's staff or a telephone. Protagonists with colourfully painted faces climb ladders to the sky, emblematic hands throughout her works protect or incite.
Primary colours, postures and props Muluneh always uses symbolically in all her photographic stagings. Red wings become the symbol of womanhood; in the series Water Life (2018), it is womanhood provide humanity with water; in Road of Glory (2020), women confront comfort with scenarios of hunger as a weapon.
Aïda Muluneh (*1974 in Addis Ababa/Ethiopia) is considered an advocate and leading voice of the African photography community and its global representation. After her family fled the civil war in Ethiopia, Muluneh grew up in Yemen, England and Canada. In 2000 she received …
The Swiss-born Brazilian photographer and activist Claudia Andujar (*1931) serves as a role model for many politically motivated artists today. She is not only an outstanding photographer but also an activist who uses her artistic voice to draw attention to social injustices and defend the rights of indigenous communities. Her political commitment is reflected in her photography, which is not only artistically documentary but also carries a clear political message.
After fleeing the Nazis, she decided to pursue a career as a photojournalist and became involved in the fight against dictatorship and violence in her new home of Brazil. From the early 1970s, she documented not only the daily life of the Yanomami indigenous community in the Amazon in northern Brazil, but also the conflicts they faced due to mining, land disputes, and diseases. Andujar henceforth dedicated her life and work to the struggle for the rights of the Yanomami, a community she joined.
As part of her five decades of dedication to the protection of the Yanomami, Andujar has taken over 60,000 photographs. She has advocated for the Yanomami through her art and has also become a vehement supporter of their rights. Her efforts helped to draw international attention to the threats they face. Many indigenous activists today refer to Andujar’s impactful work over the past decades.
Today, Claudia Andujar is considered one of the most important figures in photography in South America. Her works have been exhibited in renowned museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her artistic and social work.
Elfie Semotan born in 1941 in Wels, Upper Austria, is a renowned photographer who has created an extensive body of work over the past 50 years. Her ability to dissolve the boundaries between art history, fashion, advertising campaigns, and the everyday using the means of photography has become a defining characteristic of her work.
The exhibition showcases a cross-section of her work, beginning with the series "o. T. (Birkenwald), New York, 1999," in which blurry silhouettes move through a dark, "natural" environment that reveals itself as an artificially constructed backdrop upon closer inspection. This series sets the tone for the exhibition: viewers are invited and challenged to unveil the fiction within the staging and discover parallels between nature, art, and the human body.
Classical fashion photography is not to be found here, the artist deviates from the endeavour to create only aesthetically pleasing and glamorous images. Instead, the focus is on a deliberate departure from conventional norms. And unveil a less perfect and more enigmatic facet. The faces presented are often less perfect and inaccessible and elegant movements are not clichéd as an ideal, but instead shown in the form of unusual gestures.
Elfie Semotan's creative freedom in staging fashion campaigns is evident in the selected works for fashion house LISKA between 1999 and 2018, as well as in editorials for magazines such as Allure, D-Magazine, or Madame. Deep friendships with artists and designers and their appreciation of her ideas provided her with the space to implement extraordinary photographic productions. Her long, trusting collaboration with fashion designer Helmut Lang is expressed in fragmented, underexposed "backstage…
Digital images can display a maximum of 16,777,216 colors. This fact is not noticeable in everyday life, because in the visual perception the individual color pixels form into motifs, color gradients, outlines and shapes. However, in Adrian Sauer's artistic work they themselves become thematic. Like other parameters of photography, they serve the basic photographic research that the artist has been conducting for 25 years. In Sauer's work, each of these colors is represented by a pixel in a hue of the RGB (red-green-blue) spectrum. This generates images with colorful motifs from digital communication as well as latent images of gray noise that contain all kinds of images.
Of course, speaking of possible images means having an idea of what photography is fundamentally capable of depicting. A look at the history of photography and its theory makes it clear that the question of what reality photography actually shows and how it does so has been and is answered very differently. What role does objectivity play, as does the manipulation of photographic images with filters and editing programs? What are the consequences of the digitalization of photography and what are the consequences of the use of artificial intelligence to generate images?
Can a photographic image still claim to be truth in the present? Adrian Sauer approaches these questions by portraying the possibilities of digital photography and at the same time critically exploring its limits. Intellectual clarity is always combined with a pinch of humor in Sauer's work. Truth Table is the artist's first solo exhibition in Austria and offers a comprehensive insight into his oeuvre to date.
This long-standing annual Prize, originally established in 1996 by the Photographers' Gallery in London, identifies and rewards artists for their projects that have made a significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months.
Over its 27-year history, the Prize has become renowned as one of the most important international awards for photographers, spotlighting outstanding, innovative and thought-provoking work. The 2024 shortlisted projects all critically engage with urgent concerns, from the remnants of war and conflict, experiences of diasporic communities and decolonisation, to contested land, heritage, equality and gender. Together these artists demonstrate photography's unique capacity to reveal what is invisible, forgotten or marginalised and imagine a path to redress.
The annual exhibition of shortlisted projects will be on show at The Photographers' Gallery, London from 23 February to 2 June 2024. It will then be on display from 15 June to 15 September 2024 at the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Eschborn/Frankfurt.
The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony held at The Photographers' Gallery on 16 May 2024, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000. Full details of the Prize exhibition and award evening will be announced in early 2024.
Social bodies is the second in a series of four capsule exhibitions that celebrate Galerie Miranda's 6th birthday.
Curated across broad themes by gallery founder Miranda Salt, with both new and inventory works, this anniversary cycle reviews the gallery's choices to date and places historical photographic references in conversation with contemporary signatures.
Social bodies presents distinctive works that broach different aspects of intimacy - beauty, bodies, stereotypes, privacy, desire, love and the end of love - with staged, documented and narrated bodies of work produced from the mid 1970s to today.
Born in Paris, photographer Martine Fougeron (1954, France) moved to New York in the 1990s. Her personal work has been exhibited in the United States, China, France, Italy, South Korea and Switzerland. The Adrien & Nicolas series, produced from 2008 and published by Steidl in 2020, recounts the lives of her two sons, whom she brought up alone between the Bronx and the family home in the hamlet of Esparon, in the Cévennes. Adrien & Nicolas was exhibited in summer 2023 at the Château d'Assas, and in 2013 at the Gallery at Hermès in NYC. Works from this series now feature in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As part of the exhibition at the Château d'Assas, Fougeron has made a 30-minute short film, Summertime à Esparon, which tells the story of family life around the Esparon house, with extracts from colour films shot on 16mm film from the 1950s by the artist's father and grandfather, edited with contemporary images by the artist.
Since 2010, Thomas Boivin has been pursuing his photographic work in the northeast of Paris, wandering around his home, strolling the streets, always favoring beautiful light. Portraits of passersby or residents he meets in multicultural neighborhoods and with whom he often establishes a dialogue, urban landscapes that bring out neglected corners, and his own black and white prints, with their subtly balanced shades of gray, have become his signature. Embracing the Paris of Brassai, Marcel Bovis or Robert Doisneau, Thomas Boivin doesn’t indulge in nostalgia either but prefers to draw inspiration from the contemporary American scene, where Mark Steinmetz and Judith Joy Ross, portraitists extraordinaire, are notorious among his influences. When he’s not photographing friends and family, or leaving the house, Thomas Boivin explores still lifes, echoing a pictorial tradition that also reflects his pronounced taste for simplicity and beauty.
How did you become a photographer? Shortly after studying illustration at the Art Décoratifs de Strasbourg, I bought a digital camera – but quickly switched to a Leica - and got into the habit of taking walks with my camera or in the middle of my days, hunched over a drawing table. It wasn’t long before photography took over.
Did you immediately choose to photograph in black and white? It was initially a rational choice: about a dozen years ago, black and white film was still cheap, and I didn’t have much money. At the time, it was possible to order film directly from the United States by the hundreds, without the trouble of customs fees. In any case, I was attracted to the idea of developing film by myself, and black and white film easily…
Marvin E. Newman, who passed away on September 13, 2023, photographed everything from street photography to advertising and sports commissions, nightlife and fashion. Les Douches la Galerie, which had the pleasure of presenting his first solo show in France, in 2018, wanted to pay tribute to him, a few months after his death, with this exhibition of photographs taken in color, mainly in New York.
This city, where he was born in 1927, was undoubtedly one of his favorite playgrounds, along with Chicago, where he settled to study at the Institute of Design (ID) between 1949 and 1952, alongside Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. An inquisitive man, open to the world and never taking himself too seriously, Marvin E. Newman was above all a storyteller. Through his work, the history of American photography from the post-war years to the present day unfolds before our eyes.
Noga Shadmi's series of the kidnapped penetrates the heart. Keep sharing your images, together we will raise the global awareness and bring them back home.
