Aida Muluneh, photographer from Ethiopia launched Africa Foto Fair. This virtual magazine serves as an online platform to connect Africa to the world and the world to Africa through images. It includes a strong educational component with the aim to empower young photographers with resources and opportunities so they can reach the international market. The platform is also an online gallery where photography lovers can buy images, printed in Abidjan by Africa Print House, and delivered directly to their homes.
“Fashion” is a concept that represents what is trending at the moment. Paul Kooiker’s fashion photography, on the other hand, is characterised by its timelessness. The artist portrays the biggest fashion brands and today’s most famous faces, but transports them to a world of their own. Disconnected from time and place, his surreal images feel like film stills with stories we can only guess.
It is for this reason that Paul Kooiker is currently a much sought-after photographer in the world of fashion and beauty. With his fashion commissions, Paul Kooiker breaks free from the dominant beauty paradigms in a seemingly effortless way. He creates an unmanageable kind of beauty that is not superficial, but almost Freudian in the way it plays on dark desires, fetishisms and subconscious dreams. Furthermore, his photography transcends classic gender roles: his models adopt unusual poses and their faces are often left out of frame, obscuring their identity. At times, it is not even clear whether the subject is human or a doll. In order to capture the extravagance of luxury objects, Kooiker magnifies its means of presentation, like for example mannequins and displays, to such a degree that it is ultimately our desire itself that is captured by his camera.
All works in the exhibition are created with an iPhone. At a time when everyone photographs with their smartphone, Paul Kooiker uses precisely this tool to create a parallel world that is apparently detached from it and that cannot be copied. His exhibition, FASHION, brings together a large variety of images from his fashion commissions to create an encompassing installation that works much like a hall of mirrors: it freezes the breakneck speed of the fashion industry and reveals the absurdity of human va…
Anyone looking at Agterberg's work can sense a dark history, but what exactly lies at its core is not immediately clear. This is what makes her images fascinating: she not only investigates the malleability of memories but also how people, willingly or unintentionally, try to fill the voids within. Politics, media and citizens play the leading role in her work: they are inextricably linked, but they also find themselves in a continuous power struggle.
Agterber's inspiration
Like an optical illusion, a memory can also be manipulated or distorted: by your own brain, but in some cases also by external factors. An example is the Spanish amnesty law of 1977, which introduced the Pact of Forgetting . After the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, the government took the decision to officially forget the 40-year dictatorship. Legally, that meant crimes under Franco's dictatorship were not prosecuted. In public spaces, it meant that visible remnants of these crimes were obscured. Thus the Spanish collective memory before the Pact was fragmented, distorted and blurred.
This history forms the starting point for Bebe Blanco Agterberg's (Netherlands, 1995) images where a visual tension is felt that Agterberg manages to capture in an almost surreal and sometimes apocalyptic way.
Florentine Riem Vis Grant recipent
Bebe Blanco Agterberg is the sixth recipient of the Florentine Riem Vis Grant. Established in memory of Florentine Riem Vis (1959-2016), the grant is awarded each year with the aim of enabling young artists to further develop their artistic careers. The previous recipients of the grant were Karolina Wojtas (2022), Gilleam Trapenberg (2020), Solène Gün (2019), Rebecca Sampson (2018), Stefanie Moshammer (2016/17).
Tobias Kruse #023, 2019 From the series: DEPONIE Fine Art Pigment Print auf Hahnemühle Baryta aufgezogen auf Alu Dibond in Schattenfugenrahmen 30 x 40 cm, 2 Ex. + 1 AP 60 x 80 cm, 2 Ex. + 1 AP
For his project Deponie, Tobias Kruse sought out the traces and scars of a time that still casts a lingering shadow on the present: the years subsequent to the reunification of East Germany. A wild and paradoxical time, rich in opportunities, but one which also brought disappointment, anger and bitterness. Thirty years on from the fall of the Wall, the photographer and native of Mecklenburg, drove 8,000 kilometers through Eastern Germany, capturing what is left in the wake of this monumental juncture in history. A psycho-geographic exploration, Kruse documented everything from desolate countryside and rural villages to packed football stadiums and nighttime demonstrations – phenomena that are as much historical as they are contemporary in their integral space in Germany’s collective memory.
Kruse began his journey in Ihlenberg landfill (Deponie), near Schwerin, where he grew up, experiencing the early nineties as a teenager. A decade previously, in the eighties, hazardous waste from Western Europe was routinely disposed of in this landfill - known as VEB Deponie Schönberg - a publicly owned enterprise. The East was the recipient of foreign currency that allowed the West to dump its waste cheaply elsewhere. Even then, the damage to local people and the environment was devastating - the construction of the landfill was based on a decision by the Politburo (government) and was also illegal under GDR law. There were no serious environmental regulations or controls at the time, and as a result Schönberg quickly became the largest toxic waste dump in Europe.
After the fall of the Wall, the conventional procedure of West Germany’s script of reunification followed: takeover of the former public pr…
Seen by The exhibition series “Seen by” is a co-curatorial lab project set up in the Museum für Fotografie as a way of devising innovative curatorial and artistic strategies in art photography.
The project will work with two strategies: either UdK staff select works for the exhibition, or curators prepare the exhibition with workshops, in which students develop a common concept. This not only establishes a new form of teaching, but also results in the productive intermeshing of the artistic work processes, which can subsequently take expression in very different forms of ‘publications’: ranging from exhibitions and performances to readings and lectures.
Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present EAT FLOWERS, a solo exhibition by renowned New England-based photographer Cig Harvey, showcasing a selection of her latest photographs from her recent monograph Blue Violet. This will be Cig Harvey’s fifth solo exhibition at Robert Klein Gallery.
Cig Harvey’s photographs in Blue Violet are a celebration of the natural world and the senses. With her magical use of color and wonder found in everyday life Harvey says, “I want my photographs to be sensory, like edible flowers, a visual taste. Color and flowers act as symbol and metaphor to access our senses.” One of the most extraordinary color photographers working today, Cig Harvey’s Blue Violet is a meditation on the procession of the seasons and sensory abundance. Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique body of work together. Exploring the five senses, Blue Violet takes the reader on a personal journey through nature and the range of human emotions.
Throughout her twenty-five-year career, Harvey’s work “has always incited a jolt, eliciting a reflexive gasp of awe, triggered by memory and emotion,” writes Jacoba Urist in the book’s afterword. “In this regard, Blue Violet is no exception,” she continues, “and readers may be forgiven for assuming this, her fourth monograph, is about botanicals.” Yet further viewing of the works reveals that Harvey’s photographs “despite being of flora, are about something else: something deeper and less tangible, more saddening and celebratory, something all-encompassing and inescapable, like color.
Presented for the first time in 1955, the exhibition was meant as a manifesto for peace and the fundamental equality of mankind, expressed through the humanist photography of the post-war years. Images by artists such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Robert Doisneau, August Sander and Ansel Adams were staged in a modernist and spectacular manner.
Having toured the globe and been displayed in over 150 museums worldwide, the last, complete version of the exhibition was permanently installed in Clervaux Castle in 1994. Since its creation, The Family of Man has attracted over 10 million visitors and entered the history of photography as a legendary exhibition. In 2003, the collection was inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
Today, the restored collection is accessible to the public as a permanent exhibition at Clervaux Castle.
The conflict in Ukraine has received unprecedented visual and media coverage. Many reporters are actively working in the field to make their images accessible to the public. In addition to artists who use photography as their means of expression, inhabitants, civilians and soldiers also produce and share images that they post daily on different platforms. A tiny part of this production reaches us through our contacts, social networks, and the media.
In everyday life, propaganda, journalism, or artistic production, photography is an essential part of this conflict. From the very beginning, we have seen state-of-the-art media campaigns, perfectly mastering the codes of digital communication. Their creators know how to take advantage of the different online networks to export the war effort. These uninhibited campaigns are also encouragement to create and share without restraint. These extraordinarily creative visual narratives invade our space, to the extent that we can wonder if press images still dominate our representations of events. The images circulating by electronic messaging and on the networks, whether produced by amateurs or professionals, offer a plethora of contrasting views. We must therefore ask ourselves whether this profusion of images is just noise or, on the contrary, whether it contributes to establishing the facts.
Heidi Harsieber (*1948) is one of the most important Austrian photographers of recent decades. The Francisco Carolinum honors her work with a retrospective that focuses on the (self-)portrait.
At the beginning of her career, Heidi Harsieber - after an apprenticeship as a photographer and training at the Grafische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna - was the youngest professional photographer in Austria. In addition to commercial photography for the tableware sector and industry, she began to establish an artistic oeuvre independent of this as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s. Harsieber's technical savvy is characteristic of her work; she works analog, often with a medium-format camera, and enlarges and develops her black-and-white images herself.
Thematically, over the years, people and the human body increasingly become the focus of her interest. Harsieber's portraits revolve around the human condition: beauty, tenderness, desire, eroticism and love as well as pain, age, loneliness and death can be found in them. Especially with her unsparing self-portraits, the artist breaks with taboos. The staging of her own body in performative self-portraits anchors her photographs in the context of the international feminist avant-garde of the 1960s - 1970s.
Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung's Kunstfoyer is showing "INGE MORATH HOMAGE" to mark the 100th birthday of the famous Magnum photographer in collaboration with the Inge Morath Estate, curated by Anna-Patricia Kahn and Isabel Siben.
The retrospective and the accompanying Schirmer / Mosel book bring together the 200 most beautiful shots of her world-famous photo reportages and her legendary portraits of film stars, artist friends and literary figures. The exhibition will open in mid-December 2022. The photographer was born in Graz on 23 May 1923 and died in New York on 30 January 2002.
An international exhibition tour is being planned.
TANYA MARCUSE Chastity Belt Higgins Armory Museum, Worcerster, Massachusetts, USA Archival pigment print 14x11 inch / 35x28 cm
TANYA MARCUSE Collapsible Bustle 1880’s, American The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA Archival pigment print 14x11 inch / 35x28 cm
Galerie Miranda is delighted to present, for the first time in France, the beautiful and fascinating series Undergarments & Armor by NYC-based artist Tanya Marcuse, made in 2002-3 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The artist anchors the project in typological foundations, formally expressed with highly precise yet sensual black & white pigment prints. The complete series of Undergarments & Armor was first exhibited in Northern Ireland at Belfast Exposed gallery. The series has also featured at the triennial of photography and video called Dress Codes at the International Center for Photography (New York) and in Love and War at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York). A lavish 3-volume slipcased monograph of the series was published by Nazraeli Press in 2005 with an essay by Valerie Steele, chief curator and acting director of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Tanya Marcuse (b.1964) began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She went on to study Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. Her photographs are in many collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments & Armor. In 2005, she embarked on a three part, fourteen year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of construction to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Tanya’s books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012), Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019) and INK (Fall Line Press, 2021). She teaches Photography at Bard College, NY.
The exhibition Histoires d’eau by Isabelle Hayeur brings together photographs and videos that explore various issues related to water. The theme of water, an essential element that sustains life on our planet, has run through the work of this artist from the very beginning.
Political and deeply poetic at the same time, the pieces taken from the Underworlds series draw attention to the degradation of bodies of water. The artist’s uncommon perspective and the grand scale of her photographs take us to the heart of the matter. In Florida, Hayeur photographed manatees as she swam with them in the brackish waters around the city of Crystal River. These tranquil mammals of the tropics have practically no predators but they are threatened by human activity, particularly due to injuries from boat propellers.
The protection of water and aquatic ecosystems is one of the main environmental concerns of today’s society. In the series Le Camp de la Rivière and Dépayser, Hayeur has photographed militants who are fighting for a healthier environment and a more equitable world. She dwells on the question of citizens’ struggles while taking a critical look at human intervention that contributes to the alteration of landscapes and the deterioration of habitats.
Hayeur’s recent work explores the drought and water crisis that have been plaguing the American West for the past twenty years. In California, she has photographed the Salton Sea, a heavily polluted landlocked body of water that is slowly dying. Her video Between Wind and Water looks at water management as it relates to the watering of the golf courses of the Palm Desert. Situated between hope and denunciation, Isabelle Ha…
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The renowned German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015) changed the course of late twentieth-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era. Their seemingly objective style recalled nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine art photography.
Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers, and gas tanks with precision, elegance, and passion. Their rigorous, standardized practice allowed for comparative analyses of structures that they exhibited in grids of between four and thirty photographs. They described these formal arrangements as “typologies” and the buildings themselves as “anonymous sculpture.”
Featuring some 200 works of art, this posthumous retrospective celebrates the Bechers’ remarkable achievement and is the first ever organized with full access to the artists’ personal collection of working materials and their comprehensive archive. The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.
For its fifth session of exhibitions, Images Vevey has given free rein to the Italian-Swiss collective Riverboom that has been based in an apartment in Vevey for the past twenty years.
Riverboom was founded in 2002 by a small group of aspiring war journalists in a valley in north-west Afghanistan, through which the river Boom flows. Over the past twenty years, Riverboom has published books, created exhibitions, produced films, and organised parties, while predominantly being a stage for inner struggles. The Riverboomers, Claude Baechtold, Edoardo Delille, Gabriele Galimberti, Serge Michel, Alexandre Tzonis and Paolo Woods are photographers, filmmakers, graphic designers, journalists, and writers. Having surrendered their youthful vitality for the banal obligations that come with age, they are making the most of the invitation extended by L'Appartement to flaunt, as most ageing stars do, their soon to be long-gone 'Greatest Hits' and the five founding principles of their (dys)functioning.
Founded in 1994, the Bamako Encounters – African Biennial of Photography is organized by the Ministry of Culture of Mali with the support of the Institut Français. The Biennale is the first and principal event dedicated to contemporary photography and new imagery in Africa. Internationally renowned, the Bamako Encounters is a platform for discoveries, exchanges, and visibility. It is an essential venue for the revelation of African photographers and those of the Diaspora, a time of exchange with the Malian public and the professionals from around the world.
New dates Exhibition 08.12.2022 – 08.02.2023 Professional days 08.12.2022 – 16.12.2022
The 8th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival will kick off in Xiamen on 25 November 2022, and continue to showcase new international photography works!
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre has been working closely with Les Rencontres d’Arles since 2015 to found the International Photo Festival in Xiamen’s Jimei District. Jointly organised by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and Xiamen Tianxia Jimei Media Co. Ltd., Jimei x Arles introduces excellent overseas photography works with an open and inclusive attitude, synchronising with the freshest international vision. Jimei x Arles works with various experts and institutions to explore the creative power of Chinese photography, facilitates the dissemination of excellent contemporary photography works and continues to promote them on the international stage. Since its founding, Jimei x Arles has presented more than 200 exhibitions from China and the rest of Asia, as well as a selection of excellent shows from Les Rencontres d’Arles. To date, the festival has attracted 400,000 visitors.
Since 2020, Christoph Wiesner, director of Les Rencontres d’Arles, and RongRong, Chinese contemporary photographer and co-founder of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, have been serving as Co-Directors, with noted photography critic Gu Zheng serving as Art Director. The 8th Jimei x Arles will present thirty exhibitions, featuring works by more than one hundred artists from France, Thailand, Brazil, the United States and mainland China: Six Exhibitions from Arles selected from 202…
