Moritz Arnold of F/Stop - the International Photography Festival in Leipzig, Germany got in touch to spread the word about this year's festival. They are currently accepting submissions from photographers worldwide for the 3rd installment of the festival, which will be held from July 1st - 7th. As their press release states:
"The theme of our 3rd F/Stop competition 'Where do we go from here?' asks questions about the coordinates of our existence. From what perspective do we look at the “whereto“? Is it a place, a mood? Where do we fi nd the impulses that show us the way? And on what does it depend, our here and whereto? The international photography festival F/Stop is looking for ambitious single or serial photgraphical works that deal with the 'unknown whereto.'
A select jury of curators, gallery designers, and art critics will choose the best works that are going to be presented at the festival. The winner of the competition will have the opportunity to present his or her works in front of professional critics at the portfolio reviews of the Houston/Texas-based FotoFest in 2010."
Here's what you need to know...
1. APPLICATION FORM
Please fill out the application form completely.
2. GRAPHICAL MATERIAL
Apply with at most 3 single works or 3 series. Submit your images on a CD with a maximal size of 1280 × 1024 pixels (jpeg format). Please make sure that all works are labelled with the exact title, size, technique/method and year of production.
3. ARTIST STATEMENT
Please include a short description. In which way does your work resemble the theme of the competition? Characterize your work.
4. CURRICULUM VITAE
5. ENTRY FEE
Please include a € 20 processing fee for each submission.
6. DEADLINE
Entries will be accepted until Monday, April 6th. Submissions received with postmarks after April 6th cannot be considered. Overseas contestants: Please make sure your application is being shipped ahead of time. All participants will be notified about the results of the contest by the first week of May.
You can download the submission form here.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Karin Apollonia Müller's On Edge
I stumbled upon Karin Apollonina Müller's website today. Her series On Edge falls within one of contemporary photography's most explored relationships, the one that exists between the constructed and natural world. Nevertheless, Müller possesses a sensitivity toward her subjects that results in images which contribute something interesting to the discourse of what man's encroachment on nature really means. In her statement, she succinctly asserts:
"In “Edges” I am interested in how the earth crumbles away and how in our desperate attempt we are trying to control or hide the subtle invasion of nature in cultivated space."
All photographs from the series On Edge
All Images © Karin Apollonia Müller
"In “Edges” I am interested in how the earth crumbles away and how in our desperate attempt we are trying to control or hide the subtle invasion of nature in cultivated space."
All photographs from the series On Edge
All Images © Karin Apollonia Müller
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Lisa Oppenheim's Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans
The new issue of Blindspot, co-edited by Taryn Simon, contains some wonderful, conceptually-minded photo projects. Lisa Oppenheim's Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans is one such example. In the press release for her 2008 exhibition at Store Gallery in London, it states:
"In ‘Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans’ (2007), Oppenheim uses Walker Evans’ unpublished photographs from 1938 found in the National Library of Congress. Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document depression era rural America. These negatives are ‘killed’ because they had holes punched through them to prevent publication. Oppenheim printed them and conceptualises the holes as a space of potential contemporary interpretation."
All photographs from the series Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans
All Images © Lisa Oppenheim
"In ‘Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans’ (2007), Oppenheim uses Walker Evans’ unpublished photographs from 1938 found in the National Library of Congress. Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document depression era rural America. These negatives are ‘killed’ because they had holes punched through them to prevent publication. Oppenheim printed them and conceptualises the holes as a space of potential contemporary interpretation."
All photographs from the series Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans
All Images © Lisa Oppenheim
Monday, March 9, 2009
Johan Bergström's Nostalgia
Johan Bergström's series Nostalgia examines the deception of memory and our often fruitless capacity to accurately recall events from our lives. In his statement, Bergström writes:
"A contemporary Russian saying claims that the past has become more unpredictable than the future. Nostalgia may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power. But this is rarely the past as actually experienced; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through selective memory and desire.
The selection of memories becomes obvious in the tradition of family photography. The family albums are usually characterised by pleasure and held-off closure – happy beginnings, happy middles and no endings, making a promise of a brighter past in the future, a kind of nostalgia-in-prospect.
But how can we ever be sure to remember things as they were? Over time memory fades, people grow old and events seem to change. Shared experience slowly turns into collective memory.
We mix up what really happened and what we choose to remember, as well as mixing that up with other people’s memories and mediated information through newspapers, television and films.
The work NOSTALGIA reflects on the mechanisms of nostalgia and questions ones solidarity with the past by visualizing memories too unpleasant or too trivial to remember. It points to the deceitfulness of memory, in the age of photography, where many seem to be under the delusion of being able to control the past."
From Top To Bottom:
Psalm No 459, 2005
Site of Disappearance, 2006
Motion Scheme of a Fridge, 2005
Nine Months to Next Season, 2005
Making New Connections, 2006
All Images © Johan Bergström
"A contemporary Russian saying claims that the past has become more unpredictable than the future. Nostalgia may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power. But this is rarely the past as actually experienced; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through selective memory and desire.
The selection of memories becomes obvious in the tradition of family photography. The family albums are usually characterised by pleasure and held-off closure – happy beginnings, happy middles and no endings, making a promise of a brighter past in the future, a kind of nostalgia-in-prospect.
But how can we ever be sure to remember things as they were? Over time memory fades, people grow old and events seem to change. Shared experience slowly turns into collective memory.
We mix up what really happened and what we choose to remember, as well as mixing that up with other people’s memories and mediated information through newspapers, television and films.
The work NOSTALGIA reflects on the mechanisms of nostalgia and questions ones solidarity with the past by visualizing memories too unpleasant or too trivial to remember. It points to the deceitfulness of memory, in the age of photography, where many seem to be under the delusion of being able to control the past."
From Top To Bottom:
Psalm No 459, 2005
Site of Disappearance, 2006
Motion Scheme of a Fridge, 2005
Nine Months to Next Season, 2005
Making New Connections, 2006
All Images © Johan Bergström
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Forthcoming Monographs: A Spring & Summer Preview
Over the last few months, publishers have started to release their catalogues of upcoming releases. Surprisingly, despite the recession, the roster of forthcoming monographs is actually pretty robust. I thought I would take a moment to highlight a few of the books I'm looking forward to seeing...
Doug Dubois - All the Days and Nights (Aperture: June 2009)
"More than twenty years later, DuBois’s project has developed in remarkable ways. Doug DuBois: All the Days and Nights resonates with emotional immediacy, offering a potent examination of family relations, and what it means to subject personal relationships to the unblinking eye of the camera. Each photograph is rich with color, nuanced gestures and glances enveloping the viewer in a multivalent, emotionally tense world."
Eirik Johnson - Sawdust Mountain (Aperture: June 2009)
"Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future—no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old-growth forests."
Thomas Ruff - JPEGS (Aperture: May 2009)
"In 2007, Ruff completed his monumental Jpegs series in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. Starting with images he culls primarily from the Web, Ruff enlarges them to a gigantic scale, which exaggerates the pixel patterns until they become sublime geometric displays of color. Many of Ruff’s works in the series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, and conversely, scenes of war, and nature disturbed by human manipulation."
James Welling - Light Sources: 1992-2005 (steidlMACK: May 2009)
"American artist James Welling creates work which challenges the technical and conceptual bounds of photography. In his abstract photographs of the 1980s he usually employed simple materials, like crumpled aluminum foil, draped fabric and pastry dough. Then in 1992 he began the series Light Sources, an open-ended accumulation of diverse portraits, landscapes and interiors. All these photographs indirectly refer to the process of perception and while many of the objects literally transmit light, the series acknowledges that everything we see reflects light and is also a source of light."
Emmet Gowin - Emmet Gowin Photographs (Steidl: May 2009)
"Emmet Gowin Photographs presents a collection of 68 of these images, accompanied by a short personal text by the photographer. Inspired by the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer, Gowin approaches his subjects with a reverence for the relationship between photographer and sitter. Although his photographs often resemble home snapshots, he aspires to take pictures that succeed as more than just family records, in some cases allowing the camera lens to dictate the circular shape of the image."
Paul Graham - Paul Graham (steidlMACK: April 2009)
"His colour work in the early and mid-1980s had a transformative effect on the black and white tradition that had dominated British photography to that point. Since this ground breaking early work, and what sets Graham apart from his peers of that time, is that rather than rest on such achievements, he has continued to radically explore the medium for the next two decades, showing a profound commitment to expanding photography’s artistic space, whilst remaining faithful to that core locus where the documentary and artistic aspects of photography coalesce."
Raimond Wouda - School (Nazraeli Press: March 2009)
"The fourth title in our “Parr/Nazraeli Edition of Ten”, Raimond Wouda’s School shows groups of pupils at numerous secondary schools in the Netherlands. Rather than depicting classrooms, Wouda chose to photograph the places where students relax between classes, setting his large-format camera high on a ladder and triggering the shutter from the ground via remote control to capture specific moments. According to Wouda, the current debates about substance and behaviour in secondary schools have gone unnoticed by the students themselves, for whom school is a relatively safe place in which to meet and interact with their friends, and to discover their own identity."
Laura Carton - Stripped (steidlMACK: April 2009)
"Laura Carton created the photographs in “Stripped” by downloading a variety of pornographic images from the Internet, removing the bodies and then digitally reconstructing the backgrounds from the existing evidence. Looking beyond the camouflage of naked flesh, what remain are the carefully constructed and over-produced fictions of domestic space, suburban melodramas, utopian ideals and fantasies. These new narratives offer a number of sites from which to question underlying assumptions about sexuality, class, race, desire and commodification. “Stripped” is printed in a first edition of 500 copies. “What’s particularly alluring about these images is the way they implicate the viewer in the missing action . . . shorn of buffed, blow-dried actors, they lose their practical function and become open-ended. Your imagination does the rest.”
Chris Verene - Family (Twin Palms Press: Autumn 2009)
"Verene walks right into the lives of his folks, showing you how they are, without any embarrassment on either side. Their togetherness is taken for granted so openly that the viewer feels at each moment like one of them, a member of the clan. Verene’s color [is] tender, warm and sensual, though stops well short of being glamorous . . . flooding them all with a strange, sweet romance. These pictures convey his bittersweet fondness for a smaller world in which he grew up but no longer shares, but which has lessons to teach him about the inroads of ageing, disability and other difficulties. People do what they can to help each other and themselves, all from ‘leaking boats.’ Meanwhile, the dark room and the night bring tidings of their isolation. Many viewers are familiar with visits back home in this mood, which Verene renders luminous and fatal."
Roger Ballen - Boarding House (Phaidon: March 2009)
"Boarding House captures an imaginary space of transient residence, of comings and goings, focusing on the evocative drawings and sculptural objects as well as the people and animals found there. Compelling and thought-provoking, the 75 photographs (many of them previously unpublished) are like images from a waking dream, with layers of rich detail, flashes of dark humour and an altered sense of place."
If anyone out there can think of something wonderful and obvious that I missed, let me know and I will abridge this list.
From Top To Bottom:
Image © Doug Dubois
Image © Eirik Johnson
Image © Thomas Ruff
Image © James Welling
Image © Emmet Gowin
Image © Paul Graham
Image © Raimond Wouda
Image © Laura Carton
Image © Chris Verene
Image © Roger Ballen
Doug Dubois - All the Days and Nights (Aperture: June 2009)
"More than twenty years later, DuBois’s project has developed in remarkable ways. Doug DuBois: All the Days and Nights resonates with emotional immediacy, offering a potent examination of family relations, and what it means to subject personal relationships to the unblinking eye of the camera. Each photograph is rich with color, nuanced gestures and glances enveloping the viewer in a multivalent, emotionally tense world."
Eirik Johnson - Sawdust Mountain (Aperture: June 2009)
"Timber and salmon are the bedrock of a regional Northwest identity, but the environmental impact of these declining industries has been increasingly at odds with the contemporary ideal of sustainability. In this, his second book, Johnson reveals a landscape imbued with an uncertain future—no longer the region of boomtowns built upon the riches of massive old-growth forests."
Thomas Ruff - JPEGS (Aperture: May 2009)
"In 2007, Ruff completed his monumental Jpegs series in which he explores the distribution and reception of images in the digital age. Starting with images he culls primarily from the Web, Ruff enlarges them to a gigantic scale, which exaggerates the pixel patterns until they become sublime geometric displays of color. Many of Ruff’s works in the series focus on idyllic, seemingly untouched landscapes, and conversely, scenes of war, and nature disturbed by human manipulation."
James Welling - Light Sources: 1992-2005 (steidlMACK: May 2009)
"American artist James Welling creates work which challenges the technical and conceptual bounds of photography. In his abstract photographs of the 1980s he usually employed simple materials, like crumpled aluminum foil, draped fabric and pastry dough. Then in 1992 he began the series Light Sources, an open-ended accumulation of diverse portraits, landscapes and interiors. All these photographs indirectly refer to the process of perception and while many of the objects literally transmit light, the series acknowledges that everything we see reflects light and is also a source of light."
Emmet Gowin - Emmet Gowin Photographs (Steidl: May 2009)
"Emmet Gowin Photographs presents a collection of 68 of these images, accompanied by a short personal text by the photographer. Inspired by the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer, Gowin approaches his subjects with a reverence for the relationship between photographer and sitter. Although his photographs often resemble home snapshots, he aspires to take pictures that succeed as more than just family records, in some cases allowing the camera lens to dictate the circular shape of the image."
Paul Graham - Paul Graham (steidlMACK: April 2009)
"His colour work in the early and mid-1980s had a transformative effect on the black and white tradition that had dominated British photography to that point. Since this ground breaking early work, and what sets Graham apart from his peers of that time, is that rather than rest on such achievements, he has continued to radically explore the medium for the next two decades, showing a profound commitment to expanding photography’s artistic space, whilst remaining faithful to that core locus where the documentary and artistic aspects of photography coalesce."
Raimond Wouda - School (Nazraeli Press: March 2009)
"The fourth title in our “Parr/Nazraeli Edition of Ten”, Raimond Wouda’s School shows groups of pupils at numerous secondary schools in the Netherlands. Rather than depicting classrooms, Wouda chose to photograph the places where students relax between classes, setting his large-format camera high on a ladder and triggering the shutter from the ground via remote control to capture specific moments. According to Wouda, the current debates about substance and behaviour in secondary schools have gone unnoticed by the students themselves, for whom school is a relatively safe place in which to meet and interact with their friends, and to discover their own identity."
Laura Carton - Stripped (steidlMACK: April 2009)
"Laura Carton created the photographs in “Stripped” by downloading a variety of pornographic images from the Internet, removing the bodies and then digitally reconstructing the backgrounds from the existing evidence. Looking beyond the camouflage of naked flesh, what remain are the carefully constructed and over-produced fictions of domestic space, suburban melodramas, utopian ideals and fantasies. These new narratives offer a number of sites from which to question underlying assumptions about sexuality, class, race, desire and commodification. “Stripped” is printed in a first edition of 500 copies. “What’s particularly alluring about these images is the way they implicate the viewer in the missing action . . . shorn of buffed, blow-dried actors, they lose their practical function and become open-ended. Your imagination does the rest.”
Chris Verene - Family (Twin Palms Press: Autumn 2009)
"Verene walks right into the lives of his folks, showing you how they are, without any embarrassment on either side. Their togetherness is taken for granted so openly that the viewer feels at each moment like one of them, a member of the clan. Verene’s color [is] tender, warm and sensual, though stops well short of being glamorous . . . flooding them all with a strange, sweet romance. These pictures convey his bittersweet fondness for a smaller world in which he grew up but no longer shares, but which has lessons to teach him about the inroads of ageing, disability and other difficulties. People do what they can to help each other and themselves, all from ‘leaking boats.’ Meanwhile, the dark room and the night bring tidings of their isolation. Many viewers are familiar with visits back home in this mood, which Verene renders luminous and fatal."
Roger Ballen - Boarding House (Phaidon: March 2009)
"Boarding House captures an imaginary space of transient residence, of comings and goings, focusing on the evocative drawings and sculptural objects as well as the people and animals found there. Compelling and thought-provoking, the 75 photographs (many of them previously unpublished) are like images from a waking dream, with layers of rich detail, flashes of dark humour and an altered sense of place."
If anyone out there can think of something wonderful and obvious that I missed, let me know and I will abridge this list.
From Top To Bottom:
Image © Doug Dubois
Image © Eirik Johnson
Image © Thomas Ruff
Image © James Welling
Image © Emmet Gowin
Image © Paul Graham
Image © Raimond Wouda
Image © Laura Carton
Image © Chris Verene
Image © Roger Ballen
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The 50 States Project - "People"
The photographs from The 50 States Project's first assignment "People" were posted to the website the other day. The images below reflect a few of my favorites from this new, bicoastal collaboration.
From Top To Bottom:
"William S. Hart" © Todd Stewart (Oklahoma)
"Untitled" © Andrew Borowiec (Ohio)
"Bride to Be in Limousine" © Juliana Beasley (New Jersey)
"Untitled" © Bradley Peters (Nebraska)
"Victoria and her dogs, Coldfoot, Alaska" © Ben Huff (Alaska)
From Top To Bottom:
"William S. Hart" © Todd Stewart (Oklahoma)
"Untitled" © Andrew Borowiec (Ohio)
"Bride to Be in Limousine" © Juliana Beasley (New Jersey)
"Untitled" © Bradley Peters (Nebraska)
"Victoria and her dogs, Coldfoot, Alaska" © Ben Huff (Alaska)
Monday, March 2, 2009
Tacita Dean's Kodak
Ubuweb recently added Tacita Dean's 2006 documentary Kodak to their archives. Shot at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France after the discovery of the closing their film production facility, Dean's film is a beautiful and self-referiential homage to a process whose future is shrouded in uncertainty. As Ubuweb states:
"The 44-minute-long work Kodak constitutes a meditative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Dean's own practice. Kodak's narrative follows the making of the celluloid as it runs through several miles of machinery. On the day of filming, the factory also ran a test through the system with brown paper, providing a rare opportunity to see the facilities fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure."
To view the film in its entirety go here.
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