maandag 7 juli 2008
vrijdag 4 juli 2008
Recent European Landscape Photography Human/Nature by Bart Michiels Wout Berger and Hans van der Meer
Massimo Vitali (Italian, b. 1944), Viareggio Tuffo, 1995. Chromogenic print. Gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2007.40.8KANSAS CITY.- Large-scale color photographs by a new generation of European artists will be on view June 28 through Oct. 5 with the opening of the exhibition Human/Nature: Recent European Landscape Photography in the Bloch Building at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The exhibition provides the first opportunity to view bold, contemporary works never before seen in this region.
April M. Watson, Associate Curator, Photography at the Nelson-Atkins, has helped assemble works by 10 artists from five European countries for the exhibition. Artists include Olaf Otto Becker, Peter Bialobrzeski, Andreas Gefeller, Beate Gütschow, and Marc Räder, all from Germany; Belgian photographer Bart Michiels; Wout Berger and Hans van der Meer from the Netherlands; British photographer Jem Southam; and Massimo Vitali from Italy.
“The relationship between human beings and the natural world is complex,” says Watson. “Each of these artists view the contemporary European landscape as a source of continued fascination and beauty. Those sentiments are tempered, however, by concerns for the ways we use and abuse the land, both historically and in our own time.”
Omaha Beach 1944, Easy Green, 2003Bart Michiels, for example, considers the weight of history as it informs former WWI battlefields, while Hans van der Meer’s views of amateur football (soccer) fields situate the impassioned actions of players against the larger backdrop of Europe. For Becker and Bialobrzeski, landscape retains the romantic associations of an earlier age. Andreas Gefeller and Beate Gütschow use digital technologies to fabricate landscapes that oscillate between the strange and the familiar. For Vitali and Räder, cultural interventions such as the leisure industry are paramount concerns. Berger and Southam observe the transformation of place, the result of both human and natural processes.
“Collectively, the artists in this exhibition suggest that our relationship with the natural world continues to be highly complicated as our dependence on nature – and nature’s reliance on us – becomes increasingly tenuous,” Watson said.The Photography Collection at the Nelson-Atkins grew from its initial holding of 1,015 prints to a collection of more than 7,000 works with the acquisition in early 2006 of the famed Hallmark Photographic Collection, perhaps the finest private collections of American photography ever assembled. “With that acquisition the Nelson-Atkins instantly vaulted to the top rank of art museums worldwide with major photography holdings. Thanks to continued growth since that wonderful gift, we now have masterpieces from the entire span of photography’s history, 1839 to the present. Our recent focus has been on European photography, both contemporary and 19th century, thanks in large part to the generosity of the Hall Family Foundation. This exhibition is the first major expression of this new area of emphasis,” said Keith F. Davis, Curator of Photography.
The Somme 1916, Lochnagar Crater, 2005See also ...
woensdag 2 juli 2008
Reinventing Art Photography from scratch Miroslav Tichý
PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou presents the first ever French exhibition devoted to the photographic work of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichy (see for a review by 5B4), a singular figure now more than 80 years old. His timeless and unclassifiable work, first introduced to the wider public at the Seville Biennale by curator Harald Szeemann, reveals a unique, marginal and somewhat monomaniacal talent.The exhibition brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichy-Ocean, as well as works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou.
Between the early 1960s and the mid 1990s, in Communist Czechoslovakia and in self-imposed artistic isolation, Miroslav Tichy created a body of work obsessively concerned with the female figure, reinventing art photography from scratch.
His images, shot instinctively or carelessly on his handmade cameras with their makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream, revealing an uncategorizable artist strongly influenced by the classical pictorial tradition whose methods nonetheless recall those of the amateur, or the naivety of outsider art. Exhibited for the first time in 2004, Miroslav Tichy’s photographs, timeless and unclassifiable, stand witness to a unique talent.Born in Moravia in 1926, the only child of a tailor, Miroslav Tichy trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the years immediately following the Second World War. Having embarked on a career as a painter, influenced by Picasso, Matisse and the German Expressionists, after the Communist takeover of power in 1948 he turned his back on the official art world. Returning to Kyjov, the town of his birth, he abandoned painting and in the mid-Fifties took up photography, building his own cameras from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.
For more than thirty years – that is, until the late 1980s – he lived a life of personal and cultural isolation, but took dozens of photographs every day, his great subject being the women of the town.
His deliberately marginal and fiercely nonconformist way of life, so little in accord with the ideology of the day, led to repeated run-ins with the authorities, leading to several periods of confinement in psychiatric institutions in the Sixties and Seventies, and to his losing his studio in 1972.
His images, shot instinctively or carelessly on his handmade cameras with their makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women at the swimming-pool, women in the street, women indoors, women on the TV screen: these are his single, obsessional subject. Enlarged and printed on his own improvised equipment, the photographs were then often retouched before being mounted and framed using such materials as old newspaper and cardboard before, sometimes, being put away and forgotten for years.Over- or under-exposed, scratched, blurred, torn, and spotted, they nonetheless reveal an uncategorizable artist, whose methods recall those of the amateur or the naivety of outsider art, but whose images are strongly marked by influences from the classical pictorial tradition. With its endless return to the same subject and the volume and regularity of its production, his work also has affinities with many procedures of the contemporary art of the same period. See also Tarzan in pension ...
Paul Kooiker is inspired by Miroslav Tichy ...
Reinventing Art Photography from scratch Miroslav Tichý
PARIS.- The Centre Pompidou presents the first ever French exhibition devoted to the photographic work of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichy (see for a review by 5B4), a singular figure now more than 80 years old. His timeless and unclassifiable work, first introduced to the wider public at the Seville Biennale by curator Harald Szeemann, reveals a unique, marginal and somewhat monomaniacal talent.The exhibition brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichy-Ocean, as well as works from the collection of the Centre Pompidou.
Between the early 1960s and the mid 1990s, in Communist Czechoslovakia and in self-imposed artistic isolation, Miroslav Tichy created a body of work obsessively concerned with the female figure, reinventing art photography from scratch.
His images, shot instinctively or carelessly on his handmade cameras with their makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream, revealing an uncategorizable artist strongly influenced by the classical pictorial tradition whose methods nonetheless recall those of the amateur, or the naivety of outsider art. Exhibited for the first time in 2004, Miroslav Tichy’s photographs, timeless and unclassifiable, stand witness to a unique talent.Born in Moravia in 1926, the only child of a tailor, Miroslav Tichy trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the years immediately following the Second World War. Having embarked on a career as a painter, influenced by Picasso, Matisse and the German Expressionists, after the Communist takeover of power in 1948 he turned his back on the official art world. Returning to Kyjov, the town of his birth, he abandoned painting and in the mid-Fifties took up photography, building his own cameras from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.
For more than thirty years – that is, until the late 1980s – he lived a life of personal and cultural isolation, but took dozens of photographs every day, his great subject being the women of the town.
His deliberately marginal and fiercely nonconformist way of life, so little in accord with the ideology of the day, led to repeated run-ins with the authorities, leading to several periods of confinement in psychiatric institutions in the Sixties and Seventies, and to his losing his studio in 1972.
His images, shot instinctively or carelessly on his handmade cameras with their makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women at the swimming-pool, women in the street, women indoors, women on the TV screen: these are his single, obsessional subject. Enlarged and printed on his own improvised equipment, the photographs were then often retouched before being mounted and framed using such materials as old newspaper and cardboard before, sometimes, being put away and forgotten for years.Over- or under-exposed, scratched, blurred, torn, and spotted, they nonetheless reveal an uncategorizable artist, whose methods recall those of the amateur or the naivety of outsider art, but whose images are strongly marked by influences from the classical pictorial tradition. With its endless return to the same subject and the volume and regularity of its production, his work also has affinities with many procedures of the contemporary art of the same period. See also Tarzan in pension ...
Paul Kooiker is inspired by Miroslav Tichy ...
dinsdag 1 juli 2008
American West Fashion Portraits by Richard Avedon Photography
PARIS.- This exhibition is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work since his death in 2004. After the Louisiana Museum (24 August 2007 to 13 January 2008), it is being presented this summer at the Jeu de Paume Concorde, where it will occupy the entire space.The exhibition brings together 270 works spanning Richard Avedon’s career from 1946 to 2004. There are of course fashion photographs, but above all there are photographs of figures from the worlds of politics, literature, the arts and show business.
In Paris, at the initiative of Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume, this selection will be enriched by some forty large-format prints from In the American West, the series produced by Avedon from 1979 to 1984.
Richard Avedon (see the video) started working for Harper’s Bazaar in 1945. He joined Vogue in 1966. His pictures metamorphosed fashion photography, which he found too static and stuffy, by emphasising movement and capturing his models in public spaces such as parks nightclubs and shops. Avedon set out to recreate everyday and social situations, and to give the impression that, as in photojournalism, his photographs were taken spontaneously, on the spur of the moment.
After the Second World War the supremacy of New York meant that its fashion photographers were sent over to Paris to photograph the European collections. Avedon regularly photographed the designs of the major Parisian couture houses through to 1984. In the 1960s Avedon went back to the studio and the neutral background in order highlight the beauty and mobility of his subjects.
In parallel to his fashion photographs, Richard Avedon made numerous portraits, radically transforming the codes of genre, as did that other great American photographer, Irving Penn.But Avedon went even further than Penn. He shattered the iconic images of the stars of show business (Marilyn Monroe , see for a review ...), literature, the arts and the political elite in the United States. His portraits show all the facets of his models’ personality, however great their mastery of the codes of representation. The use of white grounds, the bareness of the compositions, helped to bring a searching psychological dimension to each subject.
Generally speaking, Avedon sought to capture the true nature of things rather than to reproduce them superficially. During his photography sessions, he sought out that very special moment when he could capture and set down the psychological intensity emanating from the sitter. For, to photograph someone “meant looking beyond the charm of the face and establishing a relation between the vital presence of the other and his own, that is to say, finding the moment when everything converged and happened.”“(…) In the American West was the result of a commission from the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas. From 1979 to 1984, Avedon photographed men and women in the American West, most of them working folk. In the process, he travelled across several states of the Great Plains and the Rockies, paying special attention to specific sites and events such as ranches, coalmines, cattle fairs, oil wells, slaughterhouses, truck stops, modest diners and offices. He photographed the homeless, housewives, cowboys, miners, prisoners and rodeo riders. His strategy was to build up a network of portraits, weaving a series of psychological, sociological, physical and familial connections between these individuals who had never met. All the photos in this series were taken in broad daylight and outdoors, looking for a certain quality of shadow, against a simple white paper backdrop hung on the side of a truck.
The uncompromising photographs that resulted caused quite a controversy when they were first shown in Texas because of Avedon’s “demystifying” vision of that Promised Land, the American West, that land of pioneers and conquerors.” (Marta Gili, from the preface to the catalogue)
Richard Avedon put his talent as a photographer at the service of the social causes and political evens that shook American society in the 1960s and 70s. He made several reports on the Civil Rights movements in the South (1963), the Ku Klux Klan, and psychiatric hospitals.A pacifist, he photographed hippies demonstrating against the Vietnam War in 1969, and travelled to the country in 1971 to make portraits of the army leaders and of napalm victims.
For the French magazine Égoïste he covered the meeting of East and West Berliners at the Brandenburg Gates on 31 December 1989 and 1 January 1990, less than two months after the fall of the Wall.
Avedon talks with actress Audrey Hepburn during a photo session in Los Angeles in 1956.
American West Fashion Portraits by Richard Avedon Photography
PARIS.- This exhibition is the first major retrospective of the artist’s work since his death in 2004. After the Louisiana Museum (24 August 2007 to 13 January 2008), it is being presented this summer at the Jeu de Paume Concorde, where it will occupy the entire space.The exhibition brings together 270 works spanning Richard Avedon’s career from 1946 to 2004. There are of course fashion photographs, but above all there are photographs of figures from the worlds of politics, literature, the arts and show business.
In Paris, at the initiative of Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume, this selection will be enriched by some forty large-format prints from In the American West, the series produced by Avedon from 1979 to 1984.
Richard Avedon (see the video) started working for Harper’s Bazaar in 1945. He joined Vogue in 1966. His pictures metamorphosed fashion photography, which he found too static and stuffy, by emphasising movement and capturing his models in public spaces such as parks nightclubs and shops. Avedon set out to recreate everyday and social situations, and to give the impression that, as in photojournalism, his photographs were taken spontaneously, on the spur of the moment.
After the Second World War the supremacy of New York meant that its fashion photographers were sent over to Paris to photograph the European collections. Avedon regularly photographed the designs of the major Parisian couture houses through to 1984. In the 1960s Avedon went back to the studio and the neutral background in order highlight the beauty and mobility of his subjects.
In parallel to his fashion photographs, Richard Avedon made numerous portraits, radically transforming the codes of genre, as did that other great American photographer, Irving Penn.But Avedon went even further than Penn. He shattered the iconic images of the stars of show business (Marilyn Monroe , see for a review ...), literature, the arts and the political elite in the United States. His portraits show all the facets of his models’ personality, however great their mastery of the codes of representation. The use of white grounds, the bareness of the compositions, helped to bring a searching psychological dimension to each subject.
Generally speaking, Avedon sought to capture the true nature of things rather than to reproduce them superficially. During his photography sessions, he sought out that very special moment when he could capture and set down the psychological intensity emanating from the sitter. For, to photograph someone “meant looking beyond the charm of the face and establishing a relation between the vital presence of the other and his own, that is to say, finding the moment when everything converged and happened.”“(…) In the American West was the result of a commission from the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas. From 1979 to 1984, Avedon photographed men and women in the American West, most of them working folk. In the process, he travelled across several states of the Great Plains and the Rockies, paying special attention to specific sites and events such as ranches, coalmines, cattle fairs, oil wells, slaughterhouses, truck stops, modest diners and offices. He photographed the homeless, housewives, cowboys, miners, prisoners and rodeo riders. His strategy was to build up a network of portraits, weaving a series of psychological, sociological, physical and familial connections between these individuals who had never met. All the photos in this series were taken in broad daylight and outdoors, looking for a certain quality of shadow, against a simple white paper backdrop hung on the side of a truck.
The uncompromising photographs that resulted caused quite a controversy when they were first shown in Texas because of Avedon’s “demystifying” vision of that Promised Land, the American West, that land of pioneers and conquerors.” (Marta Gili, from the preface to the catalogue)
Richard Avedon put his talent as a photographer at the service of the social causes and political evens that shook American society in the 1960s and 70s. He made several reports on the Civil Rights movements in the South (1963), the Ku Klux Klan, and psychiatric hospitals.A pacifist, he photographed hippies demonstrating against the Vietnam War in 1969, and travelled to the country in 1971 to make portraits of the army leaders and of napalm victims.
For the French magazine Égoïste he covered the meeting of East and West Berliners at the Brandenburg Gates on 31 December 1989 and 1 January 1990, less than two months after the fall of the Wall.
Avedon talks with actress Audrey Hepburn during a photo session in Los Angeles in 1956.
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