woensdag 24 maart 2010

Lucebert '50s '60s Photography Cobra Joan van der Keuken

Lucebert's chief claim to fame is as a poet, painter and member of the Cobra group. Not many people know of his interest in photography in the fifties and sixties. At the beginning of the fifties, curious about the medium and wanting to photograph his children, he started to experiment. In the years that followed he undertook several journeys which he documented extensively. One of them was to Berlin, where he spent some time in 1955 at the invitation of Bertolt Brecht, followed in 1956 by a visit Bulgaria at the request of the Bulgarian writers' association.

Lucebert was first and foremost a photographer of people: he aimed his camera at colleagues, his children or street scenes, and made remarkable portraits of his artist-friends. Photography was an emotional rather than a rational activity to him. Atmosphere was a particularly important element, for that is what gave his photographs their poetic charge. The important thing about both his photography and poetry was that both were the result of a sudden impulse. By that token Lucebert saw a closer connection between photography and poetry than between photography and painting.

LUCEBERT, Time and Goodbye

This portrait of the artist and poet Lucebert, the author of unseemly, almost child-like drawings, is in fact constructed from three films: black-and-white collages from 1962, a colour film from 1966 and an epilogue which was made in 1994 after the artist's death. These drawings, naive and rudimentary in their expression but also highly charged, seemingly exacted an equally robust form on Van der Keuken's film and its many details. The robust gestures of this distinctive painter dictate the expressive tempo of the director's collage, which overflows with colour, shapes and analogies. The artist's work developed alongside children, and the film's soundtrack often contains the sound of children's games, perhaps the echo of the painter's longed-for innocence. It is not until the very end that the walk through the studio, with its numerous contrapuntal colour-spray images, slows down its pace and lets in the light.... We see a hand which appears to seek shared relief in Lucebert's works.

maandag 22 maart 2010

Saving Polaroid the Impossible Project Photography

POLAPREMIUM BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE!
As the last quantities of carefully stored original Polaroid films are currently melting like snow in the sun, it is about time to introduce a new chapter of analog Instant Photography. To begin with, please make yourself comfortable at our new Impossible shop and update your bookmarks. In the meantime, we are preparing everything for the Impossible.

See for the Nostalgia Medium Polaroid Photography ...

See also Dash Snow Polaroids found-image art Photography ...

The Impossible Project from Ivo Buigues on Vimeo.

zaterdag 20 maart 2010

Play Powerlessness, vitality, love, aggression, expression Rotterdam Carel van Hees Photography

Powerlessness, vitality, love, aggression, expression...
>Play is about what it is like to be young, anywhere and in all eras. For three years the Rotterdam photographer Carel van Hees turned his camera on the youth of Rotterdam. He focused on their character, their aura and energy. His intense black and white photography is rooted in the strong Dutch documentary tradition of human interest photography. Lees verder ...

CAREL VAN HEES

Since 1980, Carel van Hees (b. 1954 in Rotterdam) has been working as documentary photographer in assignment for advertising agencies, companies, municipal institutions and for a range of weekly and monthly magazines such as Vrij Nederland and NRC M Magazine. Next to these assignments he concentrates on his own projects.

Play Powerlessness, vitality, love, aggression, expression Rotterdam Carel van Hees Photography

dinsdag 16 maart 2010

€ollecting Photograph$ Rudolf Koppitz William Klein Cindy Sherman Charles Jones TEFAF Maastricht 2010 Photography

NEW WORKS ON PAPER SECTION ATTRACTS FIRST-TIME EXHIBITORS TO TEFAF MAASTRICHT MARCH 12-21, 2010 see for more ... & lees verder ...

HELPFUL INFORMATION ON ALL ASPECTS OF PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTING ... & read more ...

Rudolf Koppitz 1925 vintage print (Euro 160.000)

Bewegungsstudie (Movement Study No. 1), 1925

This dramatic study of a group of Russian dancers... remains in the minds of all who view it.
Jo-Ann Conklin

'Bewegungsstudie' (Movement Study) is surely the most widely published and best known image in Austrian photography from the early decades of the last century. This is for good reason, as no photograph better captures the cultural strands that characterised the Austrian avant-garde at that time. Here one can see a graphic strength and compositional clarity that reflects the modernist ambitions initiated in the fine as in the applied arts by the Secession and by the Wiener Werkstätte. But what gives the image its power is the aura of mystery, of symbolist sensuality that resonates through this enigmatic grouping of the three uniformly coiffed and draped figures and the one single naked figure

William Klein -Street scene in Rome (Vintage 1957, 6300 euro)

Cindy Sherman - Untitled filmstill #33 (1979) , see for a review ...

Beans ca 1900 Charles Jones & lees verder ...

In 1981, at Bermondsey Market in London, Sean Sexton, the Irish born photographic collector, chanced upon the gelatin silver prints of Charles Jones. Dating from the turn of the century, these beguiling studio "portraits" of tulips and sunflowers, onions and turnips, plums and pears display both astonishing skill and startling originality. Their close-up viewpoint, long exposure and spare composition anticipates by decades the later achievements of modernist masters.

vrijdag 12 maart 2010

Collecting Photographs Choices by Willem Diepraam Photography

A peripatetic photographer, Willem Diepraam began his career as a journalist for the Dutch newsweekly, Vrij Nederland. He has also been an avid collector of photographs, publicist, curator of exhibitions, and organizer of exhibitions of his own work. The latter demonstrates a deep and genuine empathy for the plight of the world's underpriveleged as well as an impeccable eye for form and composition. A committed moralist and an incurable aesthete at the same time (there is no contradiction as far as he is concerned), Willem Diepraam has long been an established name in European journalism and art photography circles but remains virtually unknown in the United States.

The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam has acquired 400 original 20^th century photographic prints from the Diepraam-Kempadoo Collection. Famous photographers like André Kertész, Robert Capa, László Moholy-Nagy, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, William Klein, Cas Oorthuys and Eva Besnÿo are represented in this collection. This purchase will give the Rijksmuseum’s current collection of 20^th century photography a significant boost.

The broad and varied Diepraam-Kempadoo collection is an important addition to the Rijksmuseum’s current collection of photographs, from the perspectives of both ‘art’ and ‘history’. Some of the finer highlights from photographic art (Eva Watson-Schütze, Kertész, Moholy-Nagy) as well as important series from photo journalism by, for example, Capa, Oorthuys, Andriesse and Cartier-Bresson, which provide an insight into the turbulent history of the 20^th century, make up the Diepraam-Kempadoo Collection.

Examples from the collection include a shot by Kertész of the covered market in Paris - Les Halles - taken in 1927, a view of Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam by the surrealist French photographer Roger Parry taken in 1939 and a modernist composition by László Moholy-Nagy. There are also a few insightful photos to be found, taken by the ‘Camera in Hiding’, illegal work by Dutch photographers in the final year of the Second World War in the Netherlands. Photo journalism is well represented with captivating images taken by Robert Capa (the Chinese-Japanese War, 1938), Werner Bischof (the Korean War, 1952) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (Ghandi). Dutch photography makes its appearance with early work by such photographic artists as Ed van der Elsken, Johan van der Keuken and Eva Besnyö. The collection has been put together with much care and attention to these original, authentic and rare prints from the period.

The Rijksmuseum owns approximately 100,000 photos. Where previously the museum mainly specialised in collecting 19^th century photographs with the aim of illustrating the relationship between the art of printing and drawing, in recent years the museum has sought to build a high quality collection of 20^th century photos. The latter is now even more important since, when the museum reopens, a great deal of attention will be paid to the art and history of the 20^th century. Photography will be an integral part of this. The purchase of the Diepraam-Kempadoo Collection gives the Rijksmuseum’s current collection of 20^th century photography, comprising around 5,000 photos, a significant qualitative boost.

Privately Willem Diepraam is interested (far from the madding crowd) in photographs of : Ilse Bing, Peter Henry Emerson Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, Inge Morath, Marguerite Boux, Samuel Bourne, William B. Post, Wynn Bullock, Auguste Salzmann, Sanne Sannes, Gerard Fieret, William Mullins, Ernst Haas, Lee Friedlander, Elliott Erwitt, Eugene Smith, Andre Kertesz, Bill Brandt ...