What i´m reading this days!!!

 

 

 

Art historian Dr. Ralf-P. Seippel has curated this historic photographic overview of South African culture and lifestyle from the 1950’s to the present. Comprising mostly of black and white photography, this extensive touring exhibition gives insight into South Africa’s social, political and cultural aspects, as well as the economic situation and the struggle for survival in the mega-cities. It shows how South Africa has evolved into the modern nation we know today.

 

1950-1976 Apartheid

1976-1994 Struggle

1994-2010 Freedom

 

Images by photographers including Bonile Bam, Jodi Bieber, Pierre Crocquet, David Goldblatt, Bob Gosani, George Hallett, Alf Kumalo, Ranjith Kally, Peter Magubane, Gideon Mendel, Santu Mofokeng, G.R. Naidoo, Cedric Nunn, Mikhael Subotzky, Andrew Tshabangu, Paul Weinberg, Gille de Vlieg and Sam Nzima, as well as those from DRUM Magazine whose names are today unknown, provide us with individual insights into life in South Africa over the past 60 years.

Photographs from the 50s and 60s published in DRUM tell the story of life in the period of Apartheid and reveal the naked truth of segregation, as well as documenting sports events, football stars and a night life full of jazz and dancing. Images from the 70s, such as Sam Nzima’s iconic photograph of wounded Hector Pieterson, shot down by the police in Soweto, 16 June 1976, document the growing struggle and resistance of the anti-apartheid movements. Further photographs from the 80s and 90s highlight brutal murders, demonstrations, the violence and brutality of imprisonment and the fight for freedom. Finally, photographers working in the 21st Century show a South Africa of recovery and immense development, democracy and freedom, alongside an understanding of the work still to be done and the inequalities that remain. In this new South Africa everyone can vote, there is freedom of speech and gender equality allows women to show their strengths.

 

 

South African Photography 1950-2010

 

Edited by Delia Klask, Ralf-P. Seippel, texts by Luli Callinicos, Andries Walter Oliphant, Wiebke Ratzeburg, graphic design by hackenschuh com. design
German/English
2010. 160 pp., 129 ills. in duotone, 10 in color
25.40 x 32.10 cm

ISBN 978-3-7757-2718-1

What i´m reading this days!!!

Glamour of the Gods: Hollywood Portraits

Glamour of the Gods is a survey of Hollywood portraiture from the industry's golden age, a period lasting from 1920 to 1960. All the photographs were selected from the astonishing archive of the John Kobal Foundation in London. John Kobal was the twentieth century's pre-eminent authority on Hollywood photography, and was systematically sought to understand photography's important role in creating and marketing the great stars central to Hollywood's allure.

Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Humphrey Bogart are among the famous faces featured in Glamour of the Gods. In many cases the photographs in John Kobal's collection define their era, and most of the reproductions are from the archive's original vintage prints.

Film historian Robert Dance has written about John Kobal's important place in Hollywood history and offers an overview of the portrait photographer's place in the Hollywood studio system. Critic and historian John Russell Taylor's introduction draws from his many years of friendship with Kobal.

Placing photography at the centre of Hollywood Glamour of the Gods explores how actors and actresses had a profound effect on how beauty and celebrity was seen and understood then, and how it continues to live on.

 National Portrait Gallery

What i´m reading this days!!!

Robert Capa - The Definitive Collection

This book represents the most definitive selection of Robert Capa's work ever published, a collection of 937 photographs selected by Capa's brother, Cornell Capa (himself a noted Life photographer), and his biographer, Richard Whelan, who meticulously re-examined all of Robert Capa's contact sheets to compile this master set of images.

This book opens with a biographical introduction illustrated with rare photographs of Capa, and closes with a chronology of his life.

What i´m reading this days!!!

Auto Focus

 The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography

Auto Focus features the work of 75 contemporary photographers from around the world for whom self-portraiture is a central part of their work.

Issues of identity national, sexual, racial, personal or artistic are key to all the images featured in this book.

In an extended introduction, historical examples are used to enrich the understanding of how self-portraiture was first used in photography and to illustrate how the contemporary self-portrait derived and developed from those origins. The book, organized around five themes dominant in contemporary self-portraiture, provides a clear guide for readers through a significant and dynamic genre.

This book includes an introduction that uses historical examples to enrich the understanding of how self-portraiture was first used in photography and to illustrate how self-portrait derived and developed from those origins.

About the Author

Susan Bright is a curator and writer. She has contributed to numerous publications and is the author of Art Photography Now. In addition to organizing international conferences and seminars on art and photography, she was formerly assistant curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London, curator at the Association of Photographers, and served as acting director for the MA Photography (Historic and Contemporary) program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Bright’s previous exhibitions and catalogs include Something Out of Nothing, How We Are: Photographing Britain, and Face of Fashion. She currently lives and works in New York, where she is a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts.

What i´m reading this days!!!

Willy Ronis 
une poétique de l'engagement

Willy Ronis was born in Paris in 1910. He became a full-time photographer in 1945.
He joined Doisneau, Brassaï and others at the Rapho Agency. He was the first French photographer to work for LIFE Magazine, and Edward Steichen exhibited him at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953 in a show called Four French Photographers. He was also part of the Family of Man exhibit. The Afterimage Gallery gave him what was perhaps his first American art gallery show in 1985

What i´m reading this days!!!

Giorgia Fiorio

Legio Patria Nostra - Être ser Torero - American Fireman - Men of the sea

Giorgia Fiorio, Italian singer, actress, photojournalist and photographer was born on July 23, 1967 in Turin, Italy.

She attended the International Center of Photography in New York and produced her first in-depth photo essay on boxers. Since then she has worked primarily on long-term self-directed projects, such as "Men" which resulted in five monographs - Legio Patria Nostra (French Foreign Legion), Etre/Ser Torero (bullfighters), Boxin' USA, American Firemen, and Men of the Sea - as well as Des Hommes (Marval 2003). Her present work is on the theme of spirituality. She joined Contact Press Images in 1994, and in 1997 was named Documentary Photographer of the Year by American Photography magazine.
She is represented exclusively by art dealer Cyrille de Gunzburg for the worldwide sale of her original prints. She is based in Paris.

 

Giorgia's project "Men" began in 1990, a project exploring closed male communities: Ukrainian miners, New York boxers, the Foreign Legion, Spanish bullfighters, American fire fighters and Men of the Sea, "Men who are rooted in archaic worlds at home with centuries-old experiences, rituals and gestures".
This project has been captured in six books, published in Paris. In 2002, Stern devoted their Spezial issue to her, and her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Aperture, the Independent Magazine, etc.

Future Images by Mario Cresci

This book is intended to explore at an international level the works of some of the emerging artists who use the photographic medium without adopting the generic schemata of traditional photography.

Since the 1960s, the author, Mario Cresci, has taken an approach to photography that aims to free the medium from the specificity of its own representational language. In this book, the sum total of his artistic experience, together with a busy teaching activity, has allowed him to articulate a desire to establish a link between the various ways of investigating the visual world that are modifying the disciplinary foundations of photography.

Although not of fundamental importance in relation to the artistic transformation of photography, it is certain that the advent of the new technologies, both with regard to the cameras themselves and the printing of digital images, has contributed to new reflections that, at a theoretical level,had already been undertaken in the 1970s,when the Conceptual Art movement was at its height. In short, one could say that we are now experiencing an epoch-making transition from the analogue process to the digital one, or, to put it more simply, we have progressed from the darkroom to the lightroom.

Exposed - Voyeurism, surveillance and the camera

Tate Modern's current exhibition offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of voyeurism and surveillance.

With photographs dating back to the late-19th Century, 'Exposed' offers a fascinating look at pictures made without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the images present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on famous people and taboo subjects.

Beginning with the idea of the 'unseen photographer', 'Exposed' presents 250 works by celebrated artists and photographers including Brassaï's erotic Secret Paris of the 1930s images; Weegee's iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe; and Nick Ut's reportage image of children escaping napalm attacks in the Vietnam War. Sex and celebrity is an important part of the exhibition, presenting photographs of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Paris Hilton on her way to prison and the assassination of John F Kennedy. Other renowned photographers represented in the show include Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton and Man Ray.

Much of 'Exposed' focuses on surveillance, including works by both amateur and press photographers, and images produced using automatic technology such as CCTV. The issues raised are particularly relevant, with debates raging on the rights of individuals and the increasing use of surveillance. 'Exposed' confronts these issues and their implications head-on.

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera can be seen at the Tate Modern in London from today until 3 October 2010.

David Douglas Duncan - Photo Nomad

Photo Nomad, a unique autobiography in images from seven decades of Duncan's photographic career.

The legendary photographs of David Douglas Duncan explore the broad range of human nature, from the most quiet notes of life to the crashing crescendos of war.
Duncan began taking pictures for newspapers in the mid-1930s, then joined the Marines, where he produced some of the most moving images of World War II.

With Life magazine, he documented the end of British rule in India and covered conflicts in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Korea with clarity and compassion. Returning to the battlefield with the escalation of war in Vietnam, he produced two more books that became icons of the American soldiers' experience. Since then, he has produced books on such diverse subjects as Picasso's making of a painting to the sunflowers of France, with forays into the world of tragic personal loss. Still exuberant in his eighth decade. Duncan's keen eye and heart continue to illuminate the human experience.

Paolo Ventura - Winter Stories

Winter Stories" continues Ventura's imaginary recreation of prewar Italy, in photographs of wonderfully evocative sets and figures he constructs himself. Because every detail of these sites is meticulously realized, the work is as seductive as a magic act; you know it's all an elaborate fake, but you're enjoying it too much to locate the flaws.

Paolo Ventura - Winter Stories

 

 

Irving Penn - Small Trades

Irving Penn (1917 - 2009)

Photographer  (b. 1917) is renowned for his innovative contributions to portrait, still life, and fashion photography, and a career that has spanned more than six decades at Vogue magazine. In 1950, Vogue assigned Penn to photograph workers in Paris, and thus his monumental work The Small Trades began. Created in 1950 and 1951 in Paris, London, and New York, The Small Trades consists of portraits of skilled trades people dressed in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their respective trades. Capturing the humble coal heaver and the crisply dressed waiter with equal directness, Penn's arresting portraits also underscore fascinating cultural differences.

The Small Trades was Penn's most extensive body of work, and he returned to it over many decades, producing ever more exacting prints. Two hundred and six unique images from the series are flawlessly reproduced in this book. In addition, the introductory essay describes the history and context of The Small Trades series and its importance to Penn's career and the history of photography. An interview with Edmonde Charles-Roux, the chief editor for French Vogue from 1952 to 1966, who assisted him on the assignment in Paris, provides fascinating insights of the Paris sittings.

The obituaries and memoirs full or praise are going to continue for some time. Here’s an interesting one at the Design Observer.

 

An exhibition of the series will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from September 9, 2009, through January 10, 2010. Video 

Lisboa, cidade triste e alegre

O livro intitulado Lisboa, cidade triste e alegre foi editado em 1959, embora as fotografias que o compõem tenham sido primeiro apresentadas numa exposição realizada em 1958.
Durante vários dias e noites Victor Palla e Costa Martins misturaram-se com os habitantes de Lisboa, sobretudo com os de Alfama e Bairro Alto, e registaram, a preto e branco, o triste e alegre quotidiano dessas muitas e desvairadas gentes. Deste registo, resultaram seis mil fotografias, das quais os seus autores escolheram cerca de duzentas para integrar o livro. Fizeram-nas acompanhar de excertos de poemas de autores portugueses, como Jorge de Sena, David Mourão Ferreira e José Gomes Ferreira, optando, deliberadamente, por não as identificar, em termos de autoria. O livro foi um fiasco editorial.
O público foi indiferente - ou recusou-o por não o entender - a este verdadeiro “poema gráfico” de Lisboa e dos seus habitantes. Como consequência deste desinteresse generalizado, ele constitui uma obra rara.

Lisbon: Sad and Happy City is a lovingly produced volume of poetry and richly printed images depicting the Portugese capital in the late 1950s.For three years architects Victor Palla (1922-2005) and Costa Martins (1922-2006) recorded Lisbon street life shooting naturally lit black and white photographs influenced in no small part by the Italian neo-realist cinema of the time. Often their most engaging subjects were found in the then poor quarters of Bairro Alto and Alfama.
Interspersing the carefully laid out photographs in the book is the work of Lisbon’s poets, including poems by the melancholy recluse and creator of alter egos Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Certainly it must be the sadness of the poetry that is refered to in the title as there are no images here that evoke much sorrow, in fact some photographs of smiling shopkeepers are more picturesque than is helpful. Was life always so convivial during the Salazar regime?
On publication Lisboa: cidade triste e alegre met with critical indiference and no further editions followed the initial print run of 2,000 copies. However, like many books featured in The Photobook: A History (Volume 1, Phaidon, 2004) by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger the few remaining copies have seen their value rise dramatically, and the volume featured here was sold at auction for double the reserve price of £4,500 ($8,865) at Christie’s in London in May 2007.

The book has a 20 page index of photographic information detailing the architects use of Plus-X and Tri-X, Leica M3 and Leitz Elmar 50 and 90mm lenses, but despite their attention to detail Lisboa never quite enriches one’s understanding of the city to the degree that Brasaï‘s Séville en Fête (1956) enriches ones understanding that other great Iberian city.
Partly it is the breadth of coverege that gives the Hungarian exile the advantage. Palla and Martins produced a wonderful volume, but they never match the caught moments and eye for graphic form of the master Brassaï. Certainly some of the more touristy looking images would hve been better edited out (or, in that perrenial trick used when presenting lesser work, printed very large).

Of course it is often easier for an outsider to see the wholeness of a place, but then again Brassaï was a great photographer.
The dust jacket is printed with quotes on photography by a host of master photographers from Ansel Adams to Minor White. However, the quotes do not refer to the book.

Stanley Kubrick - The Photographer.

Stanley Kubrick

The most visual Directors, like Kurosawa, Lean and Fellini, have some sort of a visual arts background. Stanley Kubrick is no exception. He started out as a Professional Photographer.

Stanley got his first camera (a Graflex) at age 13 and was the class photographer at Taft High School.

He was just 16 when he submitted a "staged photograph" (of a News Vendor the day after President Roosevelt died) to Look Magazine and was first published. This led to a 5 year career in the magazine (1945-1950). At 17 years old, he was the youngest photographer on staff.

I am amazed at the depth and technical mastery of these photographs, specially since they were taken when Stanley was just between 17 to 22 years of age.

Roy Rudolph DeCarava

Roy DeCarava was born in New York City’s Harlem, on December 9, 1919. From 1938 to 1940 he studied painting at Cooper Union Institute, from 1940 to 1942 painting and printmaking with Elton Fax at the Harlem Art Center, and drawing and painting with Charles White at George Washington Carver Art School in 1944. He originally purchased a camera (in 1946) to document his work in printmaking, but by 1949 photography itself was his sole artistic focus. He went on to establish himself as a post-war street photographer of daily life, specifically African-American life in New York. DeCarava was not the first photographer to shoot Harlem, but his commitment to interpreting it in artistic terms sets him apart from the history of social documentary established there.

His first photography exhibition was in 1950 at Mark Pepper’s Forty Fourth Street Gallery. There were 160 prints in exhibition, and Edward Steichen purchased three for the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. There Homor Page, a student of Steiglitz, befriended DeCarava and began discussing darkroom technique with him. Soon thereafter, DeCarava started to experiment with a darker tonal range. His studies of the New York jazz world, begun a few years later, further developed his penchant for dark printing. While the deep tones in his pictures sometimes push the edge of legibility, both true blacks and true whites are rare.

In 1952 DeCarava became the first African-American recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The year of the fellowship was remarkably fruitful, producing such important prints as Nightfeeding. At first rejected by publishers, photographs from the project were eventually published with the help of Langston Hughes in 1955 as The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Shortly thereafter, DeCarava opened one of the first galleries in New York devoted to photography, A Photographer’s Gallery, which would feature exhibitions of Bernice Abbott, Harry Callahan, and Minor White in the two years it was open. At the same time, he began a series on jazz musicians that would occupy him for a decade.

Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott was born in Springford, Ohio, in 1898. After graduating from Ohio State University she moved to New York to study journalism, but eventually decided on sculpture and painting.

It was the time of prohibition, illegal speakeasies and real estate speculation. Abbott like other aspiring artists who had come to Greenwich Village to escape America's increasing commercialism felt alienated. Many left for Paris. Berenice Abbott joined the exodus in the spring of 1921. When Berenice Abbott met her fellow American Man Ray in Paris, who had also moved there in 1921, he was looking for a new darkroom assistant. Someone who would follow his orders and advice. That is how Abbott became a photographer. At Man Ray's thriving studio in Montparnasse she quickly learned from the master of stylization and abstract composition.Instead of a pay rise Man Ray offered her his studio to make her own portraits. Quickly, her reputation rivaled his. Their styles however differed since Abbott favored naturalness and spontaneity.

Abbott returned to the United States in 1929 and embarked on a project to photograph New York. In 1935 she managed to obtain funding for this venture from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its Federal Art Project.


From 1935 until 1939, she devoted her time to photographing the city, a project she named in April 1936: "Changing New York". It was a very ambitious one with three sections: "Material Aspect" was divided into buildings (historical, picturesque, architecturally significant, deluxe) and city squares; "Means of Life" was divided into transportation, communications, service of supplies; "People and How They Live" was planned with seven sections: types, city streets, interiors, recreation, culture and education, religion, signs of the crisis.

Berenice Abbott died at her home in Maine on December 9, 1991.