10.31.2012

FRANKIE TORRES: Hurricane Sandy Aftermath

Photograph © Frankie Torres
 
Photograph © Frankie Torres

Photograph © Frankie Torres

 Photograph © Frankie Torres

Photograph © Frankie Torres

Photograph © Frankie Torres

Frankie Torres, born in Puerto Rico, is a US Marine Veteran who served from '03 to '07. He was stationed in California, Japan, and deployed to Iraq for 7 months. Photography became his passion in '09 photographing a wide range of subjects and he is now pursuing a career in commercial photography.

Torres photographed on foot after Superstorm Sandy through downtown Manhattan and shared a few of his images with us. 

10.23.2012

TOD PAPAGEORGE: 2012 Lucie Award Honoree


Achievement in Documentary

"Tod Papageorge began to photograph during his last semester at the University of New Hampshire, where he graduated in 1962 with a B.A. in English literature. After living for about a year apiece in Boston, San Francisco, and Europe, he moved to New York in late 1965 and was quickly accepted into a small circle of photographers engaged in transforming  the documentary “style” of the medium into a poetic form driven more by subjective perception than journalistic literalism. During the 1970s, he received two Guggenheim Fellowships in photography and a pair of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship-Grants. In 1979, following one-year appointments at MIT and then Harvard, he was named the Walker Evans Professor of Photography at the Yale School of Art, and, as the Director of Graduate Study in the photography area from then until 2011, shaped the Yale course into an M. F. A. program that, among other achievements, would produce thirty-five Guggenheim Fellows. 

Papageorge is the author of Public Relations: The Photographs of Garry Winogrand and Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, prepared in conjunction with exhibitions that he guest-curated for New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1977 and the Yale University Art Gallery in 1981. In 2011, Aperture published Core Curriculum, a collection of his writings on photography.

Tod Papageorge’s photographic work has been widely exhibited nationally and in Europe, and is represented in over thirty major public collections, including those of the Museums of Modern Art in New York  and San Francisco as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. It has also been collected and published in three monographs: Passing through Eden: Photographs of Central Park (Steidl, 2007), American Sports, 1970, or How We Spent the War in Vietnam (Aperture, 2008), and Opera Citta (punctum, 2010). In 2008, Papageorge was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and, in the following year, invited to the American Academy in Rome as a Resident in the Visual Arts. In 2010, he was awarded the Rome Commission in Photography."–The Lucie Foundation

10.21.2012

UN / COMMON SKIN: 2012 Thesis Exhibition Curated by Michael Foley

The Well of Renewal 
 
Chrysalis 
 
Reflections of a Collective Memory

Alone | Together 

 Glimpse (Desire for a presence) 

Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten
 Desire of Men

Voiceless 
 
 My Son

 
 Greener Grass

Bound To Be
 
Hoboken Passing

Making the Unconscious Conscious
Tabula Rasa
Maryana Hordeychuk Recipe For Hunger  

In Search of the Divine 

 
Within (Dance Photography)

Sugar High

 Perception | Veil


Curated by Michael Foley
Masters of Professional Studies in Digital Photography-
2012 Thesis Exhibition
 
“We are all brothers under the skin—and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.” Ayn Rand

Michael Foley: “un/common skin brings together 19 beautiful, creative and expressive minds in a coherent visual examination of their worlds. As artists, we share in common our need and desire to make sense of our existence by creating a visual language and yet we are all capable of expressing a profound vision of the world that is clearly unique to each one of us.”

MPS Digital Photography Chair Katrin Eismann: “This year’s graduating class mirrors the great diversity of the School of Visual Arts and New York City. Students came from Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Lebanon, India, Italy, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Ukraine and the United States, to delve into contemporary digital photographic techniques and practices.” 
 
SVA Gallery 209 East 23rd Street, New York, NY
October 18 – November 10, 2012 
Opening Reception: October 24, 6 – 8pm

10.17.2012

NADAV KANDER: Talks To William Avedon Opens at Flowers Gallery | New York


Chongqing VI (Sunday Afternoon), Chongqing Municipality, 2006
© Nadav Kander,  Courtesy Flowers Gallery, NY/London

Nanjing II (Metal Palm), Jiangsu Province. 2007
© Nadav Kander,  Courtesy Flowers Gallery, NY/London

Nanjing III (after Las Vegas), Jiangsu Province, 2007
 © Nadav Kander,  Courtesy Flowers Gallery, NY/London

Three Gorges Dam IV (Flood Level), Yichang, Hubei Province, 2007
© Nadav Kander,  Courtesy  Flowers Gallery, NY/London
 Old Fengdu II, (Looking At New Fengdu), Chongqing Municipality, 2006 
© Nadav Kander,  Courtesy  Flowers Gallery, NY/London

"Nadav Kander’s photographs, Yangtze – The Long River at Flowers Gallery, New York, capture an authentic un-staged snapshot of people's lives in a region undergoing the most significant and broad sweeping changes to their physical environment in 5,000 years of their recorded history." –William Avedon
+  +  +
William Avedon: I’ve lived in China the past 12 years and was struck by the sensitivity and depth of understanding of Chinese culture portrayed in your photographs there. What led you to photograph China and the Yangtze River?

Nadav Kander: I wanted to work in China not because I wanted to be a documentary photographer within that landscape, but rather because I found it a troubled land; the reading I had done, the news casts that I saw, it seemed to be a country ill at ease. I think that always attracts me because I can take the kind of pictures that bring up emotions in the viewer that go to the collective consciousness of mankind; reminding us that we are vulnerable, that we have dark sides that we like to shy away from, but I think my photographs make you turn back to that and realize that through vulnerability we connect. So I don’t really see myself as a documentary photographer although I do realize that any series one takes in the world, provided they’re not obviously Photoshopped, become a document. I certainly don’t mind that fact but it was never my intention. I don’t go out to document what it’s like to be in China or how much water goes down the river.

+  +  +
William Avedon: Your photo in which the local police or government officials are showing on a large ruler where the level of the floodwater is going to reach is particularly interesting and beautiful [above, Three Gorges Dam IV (Flood Level), Yichang, Hubei Province, 2007]. How did you get those subjects posed in that photo? How did you meet them? How did that shot come about?

Nadav Kander: Oh, I like that one. Well I would just snoop around. That was the trip I went around the Dam wall, and I would just ask people to drive and just intuitively see a road and say, ‘Would you try to go up there?’ And they would go up there and I would get out. Some days you’re in a car and you kick some stones around and it just doesn’t seem to be working. You might look through your viewfinder and, I don’t know, it’s just not there. And ten miles on you might get out of the car and everything seems to work, the atmosphere is just perfect, and you make really good pictures. I can’t explain it better than that.

But with those guys, I think they might have been wandering around there measuring for more building. At that time, 2007, the Dam wall had been finished being built but the surrounding area was just becoming a concrete jungle all the time. So I think that’s what they were doing, they were sort of measuring where the water will be because it still has 70 meters to rise.


+  + +
Nadav Kander: ...there was one area, the Old Fengdu, where that picture of that man is sitting with his back to me in blue underpants [above, Old Fengdu II (Looking at New Fengdu), Chongqing Municipality, 2006], reminiscent to me of a Caspar Friedrich painting. Where I went to the old Fengdu and saw how most of the town, certainly at a lower level, had been flattened already. As the water was creeping up, they were leveling more and more of the buildings rather than just vacating them and letting the water come around. They had to level everything because they were worried that ships might snag their hulls on buildings so they would bulldoze everything. It was a kind of cruel end to any village or any town that was in the Yangtze’s way,in the rising of the Yangtze. So that was one place, that’s called ‘The City of Ghosts’ because of folklore and ancestry they have. They feel that dead people inhabit that city. That was pretty much covered and they built opposite on the opposite bank, which is what that man sitting in his blue underpants is looking at, the new Fengdu, which was to house about 7 million and when we went there, it was pretty empty. 

+  +  +
William Avedon: Tell me about the choice of using the quote by the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu in your book? I thought that was a very beautiful choice. How did that come about?

Nadav Kander: I did quite a lot of reading for deeper understanding of the passages of time that have passed China by. He came up a lot and I love that, ‘The State Is Shattered, Mountains and Rivers Remain.’ It’s really powerful. I think what tips its hat for me is how whatever happens to yourself, to humans, there’s always a path onwards. Whatever the world can throw at you, whatever sadness you have, however difficult your life becomes, you can choose to go through this in a way that makes you grow. So it makes a lot of sense for me – it’s almost Buddhist. (read the entire Interview here)

 Nadav Kander: Yangtze - The Long River
October 18th - November 24, 2012
Flowers Gallery, New York
529 West 20th Street



ANDERSON + LOW: Manga Dreams at The Met

Edwin Low and Jonathan Anderson 
photo © Elizabeth Paul Avedon/all rights reserved
Manga Dreams
© Anderson + Low/All Rights Reserved

Untitled (Kit The Swordsman) 2009
© Anderson + Low/All Rights Reserved
 
I spoke with the incredible photography team Anderson + Low at the opening reception for "After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. After Photoshop explores various ways in which artists have used digital technology to alter the photographic image over the past 20 years. Anderson + Low's photograph, Untitled (Kit The Swordsman), is on exhibition in Gallery 851 at The Met.

EA: Where did the idea originate for this piece?

Jonathan Anderson: The piece is part of a project called Manga Dreams. The original idea was in 2004, we finally shot the project in 2007 and 2008 and it was released in 2011. It’s based around the influence of Asian comics and Anime movies on youth culture worldwide, not only the Asian diaspora, but increasingly in the West as well. We have particular interest in identity and costume and the projection of self in our work; and this series is part of that.

We created this hybrid world that’s part real, part invented and headhunted people we felt had the spirit of Manga characters inside them, brought them into the studio and helped create new identities for them by negotiation and collaboration with them and this is the result.

This is one of a big series of about sixty works. About half of them are tableaux like this and about half of them are unadorned portraits.
 
Some of the work was shown in the Venice Biennale last year; there is this piece at the Met and we’ve had solo exhibitions of the project in museums including La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, in the UK [Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts] and Canada this year, plus group shows in The Netherlands, Taiwan and Beijing. Works were also acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. There’s going to be a large exhibition in April of 2013 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

EA: Where did you two meet?

Anderson: We met in a photographic facility in London 25 years ago October the 12th this year. We’ve been working as the team 'Anderson + Low' for over twenty years. Edwin Low: We submitted some work for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It was quite unique because it was the first time they accepted Photography as an art form in the Royal Academy. The rest is history.
Anderson: We thought we’d better take ourselves seriously and carry on, so that's where it all started.


The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
 September 25, 2012–May 27, 2013

10.14.2012

FAKING IT: The Opening for "Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop" at The Met

Io + Gatto, 1932 (right)  (c) Wanda Wulz

Curator Elisabeth Biondi with 
"Bill Cunningham New York" Producer, Philip Gefter

The Galleries were packed. 
 The following are just a few of the evenings guests.

Manga Dreams, Untitled (Kit The Swordsman) 2009
Edwin Low and Jonathan Anderson
 
Mia Fineman, Asst Curator, Department of Photographs

Known collectively as MANUAL

Okinawa 001, 2008 and Okinawa 009, 2008 
 by Osamu James Nakagawa

 Collector Wm Hunt and Author, Producer Philip Gefter 
 
 Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
October 11, 2012—January 27, 2013
VIEW:

FAKING IT: Curated by Mia Fineman

 Mia Fineman, Asst Curator, Department of Photographs
Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop

EA: How long did you research for this exhibition? Mia Fineman: About three years traveling all over Europe and North America visiting collections, museums, archives, and private collectors. EA: Are there certain images that are your favorites? Mia Fineman: I was extremely happy to discover the negatives for the Yves Klein “Leap Into The Void”.  That was very exciting. I’ve always loved that image. That would probably be what I’m proudest of.

 Leap into the Void, 1960
© Yves Klein, ADAGP, Paris; Photo: Shunk-Kender 
© Roy Lichtenstein Foundation 

 Dimanche–Le Journal d'un seul jour
Yves Klein, November 27, 1960

Mia Fineman: I also love the vernacular images of the decapitations. EA: I had no idea there were so many. Mia Fineman: I didn’t either until I’d started working on this show seeing so many of them and wondered why this was such a popular motif. I eventually figured out the motif of decapitation was a big thing in stage magic at the same time.

 Man Serving Head on a Platter Date, ca. 1900
William Robert Bowles (1861–1918 Hopkinsville, Kentucky)
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2011

 Man Juggling His Own Head, ca. 1880
Saint Thomas D'Aquin

He Lost His Head, 1910s
Unknown, American
Gift of Robert, Catherine and Molly Yoskowitz, 2011

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop
 October 11, 2012—January 27, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 ALSO VIEW:
Faking It: The Show | Faking It: The Opening