PHOTOESPAÑA - Interview with Jem Southam

"Looking at the world with a camera is hugely rewarding."
- Jem Southam

Follow the link below to read the interview....

PHOTOESPAÑA

Levitating Man/Photographic Illusion = AWESOME!

Came across this today during my morning Google Reader routine on John Foster's Accidental Mysteries Blog. Foster himself found it on a blog by Richard Wiseman (a psychologist and magician!) - I just love the blog-go-round!

At any rate, the image is a wonderful example of truth and illusion in photography!

Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance

Opens Friday at The Guggenheim in NYC - can't wait to see this show in May!

March 26–September 6, 2010

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, this art embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise irrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession, both collective and individual, with accessing the past. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, and to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as film, performance, and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Haunted will feature recent acquisitions, many of which will be exhibited by the museum for the first time. Included in the show will be work by such artists as Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, Zoe Leonard, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists. This exhibition is curated by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator.

This exhibition is made possible by the International Director’s Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Additional support is provided by grants from The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation. The Leadership Committee for Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance is gratefully acknowledged.

Douglas Gordon, Bootleg (Empire), 1998. Video installation, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of the artist, 2004.99

Above content from The Guggenheim-New York

Twitter with The Whitney?

Sure! Why not?

Have you ever wanted to ask a Biennial curator why they chose a certain work, or what it's like to try to capture what's going on in American art today? On March 23 you'll have a chance. Join 2010 co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and WNYC art critic Carolina Miranda for an online Twitter Tour of the Biennial. As Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times says, "For some of us, it may be the first time we visit the Whitney in our pajamas." Submit questions via Twitter using the hash tags #whitneybiennial or #whibi before or during the tour, which begins at 2:30 pm.

Above content from The Whitney Museum of American Art

Chrystel Lebas at Witzenhausen in Chelsea

I was so disheartened to get this announcement from Chrystel last week, as her show in New York will close before I have a chance to get up there. BUT....if any of you will be in the area between now and March 27, please go have a look.

I was fortunate to meet Chrystel while at a conference last year in the U.K., and she is a remarkable artist dealing with time, space and memory through the medium of both photography and video in a very subtle yet captivating manner. I recently purchased her book Time in Space for the Olin Library as well - go and have a look!

Information on her exhibition in New York is below:

Witzenhausen Gallery New York is proud to present work by French artist Chrystel Lebas. The exhibition is on show from February 25th till March 27th at the Witzenhausen Gallery in New York.

Chrystel Lebas’s work is drawn from her interest in looking at how landscapes contain psychological significance in relation to historical events, legends, Fairy Tales and our childhood memories and how to communicate these within an image.

She employs photography and the moving image, often pushing the apparatuses to their limits of their functionality to produce images. The works are mainly produced during the twilight hours, or as in the French expression, “Entre chien et loup”, translated in English as “Between Dog and Wolf”: the moment when twilight embodies the transition from dog to wolf, when it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between the howling sound coming from the two animals.

Above content from Witzenhausen Gallery

For more information on the work of Chrystel Lebas, visit her website: http://www.chrystellebas.com

New Yorker Critic Peter Schjeldahl's Whitney Biennial Review

...in audio slideshow format - a nice summation. He seems to find the show rather dull, but nice. He thinks we'll be glad, though, if we go!

Click HERE for the audio slideshow

Whitney Biennial Reviews Begin

Click the link below to read what The New York Times has to say. Not a bad review, really - I'm looking forward to going up to see the show in May. Have a glance at the slideshow within the Times article to see a few representative images as well.

I've also included a link to another Times review of the Brucennial 2010 exhibition in Soho - a sort of Whitney Biennial counter show of sorts, put together by the five-person art collective known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Interestingly and/or appropriately, this collective also has work in the Whitney.

Click HERE for the New York Times Whitney Biennial Review
Click HERE for the New York Times Brucennial 2010 Review

Above image:
Bruce High Quality Foundation's "We Like America and America Likes Us" and Lorraine O'Grady prints on the wall.
Photo: Chad Batka for The New York Times

Danny Lyon - The Bikeriders @ Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona

The exhibition opens this Saturday, February 27th. The museum will hold a reception from 5:00 to 7:30 p.m. It's just a quick drive to Daytona - about 40 minutes, and well worth it. The book that accompanies this series of photographs had a huge influence on my own development as an artist and photographer. It's really wonderful work, and I highly recommend heading over to the museum to view these prints in person.

"The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble. The real question faced by a photographer or journalist today is not, of course, the type of film that is inside their camera; although that matters. The real question is what's inside their head. That has always been the question and will always be the question. [The Bikeriders] is a personal record, dealing mostly with bikeriders whom I know and care for. If anything has guided this work beyond the facts of the worlds presented it is what I have come to believe is the spirit of the bikeriders: the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic or, on occasion, into oblivion." - Danny Lyon

About the exhibition:

In 1968, just before Easy Rider roared its way into American consciousness, Danny Lyon finished The Bikeriders. After four years with the Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Gang, he had created one of the defining photography projects of the 1960s: The Bikeriders, and pioneered the style that has come to be known as the “New Journalism.” With its mix of grit, realism and romanticism, and its ground-breaking use of the bikers own stories and accounts, The Bikeriders was a landmark collection that documented the abandon and risk of motorcycle gangs, and powerfully propelled motorcycle counterculture into the mainstream American consciousness. The images and interviews in The Bikeriders are as raw, alive, and dramatic today as they were nearly four decades ago.

Above content from The Southeast Museum of Photography
More information on the exhibition can be found on the SEMP website - HERE.

Photographer Zoe Strauss - 10 Year I-95 Project

Every May for the past 9 years, Zoe Strauss has mounted a public art exhibition under the ramp of I-95 in her hometown of Philadelphia. Each year, she has edited down from hundreds (if not more likely, thousands) of images to a final selection of 231 photographs. The exhibition this May will conclude her 10 year project. I highly recommend signing up to follow her blog to watch the editing process unfold. Strauss posts both new and old images and comments on those that she thinks (at the moment) are in, out, or maybe - and why.

Click HERE to access her blog, and watch the video below for more information on the project.
Click twice on the video to access the full screen version on YouTube.

Harry Ransom Lecture: Sarah Greenough

Harry Ransom Lecture: Sarah Greenough

Click the link above to find out more about this upcoming lecture that will apparently be made available via live webcast, beginning at approximately 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 25th.

More information on the lecture is below (below content from Marketing Photos with Mary Virginia Swanson)

Greenough presents the lecture “Transforming Destiny into Awareness: Robert Frank’s The Americans, 1959.”

Sarah Greenough was also the founding curator of the National Gallery of Art’s department of photographs in 1990. Since that time she has organized numerous exhibitions at the National Gallery that have traveled to museums around the world, including Paul Strand: An American Vision (1990), Walker Evans: Subway and Streets (1991), Harry Callahan (1996), Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (2001), Roger Fenton (2004), and Irving Penn: Platinum Prints (2005). She has written several award-winning publications, including Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (1983), On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of the Art of Photography (1989), Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set (2002), André Kertész(2005), and The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978 (2007). She most recently organized Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans.”

Exhibition Opportunity for Undergraduates @ Manifest in Cincinnati

For those of you who graduated last year or plan to graduate this year or next (class of 2009, 2010, 2011), this is a great opportunity for you all...
6th Annual

RITES OF PASSAGE

JUNIORS, SENIORS, and
GRADUATES ONE-YEAR OUT

$300 BEST OF SHOW AWARD

Postmark Deadline for Entry: March 5, 2010

Click HERE for specifics

Prisencolinensinainciusol

Wow. This is pretty much the best thing EVER. Diego Pinedo, a student in The Photograph as Language course, posted this on his class blog. We're working with a population with the acquired language disorder, aphasia - which led Diego to think about what English sounds like to those who don't speak the language. The lyrics of this song are apparently pure gibberish. The song's artist states that "the song is about "incommunicability" because in modern times people are not able to communicate to each other anymore. He added the only word we need is prisencolinensinainciusol, which is supposed to stand for "universal love."

AWESOME!!

(Click on the video to access the full-screen version on YouTube)

RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered @ Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach

I highly, highly recommend visiting this exhibition if you are in Palm Beach between now and May 2nd - in fact, if you're not, take a trip down. I plan to! I ordered this book for the Olin Library last year, so you can preview the work beforehand if you like.

More information on the exhibition is below.

Above Image: Copyright Fusco/Magnum Photos

Paul Fusco: RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered
Organized by the Norton Museum of Art
February 13 - May 2, 2010

On June 5th, 1968, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles as he campaigned for the presidential nomination. Kennedy's body was flown to New York City for a memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and then carried by train from New York to Washington D.C. for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the railway tracks to pay their final respects to Kennedy. On board the train was Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, on assignment for LOOK Magazine. From inside the train, Fusco took some 2000 pictures of the mourners—black, white, rich, poor, in large groups and on their own. The resulting images are one of the most powerful and affecting series of photographs ever taken. This commemorative edition of 20 images was printed in 2008 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

Click HERE to access the museum website.

Borderland Youth Documentary Project

Thought some of you in The Photograph as Language class (and others, of course) might be interested in having a look at some of the work my friend and colleague Jason Reed is doing down in Texas. Below is a video interview where Jason talks about the work. You can find out more about the program by signing up to follow the Borderland Youth Blog as well.

(Click directly on the video to access the full-screen version on YouTube)

Life After Stroke Awards

This information comes from Anna's blog, Through the Looking Glass - thanks, Anna! Follow the links below to watch videos from recent winners in the Art category. You'll note that the severity and types of aphasia are quite distinct from one another, the articles provide information and insight into each award winner's particular circumstances and afflictions. It's too bad these award are only available for residents of the U.K. - maybe we can find a similar program in the states?

2009 Winner, George Glaves Video
2008 Winner, Peter Bull