I was born in an industrial city in the middle of the European part of Russia called Ufa where I was raised and spent most of my teenage years before moving to England six years ago. I moved from Ufa to Cambridge, where I studied foundation level art at the Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Art after which I then moved to London and began my bachelor’s degree in photography at the Camberwell College of Arts. In 2011, when I had graduated from Camberwell, I began working towards my masters in fine art photography at Central Saint Martins. At the moment I am finishing up my masters and looking towards defining my career in fine art photography.
Aline Smithson is a noted photographer who created the prominent onlne photographic space Lenscratch. The SIP Blog also had the pleasure of interviewing and featuring her work in 2011.
Smithson’s work also exposed us to Six Shooters, a group of photographers that developed a framework for collaborative s projects that involve (and transcend) temporal and geographical conditions. Here’s more about their inception and work, as outlined by them:
“One winter afternoon, six photographer friends met for lunch to celebrate the unusual circumstance of being in the same place at the same time. The conversation navigated over the usual terrain most photographers cover when sharing notes and photo war stories, and eventually the discussion moved on to the desire to stay inspired and make new work. An idea blossomed—to create a visual dialogue with each other–and before we paid the check, Six Shooters was born.
Nancy Baron
All Images are Courtesy of the Artists
Ashly Stohl
Geordie wood, a graduate of the SI Newhouse School and current photo editor of The FADER, is based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2013 he was named one of PDNs 30 New and Emerging Photographers to watch.
In March 2011, The SIP Blog featured a collaborative project of his with Tayler Wood, which focused on Iceland. View (and read) it here.
Writing about this current feature, Nice Twice, Wood notes:
“Last spring, I traveled across Northern India forTRAVEL + LEISURE. On the sidelines, I shot a collection of photographs titled Nice Twice. The work is a diary of personal interactions with a people and place that have become dear to my heart.”
View the full project on his website.
All Images are Courtesy of the Artist
Dr. Aya Lurie, Chief Curator, The Shpilman Institute for Photography
The text is taken from the exhibition Linguistic Turn, Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, April 25 – July 31, 2013.
Edited by Hemda Rosenbaum. Translated by Alma Mikulinski
In her new exhibition, Ilit Azoulay presents five large-scale photographs that produce a creative and exciting viewing experience culminating in Red (2013) and Panic in Lack of an Event (2013). While her previous photographic projects – Room # 8 (2011) or The Keys (2010) – were characterized by a detailed and meticulous organization of objects on a white background, the new works spiral the gaze between different conditions, spaces, and artifacts, a viewing condition that seem to reject the inner logic of the earlier photographs. Both The Keys and Room # 8 resulted from Azoulay’s fascination with construction sites that contain buildings intended for demolition. In these abandon edifices she gleaned debris, hardware, work tools, and other found objects which she then brought to her studio and carefully cleaned, oiled, categorized, and eventually photographed. The virtual assemblage process was typified by reorganizing the objects in a fictive space that was staged in the photographer’s studio. These works relate to the theoretical discourse exploring the ontological status of the object, investigations regarding the museum and the archive as concepts, as well as questions of collecting, reconstructing, chance encounters, commemoration, and temporality. Azoulay’s artistic process included minor perspectival adjustments, alterations of scale, and intervention with Photoshop. These minute variations are visible in the final product and generate a disturbing effect that leads us to question, through the lens of the digital camera, the nature of sight and visual perception and to examine the gaps embedded in our sensory apparatus.
Red. 2013. 150X376 cm
The interview was first published in A Photo Editor. For Jonathan Blaustein’s website click here.
Roger Ballen is among the most talented and successful photographic artists in the world today. He was kind enough to agree to an extensive interview last month, and is also allowing us to publish images from two forthcoming books.
JB: Why did you choose to move to South Africa from the United States?
RB: When I was a young man in my early twenties, in 1973, it was a time of cultural revolution. I guess I was swept up with that. I graduated from University of California, Berkeley, and was quite restless. Previous to traveling from Cairo to Capetown in 1974, two important things happened. One is I got interested in painting for about six months, and the second thing my mother died in early ’73.
My mother had worked in Magnum photos, and also started one of the first photo galleries in the United States, with people like Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kertesz. I’d gotten a real introduction to photography, and had a passion towards the field by the time I was 23. Although at that time, I had a degree in psychology.
Then my mother died in January of ’73, and I began this trip that would take me four and half years, an overland trip from Cairo to Capetown. I got to South Africa, and spent some time here. Then I made an overland trip from Istanbul to New Guinea, and that was about a two and half year trip. During that time, I did
my first photo book, which was called “Boyhood.”
I got to South Africa that way, and then when I got back to America, in ’77 or so, I did a PhD in Mineral Economics at the Colorado School of Mines. Then, I came back to South Africa in ’82. This is an ideal place to practice the business of mining exploration, and anything related to the mineral business. South Africa and the surrounding countries are well-endowed with minerals.
Despite the political problems, I’d liked being here for the first time, and then married a South African lady and stayed here. I’ve been here permanently since 1982.
From the Upcoming Book Titled Asylum
All Images are Courtesy of the Artist
By Dr. Aya Lurie
A work by artist Jan Tichy that he created for the exhibition LUMA will be featured in the exhibition La Città Nuova. 1 Beyond Sant’Elia. One Hundred Years of Urban Visions, which will be on view in Villa Olmo, Como (Italy). Dr. Aya Lurie, the chief curator of The Shpilman Institute for Photography, was invited to contribute a text to the exhibition catalog:
The four cycles of images that make-up Jan Tichy’s new video installation, “Things to Come, 1936–2012″, are hypnotically captivating (fig. 1). Screened in looped successions in three projectors, the cycles are constantly evolving, merging and interchanging. Every cycle opens with an isolated, single frame that gradually opens-up, spreads-out and undergoes a series of visual manipulations – alternating positive and negative, and symmetrical mirror doublings – before traveling to the next projectors. In their ongoing succession, these accumulated images span the length of the wall, combining a fantastical-panoramic view with a sense of kaleidoscopic enchantment. Two out of the four cycles offer easily-discernable images: In the first, rectangular flickers of light recall the eternal glare of city lights entering a room through blinds (fig. 2); the second suggests a row of translucent, glass-clad skyscrapers in an urban setting (fig. 3). The two remaining images are somewhat more abstract in appearance: In one we see a translucent ball, its interior enclosing air bubbles, as it revolves around it axis over a backdrop geometric shapes (fig. 4); the last shows neatly-arranged rows of glass and metallic plates casting their dark, dramatic shadows (fig. 5). These last two, despite their mostly abstract appearance, are still suggestive of the characteristic style and materiality of the ‘city of the future’, as was typically envisioned and emblematized in the filmic fragments produced by Hungarian-born artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), which served Tichy (b. 1971) as the basis for this particular work. In fact, the first isolated frame of each cycle is a Moholy-Nagy original, which is then elaborated and reworked through the work of the latter.
Fig. 1: Jan Tichy, “Things to Come 1936–2012″, 2012, three-channel video projection, 180x720cm, 5:30 mins.
By Richard Benari and Lauren Henkin
Listen to Lauren Henkin and Richard Benari discuss their new collaborative body of work right here.
As photography has matured into its own artistic medium, narrative has become the conceptual foundation on which most work is created. The act of viewing an image is no longer sufficient. Content has been replaced by context. More and more, photographers, gallerists and critics insist on story. Images have become testimony and photographers, witnesses. The photographic object itself has become evidence. Most photography now sets out to answer questions while other artistic mediums set out to raise them.
All images are courtesy of © Richard Benari and Lauren Henkin
Small Trades is but one of many projects that was completed by Irving Penn (b. 1917 Plainfield, NJ – d. 2009), and one that actually spanned his photographic career. The photographs were created in the early 1950’s in Paris, London and New York. As a body of work, Penn would return to these negatives to continue his investigation of what a photograph print should look like.
Copyright 2009 the estate of Irving Penn, published by the Getty Museum
All Images are Courtesy of Douglas Stockdale
The original photographs were made on 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 roll film (Rolliflex), but usually cropped into a vertical image and printed on gelatin silver enlarging paper. Penn has stated that his studies were primary inspired by Eugene Atget’s petits métiers (small trades), early 1900’s photographic studies of workers in their Paris environments. As has frequently been mentioned, the viewer can also find themselves noticing the similarities to August Sander’s “People of the Twentieth Century” environmental studies created in the 1930’s in Germany. Penn on the other hand removed his subjects from their environment to a more neutral sitting located in his studio.
No CommentsBy Sofia Raquel SIlva, Nihilsentimentalgua
“Each video depicts an intervention in the abandoned space of Fábrica da Fiação. They are loops, without a beginning or an end, which brings them closer to photography rather than video.(…)”
“Micael Nussbaumer’s installation, “O Registador”, explores objects and spaces from the abandoned «Fábrica da Fiação de Tomar». The choice of this weaving factory as the main subject of this exposition was due to the perfect analogy found by the artist between the concepts he wanted to expose and the history of that enterprise.
The beginning of this factory can be described as an attempt to modernize Portugal, following the industrial revolution happening in Europe, meanwhile empowering the national bourgeoisie by increasing competitiveness. It wasn’t randomly that Tomar was chosen to host such enterprise, it was the surrounding environment that created this opportunity; the local river, Nabão, could use the new hydraulic technologies that were spawning across Europe. Effectively it was here that for the first time these technologies were used in Portugal. But even this didn’t prevent its decline in different times as a result of bureaucratic, political and economical reasons. The factory that employed hundreds of families across the region, boosting local development and economy through 200 hundred years under different administrations, close its doors completely in 1975, after a fire, being until this day abandoned. (…)” From Nussbaumer’s statement. continue reading here.
© Micael Nussbaumer, from “Tempo Imprime no Espaço” (lit. translation: Time prints in Space), installation
Images and text are re-published with permission of the author
No CommentsRead More from Peter Nitsch in The SIP Blog right here and visit his website
Back in the days of analog photography the term “instant” meant to get a photo within a few minutes. That waiting time got way shortened by digital photography and gadgets like mobile phones and digital cameras. Nowadays digital photography is instant photography. Even if the digital photo can be saved, uploaded and published within a glance, does a real picture truly exist? Picture in a sense of “always in mind” for the case this photo gets lost for some reason. Today pictures are deleted without much thought or vanish in the depths of a hard drive; as a result they get squeezed out of focus and slowly but surely erased from our memory. Without having left any permanent impression on the cortex of our brain they’re witnesses of a digital amnesia.
It’s completely different with analog photo albums from our parents’ generation before 1980, where every missing picture is forever saved in mind as chronological and topical memory. Even if some moments haven’t been witnessed personally, the associated pictures are still completely familiar through recurrent examination and tons of vivid stories. “I want to revive mentally exactly those experienced and narrated events,” states the photographer on his very private project.
No CommentsRotem Rozental (@rotroz) is web and blog editor for The Shpilman Institute for Photography and the Jerusalem Season of Culture, where she is also co-artistic director of We – Festi-Conference for Creative Collectives. Rotem is a PhD student at the art history department of Binghamton University, where she currently researchers the interrelations of Zionist photographic archives, nation-state and communication.
This post first appeared in Cyberology, leading up to Theorizing the Web 2013, organized by University of Maryland at CUNY, March 1&2, 2013. Follow the events on Twitter.
In this year’s Theorizing the Web, I will present a research that originated from my preoccupation with volatile encounters between photography and moments of social strife, as these are seen and mediated by traditional and social media. Homeless people in Libya, demonstrators’ confrontations with armed forces in Syria and Egypt, Kurd refugees in Northern Iraq, check points in Gaza, or Sudanese refugees in Sinai are just a few examples of current photographic undertakings, which are continuously mediated in independent and corporate media outlets. In this work in progress, I venture into documented ruptures while aiming to destabilize their initial appearance: to go beyond the immediate danger and visual narratives of an emergency in order to negotiate the apparatuses and discourses in which the photograph circulates, in which this practice is shaped and received.
Moments after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.
Image from video documentation, Channel 2
No CommentsNathan Jurgenson is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Maryland. He is also on the planning committee of Theorizing the Web, organized by the University of Maryland at CUNY, March 1&2, 2013. Follow the events on Twitter. This post originally appeared on The New Inquiry. Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson, tumblr or log on to his website.
All images are Courtesy of Nathan Jurgenson
The tension between experience for its own sake and experience we pursue just to put on Facebook is reaching its breaking point. That breaking point is called Snapchat.
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
—Susan Sontag, from On Photography (1973)
A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light — a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. Despite this, photographs have always been a way to cheat death, or at least to declare the illusion of immortality through lasting visual evidence. There’s always the possibility that the next photo you take will one day be lovingly removed from a box by some unborn great-grandchild; the Polaroid developing in your hands might come to be pinned to someone’s bedpost in posterity. To update that to more contemporary terms, your selfie on Instagram might be a signpost for the future you of what it was like to be this young.
No CommentsThe DEVELOP Tube Photography Video Channel is an educational resource, which features interviews, multimedia, lectures & films in photojournalism, documentary & fine art photography. DEVELOP provides resources for the enrichment of the photojournalism, fine art and documentary photography community.
The SIP Blog is excited to feature a new project from DEVELOP: a collaboration with documentarist Daniel Meadows, which includes six digital stories by Meadows.
Daniel Meadows (b. 1952) attempts to make sense of the times in which we live, engages with others to gather, create and present – with as few fictional additions as possible – stories made out of photographs and/or oral testimony.
As Featured in DEVELOP Tube
By Jonathan Morse
This text was originally published in the blog The Art Part
Photo by Jonathan Morse All images are courtesy of the writer
In Arthur Hopkins’s magazine illustration of a night scene from The Return of the Native, the corpse of Eustacia Vye is borne up into lantern-light by Diggory Venn’s shadowed body.
Hardy’s way of communicating the death was to represent a flesh that can be known now only by touch and inference. Covered by her drapery, Eustacia is no longer decently to be seen. In Hardy’s sentence, the dread of death is the dread of something that has now become only palpable. Sensing the change by touch alone, we realize, horribly, that Eustacia is now on her way toward the invisible. (more…)
No CommentsBy Peter Nitsch
Buzz Lightyear is a fictional character in the movie Toy Story, directed by John Lasseter. Buzz Lightyear’s name was inspired by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Along with Woody, a cowboy doll, they have to withstand and overcome a lot of troubles in a boy’s room. His often repeated catchphrase is “To infinity … and beyond!
Then, back to earth and reality: The real Toy Story is an installation by artist Michael Wolf made from as many as 20,000 plastic toys and up to twenty photographic portraits of workers in southern Chinese toy factories.
No Comments
As a photographer and movement artist, my work presents a dialogue between motion, time and space. Photography is a tool I use to convey the suspense and intimacy between these themes, to draw one closer to the essence of my subjects, and to reveal what our eyes cannot capture.
Over the years I have have explored urban landscapes with bicycles, buses and people in motion and also ten meter murals of martial artists and dancers. Ten years ago I devised a novel method of pulling film through a stills camera to create panoramic photographs that depicts a narrative of motion as one continuous image.
No CommentsBy Nili Goren, Tel Aviv Museum
The text first appeared in the framework of the exhibition, currently on view in Tel Aviv Museum as part of Shaham’s win of the Constantiner Award for Photography 2012. Shahm received the Shpilman grant for Israeli Photography Students 2011.
Assaf Shaham uses new ways to convene old souls to discuss mythological issues that have fascinated visual culture even before it was assigned theories. With calculated lightness, Shaham travels the tracks of discourse in parallel, opposing and circular directions. He creates poetic images while provoking the artificial intelligence of sophisticated mechanisms, disrupts the operating instructions of advanced equipment and defiantly breaches the accepted codes of ethics and esthetics.
He applies basic manipulations onto complex instruments, thus juxtaposing myths of prehistoric culture—e.g. the primitive belief that drawing a living creature subjugates it or removes its soul—with modernism in art, with constitutive theories of 20th- century history of photography, with post-modernist subversion and with contemporary commentaries of popular, virtual and cellular culture. With a seemingly innocent move, whose visual expression is simple and succinct, he renews complex controversies that were considered long outdated. He posits, near a bluish field of wireless-controlled security cameras standing erect like flowering squills—collected throughout public spaces in London and joined into one photograph whose gradual colorfulness is reminiscent of three-dimensional imaging—reminders to the early days of photography, among them a key work that defines the basic principle of photography.
New Ways to Steal Old Souls
No CommentsBy Efrat Shir
The text first appeared as part of the exhibition Hippocampus, Indie Gallery, Tel Aviv.
Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveler find
In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave,
Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place,
Convincing as those that children find in stones and holes?
No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.
His journey is false, his unreal excitement really an illness.
On a false island where the heart cannot act and will not buffer:
He condones his fever; he is weaker than he thought; his weakness is
real.
(W.H. Auden: “A Voyage”, 1938)
Annemarie Schwarzenbach – a Swiss journalist, writer and photographer – passed away seventy years ago, on November 15, 1942. This is the woman whose portrait is hanging on the gallery’s walls; the main character that appears over and over again in the varied historical sources that Porat photographed, scanned, dissected, distorted, and arranged according to visual contexts and in no chronological order. This is the woman whose story and appearance Porat decided to appropriate, to plunder and to fix as part of her own array of memories.
Ronit Porat, SS Berlin, 2012.
All Images are Courtesy of the Artist
Untitled, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, 2012
No CommentsIn December 17, 2012, The SIP was proud to host Prof. James Elkins (SAIC, Chicago) in Tel Aviv, for a lecture and a panel discussion.
Elkins gave the lecture “Obsession, Distraction, Boredom: A Reading of Camera Lucida,” which was introduced by Prof. Hagi Kenaan (Tel Aviv University) and followed by responses of Dr. Noam Gal and artist Gilad Ophir. In these videos, you can watch the event and discussions in their entirety:
James Elkins Lecture from The Sip on Vimeo.
James Elkins Debate from The Sip on Vimeo.
No Comments“We have never been in a state in which two visual mediums illuminate each other, relate to each other, respond to each other like stills photography and the cinema… In order to understand the deep meaning of photography and filmmaking, we must examine it through the parallel medium, the other… Is there a better way to ponder the essence of stills photography than to look at a blow-up of Antonioni? Or the nature of cinema through Chris Marker’s film, The Jetty?” (Philippe Dubois, Photography Mise-en-Film: Autobiographical (Hi)stories and Psychic Apparatuses, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp 152-53)
A boy wearing a costume. A woman, perhaps an unattained love. Two boys who die in an accident outside the window. Pictures. Wandering down Tchernichovsky Street in Haifa. Wandering between the present and memory. The Nazi hunter Tuvia Friedman points the director’s camera to a loaded wall of pictures. “Start with Ben-Gurion”. Friedman’s private photography museum includes pictures of Israeli leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Nazi criminals and his family, of his dead son who “was and is no more”. An endless medley of images, a Sisyphean way to be heard, to remember. The cinematic essay Hunting Time deals with the various contexts and interactions between a cinema film, a stills photograph, time and memory. The protagonist, a photography student, tries by means of pictures to place himself in space and time, in the space that surrounds him and in photographic memory.
