1000 WORDS WORKSHOP WITH ANTOINE D’AGATA IN MOROCCO, OCTOBER 2010

© Antoine d´Agata

1000 Words is proud to present its first workshop with the Magnum photographer, Antoine d’Agata, in Fez, Morocco (25-31 October 2010). We are making a call for photographers, professional and amateur alike, to submit entries for this unique creative experience.

“It isn’t the eye that photography poses on the world that interests me but its most intimate rapport with that world”
Antoine d’Agata

Please scroll down for more information and how to submit.

ANTOINE D’AGATA:

Antoine d’Agata is without doubt one of the most unique and important photographers of our age. His imagery is characterised by an intense and highly subjective experience that pushes the limits of social documentary photography. Born in Marseille, 1961, he left France in 1990 to study at The International Centre for Photography in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. His work has been published in the books Insomnia, Vortex, Stigma and Agonie amongst others, and he has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals including Rencontres d’Arles, Noorderlicht, FotoFreo and The Photographers Gallery, London.

He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 2004 and is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris.

ABOUT US:

1000 Words Photography is an artist-led organisation that has promoted the work of more than 280 art photographers through publishing and exhibiting opportunities. The organisation´s flagship is 1000 Words, an online magazine dedicated to highlighting the best work in contemporary art photography worldwide. The site attracts approximately 140,000 unique visitors from more than 75 countries every month. The 1000 Words Workshop is organised by Tim Clark, writer and editor-in-chief at 1000 Words and Michael Grieve, 1000 Words contributing editor and photographer represented by Agence Vu.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP:

The location for the 1000 Words Workshop will be the beautifully evocative city of Fez, Morocco. The salon will take place in an authentically restored riad in the heart of the medieval medina of Fez. The workshop will be an intense experience lasting six days between 25-31 October 2010 and will consist of 12 participants.

We are looking for a diverse range of participants who understand the work of Antoine d’Agata and feel that their own work will benefit from his guidance. Each participant will be asked to examine the ultimate goal of his approach, to play an active part in his own images and to work on the texture of reality. Since images, like words, only take on meaning when brought together, the workshop will focus on finding the most relevant form for each individual stance. Working with Antoine d’Agata, participants must be ready to photograph intensively throughout the workshop and to extend the limits of their approach. They will have to confront their obsessions and contradictions as they shape a series of images conveying in real or fictional terms their private relationship with the world.

Depending on individual needs the daily structure begins with lunch at the riad and during the afternoon Antoine will encourage group participation in looking, critiquing and developing ideas and image making. In the late afternoon participants will begin to photograph. The week will end with a display of the work created. All participants work will be shown in a special feature on 1000 Words Photography magazine. The purpose of the workshop is to concentrate on a very personal approach to photography and certainly this will be a richly rewarding week for those who wish to push themselves.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

The cost of the workshop will be £1250 for 6 days. Once participants have been selected they will be expected to pay a non-refundable deposit of £350 within two weeks. Participants can then pay the rest of the fee in two instalments according to deadlines (see below). Participants are encouraged to arrive the day before the workshop begins for a welcome dinner. The price includes tuition from Antoine d’Agata, a welcome and farewell dinner, lunch everyday and snacks during the afternoon, 24 hour help from the 1000 Words team and an assistant with local knowledge. Participants will be expected to make their own travel arrangements and find accommodation, which in Fez can range from £150 upwards for the week. We can advise on finding the accommodation that best suits you. Remember that most of your time will be spent either at the riad or shooting. For photographers using film we will provide the means for processing and a scanner. Photographers shooting digital will be expected to bring all necessary equipment. All participants should also bring a laptop if they have one. Every effort will be made to accommodate individual technical needs.

HOW TO SUBMIT:

We require that you send 10 images as low res jpegs and/or a link to your website, as well as a short biography and statement about why you think it will be relevant for you to work with Antoine (approx 200 words total). Submissions are to be sent to workshops(a)1000wordsmag(dot)com with the following subject header: SUBMISSION FOR 1000 WORDS WORKSHOP IN FEZ OCTOBER 2010. Tim Clark and Michael Grieve will produce a shortlist from the entries (all those shortlisted will be contacted) and then Antoine will select the final 12.

14 June 2010: Deadline for applications
30 June 2010: Successful candidates contacted
14 July 2010: Deposit due (£350)
16 August 2010: Second instalment due (£350)
31 August 2010: Third instalment due (£550)
24 October 2010: Arrive in Morocco
25 October 2010: Workshop begins
31 October 2010: Workshop ends

Bonne chance!

First UK solo show for Sally Mann at The Photographers´ Gallery

© Sally Mann

Sally Mann, The Family and the Land
The Photographers´ Gallery
18 June – 19 September 2010

This exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery will be the American photographer Sally Mann’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Combining several series from her long photographic career, The Family and the Land: Sally Mann will reflect Mann’s artistic impulse to draw on the world around her as subject matter.

The ‘family’ element of the title will comprise Mann’s early series Immediate Family and the newer series Faces, both of which depict her children at various ages. The two series Motherland: Virginia and Deep South represent the landscape, portraying images made across the south of the United States. The more recent body of work, What Remains brings together both strands of the exhibition, through its examination of how bodies, as they decompose, merge into the land itself.

Sally Mann (b.1951, USA) first gained prominence for Immediate Family (1984–94) a series of intimate and revealing portraits of her three young children, Emmet, Jesse and Virginia. Taken over a ten-year period, Mann depicts them playing, swimming and acting to the camera in and around their homestead in Lexington, Virginia. Born out of a collaborative process between mother and child, the work encapsulates their childhood in all its rawness and innocence.

Mann followed Immediate Family by focusing on the land itself in her series Motherland: Virginia (1993–94) and Deep South (1996–98). Here she is drawn to locations steeped in historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Using antique cameras and processes throughout, Mann accentuates the sense of age in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her printing process.

The most recent series in the exhibition, What Remains (2000–04) seeks to further connect human contact to the land and how the body eventually returns to and becomes a part of the land itself. This concept led Mann to photograph decomposing cadavers at the University of Tennesse Anthropological Research Facility, Knoxville, where human decomposition is studied in a variety of, mainly outdoor, settings. What Remains deals directly with the subject of death, still a social taboo. As with her other work, Mann’s subjects are sensitively handled and beautifully realised, encouraging us to reflect upon our own mortality and place within nature’s order.

The Family and the Land: Sally Mann at The Photographers’ Gallery is an edited version of a touring exhibition, conceived by Sally Mann in collaboration with Hasse Persson, Director, Borås Museum of Modern Art, Sweden. It has been presented at Fotomuseum Den Hague and the Musée de l‘Elysée, Lausanne as well as in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Helsingborg, and Copenhagen.

The Election Project

Why not get involved in The Election Project and help create the first UK mass citizen-journalist political project of its kind. Photographer Simon Roberts has been commissioned as the official Election Artist by The House of Commons to produce a body of work around the upcoming General Election. Alongside his own photographs he’s calling for members of the public to contribute their own photographs of political activity in their area. The submitted photograph will be displayed on The Election Project online gallery and some will be exhibited as part of the final artwork in the House of Commons this summer. You can find out more here or visit The Election Project website to learn about the ways you can contribute your photograhs.

The Dualism

The Dualism Book - Vol.I from The Dualism on Vimeo.

I´m very excited about the forthcoming release of The Dualism Book - Volume 1 : photos that take you on a trip - watching souls both glamorous and numb, unraveling sheets of love and hate but never quite indifferent, meeting heroes and goddesses, wandering through Caravaggio's shadows and crisp suburbs of hell, visiting ghettos of our minds, almost smelling the decay of our souls through a reflection of ourselves, frailties and our desperate humanity. You'd be a parent for a while and a child for an eternity, admiring what you do not fully understand, the sadness of beauty and the joy of things so mundane. You are being pulled out into a vortex and despite feeling the urge to get out, you surrender for what you see is yourself.

Maury Gortemiller

All images from Speed Queens © Maury Gortemiller

In his statement that accompanies this series Maury Gortemiller writes: "I’m interested in images of objects which have meanings previously thought to be closed. When photography is operating at the highest level, context as suggested by the photographer is ambiguous, allowing the viewer to re-contextualize as dictated by his or her experiences, intuition and knowledge."

It was precisely that ambiguity, that dualism between obscurity and meaning which reeled me in when first studying these images. Talking about his aims for the project, Gortemiller explains: "My objective is to reinterpret and alter the intentionality of spaces and found items. The residues of human experience, the overlooked physical phenomena, can impart a wealth of information about individuals and attitudes. My photographs maintain the semblance of ordinary, everyday things while investigating their latent conceptual meanings."

He concludes: "I hope to investigate fully Robert Storr’s notion of the estrangement of the photograph, the medium’s capability to depict persons and objects in such a way that transforms context and intention."

Maury Gortemiller holds graduate degrees in Southern Studies (University of Mississippi) and Photography (University of Georgia), and is currently a Lecturer of Photography at the University of North Carolina-Asheville. I´m told Maury is also a competitive apneist, and plans to make an attempt on the breathe-holding world record by the end of fiscal year 2010. Has he done it yet I wonder?

Nicholas Hughes

All images from Field © Nicholas Hughes

I have long been a fan of the work of Nicholas Hughes and am particularly intrigued by the way he examines our contemporary relationship to nature. In his previous series In Darkness Visible a primordial forest was resurrected from parkland in central London. In Field he has taken his constructed observations to a more challenging level.
 
Removing himself from city life - and submerged within a location chosen purely for its remoteness, over a two-year period he has analysed our current relationship to the natural world whilst making photographs only within walking distance.
 
In this three part series he found that having little to disturb his camera work enabled a clawing back of senses from the over stimulated media driven world and offered the possibility, through isolation, of being open to the restorative powers of nature.
 
Emerging eventually to a wider perspective - these beautiful observations offer up remarkable visions of a quieter contemplative world.

Nicholas Hughes (born Britain 1963) is a London based photographer who has pursued a career as a photographic artist since obtaining a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1998 followed by a Master’s Degree from the London College of Communication in 2002.

His work is currently included in the Victoria and Albert museum’s contemporary selection for the Histories of Photography exhibit in London from 2009–10. His work has also been seen at the world’s major photographic art fairs in Los Angeles, New York and Paris and is held in a variety of public and private photographic collections worldwide.

Hughes is represented by the Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York and The Photographers’ Gallery, London.