Street Photography Now Project

Seeing as there is a bit of a street photography theme going on round here of late, I thought I´d share some information about the Street Photography Now Project, a collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, London and Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren, authors of Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson).

Each week from 1 October 2010, a leading contemporary street photographer has issued a new instruction, written to inspire fresh ways of looking at and documenting the world we live in.

Over the following six days, photographers around the world are invited to upload one photograph in response, to a special Flickr Group. After six days the next instruction will be issued. See the Take Part section of the website for more details on how to contribute.

The Project will run for 52 weeks, and you can join in at any time. The aim is to build a global community of photographers exploring the rewards and challenges of documenting public life. All photographers, including those who contribute to the Instructions, will be encouraged to comment and respond to the images posted to the Flickr groups.

Though not a competition, at the end of the Project one photographer will be chosen who has made the most outstanding contribution to the project across a number of weeks. They will be awarded £1000 of Thames & Hudson books and have their work displayed on The Photographers’ Gallery digital Wall for All.

The Street Photography Now Project was launched in September 2010, as The Photographers’ Gallery closed its doors for the redevelopment of its building on Ramillies Street. The Project will run for one year and is scheduled to end when The Photographers’ Gallery reopens in late 2011.

Construction work to start on The Photographers’ Gallery, London

The Photographers’ Gallery is creating an iconic new building in the heart of London’s West End.

On 19 September 2010, the Gallery will close its doors to the public for a year while it embarks on its ambitious development of the building, creating a new, international home for photography in the UK. From October 2010, construction will begin at 16-18 Ramillies Street. Architects O’Donnell + Tuomey’s exciting plans will transform the former Edwardian warehouse into a state-of-the-art photography gallery.

The architectural plans include contemporary additions of textured acrylic render, Angelim Pedra hard wood and anthracite coloured terrazzo to elements of the existing structure and fabric of the building. The end result will provide three floors of dedicated public galleries that will enable the exhibition programme to be expanded; a floor dedicated to learning, offering space for a comprehensive programme of talks, events and education series and workshops; an enhanced Bookshop and Print Sales to nurture and inspire a new generation of collectors; a brand new café at street level; continued free admission and full access, including a passenger lift for public use.

Established in 1971, as the nation’s very first public gallery dedicated to photography, The Photographers’ Gallery always resided in the Soho area. Building on its heritage as one of the world’s primary venues for photography, it has welcomed around half-a-million visitors annually. Responding to the growing popularity in photography, in 2008 plans were launched to relocate with a major £8.7 million capital campaign. Now, two years later the gallery has reached a key moment in its history and are in the final stages of creating a unique ‘cultural oasis’ in the heart of central London.

During the construction period, the Gallery will operate a reduced programme offsite. Working in and around the Soho area, a series of innovative artist-led projects have been programmed, supported by Bloomberg, as have talks & events for visitors of all ages. The Print Sales will continue to be available to collectors through photography fairs and by appointment at its satellite location and the beloved Bookshop will be available to browse via its new online shop. To keep up-to-date with all the news, activities and developments join its free newsletter – sign up at www.photonet.org.uk.

Coinciding with its 40th anniversary, The Photographers’ Gallery will reopen in Autumn 2011. Further information on anniversary events and the opening programme will be posted on the website.

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.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2010

©Anna Fox

Just opened at The Photographers’ Gallery is an exhibition of the work of Anna Fox, Zoe Leonard, Sophie Ristelhueber and Donovan Wylie - the four shortlisted artists nominated for its annual Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

UK-born photographer Anna Fox has been nominated for her exhibition, 'Cockroach Diary & Other Stories' at Ffotogallery, Cardiff and initiated by Impressions Gallery, Bradford. Dark yet highly comical, the work is a curious blend of stark photographic evidence and written anecdotes that tell the story of a cockroach invasion in a shared house in London where the artist once lived. It is typical of the artists' wider concerns of extracting beauty from both the bizarre and the banal, particularly in relation to domestic British life. A pioneer of exciting colour documentary photography, Fox has undoubtedly helped to redefine the medium in Britain and Europe.

Also in the running for the highly coveted prize is American, Zoe Leonard, who has been selected for her retrospective exhibition, 'ZOE LEONARD: Photographs', at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, organised by Fotomuseum Winterthur. Like Fox, she takes a radically different approach to capturing and memorizing seemingly everyday things but her images offer a more subtle, visual look at the world and, in the process, reveal something of its wonderful inarticulated contradictions.

French photographer, Sophie Ristelhueber has been nominated for her retrospective, 'Sophie Ristelhueber' at the Jeu de Paume, Paris. For more than twenty years, Ristelhueber has turned her camera on people and places scarred and shaped by war and has emerged with timeless, deeply affecting images about serious world issues without resorting to tacky sentimentality.

Working with similar notions of territory and history, is the British Magnum photographer Donovan Wylie. The youngest of the four shortlisted artists, Wylie has been chosen for his exhibition 'MAZE 2007/8' at Belfast Exposed for which he spent a period of almost one hundred days photographing inside one of Ireland's most oppressive prisons (The Maze) in the aftermath of its demolition process. The only photographer granted official unlimited access to the site, he has focused on the empty landscapes to investigate the psychology of its architecture.

Brett Rogers, Chair of the Jury and Director of The Photographers' Gallery, said: "The four finalists all manifest a sustained commitment to investigating the nature and role of the photographic image. Each of them, in their own way, explores pertinent ideas around gender, nationality, surveillance and political conflict."

The annual award of £30,000 rewards a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography in Europe between 1 October 2008 and 30 September 2009. This year's Jury is: Olivia Maria Rubio (Director of Exhibitions, La Fàbrica, Spain); Gilane Tawadros (Chief Executive, Design Artists Copyright Society, curator and writer); James Welling (artist, USA); and Anne-Marie Beckmann (Curator, Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany). Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers' Gallery, is the non-voting Chair.

The exhibition went on display at The Photographers' Gallery on 12 February and runs until 18 April 2010, with the winner announced at a special award ceremony on 17 March 2010.

This article was originally published as a news story in the December/January issue of a-n magazine www.a-n.co.uk