Hans Aarsman

Greetings from Fez, where our workshop with Erik Kessels is in its final stages. Tomorrow the participants will present their projects but there will be a future blog post for this. For now, I just wanted to share this wonderful talk at TEDxAmsterdam which Erik has put me onto. Its by Hans Aarsman and is titled 'From pretty to ugly and back again; mysterious ways of beauty in photography'.

Surprising, insightful and at times hilarious, Aarsman shows different concepts of beauty in photography, and suggests that the only real photographic beauty is to be found in pictures that were made without such a goal in mind....Food for thought as we break for lunch.

Michael Ackerman

We stumbled across this haunting, yet rather dramatised multimedia piece on Michael Ackerman's Half Life, the book of which is featured in issue #11 of 1000 Words. In his review, Francis Hodgson took exception to the project stating, among other things, that although the book is often very moving it is not coherent.

"The manner is dark and often blurred, with a heavy grain and a permanent air of history weighing directly upon each photograph just as the light does. There is (or there purports to be) a great deal behind these photographs which is not actually in them. A text by Denis Kambouchner suggests that the pictures are haunted. But Ackerman’s history is not broad, although it runs deep. He has a neat trick of confining himself to that part of our cultural baggage which is shared enough that no further explanations are needed. Dark woods are a simple example. Dark woods are the places of fairy stories, but also of massacres. Naked men in the shower have overtones of concentration camps. Even if you look at photographs of the traditional showers used by the racers after the famously brutal Paris-Roubaix cycle race, they often have those overtones. Ackerman has been living and working for some years in Poland, where he can’t resist the trains: train journeys through Poland are also a branded historical reference. A composite is building up. Ackerman’s subject is often the second world war, and the legacy it has left even as the memory of it fades. And when he’s not looking directly there? Tense pictures of men with hard faces, or naked women, or people on beds. Mini-adventures up stairs or through woods. Smoking and drinking. Again, a composite is building up. This is the mind of a teenage boy. Not the football and Xbox sort of boy, but the more soulful Rimbaud-reading boy interested in death and melancholy."

The rest of the review is available here.

Irina Rozovsky

All images ©Irina Rozovsky

While looking through our submissions inbox we found this delicate and understated project by Irina Rozovsky. One to Nothing is a gentle body of work about Israel that abandons any preconceptions or prejudices we may hold towards this typically “troubled” place or depiction thereof.

“One to Nothing depicts an Israel we do not see on the news. These images go beyond politics: they do not defend a side or critique the conflict. Here, Israel is seen in an unexpected light, as a mythological backdrop to the age long struggle between man and the dusty, sun bleached landscape of his origin. The score to this existential battle is locked at 1– 0, with no finish line in sight. A loose, subtle, and open-ended narrative One to Nothing describes historic tension with striking and unusual observations.”

Irina Rozovsky, was born in Moscow in 1981 and grew up outside of Boston. She received a BA in French and Spanish Literature from Tufts University and an MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art. 

She was a recipient of the Magnum Expression Finalist Award, juried by Martin Parr in 2010 and her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions. Among these are; 31 Women in Art Photography, curated by Charlotte Cotton and Jon Feinstein, Photo España, Madrid, Les Rencontres d'Arles, and, most recently, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the New England School of Photography, Boston.

Rozovsky currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and One to Nothing is her first monograph, recently published by Kehrer Verlag.

Alejandro Chaskielberg @Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

Image ©Alejandro Chaskielberg

The exhibition season is clearly back in full swing here in London. Opening next week at Michael Hoppen Contemporary is High Tide, an exhibition of new work by the fantastic Argentinean photographer Alejandro Chaskielberg, who I tipped as my name to watch ahead of the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010 for a piece in the Telegraph last year. Chaskielberg was also the overall winner of this year’s Sony World Photo Awards.

High Tide is a series of colour photographs taken in the remote Paraná River Delta, Argentina, where Chaskielberg lived and worked from 2007-10. His subjects are local residents of this isolated community who rely on the river for food, work, travel and communication with the wider world. His portraits are ethereal, dreamlike images that convey the everyday life of those photographed - lumberjacks shifting heavy timber, an aged hunter sitting by an open fire in contemplation, lovers walking under the stars.

Working at night under a full moon, Chaskielberg documents the relationship between the inhabitants of the delta and their environment in startling technicolour using techniques that push the boundaries of the medium to transform our natural perception of light, colour and space, whilst still referencing the aesthetic of nineteenth century photographic portraiture.

Chaskielberg requires his subjects to pose still for up to ten minutes in order to distinguish the image from the thick darkness, relying on the natural light from the moon and supplementing this with a variety of artificial lighting tools - torches, flashes and lanterns, creating imaginary scenarios with real people and situations.

"My intention is to use photography to occupy a border between document and fiction and imbue the islanders with a strange timelessness. Photography can transform reality and produce a magical view of people and of life."

This will be the first solo exhibition by the artist in Europe and as such is a great opportunity to view and acquire a group of prints from an artist who is quickly crystalising his reputation as one of the bright new talents of his generation. Michael Hoppen Contemporary will be celebrating his success at the Sony World Photo Awards as well as the release of La Creciente, a monograph of Chaskielberg’s photographs newly published by Nazraeli Press.

The exhibition runs from Thursday 8 September to Saturday 1 October. Michael Hoppen Gallery, 3 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TD.

Ej Major @Matt Roberts Arts, London

All images © Ej Major

A buzz surrounds Ej Major's one man show that opens on Thursday at Matt Roberts Arts, winner of the 2011 Salon Photo Prize (sponsored by 1000 Words). Of the work on display, most notable is her clever faux biography entitled Marie Claire RIP.

"These series of 12 images," Major explains, "is based on an article published in Marie Claire in 2002, which featured police mug-shots of a [heroin addict] taken over a fourteen year period. The article revealed that not long after the last picture was taken the woman was found dead."

She adds, "Marie Claire RIP is a re-staging of these images using myself as subject. I intended the piece to be non-specific in terms of the nature of the character’s demise. There is no direct reference to heroin addiction. The series may be read in terms of each person’s story or experience who views it. While the piece challenges the veracity of the photographic portrait it also finds an authenticity in a notion of self-portraiture that involves acting. It is me and it isn’t her and yet it is her and it isn’t me at the same time."

This exhibition runs from Friday 2 September to Saturday 24 September. Matt Roberts Arts, Unit 1, 25 Vyner Street, London, E2 9DG.

David Maisel: History's Shadow

All images © David Maisel

As we gear up for the launch of our next issue, 1000 Words new Editorial assistant, Sean Stoker, takes some time out from prepping to peruse this recently released title from Nazraeli Press and is impressed with the spectral qualities of the photographs within.

While working at the Getty Research Institute in LA, David Maisel was confronted by a 12 foot high x-ray pinned to a window, rear-lit from outside. The subject of that x-ray, a small, drab painting, was left in the wake of its copy, overshadowed by the blown up x-ray. Inspired by this discovery, Maisel trawled through the archives of x-rays of old museum artefacts, uncovering these ghostly emanations of light, and then scanning, re-photographing and digitally manipulating the images earmarked for the project.

Those images now grace the pages of Maisel's latest book History's Shadow which, like many of his previous projects, illustrates a keen interest in the manner in which photography can combine art, science and a sense of humanity. While the work is also about the processes of memory, excavation and transformation it is really photography itself that is arguably the main focus of this project, and Maisel uses the x-ray to examine its inherent flaws with issues of space, depth and scale. Some images seem to emerge from the page itself, while others float in their black surroundings, yet they transcend mere images of objects, and become sculptural in their own right; a truly convincing illusion of three-dimensional space rendered on the two-dimensional page. In Maisel's words,"they becomes a vast nether world, and in others becomes the velvety ground of some kind of brain scan/portrait." Some are more successful at this than others, yet together, the images manage to reference the history of photographic practice – recalling the mysterious long exposures and amateur scientific studies of the medium's early years – and the history of art (x-rays have historically been used by art conservators for structural examination of art and artefacts), which is not just limited to icons of Western art.

The x-ray empowers us with an all-seeing, piercing gaze that distorts our perception while it transports us to a ghostly, ephemeral world in which everything appears too delicate to touch, that we may extinguish these glowing forms. Here, inside becomes out, and out becomes in. We are confronted with everything simultaneously, overwhelmed by fragile veils of light and plunging depths of darkness as space and time collapse and compound. It is within these objects that we see traces of the artist's hand, suggestions of a human presence and structural details that invoke a curiosity within us, not only to understand the vestiges and indicators of past societies, but to also comprehend ourselves and our future.

What I most enjoy about this book is also what I most enjoy in photography as a whole; despite its apparent complexity and tendency to over-theorise itself, it is often its simplest aspects that are the most interesting. History's Shadow, while intricate and well considered, represents the essense of photography: the presence and absence of light, the shape-shifting nature of time and the curiosity to see what cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Sean Stoker

Haunting the Chapel: Photography and Dissolution @ Daniel Blau Gallery, London

We are getting very excited here in the studio about this upcoming exhibition of vintage, anonymous, vernacular and spirit photography,also including works by Fratelli Alinari,Cecil Beaton, René Barthélemy, Emil Cadoo,Arthur Conan Doyle, JH Engstrom, Walker Evans, Michael Grieve, Bill Jacobson, Fritz Lang, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Floris Neusüss, Arnold Newman, Diane Pernet, Leni Riefenstahl, Jeffrey Silverthorne, Edmund Teske, U.S. Army Picture Corps et al.

"They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream." Jorge Luis Borges

Daniel Blau Gallery, London will be presenting a unique set of images that embody a theme particularly relevant to current artistic and cultural practice: that of the haunted, the blurred and the dissolved. To exemplify these themes this exhibition will feature vintage prints as well as more recent explorations in photography and its often-dissolute processes. In homage to the alchemy and chemistry of photography, this show will illustrate fire, smoke, the spirit, the x-ray, blur and motion, decay and the photogram. Like a series of dark objects and entities trapped behind the framing of glass, the gallery space becomes a chapel to the haunted history of the photographic medium.

Haunting the Chapel: Photography and Dissolution
2 September – 8 October 2011
Opening: 1 Sept, 6-10pm
Daniel Blau Gallery, London

To coincide with this, the gallery will be hosting talks and lectures that relate to the concept of the exhibition. If you would like to attend one or all of the following events, please RSVP to: london(at)danielblau(dot)com Tickets are £5, payable on arrival at the gallery. All the events open at 7pm for a 7:30pm start. 51 Hoxton Square, London N16PB.

Tuesday 6 September: Talks

Jeffrey Silverthorne in conversation with Brad Feuerhelm / Michael Grieve in conversation with Aaron Schuman.

Tuesday 20 September: Lecture

David Bate presents some ideas related to the exhibition with a following discussion.

Not to be missed!