Ori Gersht: Artist Book

Photoworks have commissioned these videos as part of their collaboration with Israeli-born artist, Ori Gersht. Here we are given an intimate behind-the-scenes look at Artist Book and his recent exhibition, This Storm is What We Call Progress, held at the Imperial War Museum. Artist Book was reviewed, somewhat disparagingly, in the latest issue of 1000 Words. The main crux of the writer’s argument pointed towards how the images perform (or fail to) in book format compared to experiencing the work as an exhibition. Not a new bone of contention by any means but obviously a noteworthy one since Ori Gerhst is both a highly accomplished and mindful artist, somebody from whom you would expect a more discerning approach to such an adaptation. As a piece of visual communication Artist Book is sloppy and ill-considered. Certain design decisions in relation to the book’s scale and size undersell his photography regardless of any "intimate/fetishistic object" PR spin that is put on it. Yes the production is impeccable, yes it offers a glimpse into Gerhst’s well of inspiration and yes the stories he narrates are undeniably emotive and beautifully shot but the simple fact remains; the project doesn’t translate well across mediums. It is therefore useful to remember that while the photobook market is booming the printed page is not always the best outlet for a photographer’s ideas. Artist Book is a case in point.

W.M. Hunt

Watch the indefatigable W.M. Hunt, a renown collector and dealer, in action. The first video is a montage of clips from a public lecture about The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious, the first major US exhibition of his collection that ran from 1 October 2011 to 19 February 2012 at George Eastman House, from which Aperture and Thames & Hudson simultaneously published a book. The video posted below the fold is from Artlog, wherein he talks about his visceral approach to collecting, acquiring an eye for good work, and his advice for aspiring collectors.

Featured in the current issue of 1000 Words, the photographs of The Unseen Eye have a common theme - the gaze of the subject is averted, the face obscured, or the eyes firmly closed. The images evoke a wide range of emotions and are characterised, by what, at first glance, the subject conceals rather than what the camera reveals. 

W.M. Hunt was a founding partner of the prominent photography gallery HASTED HUNT in Chelsea, Manhatten and served as director of photography at Ricco/Maresca Gallery. He and his collecting have been featured in The New York Times and The Art Newspaper as well as on PBS. He is a professor at the School of Visual Arts and on the Board of Directors of the W.Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and The Center for Photography at Woodstock, N.Y., where he was the recipient of their Vision Award in 2009. He also served on the Board of Directors of AIPAD (Association of International Photography Art Dealers) and as chairman of Photographers + Friends United Against AIDS.

There are many words one can use to describe W.M. Hunt; funny, captivating, even legendary but his eloquence is his own and his book is my personal favourite so I cannot.

"Insist on engagement. Wrestle with what is difficult. Pretty is boring. Seek intensity." W.M. Hunt

A slideshow and talk by Diane Arbus @MoMA, New York

“About this time everyone suddenly decided I was meant to be an artist and I was given art lessons and a big box of oils and encouragement and everything. I painted and drew every once in a while for about four years with a teacher without admitting to anyone that I didn't like to paint or draw at all and i didn't know what I was doing. I used to pray and wish often to be a “great artist” and all the while I hated it and I didn't realise that I didn't want to be an artist at all. The horrible thing was that all the encouragement I got made me think that really I wanted to be an artist and made me keep pretending that I liked it and made me like it less and less until I hated it because it wasn't me that was being an artist; everybody was lifting me high up and crowning me and congratulating me and I was smiling -- and really I hated it and I hadn't done one single good piece of work. It was the craziest pretense in the world but even though i was pretending i believed in it, for about four years I had visions of being a great sad artist and I turned all my energies toward it when I wasn't an artist at all.”

Diane Arbus, 1940 autobiography, senior class assignment, Fieldston School

It was a good thing she gave painting and drawing!

For those in New York this weekend, MoMA is screening A Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus. The 40-minute film was compiled by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott from an original 1970 recording of a slide presentation given one year before the photographer’s death. It has been shown less than a dozen times publicly and offers us the rare opportunity to hear the photographer lecture on her images. Nearly 40 years after publication, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph which features 80 of those images, remains one of our most popular photobooks.

Following the screening, novelist and president of PEN American Center, Francine Prose along with Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, and Doon Arbus discuss how the photographer’s “precise use of language” illuminates her pictures. They will also read from the recently released book, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, which was primarily composed of exerpts from her letters, notebooks, writings, and journals. Through her own words, they explore the nature of her observation. 1000 Words recently acquired a copy, and have been drunk on it ever since.

Robin Maddock @ TJ Boulting, London

© Robin Maddock

“Maddock’s views and snatches of life are both surreal and individual. He has the enviable ability to turn nothing much into something quite profound.” - Martin Parr

Opening tonight at TJ Boulting, is Robin Maddock's God Forgotten Face, an exhibition in conjunction with the book of the same name, published by Trolley, which examines aspects of the everyday life in Plymouth, a port town still bearing the scars of the Blitz.

The exhibition showcases both key images from the book as well as new additions, taken more recently. In the words of gallery director, Hannah Watson, these have the effect of “introducing a slight shift to a lighter and more lyrical interpretation of the city.”

In her press release for the show she goes on to say: “After two years spent living in the town, where he has had family all his life, Maddock achieves a familiar interaction with his subjects, visible through his portraits in night clubs and pubs, and in the witnessing of the various goings on down at the sea front or in the local rec. In the misty early morning a nun stops to call her dog, whilst later a police forecourt is bathed in light and transported to a sunny LA; Maddock’s insight into the city is at once affectionate and optimistic in outlook, but stamped with his own aesthetic and curiosity.

In the book Owen Hatherley writes with a similar affection In Praise of Blitzed Cities, citing that the negative and concrete environs that come into most people’s minds when they think of Plymouth are in fact overlooking its “shabby, ad hoc vitality that most heritage cities would die for.” As a town, Plymouth’s past has been one of ongoing economic and cultural isolation since the shrinking of the Navy. Now it reflects more a broader England in decline, whilst all the post-modern ironic contradictions of the evolving new economies are present; ‘Francis Drake’ is a shopping mall, and what was the ‘Royal Sovereign’ pub is now a ‘Firkin Doghouse’. 

His childhood memories of the place are also challenged by more adult quotidian realities of Maddock’s time there, and his own preconceptions; the journey’s question shifting from, ‘What am I doing here?’ to the more telling, ‘What am I, here?’ The ‘God Forgotten Face’ of the title, originally derived from the 1945 Philip Larkin poem Plymouth, and the words “Last kingdom of a gold forgotten face...”, perhaps coming to represent his own personal account as a photographer finding himself changed in the face of the subject he had returned to find.” 

The exhibition runs until 2 June 2012.

Is Photography Over?

Here's a blast from the not-too-distant past. Back in 2010 SFMOMA organised a fantastic two-day symposium, Is Photography Over? which has since prompted much debate on the current state of the medium.

Photography has almost always been in crisis. In the beginning, the terms of this crisis were cast as dichotomies: is photography science or art? Nature or technology? Representation or truth? This questioning has intensified and become more complicated over the intervening years. At times, the issues have required a profound rethinking of what photography is, does, and means. This is one of those times. Given the nature of contemporary art practice, the condition of visual culture, the advent of new technologies, and many other factors, what is at stake today in seeing something as a photograph? What is the value of continuing to speak of photography as a specific practice or discipline? Is photography over?

SFMOMA invited a range of major thinkers and practitioners to write brief responses to this question and then to convene for a two-day summit on where photography is at. Participants include Vince Aletti, George Baker, Walead Beshty, Jennifer Blessing, Charlotte Cotton, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Geoff Dyer, Peter Galassi, Corey Keller, Douglas Nickel, Trevor Paglen, Blake Stimson, and Joel Snyder.

Additional responses to the question and reports on the research project can be found on their blog, Open Space.

Below is the entire video recordings from the event, split up according to the various sessions held across the two days:

Day One, Part One

Topics broached - Anxiety about the future of photography. Do we need to talk about photography? Why do pictures mean something to us?

Day One, Part Two

Topics broached - Aspects of photography to be removed. Can we agree on what photography means? What has changed?



Day Two, Part One

Topics broached - History of image manipulation. Photographer or artist who uses photography? What if analogue photography becomes nothing more than a hobby?



Day Two, Part Two

Topics broached - What is contemporary? Issues of authorship. Responses of the gallery/museum to the changes in photography.




Day Two, Part Three

Topics broached - Overlapping use of still and moving image. Age of uncertainty? Size of prints and the art market. 

These videos were originally posted on SFMOMA's YouTube channel.

Out of Focus: Photography @ Saatchi Gallery, London

Just opened to the public at Saatchi Gallery is the eagerly anticipated Out of Focus, an exciting survey of contempoaray photography featuring a kaleidoscopic range of work with artists using photography in diverse and innovative ways. Artists featured include Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, John Stezaker, Mitch Epstein and may others in what should be a fascinating and diverse look at the state of the medium.  

Out of Focus, the first major photography exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery since the highly acclaimed and controversial 2001 show I Am a Camera, presents 38 artists who offer an international perspective on current trends in photography, working with the medium in diverse, innovative and arresting ways. 

This exhibition comes at a time when the world of photography is going through one of its richest and also most complicated moments. Millions of images are being uploaded onto the internet every day making available more visual stimuli than ever before; old ideas about ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ photographers are being upturned; the traditional boundaries between various territories within the world of photography - fashion, documentary, advertising and art - are blurring into one another in unexpected, exciting and not always tension-free ways; and even the labels ‘artist’ and ‘photographer’ are the subject of debate (Olaf Breuning responds to this thorny topic by describing himself as “a four-wheel drive, all-purpose terrain vehicle”).  

The work included in the show has been brought together to "challenge the received rules and regulations of the medium" while the artists featured within flag up shared concerns of the body and gender tensions, mind and memory, a sense of place and home, the face, bonds of family, friends, tribes and other subcultures, but display a huge range of approaches from classic documentary photography to the reworking of found images, from capturing collaborative performances to photographs of three-dimensional assemblages themselves made out of photographs. 

Out of Focus features works by Michele Abeles, Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Olaf Breuning, Jonny Briggs, Elina Brotherus, Anders Clausen, Mat Collishaw, JH Engström, Mitch Epstein, Andreas Gefeller, Daniel Gordon, Noemie Goudal, Katy Grannan, Luis Guispert, Matthew Day Jackson, Chris Levine, Matt Lipps, Ryan McGinley, Mohau Modisakeng, Laurel Nakadate, Sohei Nishino, David Noonan, Marlo Pascual, Mariah Robertson, Hannah Sawtell, David Benjamin Sherry, Meredyth Sparks, Hannah Starkey, John Stezaker, A L Steiner, Mikhael Subotzky, Yumiko Utsu, Sara VanDerBeek, Nicole Wermers, Jennifer West and Pinar Yolaçan. 

A catalogue to accompany the exhibition is published by Booth-Clibborn Editions with an essay by William E Ewing, former director of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne. The exhibition runs until 22 July 2012.

Gillian Wearing @ The Whitechapel, London

© Gillian Wearing

With a recent string of exhibitions devoted entirely to photography, it seems The Whitechapel Gallery has converted itself into one of London’s primary destinations for fans of the medium. Off the back of highly-acclaimed solo shows of the work Paul Graham, Thomas Struth and John Stezaker, we are now being treated to the first major international survey of Turner Prize-winning British artist Gillian Wearing. 1000 Words Editorial assistant, Sean Stoker, went along to the media preview and was impressed with the results.

For more than twenty years Gillian Wearing’s work has shown a fascination with the performative aspects of everyday life, exploring this through photography that both embraces and breaks away from aspects of a documentary tradition. Split between three galleries, this delectable exhibition shows a range of work, from Wearing’s photographic series Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, made in the early nineties, to her latest video, Bully from 2010.

Wearing’s portraits and mini-dramas reveal a paradox, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, the liberation of anonymity allows us to be more truly ourselves. The exhibition begins with the artist herself, dancing in a shopping mall, blissfully unaware of her bemused audience. The idea of performance continues with works including Wearing’s 1997 masterpiece, 10–16. Adults lip synch the voices and act out the physical tics of seven children in a captivating film which moves from the breathless excitement of a ten year old to the existential angst of an adolescent.

Bearing witness to such forthright confessions is occasionally uncomfortable, but the stories told are powerful and emotive. Because of this, Wearing’s work treads the line between real life and performance in a way that leaves the viewer unsure which is which. This feeling is heightened by the route navigated through the gallery. From the dark and intimate confessional chambers on the ground floor we must climb a set of stairs to the next gallery, giving us a much needed pause to process all that has been confided in us before the open and light spaces that follow, including Wearing’s iconic 1992 series, Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say, and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say where strangers are offered paper and pen to communicate their message, messages that are still relevant twenty years later. In the upper galleries we enter the world of private subjectivity. An advert - Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian… (1994) attracted a series of disturbing disclosures. Wearing then turns the mask from metaphor to reality to explore her own identity, simultaneously disguising and exposing herself while adopting the guise of family members or artists such as Diane Arbus or Andy Warhol, revealing her own background and influences in the process.

This comprehensive survey, which also premieres new films and sculptures, shows Wearing’s ability to remove the mask from everyday British reservations and lay bare occasionally uncomfortable truths about ourselves. She bypasses the often clichéd stigmata of the dispossessed and traumatised in order to focus on finding the extraordinary in everyone of us. Combining an unflinching honesty with an acute sense of humour, Wearing unveils the best and worst of us, like a joke amongst friends, subtly indulging our innate pessimism and self-deprecating nature in a way that is a joy to behold. The exhibition runs until 17 June 2012.