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Part of Thomas Demand's wonderful show Nationalgalerie, "Haltestelle" (2009) is a very recent work, as usual a large-scale photograph of a life-size paper model resembling a space of cultural significance. In this case it is a nondescript rural German bus shelter, which happens to be the place just outside of Magdeburg where the teen pop band Tokio Hotel were waiting for their school bus every morning. Now this is what I've been told about what happened: due to the band's huge popularity with teenagers, the shelter soon became somewhat of a favourite destination to worship the band, much to the annoyance of the local residents who had to cope with a torrent of emo kids rolling in from all directions on a daily basis. They came up with the idea of removing the shelter and putting it up on eBay, somewhat unsuccessfully. Soon after they realized that, due to their limited pocket money, Tokio Hotel's fans would not be able to purchase an item like this in one piece. In a slight iteration of the plan they sawed it apart and offered the pieces on eBay, this time to much greater success. What is interesting about this piece is that to some extent it mirrors Demand's own way of working in the way that the residents took advantage of the connotation of an object in the collective memory and used that to produce a new object (or pieces in their case) in its own right. A text accompanying the exhibition says "Thomas Demand's works test our reception of visual media and explore their influence on the structures of our memory, [he] conducts experiments in visual culture which centre around the questions of whether and to what extent a society's appearance is condensed and concentrated in individual key images as well as being retained in people's minds and remembered through such key images." The show, situated in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie close to Berlin's Potsdamer Platz features about 35 works, each reflected in a text by Botho Strauss. Runs through January 17th 2010. |
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On Thursday, i did a tour of Artissima, the contemporary art fair in Turin. One of the objectives of the fair this year was to be 'affordable'. "We are not interested in having artworks that costs 10 million euros. We want to enable young people and those who have a passion for art but a limited budget to become collectors," explained to La Stampa Andrea Bellini, the Director of the Turin art fair. I didn't ask for any price so i'll take his word for it. I did notice a fair amount of young and i must say rather exciting artists in the booths.
Well, that was a pretty inappropriate introduction because i'm actually going to focus on a photographer who gained fame in the '70s and '80s for her documentation of the internal war of the Mafia in Sicily at its bloodiest, and its devastating impact on the rest of the society. Just like Weegee and Enrique Metinides Letizia Battaglia was covering the cronaca nera, the crime stories for a newspaper. In her case, the left-wing L'Ora in Palermo.
In 1974, when mafia moved from organised crime to heroin trafficking, mafiosi became more brutal. They murdered anyone who would stand in the way of their business, from the chief of police to family rivals. By 1981, there was one killing every three day. Sometimes many more.
At the time, the Cosa Nostra was identifiable. It had faces one could photograph and associate with crimes. Today, mafia is much less visible. Battaglia's pictures, because of the corruption, silence, violence and suffering they laid bare, played a crucial role in the anti-mafia campaign. They show anti-mafia Judge Cesare Terranova shot in his car, corpses of mobsters abandoned by the road, tears of the wives and mothers when they discover the scene of the crime, arrests of a mafia boss, teenagers pretending to be though guys with attitude and guns.
Some of her photos were even used as evidence of corruption against Giulio Andreotti, a man whose authority in Italian politics was so powerful he was known as Divo Giulio, "divine Julius" an epithet of Julius Caesar. In 1993, when prosecutors in Palermo indicted the ex-prime minister, the police searched Battaglia's archives and discovered two 1979 photographs of Andreotti with an important Mafioso he had denied knowing. These pictures were the only physical evidence of the politician's connections to the Sicilian Mafia. Battaglia's life, after she retired from photography, is as awe-inspiring as her images: she's a photoreporter known for taking risks but also an editor and environmental writer and politician.
The Cardi Black Box gallery in Milan brought the work of Battaglia to Artissima, along with two other photographers of tragedy: Enrique Metinides and former Swiss police lieutenant Arnold Odermatt who during almost 50 years recorded car accidents.
Wikipedia has a list of webpages where you can find more photos of Battaglia. |
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I discovered the work of Edward S. Curtis while i was visiting the Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curtis documented the American West as well as the rites and lives of Native American peoples.
Hop! Another picture because those Navaho sure knew how to make fantastic masks.
See more images at Curtis Collection, Flury and Co, Library of Congress, Old Picture, Bruce Kapson. |
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Warf! Régine from wmmna is blogging about dog portraits now!? She's completely lost the plot, poor girl! One sunny morning, when i was in Amsterdam, i walked by Foam, the city Museum of Photography. You know me by now: i see a photo museum, i want to get in. There were a couple of exhibitions to see, the one that blew me away for the rest of the day was Paradis, the first major retrospective of the work of Dutch photographer Charlotte Dumas. Dumas makes shockingly moving portraits of animals.
It was at the Rijksakademie that she made her first series of animal portraits - five police dogs - which grew from a fascination with the portrayal of controlled aggression. In subsequent years several series emerged focusing on subjects such as police horses (Four Horses), army horses (Day is Done), wolves (Reverie), and more recently street dogs (Heart Shaped Hole). The relationship between man and animal forms a constant indirect element in her work. Dumas prefers to photograph animals with a close connection to humans and whom fulfil an important role for us: animals that have been tamed or trained by humans and which serve a particular purpose, whether in an actual task or by their appearance. Each of these animals lives in a human environment, generally in captivity. Dumas employs traditional formats, invariably placing the subject in the centre, portraying moments of concentrated calm. The psychology of portraiture plays a key role in this.
Her portraits of stray dogs depressed me beyond words but Dumas sees hope in them. If you're in Amsterdam or around, you know what you should do...
Check out the interview that Brooklyn Rail made with the artist. |
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If you happen to be in Amsterdam over the next couple of weeks you might want to walk or bike and see the exhibition of Muzi Quawson's work at the Annet Gelink Gallery.
Set in the most boondocks boundaries of Glasgow, Northeastern Montana (USA), Quawson's new film The Old Home examines "the nature of existence from society's outsiders." Her camera silently follows Ivar "Duke" T Pederson: an aging cowboy who incarnates an Old American West that mirrors almost too well our most used and abused clichés. On several occasions over the last two years Quawson stayed with Duke either in his Mid-Western bungalow or out there in the vast open fields with his cows and his dog, exploring the American West and its detachment from modern day civilisation. My grandmother was smart and witty but she was madly in love with John Wayne. She would catch every single opportunity to watch western movies. It put me off cowboys forever. Yet, I sat in the gallery and watched The Old Home twice, it's breathtakingly beautiful.
In another room of the gallery, a slide show entitled The Hissing of the Summer Lawns (2008) accompanies a run-of-the-mill family from Georgia, USA. See The Old Home at Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, through October 17, 2009. |
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After yesterday's first part of my report on Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr, here's a quick (and very sloppy i'm afraid) focus on his private collection of photographs. The artist's interest in social themes finds an echo in these documentary photographs. I'm going to leave aside the international part of this collection and concentrate only on the images from Great Britain.
Most of the works exhibited at the Jeu de Paume date from the 70s and 80s, an era dominated in England by the rule of Margaret Thatcher. Parr doesn't have fond memories of her reign and the photos he collects attest of the social decline and malaise the working class went through at the time. And without further ado - but also without any order nor detail, let me introduce you to:
Paul Reas's photo illustrate the arrival of retail culture in Britain, with American-style shopping malls and out-of-town stores (see in particular Portfolio 1 on his website.)
The work of Tony Ray Jones has been a great influence on Parr who first saw Ray-Jones's photographs of the British at work and leisure when he was still a student, back in 1970: "His pictures were about England. They had that contrast, that seedy eccentricity, but they showed it in a very subtle way. They have an ambiguity, a visual anarchy. They showed me what was possible." (via)
Chris Killip's black and white images captured people and places stricken by Thatcherism.
Tom Wood's Looking for Love series was taken in 1982-85 in a North England disco pub. The photos not only offer a crash course in that glam rock '80s fashion that's been back in favour on the catwalks for a couple of seasons, it's also an anthropological and o-so-crude glimpse into the insecurities and aspirations of young people.
Peter Mitchell has used early colour photography since the '70s to record the transformation of Leeds and its working-class. He immortalized chip shops, fun fairs, power stations, young bikers, Saturday afternoon and mills.
John Davies has been photographing the raw industrial wilderness and suburban sprawl of the Midlands and northern England since 1981.
All this grittiness is almost forgotten with John Hinde's photos of Butlins resorts, the affordable holiday destination for the British working classes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Billy Butlin commissioned Hinde and his team of photographers to immortalise his holiday camps in technicolor postcards that were sold at Butlin's camps throughout the British Isles.
The series Life as a Night Porter document 10 years that Chris Shaw spent working as a night porter in London hotels.
Chris Howgate's Mecca, a series of photographs taken in bingo halls throughout the UK. You can catch Parrworld - the Collection of Martin Parr until 27 September 2009 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Previously: Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr (Part 1), Martin Parr retrospective: from fish & chips to mass tourism, Party of the day. |
