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In the mid '70s, a group of young photographers were studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Their professors were Bernd and Hiller Becher, a couple who had gained fame for taking sharp b&w photographs of industrial archetypes long before it was fashionable to do so. The Becher took pictures like passionate and determined collectors, treating images of water towers, grain elevators, warehouses and other industrial buildings as if they were butterflies that had to be aligned with the utmost care in a catalog. They portrayed the mundane with an unprejudiced and clinical eye.
You might have heard of some of the students, they are among today's most successful photographers. Actually one of them is said to be the highest-priced photographer alive. While sharing the same tutors at the department of the photography, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and others have adopted a more personal vision and applied new technical possibilities to the neutral method professed by the Bechers. As a result, their respective artistic paths are exposing greater contrasts than similarities. An exhibition currently running at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (which has the least modern website a museum of modern art can dream of) retraces the short and inspiring story of what came to be called the Dusseldorf School of Photography . Objectivités: La Photographie à Düsseldorf presents some 160 works that gives a spectacular overview of the breadth of the photography department of the Kunstakademie from the early 1970s to today.
Before turning her lens to sumptuous interiors devoid of any human life, Candida Höfer portrayed the Turkish community living and working in the Germany of the '70s. She would photograph them in their shops, street gatherings or enjoying a family picnic in the park, letting them pose as if for a family album. It was one of my favourite body of works but i haven't been able to find much images online. It is extremely surprising to see how Höfer broke away from the intimate portrays of the Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) to photograph grandiose libraries, museums and other public places, with wow effects, lavish colours but not a single living soul in sight.
Laurenz Berges found fame with his photographies of empty constructions as well. First he documented abandoned Russian barracks, back in the early '90s after the Red Army had left the East of Germany.
The artist now dedicates his work to the ghost villages of the Rhenish brown coal area, a region between Cologne and Aachen abandoned by whole communities who had to relocate because of the advancing open-cast mining. Berges' photographs speak of private lives while having a broader, more social relevance.
Petra Wunderlich pays a more direct homage to the neutrality rule set by her tutors Bernd and Hiller Becher. In 1994, she started to document religious buildings in New York. The frontal view makes the buildings even flatter than they already are, the b&w is made more dispassionate by the absence of any human figure and most of the time only the writings on the facade indicate that these are places of worship. In fact, her images reveal that many local synagogues have been converted into Buddhist temples or Baptist churches, while others have been torn down and a few restored (via).
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg Bus Stops in Armenia (1997 / 2004) pictures dignified people waiting for public transport vehicles to stop by what is often an inadequate shelter.
Thomas Struth gives even more importance to the people in the picture. They become involuntary actors and the setting almost anecdotical. The Museum Photographs series portrays groups of sluggish tourists in shorts, t-shirts and a camera around the neck as they wander around museums. The master pieces behind the visitors are reduced to wallpapers.
Andreas Gursky might be one of the very few artists who, through manipulations, manage to re-invent historical landmarks like the Chartres Cathedral. One of the minuscule silhouettes at the bottom of the photo is none other than movie director Wim Wenders.
To make stunning Kamiokande, the artist traveled to an underground neutrino observatory in Japan. 1000 meters under the surface of the earth, a tank containing 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water and surrounded by over eleven thousands golden photomultiplier tubes keeps watch for supernovas in our galaxy. You could almost miss two tiny figures in lab uniforms standing on their inflatable rafts. Just like the picture of the Chartres Cathedral, Kamiokande is far more impressive in large-format.
Thomas Ruff leads the genre to more audacious abstractions, in particular with his jpegs series. Over the past decades, we've seen pastoral landscapes and tragic disasters alike succumb to digitization. Their passage through a computer leaves its imprint on our collective memory. But no matter how many photos, we don't get any more critical or conscious of what lays before our eyes.
Ruff turns JPEGs culled from the web into abstract works using digital technology. The JPEGs are enlarged to gigantic scale. Seen from close view, the exaggerated pixel patterns leave the image nearly unrecognizable, they acquire an Impressionist patina. The viewer has to stop and take their time to enjoy it, they must watch the images in close-up, mid-range and from far away to fully appreciate them. On view at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris through January 4, 2009. They have a tiny photo gallery. Photo on homepage: Bernd and Hilla Becher, (Blast Furnace) Neuves Maisons, Lorraine, France, 1971. |
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Bonjour les enfants! I've seen the Sacré-Cœur for the first time in my life. Been to Paris countless time but it was the first time i went in that neighbourhood. Not to visit the basilica. Non, non but because it's very close from the Galerie Paul Frèches which is currently showing the series 4/7: Slavoutich by French photographer Guillaume Herbaut.
This is the fourth section of a work of seven dedicated to the Chernobyl tragedy and it focuses on Slavoutich (or Slavutych in Ukraine), a model city purposefully built to host the personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and their families, evacuated from the abandoned city of Pripyat. However, the city appears to be also contaminated. It is after all located only 50 km away from the scene of the disaster.
The pictures quietly reveal the everyday life of a city "born" from a technological disaster, its inhabitants living under the constant threat of a poisoned nature. Here is the text that accompanies the photo series: April 26, 1986: Block N° 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station explodes. A 30 kilometres zone around the reactor is evacuated, including Pripiat, the city built to house the power station's workforce. Like Pripiat, Slavoutich is constructed as a model city: situated in the middle of a forest, its 22 000 inhabitants live in detached houses with private gardens or in large flats. The streets are clean, the shops are inexpensive. There are no power cuts or heating shortages. A television station broadcasts daily bulletins concerning the power station. As construction reached completion, the authorities discovered that this region is also contaminated. December 2001: The Chernobyl power station is closed definitely. Of the 12 000 workers, 9000 will be made redundant. More images on Paris-art and Oeil Public.
The exhibition runs until Dec. 20, 2008 at the Galerie Paul Frèches in Paris. |
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The Polish Pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at this year's edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture. And it's easy to understand why.
Curated by Grzegorz Piątek and Jarosław Trybuś, the exhibition is entitled Warsaw's Polonia Hotel. The Afterlife of Buildings and presents six major architectural projects designed in Poland in recent years by renowned architects. The exhibition engages with the theme of this year's Biennale "Out there - architecture beyond buildings" in a literal way. Looking beyond the form given to buildings by architects, the curators of the pavilion question the durability of edifices. Their project tries and forecasts how the passage of time, the changes in social or environmental conditions will affect and slowly modify buildings.
Images hung side by side present prestigious edifices as they are now and as they might be after a major transformation. The 'before' photographs were made by Nicolas Grospierre. The 'after' are collages by Kobas Laksa that imagine a possible future for these buildings.
What is the point of having a second air terminal at Warsaw airport when skyrocketing price of oil makes flying affordable to very few people? When importing bananas from Brazil and rice from Vietnam has become a scandalous luxury? The solution envisioned by Polish authorities a few decades from now is to convert an airstrip into cultivated land and to adapt Terminal 2 to the needs of a large animal husbandry plant. Could this idea be discarded as a crazy forecast when speculations about the future of Berlin's Tempelhof airport, now officially closed, envision the possibility to turn the 900-acre (365-hectare) site into a luxury spa, some condos, a museum, a park, a trade center or even the centerpiece of a new Olympic bid.
What's the use of the Metropolitan office building designed by Foster+Partners once the speculative real-estate market faces collapse or in case of a revolution in the patterns of corporate work? Could it be bought one day by the police and turned into a prison? The idea might not be as crazy as it sounds. The building encircles the courtyard (which would become an exercise yard for convicts) in an almost perfect panopticon and the polished surface of the walls multiply reflections, enabling a surveillance from all points of view.
What is going to happen with a monumental university library such as the Warsaw University Library when all the books become digital? Wouldn't it make more sense to restyle the space into a shopping mall?
Who needs a monumental Marian shrine like the Sanctuary of our Lady of Sorrow, built between 1994 and 2004, in Lichen when even the last Poles have ceased attending masses? Surely they would prefer Poland's largest church to be converted into an aquatic park, right?
The project didn't stop with a bunch of photos. The building of Polish Pavillion itself - a monumental building raised in the 1930s- is subject to change. The curators re-purposed it into a hotel for the first five days of the Biennale. When i visited, beds were still welcoming visitors willing to have a quick rest and a red sign that reads Hotel was added on the facade of the Polish pavilion.
The Venice Biennale of Architecture continues until Nov. 23, 2008. |
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The exhibition From One Revolution to Another - Carte Blanche to Jeremy Deller which is currently running at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris is worth a visit for many reasons (i illustrate some of them in an article which has just been translated in... swedish), the most exciting one for me was a large b&w portrait of the magnificent Exotic Adrian. Adrian Street was a glam rock wrestler who gained fame for dressing in flamboyant platform shoes and glitter capes, wearing bleached hair and extravagant make up, kissing his opponents on stage and tarting them up with make up when he had them pinned down.
Born in 1940 in a family of Welsh coalminers, Street left home at 16 to become a pro wrestler. To ensure that he'd get the recognition his talent deserved, he created a persona which puzzled the audience by the way its extreme toughness was paired with the appareance of an outlandish cross-dresser. Street designed his own outfits, finding inspiration in historical costumes such as those worn by Joachim Murat. His design were so successful that they ended up being worn by Elton John, Gary Glitter, Adam Ant, David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Street's involvement with the world of music stretched to releasing records, I'm Only Happy Breakin' Bones and Imagine What I Could Do To You (see video below). The best part of his career is that it is still going 'strong'. Street plans to wrestle professionally until 2010 and beyond, making it probably the only wrestler whose fights spanned over 7 decades. Adrian Street - Imagine What I Could Do to You: The magazine of the Palais de Tokyo has a wonderful interview in which Street appears to be an extremely witty and smart guy. From One Revolution to Another - Carte Blanche to Jeremy Deller is on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris until January 4, 2009. |
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The MACBA, the museum of contemporary art in Barcelona, has recently opened Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia, an exhibition that analyses the idea of a document in the history of photography on the basis of the study and staging of a number of debates about the genre during the 20th century. This is a rich exhibition at the point of being almost encyclopedic but it's also amazingly good and fascinating. Maybe later on this week i'll find the time to put my thoughts together and blog about the show but if this doesn't happen here's a picture of one of the photographers whose work i discovered last week while visiting the MACBA.
Xavier Ribas' Barcelona Pictures are miles away from your usual Gaudi facades and crazy Rambla postcards. The photographer turned his lens to the phenomenon of entertainment, of leisure, of what people do in their 'free' time, showing the extent to which such activities take place in the city's residual spaces. Quite spontaneously, people preserve, manage and recycle these spaces, effectively keeping them out of the efficient, productive order of the city: places for walking, sunbathing, picknicking, sport and exercise...It seems paradoxical that these spaces -not yet codified, as yet without regulation- are where people still have a chance to take the initiative. As Ribas concludes: 'Freedom can only flourish in a residual space that might, as a result, have a desolate appearance'.
Image on the homepage: Xavier Ribas, Untitled (Bellvitge), 1994-1997. Universal Archive. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia runs at the MACBA until January 6, 2009 and will then travel to the Museu Berardo de Lisboa. |
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Today in Italy, car manufacturers promise you that half naked ladies will throw themselves languorously over your car hood if you buy one of their models. Back in the 50s in the US, you would get a supply of Kleenex if you purchased a Pontiac. Photograph by Bill Wood - a commercial photographer in Fort Worth, Texas, whose negatives were bought by Diane Keaton and exhibited at the International Center of Photography.
The show closed a few days ago but i thought it was still worth sharing this image with you. |
