Friday Round Up - 8th July, 2016

This week on Friday Round Up four diverse exhibitions - Mongolian Lens 1 (Melbourne), Mind the Gap Kristian Laemmle-Ruff, (Perth) The Agricultural Shows of Australia Louise Whelan (Sydney), and Post Script, Rachel Boillot (New York).

Exhibitions: Melbourne
Mongolian Lens 1 - Group Show


This exhibition, curated by RMIT lecturer Jerry Galea, presents works by a number of emerging Mongolian documentary photographers providing "a close-up and intimate view of the social change and tensions of this extraordinary nation, as its traditional ways of life become unsustainable”.

Mongolian Lens 1 forms part of Galea’s research, ‘Exploring Mongolian Society in Transition through Documentary Photography’ in which he examines the cultural significance of the photograph in Mongolian society. “My work focuses on a shift in photography practice where the Mongolian herders go from idle to active participants, so that taking photographs themselves gives them a new way to understand their world in pictures,” he explains. 

“I’m excited to showcase these new emerging documentary photographers. Mongolia is in the throes of change and this exhibition gives Mongolian photographers an opportunity to express their opinions to an international community.”

Around thirty selected images are on show at Melbourne’s Magnet Galleries until 23 July.

Magnet Galleries

Level 2
640 Bourke Street
Melbourne


Exhibitions: New York
Post Script - Rachel Boillot 

This is a really interesting series from American documentary photographer Rachel Boillot that captures the fallout from the closure of 3653 rural post offices run by the US Postal Service. 

Many of these post offices were located in the south and were the focal point for communities. Their closure has meant more than the loss of a Zip Code and regular postal deliveries. Another by-product of the ascendency of digital communication at the expense of human values. 

(C) All images Rachel Boillot

Opens 19 July
The Half King
505 West 23rd Street
New York NY 10011

Exhibitions: Perth
Mind the Gap - Kristian Laemmle-Ruff

"Mind the Gap is a somewhat dark and politically charged meditation on the gap between Australian cultures. It is not asking us to close the gap, to homogenise or assimilate; rather it asks us to acknowledge the gap, nurture the gap, celebrate the diversity rather than deny its existence. It encourages us to question and hold ourselves accountable for our actions as global citizens. The work aims to highlight colonial mannerisms and differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of understanding and valuing land. Mind the Gap encourages us to imagine a future with deeper reconciliation and stronger acknowledgment of our true history rather than having our heads in the sand." Kristian Laemmle-Ruff

The Conversation & The Cycle

I first wrote about Kristian two years ago when his book In the Folds of Hills was released. It was an incredibly mature and insightful work for someone in their mid-twenties and I was curious to see how this talented Australian photographer would develop his eye and his work.

In 'Mind the Gap' my questions have largely been answered. This is an extraordinary body of work that is created with a deep understanding of the role of storytelling in photography. Yet it is far more than a collection of photographs drawn together through narrative. It is a highly intelligent coupling of creative thought and practical skills that allows the work to be presented in fresh and interesting ways that are instantly engaging and thought-provoking.

I love the way Kristian has incorporated layers into the work that advance the story and also allow the viewer to be part of the conversation. 'Mind the Gap' is intriguing as each of its components come together to create a powerful, complex narrative that when stripped bare, is essentially about our connection to the Earth, about our humanity. 

Pictured here are images from The Generation Series, Pine Gap, and an installation The Conversation & The Cycle (above).

In The Generation Series frames are filled with the red earth from Roxby Downs and Olympic Dam, (South Australia) - “the most horrible, traumatic places I have ever experienced” - and juxtaposed against a photograph of the luminous dusk sky of Lake Eyre. The earth and sky create an intriguing backdrop to the portraits Kristian took of those living in Fukushima city, following the tsunami and the subsequent radioactive contamination. 

Pine Gap: This panoramic shot captures Pine Gap, the second most important US base outside of the USA, locally known as a 'spy' base, from which the US monitors and controls military activities via satellites. This “terror facility” as Kristian labels it, is located in the centre of Australia and is shrouded in secrecy. Few photographs have been taken over its 50 year history.  

The Conversation & The Cycle is an installation. A multilayered photograph The Conversation combines three images - the Mound Springs in South Australia owned by BHP Billiton, the sacred scar tree near Dubbo (New South Wales) and a boardroom dressed with the colours of the empire. This symbolic image is displayed above a plinth on which two melted and burnt laptops (The Cycle) sit, evoking thoughts of destruction, decay and a return to the Earth. 

22 July - 21 August
Perth Centre for Photography
Opening night 21 July
18 Colin Street
West Perth

Exhibitions: Sydney
The Agricultural Shows of Australia - Louise Whelan

There's a lot to like about this series by Sydney photographer and oral historian Louise Whelan. The Agricultural Shows have played an integral part in rural communities, as well as the capital cities, for more than a century. Most of us have childhood memories of going to the 'Show', seeing farm animals, buying showbags, queuing up for rides that made you dizzy and sick, and enjoying the atmosphere of the carnival. 

In Australia there are around 600 Agricultural Show societies. Louise says these Shows "present an opportunity to reflect on the paddock to plate relationship, the value of our farmers and the value of the Australian food bowl. The images in this series explore many aspects of the ”Ag Show” including competition, food production and land management, community and social practices, genetics and modification, entertainment, competition, coming of age, nostalgia, time, intergenerational careers and employment, farming practice, architecture, the sideshow life and tradition".

For the first time since 1823, the Agriculture Show is under threat. This year The Castle Hill Show (NSW) announced its closure after 130 years of continuous operations due to lack of funds and redevelopment in the area. Let's hope this is an isolated incident. 

13 July - 14 August

Moran Prizes
Juniper Hall
250 Oxford Street
Paddington

Friday Round Up - 1st July, 2016

This week it's all about Les Rencontres D'Arles the largest photography festival in the world.

The 47th edition and the second under director Sam Stourdzé opens on 4th July with the central theme of photographers as storytellers.

That might be stating the obvious, but the art of storytelling is complex and in this image-saturated world it may be the key factor in defining the critical difference between professional photographers' work and the photography of the masses.

The 2016 programme presents exhibitions organised under key headings: Street Photography Revisited, Western Stories, Monsters & Co., Africa Pop, Platforms of the Visible New Approaches to Documentary Photography; After War; I Am Writing To You From a Far Off Country; Rereading Photography in a Different Light: Singular (Quirky Collections); Outside the Frame; and Emergences. There is also an associated programme, book awards, workshops and more.

As eclectic as the programme so is my selection. Feast your eyes on works by Alexandre Guirkinger, Bernard Plossu, Eamonn Doyle, Ethan Levitas, Garry Winogrand, Don McCullin, Yan Morvan, Piero Martinello, PJ Harvey and Seamus-Murphy, Sid Grossman and more. Enjoy!

AFTER WAR:

Alexandre Guirkinger 

MAGINOT LINE - "Burrows are fascinating because usually only the outline or threshold is known; the rest is left to the imagination. On a symbolic level, the same is true for the Maginot Line: everybody has heard of it but few can describe it. Its name resonates like a receptacle for fantasies. Their shapes have a symbolic dimension. Through my images, I wanted to share my fascination with this extraordinary relic of an already old modernity. The shape, location or outline of the bunkers I chose to photograph leads the image to become something more than the material record of a border: a kind of science fiction movie set, a trace of land art, modernist architecture, a contemporary geoglyph or something else that captures the imagination. The gap between the abundance of the line’s relics and the lack of contemporary representations offers an exciting playground to question our relationship to the landscape, borders and limits." Alexandre Guirkinger 

Yan Morvan

Battlefields - "Yan Morvan’s impression that media coverage of conflicts no longer boils down to anything more than infotainment and the mass consumption of images prompted him to orientate his work in a different direction and portray the image and reality of war more thoughtfully. In the spring of 2004, he travelled around the world with his tripod and Deardorff 20x25cm in search of places that have made history for 3500 years. Do they still recount the past? Mr. Morvan’s working conditions may not be the same as a photojournalist’s, but he actually continues photographing war through its absence. This exhibition, which features 80 pictures, provides us with a thought-provoking glimpse of history."  Marco Zappone

Don McCullin

"Don McCullin is known primarily as one of the most highly regarded conflict photographers of the late twentieth century, having produced some of the most iconic and defining images of wars in Vietnam, Cyprus, Beirut and Biafra. The exhibition of his work at the Rencontres d’Arles 2016 brings together, for the first time, the wealth and depth of his photographic practice beyond the limits of conflict, exploring his long standing practice as a documentary and landscape photographer. Even outside the frame of war, McCullin’s work reflects some of the most pressing social issues of our time, always portrayed using a photographic language of great beauty and subtlety. Perhaps his greatest talent, however, has been his ability to capture a diversity of subjects from a consistent standpoint. From his local surroundings in London, to foreign conflicts and tragedies, or returning to the peaceful landscape of the Somerset levels, there is a universal way in which McCullin reveals the world around us." Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian

WESTERN COLORS:

Bernard Plossu

"Bernard Plossu’s last official visit to Arles was for a 1987 group show of work by photographers using the Fresson process. At the age of 71, Western Colors is his first solo exhibition. Rewind: in 1966, Plossu arrived in San Francisco. The 21-year-old longhaired beatnik had a deep desire to experience and live in the American West that had captured his imagination. He was more excited about the Indians than the cowboys. In his eyes, they symbolise revolt, freedom, space and nature—a lost paradise to which he kept returning on hikes or car trips in Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and California until 1985, when he definitively returned to France. Armed with a Nikkormat with a single 50-mm lens, Plossu shot his own colour Western. The shots are still, soft and empathically and enthusiastically framed. Plossu is in his element. He not only captures his dreams but breathes life into them. He shows nothing. He is not a reporter. He constructs no series nor pursues any theme. He breathes, photographs, walks, photographs, drives, photographs. Westerns forever!" Stéphane Brasca

Street Photography:

Eamonn Doyle

"End. seeks out the driving forces of both photographer and subject in an exhibition that brings together three bodies of work—i, ON and End.—exploring the local streets of Doyle’s native Dublin. Though apparently the concluding work of a trilogy, End. actively opens up the heart of the whole. i presents unknowable street figures enveloped entirely in the interior landscape of their location. ON’s black & white giants convulse across their own image, bracing the hard Dublin light. End. as a sequence of events revealing a city whose concrete is as plastic as the movement of its inhabitants. Created as both installation and publication, End. is a collaborative work by Eamonn Doyle, Niall Sweeney and David Donohoe. Built around the photographs of Doyle, it also features drawing and sound by Sweeney and Donohoe." Niall Sweeney

Ethan Levitas and Garry Winogrand

(C) Ethan Levitas

(C) Garry Winogrand

Radical Relation - "Pairing the pioneering and complementary oeuvres of Ethan Levitas and Garry Winogrand, this exhibition re-examines the street photography through its own language and terms in order to situate it properly within the open field of contemporary art practice. Hailed by John Szarkowski as the central photographer of his generation, Winogrand’s contribution to street photography is widely acknowledged, if only partly understood. An inheritor of Winogrand’s unfinished legacy, Levitas has, over the past decade, developed and extended the practice of street photography by defining it as a relation of parts—the sum of which discloses a dissonance between visibility and appearance. What does it mean to look? Can meaning be created through the act of looking? Among Levitas’s bodies of work, we can more clearly comprehend the significance of Winogrand’s endeavor, and see a fulfillment of its promise." Joshua Chuang

Sid Grossman

From Document to Revelation - "Sid Grossman is an important but long-overlooked figure in modern American photography. Before his death in 1955, at the age of 42, he created a powerful and influential body of work. Grossman began as a social-documentary photographer and helped found the New York Photo League in 1936. In the spirit of the League’s left-leaning politics, he photographed in the working-class neighborhoods of Chelsea and Harlem until the mid-1940s, when Grossman’s vision became more personal and subjective. Radical in its day, this work exemplified the expressionistic energy of the ‘New York School’ of the 1950s. In 1949, the FBI blacklisted Grossman as a communist ‘ subversive’. This exhibition is the most comprehensive look at Grossman’s artistic achievement and influence in at least 35 years, and his first exhibit in Europe. It includes rare vintage prints from the Grossman estate and from noted public and private collections, as well as works by his leading students. " Keith F. Davis

Platforms of the Visible 

New Approaches to Documentary Photography

Piero Martinello

Radicalia - "Radical’ is something ‘acting in depth; concerning an issue beginning with its essential principles’, according to Salvatore Battaglia’s definition in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. With this as his starting point, photographer Piero Martinello travelled around Italy in search of women and men who—each in their own way and for different reasons—have embraced radical choices and lifestyles. Fools, ravers, criminals, devouts and cloistered nuns: Martinello’s subjects come to life in a series of portraits in which the photographic medium appears at times in its pure form, at others grafted in items of vernacular iconography (passport pictures, holy pictures, mug shots). Everything comes together in a concept album where the face becomes a prism through which to investigate the human need to undertake extreme and unconventional life paths."

Other Exhibitions:

PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy

Swinging Bamako

Phenomena Realities Extraterrestres

Lady Liberty

Les Rencontres d'Arles runs 4 July to 25 September.

Visit the website for the full programme. 

Friday Round Up - 24th June, 2016

This week a photographic tribute to those innocents who are caught up in the horror of conflict and have to flee their homes. Plus WARM Festival in Sarajevo and the Indian Photography Festival in Hyderabad calls for submissions for this year's festival.

Feature: What War Has Done To Me

(C) Nake Batev EPA Macedonia

Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Anastasia Taylor-Lind about her work Welcome to Donetsk for a feature I am working on for New Zealand Pro Photographer magazine.

Anastasia told me that while she was in Kiev, Ukraine she began thinking about how people are portrayed in wartime.

How you lose your identity, are stripped of being who you are - a girlfriend, sister, writer, photographer.

Instead you are labelled a refugee, you become collateral damage, a victim, a product of war.

I found her words really profound and I hope as you look at these photographs you see beyond the label "refugee" to the person and imagine how their lives have been irrevocably changed by conflict, changed by an event in which they had no part, but which has rocked them to their core.

You can also watch this video on Al Jazeera in which "refugees" talk about how they feel about that word and what it means to them. 

It's time the media started using a different language, one that recognises the individual, one that remembers we are talking about human beings, one that shows respect and compassion. 

Let's move the conversation. 

(C) Alkis Konstantinidis Greece

(C) Angelos Tzortzinis AFP Lesbos

(C) Angelos Tzortzinis AFP Lesbos

(C) Borce Popovsk AP Macedonia


(C) DarkoVojinovic AP  

(C) Eddie Mulholland The Telegraph Lesbos

(C) Robert Atanasovski AFP/Getty Macedonia


(C) Santi Palacios AP Lesbos Greece

(C) Stoyan Nenov Reuters Macedonia

(C) Warren Allott The Telegraph Hungary

Festival:
WARM Festival Sarajevo
26 June - 2 July

Sarajevo, 94 (C) Enrico Dagnino

The city is besieged, water is missing, the electricity and the gas when present are as dangerous as a bomb the home made stoves regularly explode burning big and small. The attempt of the Muslim soldiers to break the siege end in massacres of soldiers on the front line. 

The WARM Foundation presents WARM Festival, a week long event dedicated to war reporting, war art and war memory.

Bringing together journalists, artists, historians, researchers and activists WARM aims to showcase a range of media that includes photojournalism.

This year there are several exhibitions with work from Andrew Quilty, Enrico Dagnino, Dominic Bracco and Yael Martinez. #Dysturb is also involved.

Of particular relevance to photojournalists is the panel discussion about how violent events are portrayed in the media: ‘The Shock of the Image: Does it inform?’ with Enrico Dagnino (Photographer), Bernandino Hernandez (Photographer), Jérôme Huffer (Head of Photo Department, Paris Match), Paul Lowe (Photographer & Course Director, Masters Programme in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography, London College of Communication), Enric Marti (AP Chief Photographer, Latin America & Caribbean), moderated by Maral Deghati (Photo Editor & Curator) 11am Thursday 30th June.

To find our more visit WARM Foundation.

Sarajevo, 94 (C) Enrico Dagnino

(C) Dominic Bracco

Family and friends attend the funerals of three female victims of a massacre that left 13 dead and over a dozen wounded in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Most of the victims were between the ages of 14 and 20 years old and were attending a birthday party. They were herded into a corder of the house and executed by a firing squad. Armed men came looking for one young man, but when the patrons responded that he was not there they opened fire.

(C) Andrew Quilty/Agence Vu

Afghan National Army officers rest on a barren field during a clearing operation in the final days of the government forces’ counter-offensive to re-take Kunduz City from Taliban insurgents. 10 October 2015.  

(C) Yael Martinez

My daughter  after taking a shower in home in Taxco Guerrero.She is 6 years old.In 2013  three of my  brothers in-laws died. After these events I began documenting my family and tried to capture the psychological and emotional breakdown caused by the loss of a family member.

Festival: Call for Submissions
The Indian Photography Festival

The Indian Photography Festival (IPF) - Hyderabad invites photographers to submit their works for the exhibitions as part of the festival in Hyderabad, India from 29th September - 9th October 2016. 

IPF - Hyderabad, is an international photography festival showcasing a wide range of photography across all genres from portrait, landscape and photojournalism to fine-art by emerging and established photographers from India and around the globe. The 2015 edition featured 63 exhibitions by 176 photographers from 14 countries. The festival program includes Exhibitions, Panel Discussions, Artists Talks, Portfolio Reviews, and Photography Workshops & Book Launches. 

To find out more visit the website here.