Friday Round Up - 6th February, 2015

This week on Friday Round Up it's all about photobooks - the inaugural Photobook Melbourne Festival kicks off next week. Check out the preview here including book awards and exhibitions. Plus FotoEvidence and Tanya Habjouqa join forces to publish Occupied Pleasures and more links to interesting stories.

Festival Debut:
Photobook Melbourne
12-22 February

Photobook Melbourne Festival Director

Heidi Romano

This year Australia has a new photography festival to add to the calendar: Photobook Melbourne. The brainchild of fine art photographer and designer, and now Festival Director, Heidi Romano, and co-founder Daniel Boetker Smith - Director of Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive, Photobook Melbourne kicks off on 12th February.

This ten-day Festival promises to introduce Melbournians to a vast array of photobooks, including those that were finalists in the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards over the past three years.

“What we’re showing are pretty much the best books of the world. I was really lucky to see the Aperture books at Paris Photo in 2013 and I just fell in love with this whole idea that you can see, and touch all these amazing books…It is the tactility, which inspired me so much,” says Heidi Romano.

She continues. “Books travel lightly. With the limited funding we had I could afford to get lots of books over here, but I couldn’t afford 200 exhibitions! With all of these books coming from around the world I feel like I can actually showcase these little mini-exhibitions within the Festival. And it is also very interesting to expose Australia and especially Melbourne to the Aperture Prize and to share the awards that are happening around the world”. 

Photobook Melbourne will have more than 200 photobooks on display, the majority of which will be available to physically engage with. In addition to the Paris Photo-Aperture Awards finalists, books from Photobook Ireland’s library project and the Photobook Club UK will be on display. A Book Fair is also scheduled with representation from local and international photobook publishers.

The programme also includes talks, workshops, studio visits and nine exhibitions. #dysturb will participate too, although what they are posting on the streets of Melbourne is a closely guarded secret. The inclusion of #dysturb fulfills Romano’s desire to have a “political element” without it becoming a photojournalism festival. 

On the Festival’s opening night the winner of the 2015 Australian Photobook of the Year Awards, will be announced. The Awards attracted around 100 entries from which 15 finalists were chosen.

Australian Photobook of the Year Awards* – Finalists
Ashely Gilbertson - Bedrooms of the Fallen
Jackson Eaton – Better Half
Jesse Marlow – Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them
Glenn Sloggett – Fibro Dreams
Ying Ang – Gold Coast
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff – In the Folds of Hills
Odette England – Lover of Home
Kelvin Skewes – Nauru: What was taken and what was given
Jessie + Jacqueline DiBlasi – Nonna to Nana
Emma Phillips – SALT
Brendan Esposito – The Beginning
Andrea Francolini – The Kings of KKH
David Kirkland – Tribal PNG
Stephen Dupont – Typhoon
Raphaela Rosella – We Met a Little Early But I Get to Love You Longer
*Presented by the Festival’s major sponsor Momento Pro

Photobook Melbourne 12-22 February
Various venues
Visit the website and check the Festival’s Facebook page for updates

Selected Programme Highlights: 

(C) Robert Zhao Renhui - A guide to the flora and fauna of the world

Photobook Melbourne Opening Night &
Australian Photobook of the Year Awards
12 February, 6pm
Centre for Contemporary Photography
404 George St
Fitzroy

Paris-Photo Aperture Photobook Awards Exhibition
Opening Friday 13 February
The Baron Said
83 Kerr Street
Fitzroy

The Photobook Melbourne Fair
14 & 15 February
Centre for Contemporary Photography

Photobook Publishing Panel Discussion
16 February
Photography Studies College
65 City Road
Southbank
Free. Limited seats. Bookings essential. Visit website for details.

Photobook Melbourne Exhibition Programme:

Opening 12 February: 

Robert Zhao Renhui 

A guide to the flora and fauna of the world
Centre for Contemporary Photography 

Wouter van de Voorde - Sunrise
Colour Factory
409 – 429 Gore Street
Fitzroy

Glen Sloggett - Fibro Dreams
Strange Neighbour
395 – 397 Gore St
Fitzroy 

Opening 14 February: 

Jordan Madge - Backwoods
Lindberg Gallery
67 Cambridge Street
Collingwood 

Sarah Pannell - East of the Euphrates
Neospace
7 Campbell Street
Collingwood 

Katrin Koenning - Indefinitely
James Makin Gallery
67 Cambridge Street
Collingwood

Yaakov Israel 

The Quest for the Man on The White Donkey
Lindberg Galleries

Opening 17 February:

Sam Wong - NY 

Jack Shelton - LA 

No Vacancy Gallery
34 – 40 Jane Bell Lane
Melbourne

Kickstarter Campaign:
Occupied Pleasures - Tanya Habjouqa

(C) Tanya Habjouqa

FotoEvidence and award-winning documentary photographer Tanya Habjouqa have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the production of a hardcover book of Habjouqa's study of the Palestinian people. Habjouqa's body of work focuses on the everyday, ordinary things that people do to find pleasure and joy in the shadow of conflict. This is the fifth Kickstarter collaboration FotoEvidence has entered into with a photojournalist and the strategy is proving successful in bringing important stories into the public consciousness. Publisher Svetlana Bachevanova said this week that the campaign had already reached its target long before the end date, which is fantastic and further proof that people will pay for quality work. But if you want to support this worthy book, and allow Habjouqa to expand its scope, you can still contribute. Visit the Kickstarter campaign here. 

(C) Tanya Habjouqa

Links to Interesting stories from the world of photography:

NPPA funded study into what make a photograph memorable, shareable, and worth publishing

Time's Photojournalism Links - 10 Best Photo Essays of the Month

Wired Raw File: Ninjas: Gold Rush In Mongolia

Friday Round Up - 30 January, 2015

This week on Friday Round Up Australia's largest photography festival Head On calls for entries for the 2015 awards, exhibitions in London, New York and Melbourne, and links to some interesting articles on photography.

Awards:

Head On 2015
Entries open for the Head On photo awards on 1st February and close 1st March. In addition to the Head On Portrait, Landscape, Mobile and Multi-Media Awards, this year there will be a fifth award category, but just what that might encompass is currently under wraps. Visit the website here for more information and updates. Head On runs 1-31 May in Sydney.


Exhibitions:

London:
Drawn by Light: The Royal Photographic Society Collection
More than 200 photographs, some dating back to the 1820’s, feature in this exhibition which, if nothing else, shows little change in human nature and the subjects photographers are drawn to. The exhibition is cleverly hung to depict images taken decades apart that evoke similar sentiments. Many of these photographs are taken by doctors, soldiers and other non-professionals - nothing's changed there either. The Guardian has published a series of articles on the exhibition (oh for a newspaper in Australia that finds photography that important!). Start here and work your way through each posting. It’s definitely worthwhile especially if you can’t get to the physical show.


Portrait of Christina, c1913 by Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn O’Gorman
Photograph: Royal Photographic Society © National Media Museum, Bradford


Daguerreotype St. Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1840s


Hippopotamus at Zoo, 1852, Juan Carlos Maria Isidro


Nude c.1855 

The Gate of Goodbye c.1916 Francis James Mortimer 

Movement Study, 1926 Rudolf Koppitz 

Refugees from East Pakistan on the Indian Border, 1971 Don McCullin 

Until 1 March
Science Museum London

New York:
Ken Schles - Invisible City/Night Walk 1983-1989

Invisible City

Forty black and white images from Ken Schles will be on show in celebration of the republication by Steidl of Invisible City and the newly released companion Night Walk. My interview with Ken will be published in the coming weeks, but to whet your appetite, check out these images.


Invisible City

Invisible City

Night Walk


Night Walk

Night Walk

Night Walk

Until 14 March
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street, suite 1406
New York

Melbourne:
Wouter van de Voorde
(Hume) sunrise

This exhibition is part of the inaugural Photobook Melbourne festival which opens on 12 February. Look out for next week’s festival feature.

Of this body of work, Wouter van de Voorde says: “Early morning fog is one of the features of the Canberran winter rendering non-places into mystical wastelands. Wandering through these paddocks while shooting this series I imagined soldiers running through the fog, bombs, grenades, WWI… The photographer as a lone soldier wandering zig zag across the front-line in a brief instant of cease-fire. Until the sun breaks through the fog”.

5-28 February
Colour Factory
409/429 Gore Street, Fitzroy
Opening night: 12 February 6pm

Interesting Articles:

What can a pregnant photojournalist do? Everything 

Lynsey Addario 

Lynsey's book "It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War" will be released next week (5 February). To get a glimpse of what this book has in store read Lynsey's article in the New York Times here. 

The costa del concrete: the Mediterranean coastline then and now in pictures by photographer Pedro Armestre for Greenpeace - The Guardian 

Award-winning Dutch advertisement shows how guide dogs are being used to help those suffering from the nightmares of war - Daily Mail 

How photography’s ‘decisive moment’ often depicts an incomplete view of reality by Fred Ritchin

The death of Fabienne Cherisma, from the series Haiti, 2010, © Nathan Weber/NBW Photo 

Friday Round Up - 23 January, 2015

This week on Friday Round Up Chobi Mela opens in Bangladesh, two historic exhibitions in Melbourne, the winning entries in Getty #RePicture and Alexia Sinclair's new work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Festival:
Chobi Mela - Bangladesh

The 8th installation of Chobi Mela, Asia’s first and largest photography festival, opens today in Dhaka, Bangladesh and runs until 5th February. This year’s programme, with the theme of “Intimacy,” features more than 30 photographers from 22 countries. 

(C) Denis Dailleux

(C) Jana Romanova


(C) Jannatul Mawa

(C) Malcolm Hutcheson

(C) Max Pinckers

(C) Nepal Picture Library

An initiative by Drik Picture Library and supported by the South Asian Media Institute, Chobi Mela combines “big name” artists with lesser known and emerging, presenting a comprehensive selection of exhibitions, talks and workshops.

A key feature of Chobi Mela is the exhibitions that are mounted on rickshaw vans, which travel around Dhaka City literally taking photography to the masses.

Festival Director, Shahidul Alam, who is also founder of Drik and a renowned photographer in his own right, says, “It is time Bangladesh began to take pride in itself. We are now a role model in the world of photography. The world is looking up at Bangladesh. The nation needs to respond”. 

(C) Paolo Patrizi

(C) Yusuf Sevincli

(C) Abdollah Heidari

(C) Anwar Hossain

This year’s festival is curated by Munem Wasif, ASM Rezaur Rahman and Tanzim Wahab with guest curators Salauddin Ahmed and Mahbubur Rahman.

Until 5th February
Various venues and locations
For more information visit the Chobi Mela website

Exhibitions: Melbourne

Bohemian Melbourne

Liz Ham, Vali Myers in her studio in the Nicholas Building, 1997

Bohemian Melbourne shines a light on the city's cultural bohemians from 1860 to today, tracing individuals who have pushed against convention in their lives and art, from Marcus Clarke, Albert Tucker and Mirka Mora to Barry Humphries, Vali Myers and Nick Cave. The exhibition, which is currently on at the State Library of Victoria, features photographs, artworks, books including artists' journals and multimedia presentations. Well worth the visit. 

Mirka Mora in her studio, 1978 © Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Nick Cave, 1973 (C) Ashley Mackevicius & National Portrait Gallery 

(C) Albert Tucker, Self-portrait with Joy Hester, 1939

Bohemian Melbourne
State Library of Victoria
Swanston Street, Melbourne
Until 22 February

Dreams and Imagination: 

Light in the Modern City

(C) Mark Strizic - 1967 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

In "Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City" curator Melissa Miles has selected a diverse range of artists and images through which to explore what she terms “the myths that surround light in the history of Australian photography”.

Miles, who is an Associate Professor at Monash University, has come to this exhibition through her larger research project into Australian light and photography. In ‘Dreams and Imagination’ it is the urban space and how photographers have responded to the changing modernist city, which draws Miles’ focus. Artists include Max Dupain, Mark Strizic, Olive Cotton, Arthur Dickinson, David Moore and Harold Cazneaux with works dating from 1920s through to 1971. Many of these images are important documents in the visual history of Australia and it is rare to have the opportunity to inspect these treasures at leisure.

(C) Mark Strizic

(C) Max Dupain

(C) David Moore

Dreams and Imagination: Light in the Modern City
Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill
Until 1 March

Competition Winners:

Getty #RePicture

Australian photographer Ben McRae has taken out second place in Getty Images inaugural #RePicture competition for his image #RePictureFamily. McRae was one of more than 2500 photographers from 85 countries who entered the global competition that is premised on "challenging how we look at the world and exploring how we can change the paradigm around stereotypical imagery currently used to describe people and communicate concepts". US photographer Braden Summers took out the top prize for his image "All Love is Equal" (see below).

(C) Ben McRae

(C) Braden Summers

To see more visit the #RePicture site here

New Work:

Alexia Sinclair - Art of Saving a Life



Australian photo-media artist Alexia Sinclair is known for her penchant for historical figures so it comes as no surprise that her latest artwork for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s project Art of Saving a Life, is situated in 1796. In this work Alexia celebrates the invention of the first smallpox vaccine discovered by Dr. Edward Jenner. You can see the behind-the-scenes video here and watch how Alexia painstakingly creates this image right down to growing the flowers she needed!