Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 6th February, 2015|Photography Art Definition

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

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 1st April, 2016|Photography Art Definition

This week it’s all about books – three books are reviewed Erika Diettes’ Memento Mori: Testament to Life; Tanya Habjouqa’s Occupied Pleasures and Olof Jalbro’s Refuge.

Erika Diettes ? Memento Mori: Testament to Life

Imagine your husband, infant, lover, wife, or great buddy abducted without caution or cause, tortured and murdered simple for being within the incorrect place at the wrong time throughout a political struggle that no person definitely is familiar with. Then believe having no manner to honour this character or their life due to the fact their body has either been mutilated beyond recognition or dumped in which you can not cross.

This horror is what heaps of people stay with ordinary in Colombia where the armed warfare among the authorities, the guerillas and the drug lords have claimed over a quarter of 1,000,000 people this beyond fifty years.

Colombian artist and anthropologist Erika Diettes has made it her life’s work to honour the victims creating four elaborate bodies of work that come together in Memento Mori: Testament to Life, an exquisite double volume with slipcase that does justice to this phenomenal collection.

I first interviewed Diettes in 2013 about her body of work Shrouds/Sudarios, which features haunting portraits of women as they remember watching loved ones tortured in front of them. These portraits are printed on a grand scale on linen to resemble shrouds. I remember seeing this exhibition hanging from the high ceiling of the Mining Exchange in Ballarat (for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale) and walking between the portraits that swayed in the breeze, the light fabric wrapping itself gently around my shoulders and sending shivers down my spine. I saw it again the following year in a church in Sydney (for Head On Photo Festival) and this time felt it was even more moving given the venue, the hushed tones of visitors, the candles lit in sympathy.

Above:Shrouds/Sudarios

Diettes has endured to paintings in this mission developing extra our bodies of labor that suit together to tell an splendid story that is right away politically and socially applicable, but additionally deeply personal ? Diettes has spent many hours interviewing every of those ladies. This is a tale past the horrors of conflict. It is a story of humanity, of loss and of affection, a story that is underpinned by way of Diettes? Commitment to present voice to the victims.

?My paintings is inspired via the extraordinarily complicated social, political, and cultural state of affairs that exists in Colombia, along with theoretical questions raised by way of my response to the unrelenting violence that my us of a has experienced for many years. I have decided to bear witness to that violence, and to provide the victims ? Each the ones murdered and disappeared and their survivors ? Voice thru my artwork," she says.

?Because the work originates inside the direct tales of the families of the sufferers as well as in gadgets belonging to them, it assumes a significance that transcends aesthetic issues. I create a physical and emotional area inside both the pix and their installations this is recognizable to the mourners as a memorial and this is also available to other visitors, letting them go past the idea of a violent event and to become aware of with the humanity of the people affected.?

In Drifting Away/Rio Abajo, images of artifacts of the disappeared – a shirt, shoe, pair of reading glasses – are photographed in water and then suspended in glass. In Relics/Relicarios personal effects are embedded in blocks of polymer resin that resemble tombstones. These two bodies of work are joined by Shrouds/Sudarios in one volume of Memento Mori: Testament to Life. In the other volume is the final body of work that brings all three together in photographs of these memorials displayed in cathedrals and churches around the world, lit with the candles of mourners and visitors.

Above: Re lics/Relicarios

Above:Drifting Away/Rio Abajo

This is an amazing body of work and I am honoured to have Memento Mori: Testament to Life in my collection.

Publisher: George F. Thompson Publishing

Artist Website:Erika Diettes

Tanya Habjouqa ? Occupied Pleasures

Over four million Palestinians stay inside the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. The population of this region have lived with warfare for decades and there may be a nicely-entrenched narrative round life right here.

But in Occupied Pleasures, published by FotoEvidence, photographer Tanya Habjouqa, who has Circassian and Jordanian roots and grew up in the US in Texas, takes an unconventional approach to capturing the daily lives of those Palestinians living in the shadow of conflict.

Here we see women practising yoga on a mountainside; guys pumping iron; a girl traversing the tunnels to wait a celebration, carrying flowers for the hostess; a family picnicking on the seashore; a young woman surfing. In these pix are humour and irony, laughter and sorrow, tales advised through Habjouqa's specific insight; it's far apparent she has a background in anthropology. She is also a founding member of Rawiya picture collective, founded through five lady photographers from the Middle East.

All pix (C) Tanya Habjouqa

Having worked as a war photojournalist, Habjouqa says with Occupied Pleasures she was looking for a new way to tell the Palestinian story that didn’t traverse the familiar “hackneyed tropes”.

"I am usually grappling for an angle to shake up what so lamentably are dogmatic, reductive views of this area?Every tale I even have executed changed into from an perspective of bringing a fresh evaluation, or new gateway into this area...Having blanketed a few dark occasions inside the Region, Palestinians continue to amaze me, how they maintain their humanity."

Habjouqa says Occupied Pleasures was a departure, "something far more intimate than anything I have ever done before. I had something to say in what I was documenting, a personal stake. It was for my children, a push back against misrepresentation. A move from traditional documentary to what is being called new documentary, and an attempt to say something different".

Occupied Pleasures is like a breath of fresh air in the rhetoric on conflict in the Middle East and is another title from FotoEvidence that pushes beyond the stereotypical boundaries to bring new insights.

Published by using FotoEvidence

Olof Jarlbro - Refuge

One of the true pleasures of writing this blog is the opportunity to review books from around the globe. Often a publisher will write to me having discovered my work online and offer to send me a book that ordinarily I might not have seen. That was the case with Refuge by Swedish photographer Olof Jarlbro, which came to my attention quite unexpectedly.

Refuge documents those who have fled Syria and find themselves confined now to the refugee camps in Bulgaria. Why Bulgaria? Jarlbro says his choice was premised on the fact that this destination was one of the cheapest offered by smugglers.

?There were no wealthy Syrians who fled to Bulgaria. The refugees there had been already economically fragile and from extraordinary minorities, that is why their tales felt important to me.?

Refuge begins with a story of Aleppo, the shattered lives of its inhabitants, as well as the shattered buildings. Jarlbro focuses on the people and their environs. In the quietness of these strong black and white images, many of which evoke thoughts of a ghost town, Jarlbro tells the story of what is lost juxtaposed against the strangeness of what has become daily life; a woman queues up to buy bread, a soldier calls to a stray cat, a man sits texting with his weapon over his shoulder, a child holds a gun in his open hand.

The second part of Refuge takes us into Bulgaria where refugees spend days, weeks, months on end faced with uncertainty. Housed in rough accommodation, the boredom and frustration is clear, but life goes on; a baby is fed, washing is hung on barren trees, tablets and mobile phones keep people connected, children sleep, mothers prepare meals, men play cards.

All pics (C) Olof Jarlbro

Refuge follows Jarlbro’s book Syria: The War Within, which he shot in 2012 after entering the country illegally. He says, “During my first hours in Aleppo, we drove towards the bombs, the smoke, the frontline. Instinctively I wanted to go the opposite way – toward safety and security…I imagined war as entering the gates of Hell, but adding madness and the unthinkable to it”.

He says that experience gave him some inkling of what those fleeing have been jogging from. But he also knew what they were leaving behind ? Full lives, houses, buddies, circle of relatives - a torment past knowledge. Jarlbro says travelling to Bulgaria completed the photograph permitting him to also record what the refugees were fleeing towards?An uncertain destiny, in a foreign country with little method or support, however a future that might nevertheless offer hope.

These aren?T smooth pics to have a look at, but then the scenario isn?T easy both and in a small way through the act of looking we are able to connect and recognize what those people face; for they're people first and most important earlier than the label refugee is given and right here Jarlbro has given them the opportunity to be heard.

Publisher:Rough Dog Press

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 3rd June, 2016|Photography Art Definition

This week Barbara Davidson, Ryuichi Hirokawa and Look three Festival. Plus a reminder that Auckland Festival of Photography starts offevolved this weekend. To see Photojournalism Now's preview at the festival click here.

Photo Essay: Barbara Davidson

I greatly appreciate the paintings of Los Angeles Times photojournalist Barbara Davidson so it's miles usually a pleasure to proportion her paintings on Photojournalism Now.

Her present day tale is set girls as young as 12 years who have been saved from prostitution in Bihar, the poorest nation in India.

Davidson again can provide an evocative visual essay that indicates how one school near the India/Nepal border is working to give those women a brighter destiny.

Many of these girls were destined to end up prostitutes in makeshift brothels installation within the own family home, or to be offered as intercourse slaves.

The faculty, that's funded by means of Apne Aap and the Bihar nation authorities, ?Aims to break the bonds of caste and inequality?.

You can see greater pics and read the whole story right here.

(C) All pix Barbara Davidson/Los Angeles Times

Back Story: Ryuichi Hirokawa

?Palestinians made me a photojournalist,? Ryuichi Hirokawa

Perhaps nowadays he is excellent called the founding father of the mag Days Japan, but as a younger university graduate, Japanese photojournalist Ryuichi Hirokawa became enamoured with the concept of living in a kibbutz so in 1967 he travelled to Israel.

He became waiting for to find paradise, but as a substitute he arrived in a time of exquisite turmoil and now not long after the Six Day War erupted.

That trip changed into to form Hirokawa?S future in a way he couldn?T assume.

Fascinated with the ruins of an antique Palestinian village that he located near the kibbutz he become residing in, Hirokawa inadvertently started to discover the records of the Palestinian plight.

This story has occupied him for extra forty years ensuing in an in depth body of work that includes images, the documentary film Palestine 1948 Nakba and oral histories.

Hirokawa made his call as a photojournalist along with his coverage of the massacre inside the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in Lebanon.

One of the first journalists to go into the camps, Hirokawa?S 8mm pictures released his career, but through that point he changed into already invested in the Palestinian tale.

To date Hirokawa has researched and documented the histories of round 500 villages that have vanished.

He has also set up a charity, the Japanese Committee for the Children of Palestine, which increases finances to care for orphans and to construct kindergartens.

(C) All images Ryuichi Hirokawa

Festivals: Look 3 - Charlottesville, USA

This is definitely a must-attend photography festival that brings together exhibitions and talks with some of the most interesting photographers working today. I haven't been toLook 3 before, but it is on my to do list. Here's a peek at what's in store this year.

Look three Featured Artists this 12 months include Nick Brandt, Gabriella Iturbide, Yuri Kozyrev, Frans Lanting, Sheila Pree Bright, Christopher Morris and Ruddy Roye. There's a number of artists talks and "In Conversation" collection additionally. Check out the website for the whole programme, dates and venues.

Nick Brandt?S Inherit The Dust

Nick will also be "In Conversation" with legendary photography pupil Vicki Goldberg

Graciela Iturbide's Naturata

Frans Lanting's Encounters

Sheila Pree Bright's #1960Now

Christopher Morris's War Politics Fashion

Christopher could be "In Conversation" with MaryAnne Golon too

Ruddy Roye's When Living is a Protest

Alexia Foundation 25

Celebrating 25 years supporting documentary photographers, the Alexia Foundation presents works from Aaron Vincent Elkaim's Where the River Runs Through (recipient 2016 Alexia Grant) and Mary F. Calvert's Missing in Action: Homeless Women Veteran (recipient 2014 Alexia Women’s Initiative Grant).

(C) Mary F. Calvert

(C) Mary F. Calvert

(C) Mary F. Calvert