Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 8 May, 2015|Photography Art Definition

This week Friday Round Up features the last of this year's Head On Photo Festival coverage with the opening of Timeframes, an exhibition by two German photographers - Daniel Schumann and Thomas Kellner, and group show, 4, featuring Australian photographers Paul Blackmore, Murray Fredericks, Gary Heery and New Zealander Derek Henderson. Plus in Melbourne Silk Road Stories opens and Peta Clancy shows her series Puncture.

Photos of the Week:

Australian photojournalist Daniel Berehulak, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage on the Ebola crisis, is in Nepal covering the tragic aftermath of the earthquake that has devastated this nation. Berehulak continues to produce outstanding work that is insightful, intelligent and compassionate. Images (C) Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times.

Head On Photo Festival:

Last weekend I attended the opening of the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney and interviewed a host of fantastic photographers for stories that will be published internationally in various magazines. In the coming weeks I'll also post some interviews here. This week's post is the last on the actual festival and I want to highlight two shows that opened this week which are definitely worth seeing. If you missed my other picks, see my posts from 30 April and 1 May for a rundown on the International and Australian exhibitions.

Thomas Kellner & Daniel Schumann

Timeframes

(C) Thomas Kellner

(C) Daniel Schumann

These two German photographers share their visions on the concept of time. Kellner’s work is based in deconstruction and reconstruction, where he takes multiple images of a single building and recreates the perspective presenting an image of a building, usually a well known landmark, that appears to move before our eyes.

(C) Thomas Kellner

(C) Thomas Kellner

Schumann uses the passage of time to tell the story of those living out their final days in a hospice. The work, ‘Purple Brown Grey White Black – Living While Dying Today,’ gives a deeply personal insight into the final days of these individuals with dignity and compassion.

(C) Daniel Schumann

(C) Daniel Schumann

(C) Daniel Schumann

Until 31 May

Conny Dietzschold Gallery

99 Crown Street

Darlinghurst

Head On Photo Festival

4

Group Show

(C) Paul Blackmore

Photographers Paul Blackmore, Murray Fredericks, Gary Heery and Derek Henderson join in this group exhibition, which features work ranging from landscape and portraiture, to documentary and fine art. Some of photographs in this show have never been exhibited before, others are familiar, but all are representative of the great photography being created in this country.

(C) Paul Blackmore

Blackmore, who works in both the fine art and documentary genres, presents new work shot last summer on Sydney’s beaches (above). Fredericks, known for his epic, surreal landscapes includes two photographs from his Greenland series. Heery, who has worked in the music industry for decades, includes his portrait of a young Madonna, and Henderson presents a selection of B&W and colour landscapes. It's a beautifully executed exhibition.

(C) Murray Fredericks

(C) Murray Fredericks

(C) Gary Heery

(C) Derek Henderson

(C) Derek Henderson

presented by Cohen Handler

114 Brougham Street

Potts Point

Head On Photo Festival

Exhibitions: Melbourne

Guy Vinciguerra – Silk Road Stories

Shot over a decade, Western Australian photographer Guy Vinciguerra presents a selection of his works from the series Silk Road Stories shot in Pakistan.

All images (C) Guy Vinciguerra

Until 30 May

Colour Factory

409/429 Gore Street

Fitzroy

Peta Clancy - Puncture

All images (C) Peta Clancy

As part of the group show "Paper," Melbourne photographic artist Peta Clancy showcases her series Puncture, comprising four large-scale, intimate self-portraits. Clancy’s artistic practice explores themes of ‘transience, temporality, mutability and the corporeal and subjective limits of the human body’. In this series Clancy uses a fine needle to carefully apply thousands of tiny pinpricks through the surface of photographic paper. These markings rupture the surface of her self-portraits to form beautiful embroidered patterns that are visible on the surface of the paper.

Until 12 July

Linden New Art

26 Acland St

St Kilda

Photography art Gallery Friday Round Up - 30 October, 2015|Photography Art Definition

This week on Friday Round Up - FotoEvidence Book Award 2016, Photo Kathmandu makes its debut, two Australians take home Lucie Awards, Stephen Shores Complete Works, images from the photography competition run by  the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor raise questions about the aesthetic of documentary photography and Canada's Boreal Collective hits the streets.

News:

2016 FotoEvidence Book Award Open for Submissions

The 2016 FotoEvidence Book Award is now open for submissions from photographers whose projects demonstrate courage and commitment in the pursuit of human rights and social justice. The winning project will be published in a high quality, hardbound book and exhibited at the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City during the fall of 2016.

Entries are judged by an international jury of five. The 2016 jury members are international journalist Alison Stieven-Taylor, Visa Pour L’Image director Jean-François Leroy, photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg, Yahoo! News photo editor Kelli Grant and FotoEvidence publisher Svetlana Bachevanova.

“FotoEvidence Press was founded to support documentary photographers working on long-term projects that focus on human rights and social justice and to bring to light work that might otherwise not find publication,” says Svetlana.

The Book Award winner and up to four other selected finalists will be exhibited on the FotoEvidence web site and in the exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center. FotoEvidence will also offer to collaborate with one of the finalists to crowdfund the publication of their work.

Past FotoEvidence Book Award recipients are Marcus Bleasdale (2015), Majid Saeedi (2014), Robin Hammond (2013), Alex Massi (2012) and Javier Arcenillas (2011).

Festival:

PHOTO KATHMANDU

Organised by photo.circle, a Nepali platform for photography, this is the first photography festival for Nepal. With the theme TIME the festival features 18 exhibitions, artist talks and workshops as well as projections.

“Despite and because we have had an extremely challenging year in Nepal this year (with the earthquake and political unrest), we are pushing forward with this festival because we truly believe that rebuilding a sense of identity can only be done through dialogue and the arts and culture is a powerful medium to facilitate these conversations.” says festival co-director NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati.

Australian photojournalist Philip Blenkinsop has documented Nepal’s political transitions for the past 15 years. A selection of this work will be on show in the old Court House at Mangal Bazar, Patan. He says the timing of the festival “means that there is much hard work to be done, but it amounts to lighting a candle in the darkness. The importance of Photo Kathmandu at this time cannot be overlooked. It is a time for consolidation, for sharing, for rebuilding, for sowing the seeds of inspiration.”

It’s great to see Photo Kathmandu go ahead with such enthusiasm and support. More than 500 photographers submitted bodies of work for consideration in the projections with 80 chosen representing 31 countries.

(C) Amy Friend

(C) Frederic Lecloux

(C) Kevin Bubriski

(C) Mariya Kozhanova

(C) Matjaz Tancic

(C) Philip Blenkinsop

(C) Rajan Shrestha

(C) Sumitra Manandhar Gurung

Exhibitions will take place in a variety of public spaces in and around Patan including the alleyways, squares and courtyards of the historic city. The idea of exhibiting in public spaces is born from the desire to make Photo Kathmandu a festival for the people and to take photography to new audiences.

To find out more visit the website

3-9 November

Various venues

Patan, Lalitpur, Nepal

Winners:

The Lucie Awards

Two Australians were winners at this week's Lucie Awards in New York, the premiere annual event honouring the greatest achievements in photography. Kerry Payne Stailey took out the award for Moving Image Photographer of the Year and Ceiba was named publisher of the year for Sam Harris' book Middle of Somewhere. I've written about both Kerry and Sam in recent times. In fact I wrote about another winner, Sandro Miller who won Photographer of the Year for the second year in a row, earlier this year too! Congratulations to all the winners.

My cover story on Kerry Payne Stailey in Pro Photo

From Sam Harris' Middle of Somewhere

My feature interview with Sandro Miller in NZ Pro Photographer

Book Review:

Stephen Shore - Uncommon Places

The Complete Works

‘His work is Nabokovian for me: exposing so much, and yet leaving so much room for your imagination to roam and do what it will’ - Tennessee Williams

Stephen Shore is a master at photographing the ordinary in such a way as to make it extraordinary, capturing moments that are invisible to many until illuminated through Shore’s eyes. His love for the vernacular and his ability to frame seemingly banal scenes and tease out their idiosyncrasies has made him one of the most lauded American photographic artists living today.

In Uncommon Places Shore takes us along for a ride across America, a trip he made several times in the 1970s on what he calls “journeys of exploration: exploring the changing culture of America and exploring how a photograph renders the segment of time and space in its scope. I chose a view... (to read the full review and see more images please click on Book Reviews at the top of the blog).

Uncommon Places

The Complete Works

Stephen Shore

Thames & Hudson

Opinion:

The Documentary Aesthetic in Question

Bangladesh

Faisal Azim

This year’s photography competition run by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, a World Bank initiative, attracted thousands of entries from more than 77 countries, yet the aesthetic of most of the winning images showcased on The Atlantic this week shows a concerning trend. Looking at these images I feel there is little differentiation in style, or voice.

The premise for this competition is to document those business owners who are marginalised and who work outside of the world's banking systems. These photographs present an homogenised, glossy, richly coloured, and stylistically composed view of that world. Documentary photography, in my opinion, should not be so slick as to be mistaken for a scene from a movie or an advertisement. What do you think?

China

Liming Cao

India

Sujan Sarkar

Varanasi

Tatiana Sharapova

Vietnam

Loc Mai

Vietnam

Tran Van Tuy

Vietnam

Lê Minh Quốc

Activism:

Taking it to the Streets in Canada

François Pesant's image of Officers using excessive force arrested 1,118 people during the G20 Summit held in Toronto in 2010. This is the biggest mass arrest in Canadian history. (C) Ian Willms, The Boreal Collective

In the lead to the federal election in Canada earlier this month a group of Canada’s foremost photojournalists, members of the Boreal Collective, took their images to the street in a bid to show the public what they believe has happened to their country. Canvassing topics of elderly care, environmental vandalism, violence against indigenous women and the excessive force of authorities, the Collective wheat-pasted large format black and white prints in public spaces in the hope to generate discussion. #dysturb, a French group, also uses large posters of works by leading photojournalists to draw attention to important global issues and have pasted their work in major cities around the world.

Boreal Collective member Laurence Butet-Roch says, “It's our hope that upon seeing these pictures, passersby will feel the need to get more details, do more research, and get the information they need to cast their vote”.

Ian Willms aerial photograph of the Tar Sands in Alberta pasted at Queen’s Park, Toronto.

(C) Ian Willms, The Boreal Collective

Eighteen indigenous women have been killed while hitchhiking along Highway 16 and many more are reported missing. Investigation is slow and despite the gravity of the situation there has not been any public inquiry. In Toronto Rafal Gerszak pastes her photo of the Highway of Tears sign in British Columbia. (C) Ian Willms, The Boreal Collective

Marta Iwanek’s portrait of an elderly man caring for his wife with dementia in Toronto.

(C) Ian Willms, The Boreal Collective