Art Photography | Photographers’ Gallery | Until Sun Jun 22 | Free
This distinguished
annual photographic award exhibition is back with four fresh nominees who are
all worthy of the £30,000 prize, but who will take home the desired prize?
Richard Mosse's photographs of visually and politically thrilling portrayal of a turbulent Congo was shot using military surveillance film and was undoubtedly an eye catcher at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Spaniard Alberto García-Alix presents his simple black and white self-portraits, which span Franco’s dictatorship in the 1970s to present day, imitating personal occurrences. While a different approach is Jochen Lempert, a formerly qualified biologist uses a scientific method, which offers studies of humans and the natural world. The American multi-media artist, Lorna Simpson, jazzes up the selection with her performative studies of gender, culture and histories.
2. Lucas Foglia: Frontcountry
Art Photography | Michael Hoppen Gallery | Until Sat May 10 | Free
Huge skies, rearing horses, jail cells and men in hats: at first glance all the mythic elements of the American West are present in Lucas Foglia’s photographs. Taken over several years in the vast, sparsely populated states of Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming, they hint at ways of life unchanged in a century or more: simple, noble, perhaps a little naïve. But all is not what it seems. In fact, these are communities in terrible flux, riven by a struggle between the past and the future, as a giant business machine tears apart the landscape in mines and power plants.
Foglia’s great achievement as a photographer is to suggest these tensions as much by composition as by subject matter. A huge bearded man arcs backwards as he trains with weights, his shape echoed by the arch of the plastic shed he’s standing in. A coyote hunter balances precariously on a fence post, rifle in hand. A rodeo rider stretches a hamstring in a posture of mourning.
Elsewhere there are nods to William Eggleston in the plastic primness of a bank loan office, and a high-school football game against a backdrop of towering peaks. And there is war: it’s never explicit, but it’s there in the bleak valleys and the billowing smoke from wildfires, even in a grimy digger toiling up a mountain of coal towards a strange, turret-like chimney. While this isn’t war photography per se, these are the people, Foglia seems to be saying, caught up on the US home front, a place as pitiless in its way as any in the Wild West or the Middle East.
3. Esther Teichmann: Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears.
Art Painting | Flowers | Until Sat May 10 | Free
Hauntingly beautiful photographs set within a dream-like installation of statues and painted waterfalls capture the slippage between autobiography and fiction.
4. Burnt Generation
Art Photography | Somerset House | Until Sun Jun 1 | Free
‘There is more freedom in the art world than in journalism now,’ claims Tehran-born Newsha Tavakolian, one of nine Iranian artists in Somerset House’s bold new photography exhibition. Given the country’s hardline media crackdown in 2009, this doesn’t in itself tell you much. But the work in this group show – the majority of which has not been seen outside of Iran – is fresh, innovative and intellectually engaged with the challenges of life in modern Iran.
Iran’s Generation X, the Burnt Generation of the title, are those who lived through the turmoil of the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, and the ensuing Iran-Iraq war. Immediately, the exhibition sets phasers to bleak. But, troubling issues have been transformed into compelling material. Azadeh Akhlaghi recreates Iran’s most notorious death scenes; a gold-medal wrestler’s suicide, a campus shooting and a poet’s self-sacrifice, and by doing so becomes a kind of eyewitness to the country’s past. Newsha Tavakolian’s portraits show middle-class Iranians endowed with iPhones and Marlboro cigarettes, yet encumbered with a resigned, visible sadness.
Babak Kazemi’s work is the most memorable: by taking house number plates from the wartorn city of Khorramshahr and projecting images on to their rusted, scorched surfaces, the artist counts the cost of conflict one house at a time.
The burning question is: have there been traumatic events in Iran since the 1980s? Definitely. Then why is there no trace of them here? There is, sort of. These artists have been forced to allude to more recent troubles in oblique ways in order to avoid the scrutiny of officials. Like Shadi Ghadirian’s photographs of military objects in domestic spaces. Implicitly, they address the devastating impact of recent conflicts at home.
5. Capa: Europe 1943 - 1945
Art Photography | Daniel Blau | Until Sat May 10 | Free
Rare vintage prints by the audacious war photographer, Robert Capa from 1943 to 1945 when he accompanied American troops when they entered Italy on their push from North Africa.
6. Berndnaut Smilde: Antipode
Art Installation | Ronchini Gallery | Until Sat Jun 14 | Free
Clouds are suspended in either opulent or modernist architectural interiors in the Dutch artist's ingenious photographs.
7. Liu Bolin: The Heroic Apparition
Art Photography | Scream | Until Fri May 9 | Free
Now you see him, now you don't. The Chinese artist, who’s become known as 'The Invisible Man’, creates mind-boggling photographic self-portraits where he disappears into his surroundings. Whether it’s in a supermarket, against a brick wall, at the bus stop or in front of the Hollywood sign, Bolin explores the relationship between the individual and consumer culture in a developing yet oppressive Chinese society.
8. Harry Callahan
Art Photography | Tate Modern | Until Sat May 3 | Free
If you want to see the beauty of a boarded-up building or the austere grace of a windowframe, Harry Callahan’s your man. A master of multiple exposure (many of the photographs here are layered with ghost images), Callahan was also capable of disconcerting concentration on objects that most people wouldn’t bother to call subjects – a lamppost, a flagpole, a Florentine alleyway. His work revolves around his wife, Eleanor. She’s everywhere: loose black hair tumbling into water or face tight-framed by clasped arms; in silhouette or revealed, naked, except that her curves match a crescent of light against her shoulder, the wall seems to slant in a complicated echo of her hip, and before you know it you’re being ravished by a beauty only tangentially related to the female form.
Callahan, born in 1912 in Detroit (he died in 1999), experienced his own double exposure: to cars, those avant-garde machines carrying us into a formless future (he worked at Chrysler) and to the sharp simplicity of Ansel Adams’s eternal landscapes. In Callahan’s work, we can almost touch the tension between the urban and the manufactured, the epic and the intimate – between a skyscraper’s rhyming verticals, say, and swirls of grasses seemingly etched on Eleanor’s strong face. Given Callahan’s gifted peculiarity, Tate’s thematic arrangement seems unnecessary. Consider three pictures of Aix-en-Provence: one’s of a broom cupboard, another of a silvery plant against a black background. The third is of grass and a bush: Eleanor’s, that is, superimposed on a meadow. As this superb show makes clear, the world is unlikely and various, and Callahan’s a tourist impossible to trap.
9. Slim Aarons: Riviera
Art Photography | Getty Images Gallery | Until Sat May 10 | Free
Previously unpublished work by the late American society photographer, gives us exclusive access to the coastal playgrounds of the rich and famous. Shot between the late ‘50s to the mid-80s, these vibrant images capture the frivolity of the jet setting crowd.
10. Phil Bergerson: American Artifacts
Art, Contemporary Art | Work | Until Sat May 10 | Free
The Canadian photographer goes in search for evidence of the American dream.
EGPhotography x
No comments:
Post a Comment