October 31, 2014

Friday Round Up - 31st October, 2014

On Friday Round Up this week it’s all about exhibitions. In London, New York, Berlin, and Sydney there’s a host of fantastic photographic exhibitions currently on and about to open. Plus check out the photo essay on the changing face of Harlem. More than 30 photos feature on this week's blog.

Exhibitions:

London

Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age

 
(C) Andreas Gursky

This comprehensive exhibition at London's brilliant Barbican showcases the works of 18 photographers spanning the 1930s to today. With images from New York's soaring skyline to post-war California, contemporary Venezuela and the colonial era of the Congo, Constructing Worlds gives an extraordinary insight into the architectural designs that have shaped our cities. 

Dutch photographer Iwan Baan's images (below) are among my favourites, but there are so many amazing images, and structures, in this exhibition. If you are in London this is a must-see exhibition, as the stories these images tell go far beyond the physical to make comment on the changes to our communities in the wake of progress.  


(C) Iwan Baan
(C) Iwan Baan
(C) Iwan Baan

(C) Nadav Kander

(C) Berenice Abbott - New York City 1932


Until 11 January, 2015
Barbican
Silk Street
London

New York to Chattanooga

The New York Times Magazine Photographs

Curated by the magazine’s longtime photo editor Kathy Ryan and Aperture Foundation’s Lesley A. Martin


Gregory Crewdson, Julianne Moore, from “Dream House,” 2002

This traveling exhibition showcases photographic projects that have appeared in the New York Times Magazine spanning the past 15 years. The show closes this weekend in New York and its next stop is the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee 24 November to 29 March 2015.




Lars Tunbjörk, 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, published May 18, 1997



Ryan McGinley, Emily Cook, 2010 Olympic freestyle skier (aerials). From “Up!,” published February 7, 2010 (cover image)




Roger Ballen, Actress Selma Blair. From “The Selma Blair Witch Project: Fall’s Dark Silhouettes Have a Way of Creeping Up on You,” published October 30, 2005
Malick Sidibé, Assitan Sidibé in Marni and Christian Lacroix. From “Prints and the
Revolution,” published April 5, 2009

Berlin

Cordelia Beresford - Night Watchman 
Cordelia Beresford, the daughter of Australian film director Bruce Beresford, has carved a reputation for herself as an accomplished director and award-winning cinematographer, and she is also a highly collectible photo-artist. This exhibition features her still photography, recent works that echo cinematic qualities and also draw on her work with leading choreographers. It's a curious collection, but shows her diversity as an artist. 









Until 21 November
Michael Reid Berlin
Ackerstraße 163
D-10115 Berlin

Sydney

Steve Greenaway - A City Unpolarised


In this series, Sydney photographer Steve Greenaway layers images of mannequins and shopfronts over urban streetscapes to create a multidimensional look at iconic cities including London, New York and Sydney. By choosing to portray these photographs in black and white, Greenaway has managed to slow down what are busy, complex images and allow the eye to be drawn in. 





November 11-30
Blackeye Gallery
3/138 Darlinghurst Road
Darlinghurst

Anne Ferran – Shadow Land





This 30-year retrospective features the largest collection of works by Australian photo-media artist Anne Ferran to be shown in Sydney. Ferran also currently has two works on show at Monash Gallery of Art as part of the Photography Meets Feminism group exhibition.

Opens 7 November
Australian Centre for Photography
257 Oxford Street
Paddington

Photo essay:
125th: Time in Harlem


Capturing the changing face of Harlem in New York, photographers Edward Hillel and Isaac Diggs walked the length of 125th Street from the Hudson to the Harlem River in 2009 to document the neighbourhood. Here are some of their images, which the pair hope to publish in a book in the near future. 

This is important work. Our cities and suburbs are changing rapidly, not just physically, but socially as well. The gentrification of suburbs that were once deemed unfashionable, or unsavoury, has resulted in the homogenisation of the urban landscape. Photo essays like this will become visual time capsules, our only link to the past. Once the wrecking balls have done their work, and the multi-national brands have visually cloned our cities, these photographs will take on historical import and allow future generations to see what was lost. This may be a romantic view, but I firmly believe that in the rush for progress and the rapid evolution of technology, communities are losing their individuality and vibrancy to the hollow promises of the corporate dollar.


















All images (C) Edward Hillel and Isaac Diggs

October 24, 2014

Friday Round Up - 24th October, 2014

This week on Friday Round Up new exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, Majid Saeedi's Life in War in review, William Daniels Train for the Forgotten, and more.  

Picture of the Week:
In the Shadow of Ebola - Daily Life Goes On In Liberia

(C) Michaeleen Doucleff/NPR

Photo Essay:
William Daniels - Train for the Forgotten


Panos Pictures' photographer William Daniels' photo essay on the Russian medical train that services communities in remote parts of that vast country draws focus on what many who live in urban environments take for granted - easy access to medical support. For those residents in isolated towns across Siberia, medical conditions that are routine procedures in the city, like appendicitis, can be death sentences. This government funded train has around 15 doctors who treat a range of conditions as best they can given their resources and the frequency of visits. 









Above: 31 year old Elena Shershova suffers from severe psoriasis. Here she sweeps up her skin flakes in her tiny apartment. “I’m losing my skin on my body, everywhere, everywhere!” laments the 31-year-old." 


Book Review:
Majid Saeedi - Life in War


I met Iranian photojournalist Majid Saeedi at Visa pour l’Image last year when his exhibition, Life in War, was featured in the core program. Since then Saeedi has gone on to win the 2014 FotoEvidence Book Award for the same work, with the official launch of his book, Life in War, in New York earlier this month.

Saeedi has covered the Afghanistan conflict for more than a decade. But his interest in that country and its people extends beyond the news headlines and since 2009 he has lived amongst that country’s inhabitants and focused on telling the story of daily life in a war zone....(to read the full review and see more images please click on the Book Reviews tab at the top of the blog).

Exhibitions:  
Melbourne

PHOTOGRAPHY MEETS FEMINISM: 
Australian women photographers 1970s–80s


(C) Anne Ferran - Scenes on the death of nature 1986

With the resurgence in interest in feminism, not only because of Emma Watson’s landmark speech, but also other movements around the world where women are speaking up for their rights, it seems timely to look back at the feminist era of the 70s and 80s.

A new exhibition at Monash Gallery of Art opening tomorrow – Photography meets feminism: Australian women photographers 1970s–80s - revisits the work of 16 female photo-artists to explore themes that are still relevant today – the objectification of women in advertising; concepts of beauty; struggling for balance between career and nurture. 

(C) Micky Allan 1980


(C) Christine Godden 1976 

Until 7 December
Monash Gallery of Art 
860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill

Australian comedienne Hannah Gadsby will open this group show at 2pm on Saturday 25th October.

Artists: Micky Allan, Pat Brassington, Virginia Coventry, Sandy Edwards, Anne Ferran, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Helen Grace, Janina Green, Fiona Hall, Ponch Hawkes, Carol Jerrems, Merryle Johnson, Ruth Maddison, Julie Rrap, and Robyn Stacey.

Sydney: 
Gary Steer - Ghost Lakes









Australia's interior provides a rich palette for documentary photographer Gary Steer whose images have a painterly quality. In this exhibition Steer presents a series of aerial landscapes that turn the natural beauty of windswept salt pans, rivers and lakes into works of art. 

Until 9 November
3/138 Darlinghurst Road
Darlinghurst

New Articles by Alison Stieven-Taylor:

Pro Photo magazine

Magazine in newsagents now


NZ Pro Photographer
Don McCullin - No Rest for the Weary


Available in print and on iPad

L'Oeil de la Photographie
Imhoff: A Life of Grain and Pixels

Click on link above to read the story