Duane Michals

Richard Billingham

Marek MIller, Labolatorium reportazu

Polish Nobleman by Rembrandt

Mystery beyond a pearl...

Lempicka

Milo Manara

Torrentius

Wspaniale zwodniczy Torrentius drwi z wysiłków badaczy, pragnących określić jego rangę i miejsce w historii sztuki. Nie mieścił się w życiu, daremno go szukać w podręcznikach, w których wszystko z czegoś wynika i wszystko układa się w grzeczne wzory. Jedno jest pewne, że w swojej generacji był zjawiskiem zupełnie wyjątkowym, jakby bez wyraźnych artystycznych antenatów, konkurentów, naśladowców, uczniów, malarzem rozsadzającym schematyczne podziały na szkoły i kierunki.

Dlatego zapewne obdarzono go niezbyt jasnym tytułem „mistrza iluzorycznego realizmu''. Cóż to znaczy?

Po prostu oddanie osób, rzeczy, krajobrazów tak, że wydają się jak żywe, nie tylko łudząco

podobne, ale tożsame z modelem. Ręka wyciąga się instynktownie, pragnąc wyzwolić z ram uśpione egzystencje. Dawni mistrzowie apelowali nie tylko do oka — ale budzili inne zmysły — smak, węch, dotyk, słuch nawet. Więc obcując z ich dziełami odczuwamy najzupełniej fizycznie — kwaśny smak żelaza, zimną gładkość szkła, łaskotanie brzoskwini i welurów, łagodne ciepło glinianych dzbanów, suche oczy proroków, bukiet starych ksiąg, powiew nadciągającej burzy.

Kompozycja Torrentiusowego dzieła jest prosta, niemal ascetyczna. Obraz zbudowany na osi

poziomej i pionowej, czyli oparty na schemacie krzyża, może stanowić wdzięczny materiał dla zwolenników analizy formalnej, ich trochę szkolarskim poszukiwaniom — równoległych, przekątni, kwadratów, kół i trójkątów.

David Guttenfelder about North Korea

some of the photos: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/inside-north-korea-2011/2011/12/19/gIQAwoHh3O_gallery.html#photo=1 http://davidguttenfelder.com/ on Instagram http://instagram.com/dguttenfelder

talat darvinoğlu

Co jest takiego wyjątkowego w surrealizmie, co Pana w nim pociąga? 

Zdawałoby się, że prymat podświadomości nad racjonalizmem i rozsądkiem. O to w tym wszystkim chodzi. Absurd. Wraz z narodzinami surrealizmu podświadomość zaczęła odgrywać istotną rolę. Stała się autentycznym zjawiskiem. Ten z pozoru błahy przypadek, wniósł do sztuki wszystko, co najlepsze. Odkrył nowe źródła inspiracji. Artyści zaczęli funkcjonować gdzieś na granicy jawy i snu. Proces twórczy, który dotąd opierał się na racjonalnych założeniach, stał się nagle spontaniczny. To dało drogę wewnętrznej wolności intelektualnej, a co za tym idzie, myśli, która eliminowała rozum. Wyzbycie się niepotrzebnego materializmu. W takim wypadku podświadomość stała się najbardziej obiektywnym narzędziem w rękach artysty. Podobnego zdania był mój przyjaciel-malarz Piotrek Mosur, który powtarzał, że tylko szkice mają siłę przebicia, szybszego, a więc trafniejszego zapisu myśli. Z drugiej strony, narodzinom ruchu surrealistycznego towarzyszyła krytyka społeczeństwa drobnomieszczańskiego, co w zupełności mi odpowiada.

http://www.artysta.pl/artykuly/pokaz/terazniejszosc,zawsze,jest,zla,rozmowa,z,talatem,darvinolu-1116

www.cargocollective.com/darvinoglu

As I Am from dir. Alan Spearman

Chris Dean’s heart stopped when he was two. He died but he came back. When Chris was five, his father was murdered, riddled by more than 20 bullets in a gang shootout. At age 18, Chris gained national attention when he introduced President Barack Obama at his high school graduation. Chris is an observer and philosopher who has always had a few things to say about life from his vantage point in South Memphis. He and Emmy-Award winning filmmaker Alan Spearman walked the neighborhood for eight weeks observing and recording what became the script of As I Am. This film floats through this remarkable young man's landscape, revealing the lives that have shaped his world. Poetic and powerful imagery, captured by Spearman and cinematographer Mark Adams, combines with the young philosopher’s trenchant observations about life.

 http://www.roguefilmschool.com/about.asp

As I Am from alan spearman on Vimeo.

Photojournalist Alan Spearman’s short film As I Am is a work of urban poetry, spoken and visual, about life in the Memphis projects through the eyes of a young black man who grew up there. An Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and staff photographer at The Commercial Appeal, Spearman made As I Am to kick off the paper’s ongoing project about poverty.

more: http://www.pdnonline.com/features/Picture-Story-A-Gui-7319.shtml

By The Ways, a journey with William Eggleston

Wiliam Egglestone

History of transvestitism

According to Ady Jean-Gardy’s “Carnaval Histoire”: “Male transvestitism goes on throughout the 18th century, mercilessly mocking the effete lords of French nobility.”

Leah Gordon, Haiti 

1792, Chevalier d'Eon, french diplomat lived in London 1762-1777 as man, and from 1785-1810 as a woman and, during both periods, he enjoyed considerable fame in international politics, high society and popular culture.

Long before he lived publicly as a woman, d’Eon was feted as a famous soldier, champion fencer and diplomat who negotiated the Peace of Paris in 1763. 

Maria Komornicka, born 1876

circa 1898 changed gender as Piotr Odmieniec Włast

Leah Gordon - Caste

Photographer and artist Leah Gordon explores the practice in Haiti of grading skin colour from black to white, referred to as Caste, in a series of new photographs.

The system, which revealed the extent of racial mixing in 18th century colonial Haiti, moves through black to white in nine degrees. It was developed by a French colonist, Moreau de St Mery, living in the Caribbean country during slavery, and reveals the horrifying - and cod scientific- racism of the time.

Mery classified the nine degrees of colour, from pure black to 1/8 white and 7/8 black. The terminology he chose was borrowed from mythology and is offensively bestial: Sacatra, Griffe, Marabou, Mulatre, Mamelouque, Quarteronne and Sang-mele to White.

Gordon was inspired by these strange racial classifications to make photographic portraits (in black and white) of the nine skin varieties. She positions herself at one end of the scale as the 'Blanche' and her partner, the Haitian sculptor Andre Eugene, at the other end.

Leah Gordon - Canaval

Since the earthquake in January 2010, a proliferation of horrific media images have reinforced an ongoing narrative of Haitians as victims – of disaster, of poverty, of corruption. Rarely is Haiti’s incredibly potent colonial history mentioned. Between 1791 and 1804 Haitians led the only successful slave revolt in history which resulted in the abolition of French colonial rule, and in Haiti becoming the first black-led republic. Photographer Leah Gordon’s stunning images of Haiti tell the story of a country intimately in tune with its past. We caught up with her at Riflemaker Gallery where her current exhibition, The Invisibles, is showing until September 10, to find out more.

You first went to Haiti in 1991, what brought you there?

I had just finished a postgrad in photography and had this feeling that I should go away somewhere. I was watching the Holiday programme, presented by Jill Dando. She was in the Dominican Republic expounding what a fantastic family holiday it would be. Then she turned to the camera and said, “I must warn you it shares the island with this other country called Haiti. Don’t go there by accident because it has dictatorships and military coups and black magic and Voudou.” Within a month I was on a flight to Port-au Prince.

What was it about Haiti that you found so inspiring?

I think at first it was the politics. It seems quite blurred now but at that time there was a lot of clarity. Aristide had just been inaugurated as president and he seemed to be a genuinely progressive, socialist figure in that region at that time. No-one had been let down by him. There was a sense that this dynasty of dictators was coming to an end and that good had prevailed over evil. Everything seemed incredibly positive.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about Haiti?

Haiti’s tagline is always ‘the poorest country in the Western hemisphere’ rather than ‘the first ever black republic in the western hemisphere’ or ‘the only successful slave revolt in history.’ The slave revolt was so potent and it has been written out of history. Instead a major demonization of the country was written in. If you mention Santería or Candomblé, which are African American religions practised in Cuba and in Brazil, people don’t immediately think of zombies, pins in dolls, sorcery but the minute you say Voudou all of those things are evoked. Haiti has become an epicentre of western colonial and racist anxieties.

Why did you choose the title The Invisibles for your current exhibition at Riflemaker Gallery?

The Invisibles is what Haitians call the spirits. This show is quite mixed but I think what links all the images is this idea of spirit. Photography has always has been excluded from religion. I think it’s interesting that all religions are hyper aware of the power of the visual arts. Religions embrace visual arts as much as they avoid them because our world now is so visual so there’s a stressful edge between religion and the visible and invisible.

Is it that tension in particular that attracts you to religion as a subject matter or something else?

Religion is a theme that I constantly deal with but I’m not religious. I would call myself a superstitious atheist. There’s power to whatever it is and it affects me but I don’t buy into any religious organisation. I did a project recently where I asked lots of atheists how they visualised the divine. Only one person said they didn’t have a visual imagination of the divine because they were an atheist. Everyone else came up with something and their ideas were so interesting: an egg, an ox’s heart, a line of cocaine, the sky. I was photographing these things, looking at how to represent the divine but you can’t represent the divine. In a way I’m more interested in what photography can’t show than what it can, although I do love what it can show.

To what extent do your photographic subjects participate in the construction of the image?

With the studio ones, there is total participation. The Kanaval ones are an interesting set. I use a 50 year old camera and a hand held light metre. I wander the streets holding this funny camera. I say, in Kreyòl, “do you mind if I take your photograph?” There’s a negotiation about whether I’m going to pay them, which I do. Then I hang around for ages, fiddling with the camera to get it right. It’s almost like we create a little photo studio on the street. They’re not carnival pictures. The photograph always takes place away down a side street.

So are these people who have wandered away from the main carnival?

This is the amazing thing about this carnival – it doesn’t have a parade. I mean when you think about it, who invented parades? The bourgeoisie. The real Kanaval is just a whole carnival of flâneurs and meanderers. It’s hard because you go out and go, “Where are they?” and someone says, “I think I saw a donkey wearing trousers down that way” or “I think I saw some winged people round there” and you have to wander the whole town looking for them. Now they are desperately trying to make them parade up one road where all the rich people can have stands. They’re going to sell drinks and have advertising. Once you parade, you lose the narrative. You just get spectacle.

Tell us a bit about the Ghetto Biennale in December last year.

In 2006 I made a film about a group of artists from Port-au-Prince called the Sculptors of Grand Rue. I got to know them well and in fact have been in a relationship with one of them ever since. We were talking and they were saying, “why don’t we get invited to biennales?” Then someone said “why don’t we bring the biennale to Haiti?” And we did. We had no funding. We just set up a website. Artists came from the UK, American, Tasmania, Spain, Italy and Germany. Everyone paid for their own flights and hotel. It had something very different. It had an energy I haven’t seen with art in Britain for ages, it was like a happening in the 60s – it was so wild.

What effect has the earthquake had on the Ghetto Biennale?

When we started the Ghetto Biennale I never saw it as a development project, it was purely an art one, but two weeks later the earthquake happened and it seemed to just change itself. All the connections that had been made with the visiting artists became very strong. I’ve been invited to speak at Prospect which is the new biennale in New Orleans. It was created after the floods as a method of redevelopment. Our biennale was almost an anti-biennale. It wasn’t to do with tourism or development or any of those issues. I have to be careful because I don’t want it to suddenly morph into one of the ones where people go ‘this biennale brought in 3 million pounds and 20, 000 tourists to Haiti’. I’d end up being like the bourgeoisie with the parades.

http://ww.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/arts/leah-gordon

http://www.leahgordon.co.uk

Behind the masks: the photographs of Phyllis Galembo

Phyllis Galembo's fascination with costume began as a child, when she would go trick-or-treating near her home in Long Island, New York, often alone, dressed in a variety of ensembles made by her mother.
'I still remember the bric-a-brac that she used to fashion my outfits,' Galembo says. 'This is where my lifelong obsession began. I collected Hallowe'en costumes for over 15 years.'
After studying photography and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, in the 1970s she began photographing subjects wearing festival costumes. 'I have a lot of pictures of my friends as upside-down Easter baskets,' she says.
Then, in 1985, she travelled to Nigeria to photograph priests and priestesses with their traditional costumes and ceremonial objects. 'I was fascinated by the idea of ritual clothes that had spiritual, transforming power. I followed the story to Haiti, where the priests and priestesses of voodoo are believed to transform via their clothing into magical beings. Once I discovered the Jacmel Kanaval [Haiti's pre-Lenten festival], I felt I had found my metier in the masquerade.'


Masquerading has a long history in Africa. Long before the Europeans arrived the tradition criss-crossed the continent, giving birth to endless variations. Galembo, now a professor of fine art at Albany University in New York, has spent more than 20 years capturing the masquerade's myriad forms, following festivals and carnivals across Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso, and chronicling their re-emergence in places such as Haiti as a result of the African diaspora.

As alien as her images seem, Galembo - who describes her interest as 'both artistic and anthropological' - says that they are only a more strident embodiment of rituals that feature heavily in the West. They are celebrations to give thanks for spring, fertility and prosperity; to banish the threatening forces of the winter; to poke fun at authority figures - they are their Hallowe'en, their harvest festival, their Notting Hill, Rio and Venice carnivals.
In Ghana the tradition began as a party. From the late 19th century Europeans living in the port of Winneba would celebrate New Year by donning masks and dancing at the town's bars. In the early 1920s two local men, Abraham and Yamoah, annoyed at not being invited, created a rival masquerade of their own. They called themselves the Nobles, and made comical costumes that satirised religious figures and local bureaucrats.
Such was their success that rival groups formed, some boasting hundreds of members. By the 1950s Ghana's masquerade had become a national, annual competition. For a week from Boxing Day clusters of outlandish figures march together through the streets all over the country, in costumes that have taken up to a year to create. African masking generally invokes deities, nature spirits and ancestors.

In north-west Zambia, once a year the elders select boys aged between seven and 13 to participate in initiation ceremonies known as Mukanda. Over several months in an isolated bush camp the boys learn about their roles as husbands and fathers. When Mukanda is complete the village celebrates the boys' transformation by calling on ancestral characters known as Likishi. In masks made from beeswax slathered over twigs and cardboard, and body costumes woven from sisal, the Likishi masqueraders perform a frenetic dance to entertain and scare the audience. There are more than a hundred different characters, with new ones added all the time. Some of them reflect the modern world, such as Honda, Helicopter and Airplane.
Galembo's images all follow a similar pattern. She never uses a studio, but seeks out bare walls of houses and clearings in the woods, against which she photographs her subjects, usually full-length. She lights each scene meticulously, setting up her equipment at dawn, then waiting for the masqueraders to arrive.

'Often we would work the day after our first meeting with the local chief, which was usually sweetened with gifts of cash and gin,' she says. 'Masqueraders would then show up in twos or threes, followed by children and onlookers. Once a whole troupe arrived by motorcycle.' Galembo's photographs celebrate, above all, the creativity and ingenuity of the costume-makers, whose skills are passed down through many generations.
They plunder material from tar to lizard excrement, sugar syrup, coal dust, leaves, cowry shells, roots, sisal, gourds and shredded plastic to achieve their effects. Some, particularly in Haiti, use grimy pigments to colour their skin from top to toe, adding real animal skins and even stuffed heads to complete their look.
Galembo's images have now been collected into a book, Maske, introduced by Chika Okeke- Agulu, an assistant professor of art at Princeton University and a native of Umoji in eastern Nigeria, where some of Galembo's photographs were taken.
Masking, he points out, is in decline, suffering from the political, religious and cultural pressures on traditional modes of life. 'What is remarkable is that it has not declined more,' he writes. 'And yet it makes one wonder - with great regret - what knowledge of masking in Africa is now forever lost.'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/8067153/Behind-the-masks-the-photographs-of-Phyllis-Galembo.html

http://www.galembo.com/

Victorian mugshots from Newcastle

Victorian criminal photographs from the Newcastle area made between December 1871 and December 1873. 

Photographs were taken for two reasons: the identification of the criminal classes; and to support theories about criminal physiology.

''Most of the photographs show prisoners with their hands on their laps, or in shot. This is because of theories about the shape of the skull and hands of criminals,” Rees said. “These pictures fed into the cod psychology of the day.”

Theories of anthropological criminology, the idea that a person is born criminal, and that such tendencies can be identified by physical indicators.


Prisoners were photographed upon arrival at jail, so the clothes in the mugshots reflect their social status and wealth. Many of them appear dirty, unwell and malnourished.


Most of the crimes committed were as a result of poverty, there are a few prisoners who appear middle-class and well-dressed. But the majority appear in a state of desperation.

In those days there were no restrictions on the age a child could be sent to prison, or indeed an age of criminal responsibility. Reform schools had been imposed in the 1850s, but children convicted of a crime still had to go to prison first.














http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/victorian-mugshots-reveal-nineteenth-century-interest-in-criminal-anthropology-7892823.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twm_news/5268805390/in/set-72157625464218629/

Edward Burtynsky - Manufactured Landscapes

Sally Mann

Photography 1827 -1991