Reviews | DMB Media – Worldwide project and personal career management

“In a society full of prying eyes like ours, everyone can become both spectator and actor in the quotidian spectacle. With CCTV cameras scattered in every public space our dwelling leaves traces behind, stored as visual codes. Choreographed crowds transit the nameless global city during their daily commuting, with self-absorbed pedestrians experiencing the paradox of public space; between anonymity and scrutiny. Non-places are where this paradox turns explicit and evident, and this is where my project was undertaken with the intention of constructing imaginary urban landscapes that comment on our exposure to city life.”

Manuel Vazquez (Colombia) is based in London. He has a master’s in photography and urban culture from Goldsmiths University. He has also studied international cultural cooperation in Barcelona and economics in Colombia. His work was exhibited at the Liverpool Biennal in 2010, and, in 2009, in the Flash Forward (Magenta Foundation, Canada) and PhotoEspaña (Descubrimientos) festivals.

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Diver & Aguilar’s Eye of the Beholder photography project draws its inspiration from the
black and white photos of the 30s, specifically Dorothea Lange and Walker Evan’s photos
documenting America and the Great Depression. The project sets out to mislead and, while appearing
genuinely to belong to another era, the photos actually comprise a fashion story, drawing parallels between
the Great Depression and the current economic crisis.

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See more of Melinda’s work here: http://melindagibson.blogspot.co.uk/

See more about Objektiv here: http://www.objektiv.no/

 

 

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“Staticity, the snapshot-where the photograph replicates death or at least a nanosecond of life is rarely captured in sculpture where, usually (except for the bronze tonnage of many a public artwork) the artist strives to capture the energy and movement. It is ironic therefore that this display of work could be the start of a non-movement movement owing more to the stillness of photography than the unbridled energy of say, Umberto Boccioni. There is of course a direct link to one of the greatest works of art, that of Degas’ La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (or Little Ballerina) but these are real people photographed to look like hyperrealist sculptures.

In a sense they are a healthy riposte to the human detritus portrayed by Duane Hanson but these are executive toys writ large that play host to the kitsch requirements of many a public commission-a more credible school of Franklin Mint. Here, where there are certain mucky Mueck moments, instead of tiny things made huge, these big guys look like tiny heroes made into paperweights. 

They don’t carry the cultural weight of some of Jeff Koon’s iconic subjects but veer towards the banal- are these guys heroes ? Or a post-Warholian marketing man’s idea of contemporary branding that plays on gay iconography? There is an inherent vulnerability in all of the subjects-for all the uniform Men’s Health muscle, there is an undercurrent of fallibility, doubt, uncertainty, even failure floating before their eyes. There is bathos, Pathos and well… loss. What else do these figures have to say? Probably, like most sportsmen, very little but the artistry is undeniable.

So what are we to make of these figures? They are so shiny one could lick them and yet they can’t work as sculpture because you can’t walk around them. Having used hours of artifice to create these tableaux, the photographers have flattened and ‘killed’ them-this is where they start to look like a ‘brand’ this is where the viewers’ eyes are presented with the advertising art director’s idea of realism-up close and personal.” William Harvey MA

See more here: http://dmbmedia.co.uk/artists/diver-aguilar/photography/aspects-of-realism/

Behance Network here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/ASPECTS-OF-REALISM/3349345

 

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“Tokyo Tokyo” Special edition by WassinkLundgren is available here:
wassinklundgren.com/bookshop.html

Photography is currently going through a period of change. However, it is not just the digital revolution that is changing the way photos are taken and the technology that is used and broadening possibilities, the global data space itself has become a new resource. Despite all the digitalisation, the method of producing a unique analogue photograph remains an option. Aesthetics and the way photos are ‘staged’ are changing. Migration and globalisation are new themes. The ‘new photographers’ have a different perspective on the history of photography. They have new heroes; heroes that come from history and from other disciplines. They are no longer afraid of the aural and the sublime. And they are open to new forms of presentation, to installations, to a blend of media and materials. Photography, so it would seem, has at last arrived in the free arts.

‘The future does not belong to pure photography, but to the free arts,’ says Andreas Gursky, one of the advisors of the “State of the Art Photography” exhibition. The NRW-Forum Düsseldorf asked for photographers who are tipped to be the movers and the shakers in this field in the coming years. In an attempt to reflect this remit, each of the 40 artists/photographers who feature in this summary exhibition is represented by a collection of images or an installation. The photographers were proposed by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Weski, Klaus Biesenbach, Udo Kittelmann, FC Gundlach, Thomas Seelig, Andrea Holzherr, and Werner Lippert. They hail from America, Europe, and South Africa; other continents and cultural spaces will be addressed at a later date.

A tour of the 40 exhibits makes it clear, for example, that while photography is currently experiencing a renaissance of classical themes such as landscape or portrait photography, the objective and the focus have shifted. The landscape photographs of Alex Grein, for example, seem to continue in the tradition of Caspar David Friedrichs, but are in fact made up of numerous fragments of images that she found on the Internet, sections of pictures from satellite images, from Google Earth.
Notwithstanding their technical creation, they hark back to an art form where it was permissible to submerge oneself in the image and the landscape. At the same time, they point to the fact that perception can be influenced by memories, ideas, and emotions. Although Asger Carlsen, like Alex Grein, draws on the digital in his work, his work merges human bodies to create inhuman forms, an approach that is more sculptural than photographic.

Many approaches could be referred to as ‘academic’ or ‘scientific’, research into the traces of humanity, the biographies of young people, or brain imaging … these photographs are comparable with the results produced by a scientist or a researcher; they are of high documentary value, yet at the same time do not deny their aesthetic dimension. Sanna Kannisto’s work, for example, is based on biological studies; Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse investigate the high-rise residential building ‘Ponte City’, an icon of the Johannesburg skyline; Olaf Otto Becker focuses on the traces left on the landscape by human overpopulation.

What is striking is that the artists are turning away from emptiness and are allowing the sublime, the aural, to shine through, as is the case with Andreas Mühe’s photographs of Obersalzberg. In other words, photography has not just arrived in art, it has also obviously rediscovered itself.

In a unique co-operation with the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, the book ‘State of the Art Photography’ has been published by feymedia to coincide with the exhibition. In this book, 6 pages are dedicated to each of the 40 international artists and include biographies, bibliographies, and illustrations of their work. The 200-page book is an independent, multilingual hardcover publication aimed at people who want to know today what is going to be the next big thing in art and photography tomorrow.

For more information:

http://www.nrw-forum.de/state_of_the_art_photography_english

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