Rainbows Variations and Other Works is Taisuke Koyama’s first solo show in Europe. Curated by Selva Barni and Francesco Zanot, it was presented at Metronom Gallery in Modena (Italy) from October 12th to December 28th 2013. He was previously featured in Fantom 03, Spring 2010. The exhibition Rainbow Variations and Other Works presents the Japanese…
Published by MACK after winning this year’s edition of the First Book Award, Between the Shell by Paul Salveson consists of a series of photographs taken in New York and Virginia between 2006 and 2011. Absurdist playful constructions are jocosely extracted from commonplace objects, within the walls of domestic environments. Salveson’s photographic process is intended…
Italian artist Linda Fregni Nagler’s book The Hidden Mother collects 1.002 children portraits – tintypes, ambrotypes, snapshots, daguerreotypes, cartes de visite and cabinet cards – taken between the advent of photography and the 1920’s by mostly anonymous authors. At the time the photographs were taken, because of the slow exposure times, babies needed to be…
Founded in 1884, Edison P.l.c. – part of group EDF (Electricité de France) – is Europe’s oldest energy company. On the occasion of their 130-year anniversary, we curated for them Pioneers. 130 Years Young, a traveling exhibition with archival and newly commissioned photographs telling the history of the company. Fantom also designed and published the…
Hasselblad Foundation recently assigned its 33rd prestigious International Award in Photography to Catalan photographer Joan Fontcuberta. Co-published by the Swedish Foundation and MACK specifically for this occasion, “The Photography of Nature & The Nature of Photography” combines six of the author’s most iconic series: Herbarium (1984), Fauna (1987), Constellations (1993), Sputnik (1997), Sirens (2000) and…
In seemingly quiet landscapes trail echoes and traces of the bloodiest battles that occurred in Europe from antiquity to Second World War. Taken from different distances, from vast landscapes to close details, the images of the New York-based Belgian photographer Bart Michiels are a poetic, moving attempts to understand and possibly represent such complex spaces.…
Ruth van Beek’s exhibition Greenhouse, her first solo show in Italy, was curated by Selva Barni and Francesco Zanot at Metronom Gallery in Modena (Italy), where it took place from May 4th to June 29th 2013. She was previously featured in Fantom #00, Summer 2009. Greenhouse is one of the names Ruth van Beek gives…
As featured on Fantom 05 / Winter 2012 There are many ways this series could elicit reactions from its viewers: perplexing, in the form of a cocked brow or furrowed forehead; confusion, as necks crane closer and closer to the images, clearly looking for something; or perhaps boredom. The subjects of her photos, after all, could…
As featured in Pop-Up on Fantom 06 / Winter 2011 Irina Polin (1971) is a Russian-born, Switzerland-based artist, and the protagonist of this issue’s Pop-Up section. She studied in Moscow at The Arts College Named After the Memory of Year 1905 and the School of Art and Design in Lucerne. She is the recipient…
As featured on Fantom 03 / Spring 2011 Her work is a mix of performance, sculpture, photography, Pop and Surrealism. Her process usually starts when she finds beautiful bugs in her garden or things like vegetables, flowers and other organic materials at the market. These are the basic subjects for the installations she prepares and…
As featured on Fantom 03 / Spring 2011 Looking at the work of Reza Aramesh, one inevitably thinks that all styles and approaches to documentary photography have radically changed in relationship with the arts and other media. Aramesh’s perfectly executed translations of images taken from the news, merge the opposite ends of the photographic spectrum,…
As featured on Fantom 02 / Winter 2010 As a child, Alexi-Meskhishvili would dismantle every toy that was given to her. Nowadays, she is still doing the same thing – but images have replaced the toys. “The tension between what is revealed and what is obstructed is an inherent puzzle of photography which I…
Les Villes Invisibles December 4th, 2014 Fantom & La Mer at Art Basel Miami 2010 December 3rd, 2010 Joachim Schmid’s O Campo July 8th, 2010
As featured in Eye To Eye on Fantom 05 / Autumn 2010 Guido Guidi was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1941. He started to photograph in the 50s and is one of the most renowned European ‘topographical’ photographers. His work is focused mainly on the geographical, historical, political, architectural, individual and social aspects of the landscape.…
As featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010 Olivo Barbieri (Italy, 1954) investigates the intersections of reality and its perception through a single lens. The series Flippers, 1977-78, featured here was the starting point of his observations over the uncertainty of the world’s surface, which then continued with an extended research on artificial illumination (that…
As featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010 In Unbranded, Hank Willis Thomas’s largest and best known series to date, the artist selected two advertisements each year from 1968 to 2008, removing all logos and text in order to uncover what was really being sold: the representation of African-Americans, for consumption by the constituent public.…
A conversation between Selva Barni and Federico Sarica. As featured in The/End Magazine #15, March 2010. Selva Barni is the founder and editor-in-chief of Fantom, the new quarterly dedicated to photography. A Toscan raised in Florence, 34 years old, today Selva lives in Milan after the experience of living and working in New York. She has…
As Featured in Fantom Issue 05, Autumn 2010. The oceans demand our visual attention and also our awareness. This curatorial section – supported by La Mer – features a selection of photographs from across the globe. The series includes existing and commissioned work by international artists – all with an eye to appreciate, assess, absorb,…
For his first Fantom incursion into photography collections, critic and curator Francesco Zanot visited artist Linda Fregni Nagler’s peculiar selection of old tintypes, magic lantern glass slides, gelatin prints and more… The 9 images presented hereafter were chosen and extensively captioned by both; technically, symbolically, historically, emotionally and carefully. HIDDEN MOTHER. The presentation of the subject In this old tintype, behind a typical portrait of a baby we see the outline of an individual hiding underneath a dark cloth. The function of this individual corresponds to the function of every photograph: it introduces the spectator to what has to be…
As Featured in Reportage on Fantom First Issue / Summer 2009 The weather was the most effective form of crowd control. 1,8 million arrived in the predawn hours on the National Mall and snuggled closely together, tucked in sleeping bags, blankets and makeshift windbreaks made from piles of cardboard trash. At 10 a.m. the Smithsonian opened…
The New York Times, June 2009. Read it here.
As featured on Fantom 01 / Autumn 2009 “One of the things I look for in the women I work with is a unique, sometimes unexpected interpretation of what it means to be a woman. I love photographing powerful women who possess their own particular strength and charisma and I like to think that…