Phenotype is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the photographic work of the German biologist Jochen Lempert’s, spanning from the 1990s until today. Divided into thematic chapters and completed by a rich section of texts, the book offers an overview of Lempert’s distinctive black and white depiction of animals, plants and humans. Lempert’s method, although…
Curated by Silvia Ferrari and presented on the occasion of the festival Cartacanta (a cultural association in Civitanova Marche, Italy), the exhibition Gli scatti della storia tells a history of photojournalism through the works of masters such as Weegee, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Selva Barni, Werner Bischof, Robert Capa, William Klein, and many others. After many…
How does photography act? How is it in an act in the making? The exhibition Photography Performs [The Body and the Archive] at the Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France show how performative photography passes through forms, as the verb perform indicates. It points to the invention of new paths, new ways of crossing through the present times,…
Brighton Photo Biennial, the UK’s most expected international photography festival, is taking place in Brighton until November 2nd, with pop-ups in Hove, around the region and even online through a series of special projects . The current 6th edition – entitled Communities Collectives & Collaboration – presents a packed schedule of shows, events and talks focusing on the…
As Featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010 Graziani (1971) is a photographer like no other. His series adhere to non Euclidean rules of associations and constructions of meaning. They are distorted encyclopedias – hyper-elliptical narrations. For a writer working with an artist like this means plotting a veritable coastline of connections and references, ideas and…
As Featured on Fantom 02 / Winter 2010 For some people, their only sexual release is through pornography and good luck to them. I find it interesting to see what turns other people on. Yesterday’s smut is today’s erotica… it was like that with Bettie Page. At first glance all of these photos by…
The work presented here began in Turin while Simon Starling was finishing his previous project for our gallery. In that period, a few days after a conversation he had with Pierpaolo Falone on Manik Bagh and Eckart Muthesius, in an apartment in Turin he accidentally came across the double portrait of the Maharajah and Maharani…
As featured in Eye To Eye on Fantom Issue 03 / Spring 2010 A number of years ago I became fascinated by the story of the Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph. While his bombings were of course despicable (along with Olympic Park he bombed an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub), I’m oddly enchanted by Rudolph’s…
Retracing the distinctive 40-year career of Italian photographer Guido Guidi’s, “Veramente” gathers excerpts of his entire oeuvre spanning from 1959 to the present. Pioneer of Italian landscape photography, Guidi’s body of images highlights the importance of the medium as a process and experience of understanding, and carries out a visual discourse upon the meaning of…
In his latest publication by MACK, Roe Ethridge combines a series of personal documentary images taken in western Palm Beach County and surreal collage works, together with discarded images from a Chanel fashion shoot. The author’s narrative – largely inspired by David Lynch’s approach to film-making and pertaining to the “new school of synthetic photography” – aims…
In order to celebrate the one-hundredth birthday of Danish designer Hans J. Wegner (1914–2007), Hatje Cantz dedicates the monograph Just One Good Chair to his groundbreaking career, identified with the production of an unrivalled number of chairs. Trained as a furniture maker, Wegner was capable to push the technical limitations of wood by always giving…
The book “Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets” illustrates Marcel Dzama’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery in London. The artist’s eclectic puppets and masks, a peculiar subject matter that originates from Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp’s influences above all, are presented here in form of drawings, collages, sculptures, dioramas, paintings and video stills. Best known for his…
Sewell’s new book consists of beautiful landscapes, domestic interiors and still-lives that make up a delicate portrayal of today’s English countryside. The artist explores how our idea of this land, and the pastoral symbolism related to it, intersects with contemporary culture. Sewell goes beyond the clichés in order to create a visual experience in which the…
‘The Sochi Project’ was born in 2007 from the will of Rob Hornstra and Arnold Van Bruggen’s to tell the story of the city of Sochi, Russia, site of the controversial Winter Olympic Games that took place earlier this year. The city is located on the border of the conflict zone Abkhazia and, across the Caucasus…
First published by Aperture in 1986, Nan Goldin’s groundbreaking publication The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – now considered as a contemporary classic – was given new life in a fresh paperback edition with new scans from the original transparencies. Originally presented as a slide projection, this body of work offers an intimate visual portrait of the photographer and…
This is the first release (together with Larry Fink’s) of the new ‘Photography Workshop Series’ edited by Aperture. The series features a selection of the world’s most renowned photographers, who were asked to share their approaches, techniques and insights on photography for the purpose of recreating the workshop experience in a book. Internationally acclaimed for their color…
The third edition of Unseen Photo Fair just took place in Amsterdam, blessed by a sunny weather that warmed up the beautiful context of the Westergasfabriek. Unseen, just like the name itself states, focuses on the promotion of undiscovered photography talents as well as unreleased works by established photographers. Together with a selection of over…
Steven Kasher Gallery inaugurates a new exhibition space in New York with a solo exhibition of Paul Kooiker, previewing his upcoming major retrospective at the Fotomuseum in The Hague, which will open in October. Eleven large-scale color nudes from the artist’s recent project ‘Sunday’ will be presented, together with pieces from the series ‘Hunting and…
The collective exhibition “Phantoms in the Dirt”, hosted at MoCP in Chicago, gathers sixteen artists whose works focus on the mutability of the photographic imagery in relation to the (often invisible) forces that leave their mark on our surroundings: enigmatic remnants and traces, cryptic objects, rugged landscapes altered by human activities. Guest curated by Karsten…
Hosted at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, the exhibition “Back Grounds: Impressions Photographiques (2)” traces a history of conceptual, process-based photography ranging from the early experimentations of the 19th century to the contemporary era. The show, organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément, produces an intimate dialogue between artists Liz Deschenes (Fantom 02, Winter 2010) , Martin…
The exhibition “Somos Libres II” – the titles refers to the Peruvian national anthem – presents a selection of works from Mario Testino’s contemporary art private collection, curated by Neville Wakefield. Focusing on the tension between photography and abstract painting, the exhibition includes works by Tauba Auerbach, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Andy Warhol and many…
Vivian Sassen’s exhibition “In and Out of Fashion”, currently on show at the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, focuses on the fashion work the Dutch photographer has developed in the past 18 years, alongside her acclaimed artistic career. The presented images – more than 300 pieces between past classics, new work and a site-specific installation – are…
Erwin Wurm’s De Profundis, published by Hatje Cantz, collects a series of hand-painted photographs representing naked or barely dressed men posing in front of the camera. Using a variety of media, such as drawing, photography and painting, the artist takes inspiration from the ideal beauty of the Gothic language, where the representation of the body is…
We are glad to celebrate the birth of a new independent publishing house, Skinnerboox. Founded by Milo Montelli and based in Italy, it focuses on contemporary photography with particular attention towards Italian young authors. The inaugural released titles are Thoreau by Alessandro Calabrese and I resti del viandante by Giuseppe De Mattia. Alessandro Calabrese’s work…
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…
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.…
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…