News

On July 1st, Foam (the Dutch photography conglomerate, which oversees a museum, a magazine, a website,  and an array of books, prints, and other for-sale editions) debuted Willem Popelier's project Showroom Girls in their Amsterdam space. Popelier's latest venture in a long list of conceptual films and photographic works, Showroom Girls is a collection of images that the artist discovered on a publicly accessible computer in a store showroom.

While collecting photos that were saved on  display computers for another similar project, Showroom, Popelier found 91 pictures and 2 short 'movies' that two adolescent girls had taken of themselves and left on the computer's memory. He quickly determined that the girls had spent roughly an hour taking these photos, in addition to 62 more, which they had deleted. Fascinated by their decision to remove some images, while deliberately leaving others for future customers and curious photo-takers to see, Popelier wanted to know what other information he could discover about these girls. Noticing that one of the them wore a necklace bearing her name, Popelier went online and succeeded in finding her Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as her home address and data about her performance in school. 

To articulate this feat, Popelier has included a full year of this girl's tweets in the exhibition, printed onto an alarmingly large stack of paper. The selection of the 91 images that appear in the show are entirely untouched by Popelier, save for the conspicuous light-pink circles which he superimposed over the girls' faces. The circles seem quite obtrusive, but successfully so--they underline the viewer's expectation for more information in a world in which, as Popelier proves, it is so readily available. The visual emphasis also drifts to the girls' playful and sometimes coy poses, gestures that the realms of Facebook and other social networking sites have made so familiar--but their removal from the profile page and placement in an art exhibition delivers Popelier's intended message about narcissism and performance. 

Showroom Girls is on view until August 31 at Foam in Amsterdam. 

South x Southeast, a new online monthly and in-print quarterly magazine, has just launched its debut issue for July 2011. The magazine promises to focus on all things photography in the American southeast. The debut issue includes images from Shelby Lee Adams's new book Salt and Truth, Anderson Scott's project on Civil War re-enactors, and Brandon Schulman's landscape photography, as well as interviews with photographers Jack Spencer and Marilyn Suriani, videos of William Eggleston and Larry Fink, and reports on festivals, museums, and more.

http://sxsemagazine.com/

Announcing the launch of the PICTURE CoNsEqUeNcEs website. Two photographers who met in graduate school, Katie Murray and Joseph Maida, have devised a new way to keep a critique going and also create a 21st century "exquisite corpse," using the internet in a novel way as the medium of their dialogue. The website and show are the culmination of a 90-day photographic conversation in which the two artists exchanged new (and also existing) pictures online. Taking into consideration the rise of the Internet as the primary platform for "reading" photographs and the current zeitgeist of working among genres and formats, Maida and Murray's resulting exhibition re-contextualizes their work, and attests to their shared belief in the power of photographic pictures as potent language, metaphor, riddle and game.

Please follow the link to learn more about our collaboration and to click for a consequence:
www.picture-consequences.com http://www.picture-consequences.com/>

PICTURE CoNsEqUeNcEs
June 25 - August 27, 2011
The Homefront Gallery
26-23 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101
www.thehomefrontgallery.com http://www.thehomefrontgallery.com/>
347.827.0553 <347.827.0553>

Here's a extract of an interview with genius photographer and witty man, Martin Parr by Peter Aspden. Who doesn't admire Mr. Parr?

I am on the train to Bristol to meet Martin Parr, a photographer whose brilliantly coloured images of vulgarity and the hyper-consumerism of the modern age have made him one of the leading names in his field. So I am mindful that he may have a nasty surprise in store for me when it comes to his choice of lunch venue. Sure enough, it has crossed his mind. “I wanted to take you to McDonald’s,” he says breezily. “Just for the hell of it. I am sure no one has asked to be taken there.” But instead we are in a cosy, wintry pub in the highly desirable Clifton area of the city, for which I am grateful. “I thought it was a great idea. But you have come all the way from London,” he relents, with the utmost reluctance.

Nothing would be more typical of Parr than to plan an ironic repast amid the sachets of ketchup and wolfing hordes of Britain’s hungry high-street shoppers. Some of his most striking photographs are taken in chip shops and fast-food outlets, portraits of a nation indulging cheerfully in systemic malnutrition. The Albion pub, on the other hand, is buzzy with middle-class gentlefolk, modest appetites and smooth manners. Parr has lived in the city for 18 years, not far from this pub, and says that he enjoys the air of anonymity. “When I am in London, all I do is mix with other people in the arts,” he says, making it sound like a grim sentence. He chooses the mackerel pate and the confit of duck, and I copy him, which makes him laugh. Parr has an appropriately comic-book laugh - “Ha, ha, ha!” - that he deploys whenever he senses a moment of awkwardness or absurdity, which is often.

He has been a part of the Magnum collective of photographers for nearly 20 years, and I ask about the well-chronicled problems that surrounded his application to join. “It was the biggest controversy they had ever had about a new photographer,” he says with palpable pride. I ask what the problem was. “I was one of the first to break that humanist tradition that was so strong in the previous generation. They thought I was exploitative, cynical, even fascist. All kinds of words were used. But you should ask them.”

But he was a kind of humanist himself, surely? “That’s the irony. I do the things I do because I am interested in people. I do accept that photography is to a degree exploitative. But I quite like controversy. It doesn’t do you any harm. In any case, what is so controversial about walking into a supermarket and taking photographs, as opposed to photographing a war in Afghanistan or Gaza?”

Parr’s photographs address their own conflicts, observing, in the words of the catalogue that accompanied his major retrospective at the Barbican in 2002, the “myriad of social ills” that have inflicted themselves on Britain over the course of his 54-year lifespan: “the loosening of community ties, the mass embrace of consumerism, the manic pursuit of leisure and global tourism, the vanity fair of the English middle class and the phantasmagoria of the sub-class that emerged... during the 1980s”.

But Parr says he regards himself as a “European photographer, working in Europe”, much better known in France, Germany and Italy than in his native land. He is just about to go to Luxembourg for the first time, to fulfil an assignment. “I expect it to be comfortable, wealthy, maybe a bit boring.” Surely there is no such thing as boring to a photographer like him? “Of course not,” he retracts instantly. The veneer of irony that exists in his photographs is also constantly present in Parr’s conversation, making it hard to know what he really thinks about anything.

I say that, having studied so many of his photographs during my train journey, I looked at the streets of Bristol in a different way as I was walking to meet him, which was a tribute to his craft. “I don’t like being flattered,” he says abruptly. “It doesn’t suit my English sensibilities. Remember, we are the great country of understatement.”

Is he entirely happy at being labelled an obsessive, I understate?

“Very much so. My father was an obsessive bird-watcher. The genes of observation passed down. A good photographer has to be obsessive. There are a lot of photographers out there, and most of them are very good. But there are few who go beyond that, who have a vision or signature.”

I ask if Britain is a less interesting place today than when he started taking photographs, in the 1970s.

“There has been a homogenisation, of the high streets and so on. But I go to Sainsbury’s like everyone else. I am a great believer in hypocrisy,” he announces suddenly. “All the things I critique are the things I do myself. My main agenda is the increasing wealth of the west, which is a big problem we have.”

For the rest of the interview, visit: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cda08fb4-bbf5-11db-9cbc-0000779e2340.html#ixzz1QoZK4er8

Murray Guy Gallery will be presenting an exhibition (A form is simply something which allows something else to be transported from one site to another) comprised of works and performances by artists Leonor Antunes, Gregg Bordowitz, Joachim Koester, Ulrike Müller, Hannah Rickards, John Smith, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Emily Wardill. 

"This exhibition is conceived as a prompt for asking how artworks might deploy and multiply uncertainties, compelling viewers to look closely at the forces they collect, the displacements they enact, and the associations they draw. But in contrast to any “deconstructive mood” or an idealized version of “not-knowing,” the uncertainty produced by the assembled artworks and events could be said to correspond directly with a “continuous and obsessive attention,” one that circulates widely, following connections wherever they may lead. Many of the works in the exhibition ask the viewer to consider what types of knowledges—e.g. historical, scientific, technical, aesthetic—might be brought to bear on them, while others—like the “sociologist of associations” who must self-reflexively track his or her own moves while compiling an account—demand that the viewer consider the uncertainties, capacities, and boundaries of human perception." - Murray Guy Gallery

Be sure to make some time in your schedules for the following events:

Thursday, 7 July, 7:00pm: Performance/talk by Gregg Bordowitz, “Testing Some Beliefs”

Thursday, 21 July, 7:00pm: Film screening, John Smith, “Slow Glass” “Lost Sound”

Friday, 5 August, 7:00pm: Performance/installation by Sergei Tcherepnin

Or visit http://www.murrayguy.com for information