News

If you are lucky enough to be in Rome this Fall, make sure you visit The Rome International Festival of Photography (FotoGrafia Festival Internazionale di Roma - IX Edizione.) This year’s theme is “Can photography see into the future? Is there a future for photography?” Of special note is new work by Tod Papageorge, whose fairly recent appearances in books and exhibitions in the United States and United Kingdom have presented us with work he made in black-and-white in the Seventies. (American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam from Aperture and Passing through Eden from Steidl) Papageorge is an American art photographer who began taking pictures in college, while he was studying literature. He moved to New York and became a part of the New York City street photography movement of the 1960’s, along with the likes of Garry Winogrand.

Tod is still out on the street, but across the pond in this exhibition. In a UK Guardian interview, he was asked what his “Dream Location” would be. His answer: "Rome. Or even your wonderful London." His dream came true just under a year later when he was invited to make work on the streets of Rome during an extended visit during the summer of 2009, showing his brand-new work at the American Academy in Rome. It wasn’t his first time there, but he had never worked as extensively as he did that summer. He picked up the Leica M8.2, and headed out to explore the City of Light, often after 4p.m. He said, “The light began to settle down into a kind of generalized glow just about then, and the heat became more bearable.” Some of this work is online here: http://www.aarome.org/index.php?rt=news=98

His 2010 solo show of operatic new color work made with the digital Leica M9 consists of about 30 prints showing at MACRO (the City of Rome Museum of Modern Art), Testaccio branch, opening on September 23, and continuing through October 24, 2010. The space is a former abattoir, and the neighborhood is not touristy, more working-class, according to Papageorge. There are also three other exhibitions, but his is the only one-person show. OPERA CITTA is also being presented in an accordion-style book of 21 pictures, curated by Marco Delogu and published by Punctum Press in Rome, and will be available through DAP. The work from Rome is both subtle and patently clear, filled with gorgeous light and intonation. It presents the viewer with slices of the high-drama, fast-paced contemporary lives of Italians and tourists mingling with, and set against,  an ancient background of religion, history and art.

To read the interview from last summer:

http://sofaarome.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/an-interview-with-photographer-tod-papageorge-raar09/

And the one from London:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/31/photography

And the one about the Central Park “Eden” project:

http://www.aaronschuman.com/papageorge.html

Online now at LIFE magazine's website are disturbing and chilling photographs of the last seven minutes on Earth of six French collaborators, as they are tied to stakes and killed by firing squad in 1944. LIFE photographer Carl Mydans and correspondent John Osborne were  the witnesses to the executions in the French Alps. 66 years ago, almost to the day, resistance fighters came together in Grenoble to execute these men who had worked for the Milice, the Vichy police. These pictures first ran in LIFE on October 2, 1944, just one month after they were taken. The slide show is long and feels complete, and shows the men before, during and after their deaths. The photos taken at the moment of fire are blurry from the shock of the shots, and you swear that you see ghosts beside each man. What we don't see much of is the audience, described on LIFE.com by Osbourne: "They might have been hurrying to a circus. They laughed, shouted greetings, raced each other and, at the execution spot, good-naturedly elbowed and jammed each other aside as they struggled for a vantage point."

http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/47661/nazis-meet-the-firing-s...

On View At Gallery Kayafas
September 10 - October 16, 2010

Opening Reception:
Friday September 10 5:30 - 8:00

Rania Matar's latest work explores the passage of young girls from the adolescent to the adult.  Matar, a mother of a teenage daughter, became fascinated with the transformation in personality, self-consciousness and fragility her daughter was experiencing.  A Girl and Her Room takes the viewer into a young woman's personal space. This space illustrates the duality and tension of this time -- the space between the two worlds. The teddy bear and the teddy.  Heaps of makeup for perfect skin.  Matar presents these private moments in these private spaces with an intimate understanding and nonjudgmental view. A Girl and Her Room, a powerful glimpse into sanctuaries at this confusing and conflicting time in life.      Arlette Kayafas

Gallery Kayafas | 450 Harrison Avenue #37 | Boston | MA | 02118

Book Launch and Private View: 6.30pm - 8pm, Thursday 14th October 2010

Flowers, 82 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP

Exhibition Dates: Friday 15th October - Saturday 13th November 2010

"This is a study of a home, of a particular idea of home at a particular time in our history.  This is the study of the lives of people whose paths crossed whilst in a camp on 45 square miles of Cuba, cut off from the rest of the world by razor wire and water.

 The atmosphere of life in Guantanamo is conveyed by Edmund Clark’s award-winning photographs.  Rather than acting as reportage, these contemplative images look at three different ideas of home: the naval base at Guantanamo, which houses the American community; the complex of prison camps there; and the homes, new and old, where former detainees now attempt to rebuild their lives. Clark says the work “is not about monumentalising the historical fact of the camps, but evoking the experience of individuals caught up in events in a backwater of Cuba.”

 The narrative of these images aims to evoke the process of disorientation and dislocation central to the techniques of incarceration at Guantanamo.  The photographs force the viewer to jump from prison camp to domestic stillness, from freedom to confinement and from light to dark."