News

27th September - 3rd October 2010

The Gallery Soho, 125 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0EW

Private View: Monday 27th September, 6pm till 8.30pm

The fine line between sculpture as an object and as a form of socio-historical interpretation is explored by Liane Lang in her new exhibition Monumental Misconceptions. 

This award-winning artist challenges society’s conventional understanding of historical monuments by taking a contemporary perspective that re-contextualises them. Using life-size models and props intermingled with more traditional bronze or steel sculptures, Lang creates unnerving, humorous and thought-provoking installations. This dichotomy of contexts and mediums is further emphasised by capturing these alter-realities using new media such as photography, film and pre-cinematic zoetropes.

In 2009 Lang spent a month photographing Soviet era monuments in Budapest. After the fall of communism most Soviet sculptures were quickly removed from the public eye, sometimes ripped from their boots, which were welded to the plinths. In a few places, however, such sculptures can still be found. Many of the visible remnants of Budapest’s communist history were relocated to a suburban field (now the Memento Sculpture Park) by the architect Akos Eleöd, in order to preserve their historic value and save them from destruction.

Lang photographed sculptures in several other sites around the city of Budapest during her residency. Included in her forthcoming exhibition are images from the 19^th century Kerepeszi cemetery (which also contains many Soviet era graves) and from the running track at Nepstadion. This all but forgotten site of Hungary’s sporting history is surrounded by groups of giant steel plated figures representing sportsmen and soldiers. In the video work The Track Lang animates these figures, apparently frozen in the act of movement, drawing out their strangely ambiguous message of sport and camaraderie, militarism and propaganda.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas collect the paintings of Norman Rockwell, but who knew? A current show at the Smithsonian highlights their holdings. (For the record, Spielberg is winning, with 50 pieces to Lucas’ mere 30.) The painting reproduced with this post was commissioned in 1923 as an Underwood Typewriter ad. It was Spielberg's very first Rockwell purchase. He said in the NY Times, “I hung the painting over my desk... It was my deblocker. Whenever I hit a wall or couldn’t figure out where a story was going, I just looked up at that painting.” It all makes sense – the three of them and their love for drama and Americana and story-telling. Spielberg was quoted as saying, “He was always on my mind because I had a great deal of respect for how he could tell stories in a single frozen image. Entire stories.” Looking at the slide show on the NY Times website, you can almost hear the painted characters coming to life in one of their movies, not to mention on Main Street, USA.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/arts/design/04rockwell.html

It makes even more sense to me when the show reminds me of Gregory Crewdson’s work. Two of the photographer’s big influences are the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the work of Norman Rockwell, the local hero who lived and worked not far from Crewdson’s childhood country home in Lee, Massachusetts. I believe that at least one of these two filmmakers collect his photographs as well. The influence is all inter-connected.

The show in D.C. is a must-see, especially as a follow-up if you were lucky enough to see last year’s show at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera. It showed the process photos taken for his painitngs in teh studio. A book under a heel here and there made the subjects look like they were in mid-stride. PDN posted comparisons of the final paintings to their photographic studio predecessors.

http://www.pdnphotooftheday.com/2009/12/2778 If you missed it, take heart, there is a handsome book published by Little, Brown and Company, or go see it next year at the Brooklyn Museum:

http://www.nrm.org/2009/10/norman-rockwell-behind-the-camera-2/

To bring it all back around full-circle, Rockwell was no stranger to Hollywood, as is shown in this summer’s show of his movie poster commissions at the museum in Western Massachusetts, Rockwell and the Movies:

http://www.nrm.org/2010/06/rockwell-and-the-movies/

I first met Pete Mauney when I started taking photography at Bard College in the early Nineties. Pete was one of the older kids, been around the darkroom for a couple years; he had long hair in a ponytail and shot 8x10. He owned an old house in the nearby cool, little village,  and knew where all the best photo spots were, like the old cement factory and the quarry. We looked up to Pete. He also had one of the best collections anyone had ever seen, the things displayed all over his house. (Come to think of it, a bit like how my house is now…) He collected photography books and quirky old pictures. He scoured flea markets and junk shops for discarded religious items and outdated medical devices, and even placed one of the the more rugged of the latter (a dental school practice head) on the front porch to scare off the bad neighborhood kids.

He saw himself as the saviour of these lost items, keeping them from ending up in the landfill. He also collected negatives, and unbenounced to me, has gotten around to drum scanning some of them. The collection is fantastic – oddball and quirky and downright weird, but all of that seen through the veil of well-lit and executed commercial photography, many from the Fifties, all from North America. There’s a cheerleader with a baton posing for her picture, with her left hand almost touching some Roger Ballen-esque graffiti alien drawn on her high school cinderblock wall. There’s a couple on the beach with oil wells dotting the immediate background. There’s a prized cow giving us a look, and a Sixties hipster giving us the finger. The latter picture you would swear was an outtake from Stephen Shore’s Warhol-era Velvet Years series. Accidents and grapefruits, blackface and sports teams, a midget and bare breasts. Synchronized swimming and men in a group shower. It’s all there.

What we get to see online is really only a fraction of the thousands of negs he has up on shelves, awaiting the scanner. It is almost ten years of accumulation, some of it at flea markets, but much of it, especially in recent years, from Ebay. He remarked that he used to buy lots, often by the pound, for as little as $50 or $100. Today, more people are collecting, so lots are now going for about $300 for a good batch, something he laments, as he doesn’t have the money to buy everything that he wants. What he wants are images that strike him as weird, or touching. He’s not interested in nostalgia, the whole “good ol’ days” mindset. Instead he tends toward the darker side. He said that, “There needs to be something ambiguous about it, where it’s not completely clear what exactly is going on.”

Look out for a more complete website and book in the future, as Mauney is actively collaborating with writers on a project involving these pictures.

Add this to your bookmarked list of old photo websites:

http://global-pillage.blogspot.com/

And Pete’s other favorite old photo site:

http://www.squareamerica.com/

A couple of months ago, the folks over at BenQ sent us a test unit of their "Ultra Portable Projector," the BenQ GP1. This projector is designed for photographers and videographers "on the go" and boasts a 3LED light source offering 100 lumens, a 2000:1 contrast ratio, Native SVGA resolution of 858x600, full HD compatibility ranging from 480i-1080i, projection size range from 15" - 80", a built-in USB reader and 20,000 hours of light life. All of this is packed into a stylish casing that measures at about 5"x2"x4.5" and weighs just under 1.5 lbs. Simply put: this projector is amazing! Daylight's staff has tested the unit internally as well as publicly at a photography screening event with nothing but staggeringly positive results. The image quality is superb, setup is quick and easy (as is breakdown) and the unit powers up, ready to project, in mere seconds. The downsides: for larger projection needs, this little unit just doesn't have the lumen heft to throw a large, bright image (anything beyond 70" inches, really...), the control buttons (while very stylish and sleek with blue backlighting and touch sensitivity) are a bit clumsy and often don't respond on the first tap, and the built-in speaker is limited to a 28 db output - just not enough sound for projection needs outside a small room. However, all-in-all, this projector is highly recommended for photographers, videographers, artists and anyone else for that matter, looking for a solid, portable digital projector to take on the road. And for only $500, it seems worth every penny. Stay tuned for a durability followup review later in the year as we put this little piece of magic to the test on the road...

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has awarded the twentieth Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize to photographer Tiana Markova-Gold and writer Sarah Dohrmann, both Americans. The $20,000 award is given to encourage collaboration in documentary work in the tradition of acclaimed American photographer Dorothea Lange and writer and social scientist Paul Taylor. Lange and Taylor worked together for many years, most notably on fieldwork that resulted in American Exodus (1941), a seminal work in documentary studies.

Tiana Markova-Gold and Sarah Dohrmann’s project, “If You Smoke Cigarettes in Public, You Are a Prostitute: Women and Prostitution in Morocco,” is an investigation of female prostitution in Morocco and the experiences of two American non-Muslim women documenting women’s lives in a country where pre-marital virginity is considered sacred. With their project, they “seek to dismantle Americans’ preconceived notions of the prostitute as sexual deviant and the hijabed woman as ‘exotic’” and examine the negotiation of relationships “between the prostitute and the society she lives in, between the artist and the subject, between non-Muslim and Muslim women, between women.”