Profile : Colby Katz

Colby Katz is one of my favorite photographer, she has worked in different photographic project and her Beauty Pageants in America is the one I like most. The project has been exhibited widely and had many important recognitions.
Here a note from the project
Beauty pageants originated as a marketing tool in 1921 by a New Jersey hotel owner who wanted tourists visiting Atlantic City to remain in town longer. They are now one of the fastest growing businesses in America grossing over 5 billion dollars a year. For this project, I decided to focus on girls ages 12 months to 5 years of age. Kids too young to be able to comprehend the event in which their parents are preparing them for. My project is spilt in to two sections. One is about the ritual of getting ready. A behind the scenes look at the girls picking out their clothes, getting dressed, and having their hair and make-up done. It’s at these moments when the girls are at their most natural and act their age. It’s also the moments when they seem detached, sad, old, apathetic, and tired of the ritual. The second half of my project is of the girls posed inside hotel conference rooms. Here, after hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars have been spent having them look and act mature, after all the prodding, they often fail to follow through. Mom’s stand beside their little girls telling them to “show their dimples” and “do their pretty feet”. Their dimples show but the smiles are forced and poses are awkward and usually not what the parent hopes. When they are doing the thing they been prepared to do, which is after all to look and act like a miniature adult, they fail terribly and end up in the end looking like they should, kids.
And a note about Colby Katz:
Colby Katz attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. After graduating in 1998 with a B.F.A. in Photography, she began working for The Associated Press and The New York Times Newspaper. In 2001 she returned to her home state of Florida to be able to spend more time working on personal projects about the South. The work from her projects in Florida was received very well. Earning her a spot in the Powerhouse published book, 25 Under 25 Up-and-Coming American Photographers in 2003, the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists in 2004, participation in the 2004 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass, and inclusion in 2005 edition of PDN's 30 Choice of Emerging Photographers

Exhibition : Entitled Tree by Myoung Ho Lee

Interesting exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, the work "Entitled Tree" by Myoung Ho Lee will be presented. The work from the young photographer from South Korean has a quite remarkable impact using a concept of isolate the tree with a background. I found really interesting
here note from Yossi Milo artist' statement:
Myoung Ho Lee photographs solitary trees framed against white canvas backdrops in the middle of natural landscapes. To install the large canvases, which span approximately 60 by 45 feet, the artist enlists a production crew and heavy cranes. Minor components of the canvas support system, such as ropes or bars, are later removed from the photograph through minimal digital retouching, creating the illusion that the backdrop is floating behind the tree.
The series includes diverse species of trees photographed with a 4x5 camera in a variety of seasons and at different times of day. Mr. Lee allows the tree’s natural surroundings to fill the frame around the canvas, transforming the backdrop into an integral part of the subject. Centered in the graphic compositions, the canvas defines the form of the tree and separates it from the environment. By creating a partial, temporary outdoor studio for each tree, Mr. Lee’s “portraits” of trees play with ideas of scale and perception while referencing traditional painting and the history of photography.
Yossi Milo Gallery 525 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 - Thursday, March 19, 2009, 6:00–8:00 pm

Exhibition : Beijing Sixty-Six by Solange Brand

Interesting exhibition at Beaugeste Photo Gallery in Shanghai, the Gallery curated by Jean Loh will introduce some historical color photos from the Cultural Revolution in Beijing. The Exhibition will open on the 28th of March at 5Pm at Beaugeste Gallery , lane 210 Taikang road.
here the statement from Jean Loh :
Beijing Sixty-Six: Portrait of a Lost Generation
In 2002 the cofounder of the Pingyao International Photography Festival, Alain Jullien, invited an unknown amateur photographer to participate in the annual visual feast that went on to become the landmark of Chinese photography today. Solange Brand, then the Art Director of the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, mentioned in passing to Alain that she had been in China from 1966 to 1968, and had not set foot on the Mainland since. When Alain asked if she had taken any pictures of China; that innocent question turned out to be a major discovery: Her Kodachrome slides and Agfa prints buried in a shoe box for all those years emerged to become an award-winning book.
That same year in Pingyao I was privileged to be in Solange's hotel room where she first showed her sensational pictures on my laptop screen. Everyone in the room was awestruck. And I was captivated by the freshness of the images as if they were snapshots made just the day before. Later during the al fresco projection, many of the Chinese photographers were moved; all were fascinated by this very rare natural portrait of “Beijing '66,” and in color!
Photography is indeed a time machine where reality travels from yesteryear to yesterday.
The magic about the number “1966” is that this was the year when everything started going upside down, the beginning of an unprecedented upheaval. As if there was a before and an after—following 1966 nothing was the same any more. When Solange raised her camera she was wondering why those great numbers of students, instead of attending classes, were all over town, writing slogans on the walls. She sensed something was happening but did not really understand the scope of the phenomenon. It was the year that the Beatles revolutionized rock music with their albums Rubber Soul and Revolver. It was the year Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander invented new American photography. When Solange eventually left Beijing in 1968 she went home to a France shaken by a nameless revolution dubbed “May 68.” John Lennon said (in “The Beatles Anthology”); “The sixties saw a revolution among youth, not just concentrating in small pockets or classes, but a revolution in a whole way of thinking; the youth got it first and the next generation second. The Beatles were part of the revolution.”
What, with indescribable emotion, did the Chinese photographers see in Solange's Beijing '66? I honestly don't know. What I saw was the original iconography that would serve as the visual aesthetics underlying China's contemporary art today. What the Chinese photographers saw was perhaps a “self-projection” or “self-identification” with the faces of these young men and women, even children, who could have been their grandparents or their parents from a long lost memory.
Here lies the power of photography: What the Chinese viewers experience is like taking a swab of reality—an operation of “cut and paste”—and transposing it to fill in the void in our imaginations, to fill in the empty place in our collective memory, to fill in the absence as in our absentmindedness. We are confronted again by Roland Barthes’ famous “Ça a été—that has been.” Photography's immediacy acts to set up an instantaneous observation of the experience of its author. As a result of the cut and paste, this transposition becomes an affirmation of “I have seen this” or “I have been there.” Hence the excitement we feel in the possibility of scrutinizing each face in the crowd and asking of ourselves: Was that how we (or our progenitors) used to look?
Diane Arbus had the conviction that there are things people would never have noticed had she not photographed them. Thanks to Solange Brand we relish the opportunity to take in every detail of the clothing, of every particle in the air, of every expression on the faces in this Beijing Sixty-Six, and ask ourselves: Where have all these heroic faces gone? The students with their uniforms; those “lake hero” figures (Jianghu Renwu) with their fur coats of another age; those dancers on the train expressing their revolutionary fervor with a martial choreography; and those pilgrims on the road beaten by sandstorms but bravely carrying the icon of the holy idol on their backpacks. Where have all these Red soldiers gone?

Article : Matsushige Yoshito

Yoshito Matsushige was the only person/photographer who took photos of his native Hiroshima soon after the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Here an extract of the story from Japan Focus :
Inscribing Hiroshima: The Photography of Matsushige Yoshito
There are dozens of brilliant war photographers, but there is only one Yoshito Matsushige.
For many years, Matsushige, 92, worked for a major metro daily called Chugoku Shimbun. He may not have been the greatest war photographer ever but he is unique: he took the only photographs in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was detonated over the city, killing 150,000 people.
Photos of war are very much with us today, with fierce debates over whether we are seeing too much of one kind (Americans getting mutilated or strung up on bridges) and not enough of another (civilians dying in Fallujah and other cities). On Aug. 6, 1945, Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for 10 hours, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures. This was no ordinary photo opportunity. He lined up one gripping shot after another but he could only push the shutter seven times.
When he was done he returned to his home and developed the pictures in the most primitive way, since every dark room in the city, including his own, had been destroyed. Under a star-filled sky, with the landscape around him littered with collapsed homes and the center of Hiroshima still smoldering in the distance, he washed his film in a radiated creek and hung it out to dry on the burned branch of a tree.
Five of the seven images came out, and they are all the world will ever know of what Hiroshima looked like on that day. Only Matsushige knows what the 17 photos he didn't take would have looked like.

Exhibition : Yasuhiro Ogawa , Slowly Down the River

I went to see an exhibition which opened yesterday at the Konica gallery in Shinjuku (Tokyo) , a work done by Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa on the Three Gorge Dam area . A reportage on the municipality of Chongqing done in different times. The exhibition also introduce the book "Slowly down the river".Yasuhiro Ogawa is a photographer of Collective Sha-Do , an interesting project between european and japanese photographers working in Japan. I will talk more about Sha-Do in the future as I am preparing a conversation which will introduce the idea and concept of the collective.
Here a note from the photographer on the Three Gorge Dam Project :
I wandered from place to place, being a passenger on the slow boats which run along the river. During the journeys I saw thousands of faces; faces reflecting the situation of the people, who are in the midst of a strong transitional current in this country." A photo story on modern day China, focusing the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

Profile : David Burdeny

I was invited to look at the workd of american photographer David Burdeny and I found it amazing, panorama landscapes is something unique and the result of the interpretation is surreal and with a strong impact.I do like in particular the projesct/series on Antarctica/Greenland 
here some words taken from David Burdeny's statement:
I'm fascinated with the quality of light and the spatial immensity the ocean possesses. I have an enormous reverence for feeling so small in the presence of something so vast, where perspective, scale, time and distance momentarily become intangible. My photographs contemplate that condition, and through their reductive nature, suggest a formalized landscape we rarely see. The glory lies not in the act of this removal or reduction, but in the experience of what is left - sublime experience located in ordinary space: a slowly moving sky, the sun moving across a boulders surface or sea foam swirling around a pylon.
Exposed onto large format black and white film under the soft light of dusk and dawn, the shutter is held open for several minutes at a time, recording the ocean and sky as it continuously repositions itself on the negative, a process both dependent and vulnerable to chance. The resultant image is an accretion of past and present. Each moment is layered over the moment immediately preceding it a single image that embodies the weight of cumulative time and unending metamorphosis.

Books : Bright Humility- Photography by Jaakko Heikkilä

Presenting a new book from Jaakko Heikkilä , the finnish photographer exploring the north land of Lappland, I found interesting the portraits mixed with the landscapes.
Note from the publisher
Lars-Levi Laestadius (1800-1861), parson, thinker and a man of strong influence, has left his mark on the mind of all those who come from the northern regions of the Nordic countries. In this work, Heikkilä walks in the northernmost Swedish Lapland, in the birth place of the Laestadian religious movement. With him he carries pictures of the parson himself and his seven preachers dating from the19th century. He finds people who are quiet, strong in their humility and who have experienced the atmosphere of prayer houses from the beginning of last century to the present day. He finds the nothern vernacular; the heavenly poetry and the life supporting full-bodied self-irony. Amazing present day portrait photography interspersed with the old pictures, the latter mounted on transparent paper with fire in the background, interesting technique - beautiful book by one of Finland's foremost art photographers.

Photographs : Lee Friedlander - Cherry Blossom in Japan

I am in Japan these days following an assignment and I am experiencing the beginning of the Sakura which is the beautiful time of the Cherry Blossom, the beginning of spring season in Japan where many photographers have covered this colorful event, I found out this auction where the series from Lee Friedlander , american photographer, has done on this natural event in Japan.
here some words from the Photographer when he did the project:
I first went to Japan in 1977 and found the whole country ablaze with blossom. I went again in 1979, 1981 and 1984, always at cherry blossom time. As far as I knew, Japan was always abloom
and a note from the auction:
Cherry Blossom Time in Japan. The Complete Works. Photographs by Lee Friedlander. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, 2006. Unpaged. Oblong quarto. First edition. Hardbound. No jacket as issued. 73 tritone reproductions by Meridian Printing using the dry-trap process. Bound dos-à-dos (essentially two books bound together, which can be read in two directions: one half features horizontally oriented plates; the other vertical), with list of plates in the center.

Exhibition : Polyarnye Nochi by Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts will exhibit his project on Polynarnye Nochi and will held an "One Day Masterclass" during the Format International Photography Festival in Derby. Roberts is one of the most interesting photographer who has worked for a long project on Russia which ended up with a book "Motherland". Now working on a project on England which gave the name of his blog " We English" and it will be published as a book pretty soon.
here a note from the exhibition
Polyarnye Nochi
Unforgiving and dramatic winters have often been regarded as one of Russia’s most defining characteristics. A Russian winter is redolent both of great hardship but also great beauty and for centuries it has been romanticised in the country’s painting, music and cinema. A continuation of Roberts’ exploration of contemporary Russian society and inspired by Russian cinema, Polyarnye Nochi explores the winter landscapes of Northern Russia during a period known as Polar Nights, when the region is shrouded in darkness nearly 24 hours a day.

Profile : Jacob Aue Sobol

Being in Japan at the moment means also to experience a place  where is quite impossible to give a rest to the eyes...the city of Tokyo as well the country offer many opportunities for a photographer and the list all the great photographers who has worked in topics here is huge. Today I would like to post the work from Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol, represented by Magnum , who has lived and worked in a project in Tokyo. His work is very interesting to me , although might seem pure reportage the series on tokyo revealed a strong artistic impact. 
Here his biography from Magnum web site:
After a period studying at the European Film College, Jacob Aue Sobol was admitted to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography, in 1998. At Fatamorgana he developed the photographic idiom that runs through his pictures from the East Greenland settlement of Tiniteqilaaq, where he went in the autumn of 1999. Over the next three years he mainly lived in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter. In 2004 the book Sabine was published. In photographs and narratives it depicts his encounter with Sabine and life on the east coast of Greenland. The book was nominated for Deutche Börse Photography Prize 2005.
In the summer of 2005 Jacob Aue Sobol went with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girls’ first travel to the ocean. The year after he returned to the mountains of Guatemala by himself. He met the indigenous family Gomez-Brito and decided to stay with them for a month to tell about their everyday life. The series won the First Prize Award, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo 2006.
His photographs are represented in the Royal Library’s National collection of photography and the National Arts Foundation in Denmark.
In 2007 Jacob became a nominee at Magnum Photos. His latest book project about Tokyo won the 2008 Leica European Publishers' Award, and will be published shortly.