Kevin Fox Photo Blog

AMAZON - Sebastião Salgado and Per-Anders Pettersson.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a private viewing of Amazon at the Gallery of Photography this evening. I lovely evening and thanks to all involved. 

I have to say though, with regard to the work and the Per-Anders Pettersson work in particular, I couldn’t help but be slightly annoyed. The Selgado work is beautiful, yes, but there are legitimate questions to be asked of the means and rationale of production. In fairness to Selgado he has said he’s not an artist he’s a photographer, which deserves a lot of kudos in my book, but here again we have white middle class photographer on human safari producing wonderful images of the ‘other’. Personally I believe the Prix Pichet work is vastly more environmentally concerned and includes work which is much more developed. 

Per-Anders Pettersson work, which seems to based on following an actress Gemma Arterton as she flies over the Amazon, witnessing the results of deforestation. Perhaps most irritating is the image description’s which seem to think its important that Artertons is mentioned. Is this really important? 

The fact that it is also sponsored by Sky TV grates the throat perhaps most severely of all.

Maybe I am being too cynical, maybe my anti News International bias has clouded my view, maybe the very thought of Sky having any involvement with the arts is just something I can not accept. Regardless of the reason I found the show more Hollywood that Jungle, more tax write off than socially aware, but worth checking out.

 

Gallery of Photography: 

An exhibition in Aid of Sky Rainforest Rescue with photographs bySebastião Salgado and Per-Anders Pettersson.

Sky, WWF and the Gallery of Photography are pleased to announce the Irish premiere of ‘AMAZON’, an exhibition in aid of Sky Rainforest Rescue, featuring the work of two award-winning photographers - Sebastião Salgado and Per-Anders Pettersson, which opens to the public on 1st March 2012 at the Gallery of Photography.

The exhibition, brings together two remarkable, distinct bodies of photography, highlighting the plight of the Amazonian rainforest and the people living within it and showcasing the efforts of Sky Rainforest Rescue, a three year partnership between Sky and WWF, that began in 2009 and aims to help save one billion trees in the state of Acre, Northwest Brazil.

READ MORE HERE

On the Beat: With a Gun and a Camera By MICHAEL WILSON

There are all sorts of reasons why people become New York City police officers. Tradition. Family ties. The pension. Antonio Bolfo’s reasoning was simple.

“I was bored,” he said.

It was 2006, and Mr. Bolfo – a born-and-bred New Yorker with a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design – was an animator working on PlayStation games like Guitar Hero and Amplitude. Still, he was unfulfilled. The attack on the World Trade Center had gotten him thinking about law enforcement.

“I wanted street-level experience, so I opted to be a cop,” he said recently. “I didn’t want to just ride a desk all day in the F.B.I. right off the bat. It was a really idealistic time in my life. I really thought I could make a difference. Save some people. It was very naïve, but that was my thought process at the time.”

READ MORE HERE 

The Last Iceberg photographs - Camille Seaman

The Last Iceberg

photographs by 
Camille Seaman

California-based photographer and 2011 TED Fellow, Camille Seaman, has been photographing in both Arctic regions, including in Svalbard, Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica, since 2003.

Seaman writes: 

“Nick Cave once sang, ‘All things move toward their end.’ Icebergs give the impression of doing just that, in their individual way, much as humans do; they have been created of unique conditions and shaped by their environments to live a brief life in a manner solely their own.”

She explains that some go the distance traveling for many years slowly being eroded by time and the elements; others get snagged on the rocks and are whittled away by persistent currents. Still others dramatically collapse in fits of passion and fury. The Last Iceberg chronicles just a handful of the many thousands of icebergs that are currently headed to their end.

READ MORE HERE 

(Source: lensculture.com)

Tokyo Compression - Michael Wolf

LENS CULTURE 

Tokyo Compression

photographs by 
Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf is known for his large-format architectural photos of Chicago and primarily ofHong Kong, where he has been living for more than 15 years.

His latest pictures have also been created in a big city: Tokyo. But this time Tokyo’s architecture is not the topic. Michael Wolf’sTokyo Compression focuses on the craziness of Tokyo’s underground system. For his shots he has chosen a location which relentlessly provides his camera with new pictures minute by minute.

Every day thousands and thousands of people enter this subsurface hell for two or more hours, constrained between glass, steel and other people who roll to their place of work and back home beneath the city. In Michael Wolf’s pictures we look into countless human faces, all trying to sustain this evident madness in their own way.

— Christian Schüle

The V&A’s new Photographs gallery: behind the scenes at the museum

Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn … the new Photographs gallery at London’s V&A, opening on 24 October, showcases extraordinary images by some of photography’s greatest names. Join Roger Tooth, the Guardian’s head of photography, as he takes an exclusive guided tour. Will be going along to have a loon next week. Looks great from the video. 

After Quick Growth, and Pollution, China Retools

Stunning stuff form Toby Smith. 

By JAMES ESTRIN New York Times 

Toby Smith doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Three years ago, however, he did set off on a difficult journey to ask a single complicated question.

Can China go green?

After a run of unbridled economic growth that often caused crippling pollution, China is now trying to shift gears. Concerned about the effects — and cost — of environmental changes, the Chinese central government is trying to slow down growth and promote alternative energy sources and eco-friendly manufacturing. The photographers Lu Guang, Sean Gallagher andJames Whitlow Delano have already documented the devastation of industrial pollution. Mr. Smith decided it was only fair to explore the recent attempts at healing the environment.

“When China made its 12th five-year economic plan last year, they put an emphasis on pedaling back their reliance on coal and simultaneously upping their usage of renewable energy and also investing in new technologies,” he said. “So, I researched some of the traditional polluting sites across China and looked at where they were deploying renewable energy in the harshest and most unwelcoming environments. I also found specific examples of new technology being deployed.”

Cindy Sherman Untitled Colour Print becomes the most expensive Photograph ever, a snip at $3,890,500

by CLAIRE O’NEILL

The 1981 self-portrait taken by celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman was sold at a Christie’s auction Wednesday. The sale surpassed Christie’s estimates of $1.5-2 million ringing in at a final price of $3,890,500. That’s not only a record for the photographer, but also the “highest price ever realized for a photograph,” says Daniel Kunitz, editor in chief of Modern Painters.

The buyer, according to Art Info, was New York dealer Philippe Segalot, a former head of contemporary art for Christie’s, now a private adviser to some of the world’s richest art collectors.

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Subterranean, Homesick, Alienated. Matt McCann on Bruce Davidson

“In 1980, the photographer Bruce Davidson went underground and began snapping away at the young, the old, the Latinos, the Hasids, the black, the white, the angry, the lonely and the aimless, who were all bundled together and jostled around on the New York City subway. “[It] was in a deplorable state of disrepair,” Davidson, now 78, told The Moment. “Graffiti scrabbled on doors and windows and a dangerous atmosphere persisted. There was something in the air at that time that drove me into the dark tunnels of the subway.” 

Davidson first made a name for himself in 1959 cataloging rudderless, disaffected youth on the precipice of an explosive decade with a series of photographs of a Brooklyn gang that called themselves the Jokers. He made trips to the South eight times between 1961 and 1965, capturing the fear and dignity of individuals fanning a turbulent movement. Other projects had him following a lonely dwarf, an ancient Parisian widow or poor residents marooned in an East Harlem tenement; it would seem his eye was fixed on the impoverished, the alienated, the disenchanted and the invisible.”

Read More Here 

(Source: )

The F.S.A 1935 -44 re-imagined for today

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother 1936. 

When the Farm Security Administration undertook the task of documenting the plight of farmers across the US from 1935 -44 the result was some of the most distinctive American photography ever produced. More American Photographs commissions contemporary American photographers to travel the country and document the current deep deep economic crisis. A very interesting idea, which perhaps needs more time from the photographers involved to sit comfortably with the original FSA work.  

 

“When the economic crisis hit in 2008, I began looking into the F.S.A. material with greater and greater interest,” Hoffmann told me. “I honestly think that the program was one of the most important and influential artistic undertakings of the twentieth century. I was curious to see what contemporary photographers would come up with if they were given the same assignment.”

The photographers Hoffmann and Blankenship chose to commission are Walead Beshty, Larry Clark, Roe Ethridge, Katy Grannan (who photographed Taylor Swift for Lizzie Widdicombe’s profile), William E. Jones, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth and Hank Willis Thomas. “I wanted this show to represent a very wide range of approaches to photography, from documentary and activist to very formal and even abstract,” Hoffmann said. “I deliberately invited artists who are known for a particular style or type of practice and challenged them to think outside their comfort zones. It was important to me that visitors to the exhibition would know who these artists are, in order to understand the context of each one’s particular take on the assignment.”

NY Times 

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Walker Evans, Allie Mae Burroughs, 1935/36

NY Times - Lynsey Addario: ‘It’s What I Do’ By LYNSEY ADDARIO

Interesting article  and images by Lynsey Addario. 

Lynsey Addario was freed from captivity in Libya on March 21, along with Tyler Hicks, Stephen Farrell and Anthony Shadid. Nine days later, in New York, she sat down with James Estrin, Kerri MacDonald and David Furst to share her thoughts on the experience. David W. Dunlap edited Ms. Addario’s answers to her colleagues’ questions into a narrative.

I was reading the feedback to the account that Anthony, Tyler, Steve and I wrote. (“Four Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality.”) Some comments said: “How dare a woman go to a war zone?” and “How could The New York Times let a woman go to the war zone?”

To me, that’s grossly offensive. This is my life, and I make my own decisions.

If a woman wants to be a war photographer, she should. It’s important. Women offer a different perspective. We have access to women on a different level than men have, just as male photographers have a different relationship with the men they’re covering.

In the Muslim world, most of my male colleagues can’t enter private homes. They can’t hang out with very conservative Muslim families. I have always been able to. It’s not easy to get the right to photograph in a house, but at least I have one foot in the door. I’ve always found it a great advantage, being a woman.