I did a post about Nan Goldin here , and of course i assume you already know who she is. Her new exhibition, ‘Scopophilia’ (means The Love of Looking), consists of 400 photos taken by Goldin paired with photographs of paintings and sculptures from Le Louvre collection. She took new photos of Louvre’s artworks last year during the museum’s off hours.
The Magdalene and Greer
The Back
Aldo Fallai is mainly known as the photographer of Giorgio Armani’s early campaigns. Although he has worked for various fashion designers such as Calvin Klein, Giafranco Ferre and Roberto Cavalli, his works are not limited to only fashion photography. In 1993 he published an art-photography book, “Almost One Year”. The book is an aesthetic documentation of his journey in 1992, an extraordinary visual journal. Traveled around Italy and Morocco, he captured the beauties of male and female bodies with various culture and geographical background.
This photo, taken by the famous Sally Mann, has caused some controversies in the past. A photo of a girl smoking a cigarette, with feisty attitude and strong emotion on her face. Sally Mann has been my favourite photographer, and few weeks ago, i stumbled upon this photo when i was browsing my archive. This girl, once again, captivated me. I wondered what she looks like now as an adult. How’s her mothers works affected her and shaped her personality. Jessie Mann is an artist now and in 2007, she and Len Prince did a collaboration together.
Len Prince and Jessie Mann first met in 2001. He was a photographer looking for a muse. She, the daughter and frequent subject for her mother, Sally Mann, felt literally compelled to explore the creative possibilities of self-fictionalization, or, in her words, of “making art by being in art”. And so the pair embarked on a partnership which is itself about the act of collaboration, while at the same time being about creating memorable images that combine theatrics, and performance, and ideas.
The resulting body of work comes from a world where form, concept, and technical virtuosity mix. It is the result of a now five year collaboration between a highly regarded photographer and a subject who both wittingly and unwittingly has become one of the most compelling and controversial subjects in the history of photography.
Every image is layered with meaning. Two examples: The re-creation of the famous image of Joseph Beuys is not just imitation. It is a picture about passion (Beuy’s passion as well as Prince’s and Mann’s for their art); place (a doorway on Mann’s Virginia property); light (and the ability of Prince’s 8x10 camera to capture so much of the nuance of glow and shadow); and gender.
The photograph of Jessie Mann bathing in the stream references the mythological goddess, Diana. And so the photographer becomes Actaeon - the hunter who unwittingly comes across the naked goddess and is violently punished for his transgression. But the image is also about the transformative aspects of seeing and being seen. It is about power. And not incidentally about rushing water captured on a long exposure.
The inspirations in this body of work may vary from mythological to art historical to pop-cultural. The references may vary from public to personal. Yet what holds everything together is a sense of commitment and engagement with photography and the profound belief that art matters.
Read her amazing interviews:
more images :
http://www.danzigerprojects.com/exhibitions/2006_09_jessie-mann-self-possessed/
http://www.edelmangallery.com/princeshow2007.htm
Dysfashional exhibition is a part of Printemps Francais program which is held by Centre Culturel Francais Jakarta. After exhibitions in France, Germany and Russia, in 2011 the exhibition is taking place at National Gallery of Indonesia. The curators chose to ‘dys-placing fashion language and questioning it’s expressive potential’, explore fashion in aesthetics approach and the differences between fashion and art.
HUSSEIN CHALAYAN, Anaesthetics, 2004
The installation Anaesthetics merges design and video to investigate the sensitive but in the negative, highlighting it’s surpression. Concentrating on the formal processes of the neutralisation of violence, the film accentuates how certain rituals of style and aesthetical procedures can become real anaesthetic strategies.
AMIE DICKE, Effacement, 2008;
Where are the stars, but points in the Body of the God where we insert the healing needles of our terror longing?, 2007.
The Amsterdam-based artist Amie Dicke considers her work as a self-portrait. She projects her own feelings on surrounding objects and images. She writes “I like the work ‘consuming’ because it means to destroy or expend through use, to ‘use up’”. Her work is about understanding and feeling the objects and images, taking possession od then in order to insert her own personality into these objects and images. By working in layers, by adding or by removing, she is hoping to find a truth, a deeper meaning or a shadow side. In her work on fashion magazines, she rips, cuts and transforms images. This dissection of images enables her to point out a critic on the use of this mass communication medium.
RAF SIMONS, Repeat,1995-2005
Repeat exhibits Raf Simons’s imaginary world through a series of silent videos. These screens simultaneously broadcast different sequences shot by Peter de Potter as elements of film editing, which reveal the complex personality of the designer and the magnetic vision he has relentlessly put forward: that of transition - adolescence to adulthood, a paradoxical wandering between rage and distraction, black and white, darkness and light.
MICHAEL SONTAG, Schminktisch, 2009
Following fashion studies in both Berlin and Paris, the young German designer Michael Sontag worked for the likes of C.neeon, Kenzo, and Givenchy before presenting his first line at Berling Fashion Week in July 2009. Allowing himself no themes or fixed boundaries, Sontag creates clean and elegant looks which are offered only in limited quantities upon order. For Dysfashional, he offers us an interactive installation: inspired by a dressing-table, Schminktisch invites the viewer to ‘observe’ himself, awake his senses and question the vanity of images.
OSCAR LAWALATA, Education, 2011
Fashion designer Oscar Lawalata’s installation is directly inspired by the traditional classroom, focused on nine wooden chairs covered by ikat fabrics of East Nusa Tenggara. The process originates with Oscar’s experiences creating works creating this traditional fabric. Bringing us closer to the journey, it is a re-evaluation of the designer’s perception and creative roles in the production process. The object is no longer important, but the creative process itself is presented as ‘education’
STELLA RISSA + JAY SUBIAKTO, Boxes, 2011
The Multitalented artist, Jay Subiakto and designer Stella Rissa, both try to accomplish simultaneously and in collaboration, the creation of an installation in two forms. Their experimental creations in ‘Passion Room’ offer a variety of choices and plenty of surprises. Every room is different and distinct, and each of them has four sides, four shapes, four rooms and four sensations. There are no more rules or boundaries in fashion and both explore sensitive themes, visualizing lips as Lingga, silhouettes or movements of women as Yoni, water drops as infinity, and light as organic, taking possession of it’s own experience. The rooms represent fantasy, creativity and passion through textures, visuals and sound.
DITA GAMBIRO, Mbak Yu, 2007;
Safety First, 2007
The two works by Dita Gambiro focus on issues concerning women and their position within the family and in society that will never change completely. Mbak Yu is a series of seven wooden sticks of various dimensions hanging on the wall, made from synthetic hair, rattan and wood. Her other installation, Safety First, is a five series of helmets made of synthetic hair, hair buns (sanggul), hair accessories, helmets and rattan, displayed on a white table. The works reflect on the protection from and the prevention of invasion of cultural traits and social patterns in a society.
ANTONIO MARRAS, Le Orfanelle, 2006
A field made up of fabric cones, Antonio Marras’s installation is an enigmatic landscape with numerous interpretations. Though their shape may evoke skirts, the light they diffuse makes them appear as inhabited tents. This production by Marras, artistic director of Kenzo Woman as well of his own label, is marked by his native Sardinia and always strives to respect the balance between contemporary life and the legacy of past traditions, pret-a-porter and haute-couture, art and fashion
This installation is the highlight of the exhibition but i couldn’t get a good picture because it’s located in a small room so i made a video + the fabric detail: (sorry it’s shaky and choppy)
Dysfashional Exhibition opens until 15 May 2011.
All photos taken by me.
Photographer Philippe Vogelenzang (b. 1982) and stylist Majid Karrouch (b. 1984) feature in a new production for Amsterdam Museum’sADAM, Man & Fashion exhibition.‘Everything you can imagine is real,’ Pablo Picasso said. This inspired Philippe Vogelenzang and Majid Karrouch to make MODE MADEMAN, a series of portraits combining fantasy and reality. Vogelenzang and Karrouch portrayed 29 men who aroused their curiosity in various ways. This is about more than who these men are; it is also about who they could be.Using form, light and fashion, Karrouch and Vogelenzang weave an imaginary story around the men. In the photography the approach is direct, showing the man as he is. At the same time, he appears in the context of an unrelated story. A portrait in which a real person combines with an imaginary person, merging fiction and reality to create a new image. In MODE MADE MAN, Vogelenzang and Karrouch explore the boundaries of fashion and portrait photography, while demonstrating the ability of fashion to convey a narrative and its capacity to create a new identity.
MODE MADE MAN is part of the second edition of SALON 1, an initiative that presents Dutch fashion, design, art & culture, on different locations in Amsterdam.
How did you initiate the project MODE MADE MAN?
Philippe: We were asked by “The Amsterdam Museum” to create something for their online platform during their exposition ‘Adam, Man & Mode’ which was during Amsterdam Fashion week and Salon/1. We were free to choose our own direction, which we both loved, obviously. Then we started to think about the platform, the exposition, and how this could merge with our work and vision of fashion. We wanted to create a project including images that ‘spoke’ to the viewer, it had to be a project that would be close to the viewer and ‘real life’, but at the same time would be about the subject: Fashion and Men. In Holland you have a saying; ‘Kleding maakt de man’, which translates to ‘Clothes make the man’. So this is how we approached our project. We started to look for men that caught our eye somehow, and to dream and visualize who and what they could be in our imagination.
You say that you want to show the real men and at the same time you want to show what they could be. How did you relate the characters of these men to the “fake” characters and which role does fashion play here?
Philippe: This was something that was quite exciting for us, too. We had a man, an idea, two to three hours, a setting, light and styling. In that time we and the man had to make it work somehow. If the man in question didn’t feel our idea or didn’t understand what we wanted to create with him, then the idea would have failed. In the end, the person in the picture would have to tell the story. When an image is made with integrity and in the power of ‘the moment’, it just works. We’ve been very lucky that in almost all the images, this just happened naturally. About your question how the real characters of the men relate to the fake characters we created, for us, and I think for all the men, it didn’t feel fake somehow. They just showed themselves in another ‘skin’. A lot of them were absolutely amazed by seeing how well and ‘right’ the image felt. And about what role fashion plays here: fashion was, as well as many other things like, the character, the setting and the right feeling, a very important ingredient. When you have this right mix, you can create new identities.
Where did you find these 29 men and how was it working with them?
Majid: The casting was a very difficult thing. We really didn’t want to use models, for the project had to be much more real than that. We wanted to show men as we know so the project would show a general outline of men them and make the project a general outline of men. This includes men that aren’t models. We started out asking some friends and acquaintances and soon after started scouting men on the streets. If we wanted a very specific type of man, we also searched on facebook and casting agencies. Working with them was a lot of fun. A lot of these men hadn’t been in front of a camera as a model before, so this required lots of communication.
How far does surrealism or “everything you can imagine” (the Picasso quote that you refer to) influence our reality or how far does it influence yours?
Majid: I think this is all about your own beliefs. We believe in working hard to achieve even more. Nothing is impossible, even if it seems impossible. In my world miracles happen and facts shift very easily. Of course we also have to be realistic sometimes, but realism comes second for me.
Philippe: I think with time this quote becomes more and more real. I believe one day, everything will be possible. It is this mindset that frees me from restrictions, which enables me to create reality according to my own imagination. I set my own boundaries in a world of endless possibilities. Regarding how it influences our reality in general, it is always up to person to decide what reality really is.
Would you agree in saying that with your work you show the fragility of the male?
Philippe: This question reminds me of some weeks ago when I’d been asked to speak on an event about photography on how I was dealing with the interface of fashion and art in my work. Quite a heavy subject I felt, similar to your question, because I see myself as a young photographer. I started my story with that fact that I couldn’t speak about this subject from a long road of experience but what I could say is what I ‘believed in’ and why I am a photographer. This talk forced me to really think about myself and my work, which in my opinion is very important if you are a photographer. With my images I want to tell people something about the people in my photograph, something you can ‘overlook’. I’m looking for an honest moment, something unique, something special. Creating an image is a very psychological process for me; the ‘road’ to a picture/portrait and finding out how someone opens up is very important to me. I then realised that ‘vulnerability & strength’ is a subject that is developing in my work. So, that’s indeed like you say, a moment of ‘fragility’. If that is ‘the soul’ on that moment you see, I don’t know. I do feel that it is an ‘honest and pure’ moment of someone or something.
Where did you get to know each other and why did you decide to do the project together?
Majid: Philippe and I got to know each other threw a simple go see. We had an appointment to check out each others work and we felt a click immediately. We started out shooting some work together and this really felt good. Philippe told me about this project that he was trying to start. Like Philippe, I loved the idea of working on projects rather then shooting a whole story on one day, so I started brainstorming with him on that specific project (IN&OUT) about the Red Light District. We started working on this project and found out that this way of working really suited us. Then the Amsterdam Museum asked us to exhibit a preview of that what is still in progress by the way, in an exhibition that was showing called the “The Hoerengracht” and we did. This was very exciting. We were showing together with amazing artists like Marina Abramovic, Lidewij Edelkoort, Kienholz art piece The Hoerengracht and Ted Noten
Interview by Husk Magazine
http://huskmagazine.de/blog/2011/02/14/mode-made-man/
More photos can be found here
The young Nan Goldin caught Stephen Shore’s series American Surfaces when it was shown at New York’s Light Gallery in 1973, and it apparently made quite an impression. The account of his trips across the United States, presented as a grid of standard Kodak prints, with its casual, spontaneous focus on private rather than public concerns suggested a realm of possibilities. Another point of reference for her later work would seem to be Larry Clark’s Tulsa, a book published in 1971. Clark scored a notable succès de scandale with his downbeat, revealing (in more ways than one) photographs of youth commune in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The photographer showed a world of sex and drug abuse, when serious drug-taking seemed to rate higher than casual sex on the activities list. He lived with the kids and did everything they did. It was a true photo-diary, and view from the inside, and Tulsa became one one of the most talked about and important photobooks of the 1970’s, making Clark photography’s resident ‘bad boy’.
With publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1986, it looked as if Nan Goldin was bidding to become photography’s ‘bad girl’, although beside Clark - who had raised the stakes by serving a stretch in prison and published the notorious Teenage Lust (1983) - Goldin was tame stuff indeed. But, like Clark, Goldin depicted a bohemian world of squats and shared apartments, and international coterie of youth born out of the punk movement, in which drugs and liberated view of sex flourished. However, there were important differences in the work, and these were explained not just by the fact that Clark worked gritty in black and white and Goldin in seductive colour. The books differed completely in their view of women and of gender relations generally.
Goldin’s life - and that means her work - was shaped by the suicide of her sister Barbara Holly Goldin, in 1965, when Nan was fourteen. Deeply disturbed by this event, Goldin moves in with a series of foster families and enrolled in an alternative schools called Satya Community School, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. There she met two important friends, David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher, and began to photograph with them, firstly at Satya and then at the Boston School of Fine Arts.
Goldin, Armstrong and Fletcher used photography both to record their lives and reinvent them, rather in the manner of Cindy Sherman. Dressing-up and role playing were important components of their photographic experiments. Armstrong had also introduced Goldin to the Boston drag scene, and this - a transgressive sub-culture embedded within ‘normal’ society - as well as the blurring of gender differences that drag and cross-dressing entail became primary themes in Goldin’s work.
In 1978, she moved to New York, and her life went into overdrive, a round of parties, drugs and alcohol, sex and relationships. Despite the pace, she documented anything and everything, the good and the bad, even beatings from boyfriends, because the excessive use of drugs and alcohol meant that abusive relationships were common among her circle of friends. She became involved in the thriving New York punk-rock scene, and began to show her photography in the form of slide show. This slide show, which she carefully arranged with musical soundtrack, was presented in clubs like Tin Pan Alley, a venue that provided work space and gallery for young artists involved in the scene.
As Goldin evolved as an artist and became more confident in her work, the slide show also evolved, gaining the title The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. At the instigation of photo- impressario Mavin Heiferman, and with the help of the distinguished photo-editor Mark Holborn, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was published in book form by Aperture in 1986. A mass of material from the slide show was edited down and grouped in thematic sections - women alone and together, men alone and together, children, marriage, sex, death.
As these divisions indicate, the book is about relationships - about Goldin’s relationships with her friends and lovers certainly, but also about the nurturing yet often corrosive nature of human relationships generally. That makes The Ballad a more complex work than, say, Clark’s Tulsa or Teenage Lust. Goldin looks beyond the sleazy glamour of the sex and drugs to examine such issues as the limitations of society’s prescribed roles for the genders and the conflicted, often violent (emotionally and physically) aspects of sexual relationships. Behind the vibrant and seductive colour of her imagery, her view is clearly profoundly pessimistic.Yet, as someone who lost a sister and felt that deeply, she still admits the need to form relationships:
I often fear that men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they were from different planets. But there is an intense need for coupling in spite of it all. Even if relationships are destructive, people cling together.
Throughout The Ballad, Goldin subverts stereotyped gender roles. Men are shown vulnerable as well as tough, women tough as well as vulnerable. And she often photographs like a predatory voyeur - employing the searing intensity of flash, for instance - although the results are far from voyeuristic. She is remarkably non-judgmental about her subjects, even those who have beaten her up, and the aspect of her work makes The Ballad one of the most generous and open-minded examinations of the thorny relationships between the sexes. Her imagery deals with issues of gender representation quite as well as any of the more theoretical post-modernists, and it resonates more than most because it has authentic ring of lived experience. ‘You can only speak with true empathy about what you have experienced’, she has written.
Unlike some photographers working in the ‘diaristic’ mode and using the ‘snapshot aesthetic’ she does not deny its origins, and clearly has a great ambition for it.
My work originally came out of the snapshots aesthetic… Snapshots are taken out of love and to remember people, places, and shared times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.
The last sentence is a good definition of photographs generally.
Although Goldin has said that The Ballad is ‘my family, my history’, it soars beyond that circumscribed horizon, unlike many of the imitations it has spawned. But her work - like that of Diane Arbus, with whom she can be usefully compared - does not revolve simply around personal relationships. It continually demonstrates how personal relationships determine social relationships and then societal relationships. Like Arbus, Nan Goldin surefootedly negotiates the tightrope between the personal and the public, confession and art, the snapshot and the documentary. That is the true value and potential of the ‘diaristic’ mode at its best. Like the best photography, it holds up a mirror to its time
This text is written by Gerry Badger taken from the book
The Genius of Photography, 2007
http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Photography-Gerry-Badger/dp/1844003639
—Woodman’s photographs always remind me of Duane Michals’s works. The narrative, use of lights and surrealism style. That’s what made me fascinated by her photographs. Woodman seems to obsessed with existence and reflection, it shows in her works that have a lot of ‘invisible’ theme on it. She killed herself when she was 22 by jumping from the window of her apartment in Manhattan. Its hard not to relate her suicide with her works, which are have a ‘haunting’ and afterlife feels. Like Sylvia Plath, i can’t stop asking “what would she be like right now if she didnt killed herself”.—
“Born in Colorado, she studied at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, and the body of her work was produced in response to school assignments. From her time spent in Rome on scholarship and in New York after completing her degree, she produced an oeuvre that is often described as brief yet powerfully accomplished. Woodman photographically blurred and mutated her body via a deft mastering of prolonged single exposures. In these images, her body traverses dilapidated interiors, is sometimes lodged behind disintegrating scraps of wallpaper, and often appears to move across space despite the static nature of the form, her edges foggy and shifting.”
Woodman’s genius had concrete foundations. Her mother was a successful ceramicist; her Harvard-educated father a professor of painting. From an early age, she spent long spells in Italy with her family. Clever, creative, encouraged by her parents, she soaked up every artistic trend, from postmodernism to the Baroque. When most teenagers were experimenting with make-up, she wore Victorian-style dresses and read Proust.
Distortions, faceless bodies, cropped bodies, dissolving bodies, all contribute to the idea of a constant transitionality and mutability of being. Woodman engages her body in a subtle and at times strongly dynamic physical exchange with the built environment, thus achieving the goal of both revealing and concealing her body and identity. She is the girl hidden under the detached mantel of the old fireplace, she is the woman in the wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, imprisoned in the overlaying pattern, creeping around the circumference of the room, who is unnamed because the experience she is undergoing robs her of her identity.
Woodman claimed that she was interested in ‘the relationships that people have with space’ and created ghost and angel female bodies that move between the oppositions of inside/outside, self/ surroundings. Sollers observes in Woodman’s work that: ‘When one doesn’t really exist, except in the impossibility of being an angel … one has a tendency to float, to levitate, for space and weight obey new laws.’ The ghost-like identities of Woodman’s photographs appear like apparitions due to their unique relationship to the rooms and spaces they inhabit, defying gravity and the possibilities of human movement. The literal blurring in Woodman’s shots between the fixed subject and the space it moves through creates images of liminal and unstable figures and places. This instability works to ‘simultaneously create and explode the fragile membrane that protects one’s identity from being absorbed by its surroundings’. Just as ghosts mythologically possess the ability to ‘walk through walls’, Woodman’s female ghosts melt into and move through the locations that seemingly enclose them.
MORE OF HER WORKS HERE
TEXT CREDIT :
Surrealism and Self-representation in the Photography of Francesca Woodman by Eva Rus
Transitory Ghosts & Angels in the Photography of Francesca Woodman by Georgie Boucher
Francesca Woodman, Palazzo della Ragione, Milan by Rachel Spence
From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The ‘refined,’ the rich, the professional ‘do-nothings’, the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today’s art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.
Restaurant, 2000
No Title, 1998
Miror, 2000
Back On Table, 1994
Woman and Chair, 1997
Man, Chair and Table, 1995
Corporate Director, 1997
Knee and Woman, 1994
No Title, 1997
