Gavin Watson grew up in a typical working class overspill town that surround London. Stumbling into photography aged 14, becoming a skinhead at 15, he inadvertently documented the real, social, interracial and musical scene behind the media’s right-wing portrayal of this demonised youth culture of the late 1970s and 1980s… Read More >
In the early 1970s New York City was in the midst of a recession leaving many vacant lots occupied by homeless people. Witnessing these conditions daily, artist/activist Liz Christy and friends formed the Green Guerrillas. They dropped “SEED BOMBS” into these… Read More >
Beijing in 1966: Streets full of young people bustling around, the demonstrations of Mao’s activists, a sea of red flags. The 19-year-old Solange Brand, then a secretary at the French Embassy, captured the early years of China’s Cultural Revolution with a camera that she had bought in Hong Kong. Color photography was practically nonexistent in China at that time; a handful of government publications … Read More >
David Benjamin Sherry was born in Woodstock, New York – yes, the Woodstock – in 1981 and graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. His work includes photography, photograms, and prints, and is exhibited internationally. Quantum Light, his second book, appeared… Read More >
Each summer the Russian state honors 25,000 “gifted” children aged between eleven and sixteen at an activity camp in Orlionok, on the Eastern coast of Black Sea. Girlie cult mixes with the Soviet tradition of Komsomol – exuberant beach games and party-jinks… Read More >
“You press the button. We do the rest” was Kodak’s slogan when Kodak No. 1 came on the market in 1889. Black is the artists’ garb. The 21th Century is a purgatory for specialists, skills, and the innocent object on the photographic paper. From all sides, the death of the medium is proclaimed, and images in galleries document first and foremost the disappearance of their own genre. Photographers no longer embark on expeditions through the streets, but wander for hours through Google Street View, like the Canadian artist Jon Rafman, taking screenshots of wondrous places that the Google camera has captured inadvertently. The avant-garde of photography doesn’t need to leave the house. And meanwhile, since everyone has a digital camera or smartphone, there has never been so much photographed by so many people and uploaded to the Internet. Photos are the new text. … Read More >
