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 >
Observing Michele Abeles working laboriously on her staged photographs, her future gallerist, Oliver Newton, asked her why she did not use photo-editing software. “I can’t get to grips with it,” came the pragmatic answer. And even though the amount of digital post-production in the New York artist’s most recent works has… Read More >
Around 1905 the chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky devised a plan to systematically document the Russian Empire using color photography. He received the necessary materials, a railway car refitted especially for the enterprise and a permit to enter prohibited areas from Czar Nicholas II himself. The photographs, created between 1909 and 1915, aimed to give Russian school children a better understanding of the history and culture of their… Read More >
Isabelle Wenzel creates pictures of bodies, not people. Often posing for her own photos so she is able to control every aspect of the picture, she is willing to put herself into difficult positions that run-of-the-mill models otherwise may not. Its unsurprising then, Wenzel was formerly an acrobat before an injury forced her retirement from such activity on a professional level. When not posing herself Wenzel cajoles close friends and family in front of her camera, though admits she considers herself the perfect model – “communication becomes instant and the process becomes quicker”. Read more >
Yue Minjun’s first big solo show in Europe at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, is for all intents a Western debut, but goes far beyond an introduction to this accomplished Chinese artist. Instead, running for four months through fall 2012 to spring 2013, the show is a major retrospective. For the first time his main works are shown in one place, so the visual force – the evolution of his work since the 1990s, and the differentiated aesthetics – are presented in one single time and place. Read More—
Night and Day comprises one hundred and ten iconic Kodachromes from David Armstrong’s archive of late 70s and early 80s photography. A pictorial manifestation of the period’s art and literary scene in New York: A sundry of bohemians, artists and ultimately flaneurs, captured by Armstrong in their hedonistic and carefree lives, surrounded by sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that so epitomise this era. More—
