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For the first time, Tate Modern tells the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art

​Antony Cairns, LDN5_051 2017 © Courtesy of the artist Antony Cairns

2 May – 14 October 2018

The birth of abstract art and the invention of photography were both defining moments in modern visual culture, but these two stories are often told separately.

Shape of Light is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between the two, spanning the century from the 1910s to the present day. It brings to life the innovation and originality of photographers over this period, and shows how they responded and contributed to the development of abstraction.

Key photographs are brought together from pioneers including Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz, major contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten and Thomas Ruff, right up to exciting new work by Antony Cairns, Maya Rochat and Daisuke Yokota, made especially for the exhibition.

Read more on the story HERE >>>> Source: Tate Modern Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art – Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

Kenneth Josephson, Chicago, 1972. Gelatin silver print; 4 ¾ x 7 in. (12.1 × 17.8 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gift of the Foster Charitable Trust in memory of Reuben A. Foster, 1983.37. © 1972 Kenneth Josephson. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Images surround us daily—from art to advertising and social media. But how do these images relate to reality? Chicago-based photographer Kenneth Josephson (American, b. 1932) changed the way we think about pictures. His so-called conceptual photography pushes the boundaries of the medium, demonstrating that photographs are not neutral; on the contrary, they convey an idea in addition to a picture. Josephson’s work focuses on the unique qualities of a photograph, specifically how it is cropped, reproduced, circulated, or archived. Using visual techniques such as taking photographs of photographs, his images often comment on themselves with a wry sense of humor.

Josephson has spent his career carefully examining the building blocks of photography and has influenced artists of all kinds. He was exposed to the experimental pedagogy of László Moholy-Nagy as a student at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, where he also studied with pioneers of photography Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Josephson later went on to teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly 40 years. The title, Picture Fiction, which comes from a work in the exhibition by Robert Cumming, distills Josephson’s skill at bending the truth in order to expose the inner workings of photographic images.

Drawn largely from the MCA’s permanent collection, Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography considers the artist’s work in the larger context of conceptual art. Core to the exhibition are four major series made roughly between 1960 and 1980: Images within Images, Marks and Evidence, History of Photography Series, and Archaeological Series. The exhibition also highlights links between Josephson and other contemporary artists working in photography, film, and sculpture—including Roe Ethridge, Jessica Labatte, Marlo Pascual, Jimmy Robert, and Xaviera Simmons. Together, their work illuminates the ways images make meaning today.

The exhibition is organized by Michael Darling, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Lauren Fulton, former Curatorial Research Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

It is presented in the Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel Galleries on the museum’s second floor.

See the Show HERE >>> Source: MCA Chicago Picture Fiction: Kenneth Josephson and Contemporary Photography

How our life experiences change the way we perceive colours.

Pexels, CC BY-ND

The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way.

Some people can’t see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with “normal vision” causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.

Besides our individual biological make up, colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and so is subjective – and prone to personal experience.

Take for instance people with synaesthesia, who are able to experience the perception of colour with letters and numbers. Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses – where a person can see sounds or hear colours. But the colours they hear also differ from case to case.

Another example is the classic Alderson’s checker-shadow illusion. Here, although two marked squares are exactly the same colour, our brains don’t perceive them this way.

Even though squares A and B are exactly the same colour, our brain interprets them as different. By derivative work: Sakurambo, CC BY-ND

Read the full story HERE >>>> Source: The Conversation The way you see colour depends on what language you speak

Kinosaki International Arts Center in Japan

By Alex Teplitzky for Creative Capital

Every month we compile a list of residencies, grant and award opportunities, and exhibition open calls for artists, writers, musicians, composers, and curators.

Writers who write about contemporary visual art should apply for the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program before May 21! The grant funds articles, blogs, books, and short-form writing.

Bemis Center for Contemporary Art Residency
Omaha, Nebraska
Deadline: May 1, 2018

Located in downtown Omaha, the residency includes a private live/work studio complete with kitchen and bathroom. Artists-in-residence have 24-hour access to extensive installation and production spaces and the Okada Sculpture & Ceramics Facility, a 9,000 square-foot industrial space used for large-scale sculpture fabrication.

Apply here

The Shed Open Call
New York, New York
Deadline: May 4, 2018

Early career, New York-based artists are invited to apply to submit their project ideas to receive a commissioning fee of $7,000 – $15,000 to support the creation of their work. Open Call will occupy various spaces at The Shed throughout the year, including one of the galleries, the theater, and the outdoor plaza, allowing for artistic diversity in commissioned works.

Apply here

The Studios of Key West
Key West, Florida
Deadline: May 15, 2018

The Studios offers a month-long residency for emerging and established artists and writers designed to encourage creative, intellectual, and personal growth. The residency comes with housing and work space in the program’s Conch cottages.

Apply here

Mitten Lab Residency
Bear Lake, Michigan
Deadline: May 15, 2018

This is a residency for artists who are playwrights, musical theater composers, lyricists, and librettists. The residency happens in September at Bear Lake, and is open to individual artists or duo collaborators. It includes support for travel, housing, workspace, as well as a stipend.

Apply here

Art Center South Florida Creator Award
Miami-Dade County, Florida
Deadline: May 24, 2018

The Ellies Creator Awards has an open application. The Award supports artists in Miami-Dade County, Florida, with grants from $2,500 to $25,000 to realize a significant visual arts project that will advance their careers.

Apply here

Solarium International Hostel
Fort Collins, Colorado
Deadline: May 31, 2018

This hostel supports writers and poets of any level to take their readers on a journey. The residency comes with living space, access to their tropical solarium, and cultural activities in Northern Colorado.

Apply here

Borscht Film Festival Commission
Miami Beach, Florida
Deadline: June 1, 2018

CC Awardees Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer are looking for new film projects to be created for their upcoming Borscht Film Festival. Depending on the nature of the project, filmmakers may be eligible for a cash commission, full production support, and/or other considerations.

Apply here

BigCi Environmental Award
Blue Mountains, Australia
Deadline: June 1, 2018

International Artists working in visual art, installation, multimedia, performance, literature, music, photography, filmmaking, and curating are eligible to submit entries for the BigCi Environmental Awards 2018. Artists will each receive four free weeks of BigCi residency and AUD$2,000 spending money.

Apply here

Kinosaki International Arts Center Residency
Kinosaki, Japan
Deadline: June 4, 2018

The Arts Center is situated in Kinosaki Onsen, a hot spring town known for its rich natural environment. The residency program is looking for performing artists to respond to themes of  internationality, locality, and innovation. The artists will be supported through studio and accommodation space for up to three months.

Apply here

McColl Center for Art + Innovation Artist-in-Residence
Charlotte, North Carolina
Deadline: June 6, 2018

Regional, national, and international artists are welcome to apply for McColl’s annual Innovation Artist Residency. The program comes with $6,000 living allowance, a $2,000 materials stipend, one bedroom, and much more!

Apply here

Read the full list and apply HERE >>>> Source: Creative Capital Residency, Commission, and Open Application Opportunities in May and June

All Photographs Copyright Joel Meyerowitz

By Michael Ernest Sweet

Joel Meyerowitz requires little introduction. He is a living legend in street photography. Beginning with his pioneering of color street photography, more accurately color photography in general, Meyerowitz has innovated and trail blazed his way through five decades of making photographs. For a few years now Joel and I have corresponded, mostly me nagging him about opinions on my work, which he graciously entertains albeit with moments of harsh criticism. However, I do want to say that it was Joel who offered up, albeit most likely inadvertently, the title for my first book – The Human Fragment. Despite our aesthetic differences, I’ve always maintained an immense respect for Joel Meyerowitz and what he’s done for the world of photography.

For a long time color photography didn’t interest me too much; I am a black and white kind of guy. Lately though, given my project involving disposable cameras and my Harinezumi color work, which ended up being a full-length book, color has really come crashing in on my creative life. Given this, I revisited the work of Joel Meyerowitz and came to really appreciate his brand of genius. So I got in touch with Joel, once again, and we hashed out an interview. Here’s that conversation:

Michael: Joel, you began shooting color at a time when color film was perceived as amateur. Have you ever regretted this? Do you think color, in some way, helped you to express your inner self in a way which monochrome would have perhaps stifled? Color is very emotive after all.

Joel: I have never regretted my beginnings in color. In fact by starting that way I was actually freeing myself from conventions, which of course, due to my own innocence, I didn’t really know existed. So color was a basic force in my development and I learned, early on, that it had an emotive power that needed to be recognized and which made me become a kind of early missionary for color.

Michael: Digital has kind of changed it all in a way. At least you don’t have to commit to a roll of film. You can shoot one image in color and another in BW, or you can always change images in post. If you were doing it all over again today, digitally, do you think you would still take a similar path in terms of color and black and white, or would things be more mixed? Why?

Joel: This question has a difficult hypothesis coming as it does 15 years into the digital photo revolution. The struggles of the 1960’s were unique to its time and produced the arguments and challenges of that period. Now that color is the dominant voice of photography, people are free to move fluidly between B&W and color depending on the subject, or their feelings about a particular moment, so that anyone coming into it today has a wider vocabulary to work from. But from where I stand now color would still be my way of relating to the world around me.

Michael: You speak of “feeling a photo in your gut”. How often do you “feel” a photograph rather than “see” one? Or, are they one in the same for you?

Joel: As I have gotten older I find myself more committed to that gut sensation rather than the purely ‘optical’ point of view, which is absolutely a valid and valuable way of working. It’s just that I have found that there is a direct connection between my deepest instinct – what I ‘feel internally’ – even before seeing the frame fill up with the image. That quickening of the intuitive ‘knowing’ is my guide. Maybe working for so long has trained me to trust that, and so I follow that method.

Read the full interview HERE >>>> Source: HuffPost https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-ernest-sweet/half-a-century-of-making-_b_7844038.html

A new book highlights candid, sometimes clandestine photos of New York subway denizens in the 1930s and 1970s.

(Helen Levitt/Film Documents LLC, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne)

By Kenneth Dickerman

New York is one of the most photographed cities in the world. It is a city that is full of energy and characters that creative types of all kinds are magnetically attracted to. It is also a place where legends are made. One person who falls under both those categories is photographer Helen Levitt. A new book called “Manhattan Transit: The Subway Photographs of Helen Levitt” (Walther Konig, 2018) showcases some of the work that her native city of New York compelled her to make — candid, sometimes whimsical portraits of her fellow subway passengers. While the subject has been photographed by dozens of people over the years, there is an interesting backstory to how Levitt began her foray underground. The photographs, many previously unpublished, also provide us with a compelling window into the past.

In 1938, Levitt set out with another hallowed photographer who had the idea of photographing New Yorkers as they sat in the subway, hurtling through tunnels uptown, downtown or crosstown. That photographer was Walker Evans, and he, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, was a friend and mentor. Evans is probably best known for his large-format work documenting the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration. But at the time he and Levitt embarked on their subterranean journeys, he decided to veer away from the large cameras he used in favor of a little 35mm Contax. Levitt wasn’t just along with Evans for companionship. Yes, she was taking her own photographs. But also, according to MoMA.org, “for extra assurance, he [Evans] asked his friend and fellow photographer Helen Levitt to join him on his subway shoots, believing that his activities would be less noticeable if he was accompanied by someone.” Evans eventually finished his project and presented his work to the world. But the work that Levitt did stayed under wraps until decades later. In fact, four decades later, in 1978, Levitt returned to the subway system to continue her work.

Read the full story HERE >>>> Source: The Washington Post Perspective | A nostalgic look at New York’s subway through the eyes of legendary photographer Helen Levitt

By Grant Scott for BBC

A new film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, is about to premiere in Bristol. It explores the life of Bill Jay, one of the most influential figures in British photography. Grant Scott, lecturer and writer and one of the film’s editors and producers explains why Jay is such an important figure.

Image copyright David Hurn / Magnum Photos
Image caption Bill Jay with some students on one of his photographic workshopsTo suggest that Bill Jay was the spark that lit the fire beneath British photography in the late 1960s and helped form the idea of photography as contemporary practice in the 1970s is no exaggeration. His seminal lecture at Manchester Polytechnic in the autumn of 1971 certainly did that for the now established then student photographers Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows and Brian Griffin.

Jay’s promotion of the work of Tony Ray Jones, saving of the Francis Frith collection, creation of the Photo Study Centre at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and involvement in creating the first photographic gallery – the Do Not Bend Gallery – among so many other initiatives cannot be easily dismissed when assessing the photographic landscape of 1970s Britain.

Bill Jay said of himself, in an editor’s letter in Creative Camera in 1969: “The fate of photography in this country is at stake. And that is more important than my opinions, or your opinions of me.”

—————-

The film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, premieres at the Martin Parr Foundation on Friday, 20 April.

Further screenings with panel discussions featuring Grant Scott and Tim Pellatt will take place in collaboration with the Royal Photographic Society on 8 May at The Frontline Club and the Oriel Colwyn Gallery on 11 May, where an exhibition of Jay’s work will be on show until 30 June.

The Scottish premiere of the film will take place in collaboration with Stills, Edinburgh, Street Level, Glasgow and Edinburgh Napier University in September.

You can find out more about the film at www.donotbendfilm.com

Read the full story HERE >>> Source: BBC http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-43567458

On facing pages, text and image can be brought into intimate conversation.

A Garry Winogrand photograph taken in Portland, Ore., in 1964. Credit Photograph by Garry Winogrand. From Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

On Photography

By GEOFF DYER APRIL 18, 2018

Design-wise, the most famous collaboration between a writer and a photographer did not end up looking like much of a collaboration at all. Walker Evans contributed a preface to the 1960 reissue of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the study of poor tenant farmers in Alabama, originally published in 1941; “Walker” crops up a number of times in James Agee’s text, but a formal separation is maintained between the tenderly austere photographs of families and their homes — printed at the beginning — and the 400 pages of Agee’s highly wrought, much-agonized-over text. This, for Gore Vidal, was no bad thing, because it left Evans’s “austere” photos untainted by what “good-hearted, soft-headed admirers of the Saint James (Agee) version” so loved about the sharecroppers’ gospel.

When it comes to the relationship between a critic or curator writing about photographers or photography, the results span the spectrum of exclusion, segregation and integration. There is not a single photograph in Susan Sontag’s classic “On Photography.” At the other extreme, the exquisite silence of the plates in lavish monographs is sometimes protected by only the slimmest prefaces or afterwords. At all points in between, the word-image ratio shifts constantly between the writing informing the pictures and the pictures illustrating the writing. But there is one form — the simplest in many ways — that permits and encourages a uniquely intimate relationship between writer and photographer.

John Szarkowski was for many years the head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2000, in the twilight of a provocative, highly influential career, he published “Atget,” a selection of 100 images by the French photographer Eugène Atget, each reproduced on the recto page with an accompanying caption-essay on the facing verso page. With Szarkowski as the best kind of guide — one whose itinerary allows interludes of undisturbed contemplation — we wind our way through the haunts of old Paris, emerging from time-shuttered streets into the open skies of the surrounding countryside. Szarkowski had always been a distinctive stylist, but this format enabled him to give free rein to his talents as a writer, which were usually securely tethered by curatorial obligation. He also drew confidence, I think, from an earlier assay at the same form, “Looking at Photographs” (1973), in which he used a single picture by each of the most important photographers in the museum’s holdings to compile a radically synecdochic survey of the medium’s history. The obligation to cover so much ground, to balance what he had to say about so many major figures on such slender plinths, rather limited Szarkowski’s range of literary and thematic movement. With Atget — whose photographs, appropriately enough, were originally offered as “Documents for Artists” — the combination of abundance of subject matter and limited space encouraged a kind of tight flourishing or contained extravagance. Szarkowski’s knowledge of Atget’s work was so extensive that he had scarcely even to think about what he knew. And so the photographs serve as starting-off points for reflections on all sorts of things, including how photography has changed our view of the world: “I do not think that empty chairs meant the same thing before photography as they mean to us now.”

A spread from “Atget,” by John Szarkowski, with a photograph by Eugène Atget. Credit From Museum of Modern Art, New York

Read the full story HERE >>> Source: NY Times The Magic of Books Where Photography Meets Essays

International Call for Entries | Center Forward 2018

Image by Robert Calafiore

Please LOG INTO OR CREATE YOUR FREE ACCOUNT to begin the submission process.

Or open step-by-step SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS HERE

For the past seven years Center Forward has featured the best images in contemporary photography and photo-based work. Emerging to established artists are encouraged to submit. All types of photographic process are eligible for selection and exhibition.

JURORS | The Center’s Executive Director and Curator Hamidah Glasgow in collaboration with Kris Graves. Graves is a publisher and artist. Kris Graves Projects creates limited edition publications and archival prints, focusing on contemporary photography and works on paper. +KGP focuses on current world issues including race, policy, social awareness, science, feminism, and culture. Graves has reviewed at Photolucida + Fotofest.

ARTIST HONORS AND AWARDS:
 All selected artists’ work is included in the gallery exhibition and online exhibition complete with artist website links. The Center also provides professional installation images, event press release and social media promotions with an audience of 180,000+ followers internationally. All artists and friends are welcome to celebrate the exhibition with us at the Reception.

JUROR’S AWARD: $400
DIRECTOR’S AWARD: $200
HONORABLE MENTIONS
NEW* TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIP: To further our goal of inclusivity one artist will receive a need-based scholarship for air travel to Fort Collins, accommodations, and ground transportation. Applications taken after selections announced.

IMPORTANT DATES
Entries Due | May 20, 2018
Notice Of Acceptance | May 30, 2018
Exhibition Dates | Opens September 7, 2018
Public + Artists’ Reception | September 7, 2018

For More Information and to Submit your entries GO HERE >>>> Source: C4FAP Center Forward 2018 | The Center for Fine Art Photography