Peter Turnley has put up a slide show of photographs from Havana, Cuba.  The show is titled “CUBA: A Grace of Spirit” and features 45 images.

While at Peter’s website, be sure to check out some of the other shows.  Some of this work comes from his Street Photography Workshops, which are instructional trips that one might think of as a combination of urban exploration and a master class.  Forthcoming workshops include the Rio Carnival, Feb. 14-22 and Barcelona, April 22-28.  You can learn more at Peter’s website.

Photograph by Peter Turnley/Corbis, 2006.

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This Storm is What We Call Progress

Ori Gersht

Imperial War Museum, London

25 January – April 2012

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February 18-April 1, 2012

Noorderlicht Gallery

Groningen
The Netherlands

Drawing on the work of different photographers, Cruel and Unusual illuminates various aspects of the prison system and the ways it has been depicted in photography: social justice, crime and punishment, the boundaries of liberty.  The exhibition is curated by Pete Brook and Hester Keijser.

Pete is the author of the Prison Photography blog, and we’ve featured the recent Kickstarter/Creative Commons project where he took ‘Prison Photography’ on the Road.  “Cruel and Unusual” distills some of that work and other contributions as well.  You can read about how the project developed here.  Pete’s blog is a contribution to both social justice and photography, and he continues to work at finding the right means to raise awareness regarding the US incarceration complex.  “Cruel and Unusual” will provide another occasion to consider how the carceral system condemns those within and without, and how photography can reveal and build relationships where before there was only confinement, within and without.

Photograph by Deborah Luster: Pamela Winfield, Easter Bunny, Children’s Visiting Day, Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, St. Gabriel, Louisiana.

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Considering Vietnam

Imperial War Museum

17 February 2012 – 18 February 2012

The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. This two day conference, held at IWM London, explores how the media and popular culture have shaped our understanding of the Vietnam War.

Day One of the conference will focus on how the Vietnam War was represented in the media with particular reference to photography, documentary film and television.  Day Two will focus on the representation of the Vietnam War through popular culture, with particular reference to feature films and popular music.

Speakers will include veteran journalists Don McCullin, Michael Nicholson and Philip Knightley. Additional information including a link to the conference program is here.

The conference is produced in association with the University of the Arts Photography and Archive Research Centre (PARC) and the London College of Communication

Photograph by Don McCullin, Hue, Vietnam, February 1968.

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Zoe Strauss: Ten Years

Philadelphia Museum of Art

January 14, 2012-April 22, 2012

“Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is a mid-career retrospective of the acclaimed photographer’s work and the first critical assessment of her ten-year project to exhibit her photographs annually in a space beneath a section of Interstate-95 (I-95) in South Philadelphia. Strauss’s subjects are broad but her primary focus is on working-class experience, including the most disenfranchised people and places. Her photographs offer a poignant, troubling portrait of contemporary America.”

We’ve been proud to feature Zoe’s work previously and to plug her terrific book, America.  You can learn more at her blog.

“Woman with Red Hair,” photograph by Zoe Strauss.

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This blog periodically cites the work of Ariella Azoulay, whom we consider one of the most important writers on photography in our time.  Azoulay directs the Photo-Lexic project at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.  She is the author of Civil Imagination: Political Ontology of Photography (forthcoming), The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), Once Upon a Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin (2006) and Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (2001). She has received the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing, presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography.

This month Pluto Press has released From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950.  The work is the most recent articulation of a continuously unfolding project of critical exegesis on behalf of democratic citizenship.  Azoulay’s analysis of ordinary photographs from both state and private archives explicates the administrative mechanisms and tragic consequences defining the early period of Israeli state formation.  In place of the myth of the state, Azoulay exposes the architecture of the regime-made disaster, a distinctive mode of power that can co-exist with but ultimately undermines democracy.

Additional work by Azoulay is cataloged here.  For an example of her commentary on current events, go here.

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COAL + ICE

Curated by Susan Meiselas and Jeroen de Vries

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, No. 155A Caochangdi, Beijing, China

September 24 – November 28, 2011

Coal + Ice is a documentary photography exhibition featuring the work of 30 photographers from China, the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, whose work, brought together here, visually narrates the hidden chain of actions triggered by mankind’s use of coal.

This photographic arc moves from deep within the coal mines to the glaciers of the greater Himalaya where greenhouse gasses are warming the high altitude climate.  As these mighty glaciers melt at an accelerated pace, the great rivers of Asia that flow from the Tibetan Plateau into the oceans are disturbed, and the lives of billions of people downstream are disrupted.

A video about the show is here (it loads a bit slowly).  A gallery of images is here.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin.

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The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951

An exhibition by The Jewish Museum, New York and The Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

The exhibition features more than 140 works by some of the most noted 20th-century photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Sid Grossman, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, and Weegee.

The exhibition will be housed at the The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York, NY from November 04, 2011 – March 25, 2012; at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Oh, from April 19 – September 9, 2012; at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA, from October 11, 2012 – January 21, 2013; and at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fl from February 9 – April 21, 2013.

More information is here.

Photograph by Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947.

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Given the interest in the Occupy Wall Street protests and those that preceded them in the Middle East and Europe this past spring and summer, readers may want to see the recent issue of Photoworks, a photography magazine published in the UK.   “Issue 16 considers the ways in which photography has been used to document civil unrest, the roles available to photography as a vehicle for protest, and the political operations of photography in contemporary culture.  Through a series of folios, essays, interviews, book reviews and a round table discussion, it brings together a wide range of photographs, drawn from different moments and disparate contexts.  Contributors include Ariella Azoulay, Nina Berman, Iain Boal, Shami Chakrabati, Monica Haller, Geert van Kesteren and Martha Rosler.”

You can see the table of contents for Issue #16 here.  Texts for this issue will be available to download from 1 November 2011.  The Photoworks organization main page is here.

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Copia—Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001–11

Cleveland Museum of Art

August 27, 2011–January 16, 2012

Nobody has captured the emptiness at the heart of American consumer culture better than Brian Ulrich.  For those fortunate enough to be in the area, his work will be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art  from August 27, 2011 to January 16, 2012.  The exhibition features 50 color photographs from the artist’s Copia series (2001–10), a three-part project labeled Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores.  Initially using a hand-held camera with the view finder at waist level, Ulrich remained anonymous while documenting shoppers engrossed in navigating the abundance of goods found in vast enclosed malls and big-box stores. The second phase focuses on thrift stores, the collecting places for discarded and unwanted consumer products, yet a primary destination for a growing segment of the United States’ population. The concluding group features haunting images of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, highlighted by the exteriors and interiors of dark stores, ghost boxes, and dead malls.

And be sure to get the book: Is This Place Great or What.

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