Metropolis: City Life in the Urban Age

September 11-October 9 2011

Noorderlicht Photography
Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen
The Netherlands

Since the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the world’s population are living in cities. Metropolis:­ City Life in the Urban Age shows the many faces of the modern city.

In photography of diverse sorts – documentary and constructed – Metropolis literally leads you through a city of images. Metropolis exposes the soul of the city, the place where our future is being shaped.

Information about the exhibition, including satellite programs, is here.  Examples of work by each of the exhibition’s photographers are here.

Photograph by Michael Wolf.

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CONSIDERING VIETNAM: Call for Papers

17^th-18^th February 2012

Imperial War Museum, London

with Don McCullin, Philip Knightley and other guest speakers

The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. Fifty years on, it still serves as a benchmark in the history of war reporting and in the representation of conflict in popular culture and historical memory. This conference seeks to explore the legacy of the US involvement in South East Asia and the resonances it still has for the coverage of contemporary warfare. In particular, the conference will reassess the role of the media in covering the war and the implications this has had for the coverage of subsequent conflicts, the impact of the war on popular culture, the ways that wars and their aftermaths are experienced on the ‘home front,’ and issues around memorialisation and memory, particularly in museum culture. The conference will bring together practitioners, academics and curators in an interdisciplinary engagement with this complex but important issue.

This conference is organised by the Imperial War Museum and the University of the Arts Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) in support of IWM’s major exhibition SHAPED BY WAR:  PHOTOGRAPHS BY DON McCULLIN.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers discussing the representation of the Vietnam War across the following areas:

• Photography
• Film & television
• Written journalism
• ‘Mythologizing’ the Vietnam War in cultural memory

Please send a 250 word abstract and one-page c.v. to Dr. Jennifer Pollard at considering.vietnam@arts.ac.uk by September 30^th 2011. Notifications will take place by October 28^th 2011.

A special issue of the journal Photography and Culture is planned in response to the conference, including selected papers from the event.

 

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What Happens Now?  Proposals for a New Front Page

What should we be looking at? The extraordinary number of photographs taken on September 11 made it the most photographed event in history and may have signaled the birth of citizen journalism. However in our impulse to record, we have not formulated new strategies to gain a better understanding of today’s pressing issues of a globalized world.

Ten years post-9/11, at a time when we are more overloaded with information than ever but cannot access it in a coherent manner, Aperture will create a visual café for collective social engagement with the question: What Matter’s Now? and turn it into an evolving exhibition space. During a two-week period Aperture will turn itself “inside out,” letting participants engage in the editorial process of weighing questions, ideas, and images, and proposing conceptual and curatorial solutions. Both invited guests and gallery visitors will be asked to participate.

The exhibition What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page will combine the crowd sourcing of images and ideas with the curatorial engagement of six experienced individuals, each hosting a table and a conversation within the space, where on corresponding walls each group will present its proposals for the contents of a ‘New Front Page’.  Hosts include a variety of visual image specialists: Wafaa Bilal, Melissa Harris, Stephen Mayes, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Ritchin (who conceptualized this project) andDeborah Willis.

Contributions will be solicited from people around the world who are not able to visit in person. By sending files to dedicated email addresses set up for each table, as well as a general account, remote participants will be able to add their suggestions of imagery, multimedia projects and websites as part of the exhibition in-process.

Exhibition in progress: September 7–September 17, 2011; Monday-Saturday, 10:00 am-6:00 pm.  The exhibition is sponsored by the Aperture Foundation with support from Canon.  More information will be available soon at the Aperture website.

Photograph by Lorie Novak.

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The International Center of Photography has opened an exhibition of photographs taken to document the destruction of Hiroshima by the atomic bomb dropped on August 6, 1945.  Long classified, these images are now presented for public viewing.

A slide show of images from the exhibit is also available at the New York Times Magazine.

Photograph by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division, [Rooftop view of atomic destruction, looking southwest, Hiroshima], October 31, 1945. International Center of Photography.

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Flesh and Metal, Bodies and Buildings

Works from Jonathan Hyman’s Archive of 9/11 Vernacular Memorials

Duke University has put up an exhibition, including online galleries, of an outstanding collection of work by Jonathan Hyman.

The work can be seen at the Duke Special Collections Gallery, Perkins Library , from May 9 through October 16, 2011.  Hours are here.

Photograph by Jonathan Hyman, Bleeding Statue of Liberty, Manhattan, 2002.

 

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CONFLICT ZONE is a collection of images from the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, captured by some of the world’s leading combat photographers and journalists.

The Conflict Zone exhibit is running through June 18 in a gallery across the street from the Chicago Cultural Center.

The Poynter Institute is collecting reactions to the exhibit in text, photo, or video here.

Photograph by Jason P. Howe.

 

 

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Theprintspace has announced an exhibition of 100 images of Japan taken over a period of 13 years by award-winning photographer Jason Hindley.  All proceeds from the print sales will go to the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal.

Familiar and Distant opens at theprintspace gallery at 74 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DL on Thursday, 19th May from 7pm-9.30pm with drinks provided.  The exhibition then continues from 20th May-3rd June, Monday-Friday 9am-7pm.  Admission is free.  More information is here.

Photograph by Jason Hindley.

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“Classically, photojournalism has been governed by a number of tropes: the heroic figure of the photographer, the economy of access to the event (getting “close enough,” as Capa famously said), the iconic image, the value of ‘the real’ and its faithful representation in the picture, the mission of reporting the truth and conveying it to a faraway public, and often a commitment to a sort of advocacy or at least a bearing witness to terrible events.

Antiphotojournalism names a systematic critique of these cliches, and a complex set of counter-proposals. It names a profound and passionate fidelity to the image, too, an image unleashed from the demands of this tradition and freed to ask other questions, make other claims, tell other stories. Sometimes the gesture is reflective, self-reflective — what are we photographers doing here, what do we assume, how do we work, what do we expect and what is expected of us? Sometimes the desire is evidentiary — not in the old sense of simply offering the ‘evidence’ of images to an assumedly homogenous public opinion, but in much more precise way: photographs have become evidence in war crimes tribunals. Sometimes the innovation is technological, whether it involves working with the hi-tech resources of advanced satellite imagery or the low-tech crowd-sourcing of participatory protest imaging. Sometimes the practices are archival, even bordering on the fetishistic.

And sometimes the question is simply whether we even need images at all.”

The exhibition is curated by Thomas Keenan and  Carles Guerra (see him talk about antiphotojournalism on You Tube here) and  incorporates the work of an array of Magnum photographers including Broomberg & Chanarin, Mauro Andrizzi, Jonathan Cavender, Robbie Wright, Shane McDonald, Hito Steyerl, Ariella Azoulay, Paul Lowe, Goran Galic & Gian-Reto Gredig, Laura Kurgan, Renzo Martens, Kadir van Lohuizen, Allan Sekula, Phil Collins, Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, Paul Fusco, Gilles Peress and Susan Meiselas. Compilations by Sohrab Mohebbi, Eyal Weizman, with Yazan Khalili and Tony Chakar.

It is on display from April 1 to June 8, 2011 at the Foam_Fotografiemuseum, Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam.

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Louie Palu’s The Fighting Season is an in-depth retrospective of the conflict in Southern Afghanistan photographed over five years.  This is the first time that images from this extensive, award-winning archive will be publicly exhibited.

The show opens at the Kinsman Robinson Galleries, 108 Cumberland st. Toronto, ON M5R 1A6 on May 7, 2001 from 2:00-4:00 PM.  The show continues until May 31, 2011.  For more information contact info@kinsmanrobinson.com.

You can see a proof copy of the catalog here Louie Palu Catalogue Proof.

 

 

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Blogging Images: Photojournalism and Public Commentary

Northwestern University, Saturday, April 30

Because photojournalism is a public art, it exists in part to provoke and inform public discussion.  Likewise, good public discussion includes talking about images as a way of thinking about public affairs and other things held in common.  Although photojournalism has been accompanied by commentary from its inception, digital technologies have provided both new media for image circulation and new venues for critical commentary and audience interaction.  These changes provide an opportunity for scholars in the humanities to become more directly engaged with public audiences, but effective engagement is likely to require different skills and perhaps different attitudes than those that characterize academic discourse.

The conference and workshop on Blogging Images focuses on analyzing and writing about images for a public audience.   The morning sessions will feature presentations by photographer Brian Ulrich and bloggers Jim Johnson and Michael Shaw.  These sessions will focus on the transformation of the visual environment as it has altered photograph documentation, the use of photography in the definition and redefinition of public spaces, and the rhetorical constraints and strategic decisions involved in developing blogs devoted to critical discourse about visual culture.

The afternoon sessions will be devoted to critical discussion of draft blog posts presented by student participants.  Each post will be presented to a small group of other writers, who will help each other improve their interpretive and presentational skills.  The presenters from the morning session and other faculty will be involved as well.  Students who wish to have their work reviewed in the workshop should notify Jesse Baldwin-Philippi at j.baldwin.philippi@u.northwestern.edu by April 22.

Schedule:

Annie May Swift Hall: Helmerich Auditorium

8:30 Continental Breakfast

9:00 Brian Ulrich, Document to Propaganda: The New Face of Photographic Truth

10:00 Jim Johnson, The Uses of Photography: Thinking About Public Space

11:00 Coffee break

11:15 Michael Shaw, BagNews and the Role and Process of Analyzing News Images

12:15 Break

2:00-4:00 Workshops: AMS Hall, rooms 109, 110, 219 (specific rooms will be assigned to workshop participants at a later date)

4:00 Closing Remarks (AMS Helmerich Auditorium)

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the Department of Communication Studies/Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture.

Photograph taken in Bloomington, Minnesota by Brian Ulrich.

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