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Who’s Perfect, Anyway? Pro Infirmis Exposes the Power of Modeling

Idealization suffuses visual media, and the damage includes everything from promoting impossible body images to making real people invisible.  But sometimes an artist can turn convention against itself, and the results can be amazing.

pro infirmis wheelchair

The Swiss organization Pro Infirmis has created an art project that includes a department store installation and this film.  Their website is here, and for those who can’t read German, French, or Italian, you can read more about the project here.

The film has been going viral–over 11 million views at YouTube, among others–and we’re happy to help it along.  There is much that could be said, and not only about issues of disability.  For readers of this blog, the work could provide a fascinating reconsideration of questions about modeling, the relationships between images and mannequins, and between mirrors, mannequins, photographs, and self-image, and about copying and self-consciousness, and much more as well.  But that will be left for another day.  For now, watch the film and ponder what is revealed.

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Life-Framer Contest and Exhibition

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Life Framer is a non-profit driven photography competition designed to source and showcase outstanding photography from amateur, emerging, and established photographers.  Each month there is a competition on a theme, with the winners then collected for an annual exhibition.

The submission deadlines currently open are January 31st, on the theme Times of Your Life, and February 28, with an open call.  More information is available at their web site.

This year the annual exhibition will run from April 1-22 at theprintspace gallery in London.  There will be an additional show from April 19-May 3 at Juraplatz, Switzerland, an outdoor road-side art space.

Photograph, a runner-up in the 2013 open call competition, by Visarut Teerawatvichaikul.

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Exhibition: Prison Obscura

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Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Whitehead Campus Center, Haverford College, Haverford, PA

January 24 -March 7, 2014

Curated by Prison Photography editor Pete Brook, Prison Obscura presents rarely seen vernacular, surveillance, evidentiary, and prisoner-made photographs, shedding light on the prison industrial complex.  Why do tax-paying, prison-funding citizens rarely get the chance to see such images?  And what roles do these pictures play for those within the system?  With stark aesthetic detail and meticulous documentation, Prison Obscura builds the case that Americans must come face to face with these images and imaging technologies both to grasp the cancerous proliferation of the U.S. prison system and to connect with those it confines.

Additional Information is available here.

Prison Obscura illustration by Ellen Gould.

 

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Paper Call: The Visual Communication Conference

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Call for Papers and Panels – 2014

Deadline for proposals is February 28, 2014
Hosted by the University of Rhode Island & Roger Williams University
June 22-26, 2014
Whispering Pines, West Greenwich Rhode Island

The organizers of the 28th Annual Visual Communication Conference invite faculty and students to submit research and creative presentations from the varied and emergent field of visual communication. Topics may include, but are not limited to, graphic design, visual aesthetics, visual rhetoric, semiotics, still and motion photography, documentary and feature films, visual literacy, visual ethics, multimedia and new communication technologies, visual culture, and pedagogy in visual communication. While traditional research is welcome, authors and creators of all accepted submissions must present their work in a visual way.  In addition, video presentations of research will be considered creative work and reserved for the creative work sessions.

Additional information on the paper call is here.  The VisCom main page is here.

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Aperture Gallery Workshop on Photographic Collaboration

Collaboration: Revisiting the History of Photography

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Saturday, December 7
1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Aperture Gallery and Bookstore
547 West 27th Street
New York, NY
FREE

Join Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and graduate students from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design for an Open Lab at Aperture Gallery, as they develop the first draft of a research project that reconsiders the story of photography from the perspective of collaboration. The team will map out a timeline of approximately one hundred photography projects—in which photographers “co-labor” with each other and with those they photograph—on the walls of the Aperture Bookstore.

“The timeline includes close to one hundred projects assembled in eight different clusters. Each of these projects address a different aspect of collaboration: the intimate ‘face-to-face’ encounter between photographer and photographed person; collaborations recognized over time; collaboration as the production of alternative and common histories; as a means of creating new potentialities in given political regimes of violence; as a framework for collecting, preserving, and studying existing images as a basis for establishing civil archives for unrecognized, endangered, or oppressed communities; as a vantage point to reflect on relations of co-laboring that are hidden, denied, compelled, imagined, or fake.

“These clusters are taped to the walls as a large modular desktop, susceptible to multiple readings and changes. The different projects are ‘quoted’ through small reference prints in a laboratory mode, and juxtaposed on the wall with verbal quotations from the participants in the event of photography, as well as other archival documentation. This display format is a first draft that will be extended and modified following the discussions with the audience in the space.

“In this project we seek to reconstruct the material, practical, and political conditions of collaboration through photography and of photography through collaboration. We seek ways to foreground—and create—the tension between the collaborative process and the photographic product by reconstructing the participation of others, usually the more ‘silent’ participants. We try to do this through the presentation of a large repertoire of types of collaborations, those which take place at the moment when a photograph is taken, or others that are understood as collaboration only later, when a photograph is reproduced and disseminated, juxtaposed to another, read by others, investigated, explored, preserved, and accumulated in an archive to create a new database.”

This one-day event is a unique opportunity to engage with the project. All gallery visitors are invited to see the Open Lab in progress, and encouraged to contribute to the informal discussion about photography and collaboration.

The Saturday schedule and additional information is here.

Photograph by Wendy Ewald: Harshad, Hasmukh, Chandrakant, and Dasrath learning to hold the camera.

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Last Stop: War/Photography at the Brooklyn Museum

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WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath is an exhibition of 400 photographs that was organized by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and now has come to the Brooklyn Museum, where it will close on February 2, 2014.

The exhibition “explores the experience of war with an unprecedented collection of 400 photographic prints, books, magazines, albums, and camera equipment, bringing together iconic and unknown images taken by members of the military, commercial portraitists, journalists, amateurs, artists, and numerous Pulitzer Prize–winning photographers.

“Including the work of some 255 photographers from around the globe who have covered conflicts over the last 166 years, WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY examines the interrelationship between war and photography, reveals the evolution of the medium by which war is recorded and remembered, and explores the range of experience of armed conflict: recruitment, training, embarkation, daily routine, battle, death and destruction, homecoming, and remembrance. In addition to depicting the phases of war, WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY includes portraits of servicemen, military and political leaders, and civilians and refugees.”

More information on the exhibition and the museum is available here.

Photograph by Walter Astrada. Congolese women fleeing to Goma, from the series Violence Against Women in Congo, Rape as Weapon of War in DRC, 2008.

 

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Fade To Black with BJP

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The British Journal of Photography has a new online quarterly magazine for the iPad called Fade to Black.  The magazine is “dedicated to a new generation of image-makers who embrace the convergence of photography, video and multimedia, and all the new opportunities offered by digital capture and distribution to shoot and distribute their projects themselves.”

A free six-month subscription is available here.

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Paper Call: The Visual Culture of the News

Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News

LA Times riots

 The Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California invites submissions for a conference on Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, which will be held May 4-5, 2014.  The conference is part of a three year project on “Visual Evidence.”  The full paper call is here.

They invite submissions from junior scholars and graduate students in their final year working across all times and places on “news pictures.” Send a 250-word abstract and CV by November 1, 2013 to vsri@usc.edu; include “News Pictures” in the email title. Travel and expenses will be paid. Papers will be pre-circulated and commented upon and there is an expectation that participants will read the papers of other participants (between 10-12 papers). They will be due April 25, 2014.

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Exhibition on The Social: Encountering Photography

NEPN / Sunderland

The North East Photography Network is sponsoring The Social: Encountering Photography, which is a month-long series of photography exhibitions, installations, and talks in Sunderland and North East England, UK.  The program (OK, the programme) is listed here.

Photograph by Simon Roberts, Penshaw Monument, Penshaw, July 2013 from The Social: landscapes of leisure.

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The Street Collective Shares their Craft

 

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For a limited time, the photography site PhotoWhoa is providing a free download of an e-book they’ve produced on street photography.

Freddy from PhotoWhoa says, “We’ve just spent months creating a free e-book with insights from several extremely talented street/doc/fine art photographers. We entitled it ‘The Street Collective.’

The Street Collective was the result of many hours interviewing top photographers such as Bryan Formhals (of LPV Magazine) and World Press Award winner Laura Pannack about their process and how they achieve
their unique looks. We did this to help our audience learn what it takes to make great street photography.”

You can see the free e-book here and download your own copy here.  The work is highly stylized, which is not to some tastes, but the price is right and there is much to be said for this kind of sharing and networking.   The site offers other freebees here, as well as plenty of pay as you go classes.

You also might want to opt in to their subscriber list.  They don’t sell or share their list, but you would get emails about product recommendations, as that is part of what they do.  Once again, photography needs to keep experimenting with varied business models, and this might be an effective way to get professionals and amateurs working together in win-win arrangement.

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