Giancarlo Mori | Blog

LACMA Reading Room Online

LACMA has just created an online portal for its extensive collection of exhibition catalogs from the past. On Jan 25th the first set of electronic catalogs was put online in a dedicated section of lacma.org.

Check it our here, and read about it at UNFRAMED, the museum blog.

WestPrize 2010

The WestPrize 2010 winners were announced last week. Very eclectic and original choices... none I truly feel drawn to.

Congratulations to the winners: David Almeida, Miyo Yoshida, Ryan McLennan, Revital Falke, Nathalie Alony, Leah Bailis, Sarah Kabot, Kevin Cyr, Julie Weitz, Sharon Levy. See their work Prize's website at:

http://www.westcollection.org/West_Collection/Home.html

Note that while I was an entrant of the 2010 Prize, I like to think that the result are not affecting my views.

"The Americans"

"The Americans" by Robert Frank (1958) is one of the most influential -- and at the time, controversial -- photography books of the XX century. With a jazzing introduction by Jack Kerouac, and 180 pages and 83 examples of beautiful, haunting, piercing photography, it changed the way the world regarded the medium, establishing a new canon for the craft, and made a profound statement about America... 

Frank, with his idiosyncratic, and unorthodox style, his apparent carelessness for form, the grainy texture of many a photograph, their skewed horizons... struck a nerve with many in the art establishment ofAmerica. All the while suggesting the official country had a more somber counterpart just waiting to be found, if one was willing to look. "The Americans" places itself squarely, and with unwilling authority, in the lineage of Evans' South and Smith's Pittsburg. It is a work of daunting and penetrating observation.

Frank's style has since found many followers, but its depth and quality (that has wabi-sabi purity and roughness) survives even today, after 50 years of circulating in book form and being shown around the world in galleries and museums.

After many years of being out of print, and only available as an expensive and hard to find collector item, Steidl has released the book once again last May. Steidl's perfect tri-tone reproduction of the original photographs, printed on very high quality paper, is a long awaited and finally affordable homage to one of my favorite photographic books ever published.

Some images from the book... 

(All Images © Robert Frank) 

 

 

 

More Italian Photography...

Is there an Italian photographic renaissance in the US? Perhaps, but there is certainly a renewed interest in artists that, while very reputable in Italy and Europe, have been largely unknown to the photo public in North America.

I have already covered in previous posts the solo shows of Patrizia Della Porta and Massimo Vitali. Now, with the opening of the Nile Tuzun Gallery in San Francisco earlier this year, artists such as Gianni Berengo Gardin, Francesco Jodice, Patrizia Savarese, Franco Fontana, Patrizia Della Porta (see previous post here), and many talented others seem to have found a permanent home in the United States.

The gallery, and the photographers it represents, was showcased in issue n. 57 (Mar 08, pag. 24) of Black & White Magazine, which featured profiles of, and images by, most of the photographers represented.

It is very encouraging to see such renewed focus on Italian talent here in the States, beyond the laudable work the Italian Institute of Culture in LA has been doing for some time to promote Italian photographers in America. We, for one, applaud the effort.

Venezia (© Gianni Berengo Gardin)

Coney Island (© Francesco Jodice)

Acquaria (© Patrizia Savarese)

Buenos Aires (© Franco Fontana)

Tous Photographes!

Earlier this year (Feb 8 - May 20) at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, was held the 2007 conference on "the rapid mutation of digital photography in the digital age." Their website has several very interesting entries and links, including a pointer to their blog, with its ongoing discussion of the phenomenon of popular digital photography. Here you will find the Conference main site, and here the link to their blog.

I found particularly interesting an interview with Martin Parr (Magnum) on Vernacular photography and propaganda, how Flickr is impacting Getty Images and Corbis, and some pointed comments on how dreadful a lot of amateur photography really is. You will find Martin Parr's audio interview here.

I also enjoyed a discussion with MaryAnne Golon, director of photography for Time Magazine, on topics from Time’s “you” person of the year, to amateur photography websites, James Nachtwey in Iraq and how Time Magazine is planning to deal with crowdsourcing. You can find the full discussion here.

With several million users on Flickr alone, million of cell phones in the streets, megapixels going steadily up and $/megapixels trending down in striking resemblance to Moore's law, this is a phenomenon that is here to stay. More on this subject in the very near future...

The following photos of the conference are courtesy of André Gunthert, Professor of Visual Studies at the EHESS, Paris. Many thanks to him!