Fotoindustria 2017 Exhibitions and Artists Biography
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FOTO/INDUSTRIA 2017 – Exhibitions and biographies THOMAS RUFF, GERMANY MACHINE & ENERGY CURATED BY URS STAHEL MAST. GALLERY Via Speranza, 42 Thomas Ruff is the prototype of the artist whose work requires a great deal of preliminary research. An image demiurge, he sees the camera as more than simply an optical mechanical recording device, but rather as a powerful image machine through which—depending on the motivations, the criteria, the selected recording system—he can transform the elements of reality into a new visual dimension. Ruff takes up different photographic genres: portraits, urban night scenes, images of the sky, landscapes, snapshots borrowed from press clippings, dream images, jpg depictions of catastrophes, photograms created in a virtual dark room. Ruff is an archivist and a photographer, a collector and a creator of raw data, which he pours out onto large-format panels. Philosopher Michael Stoeber uses the terms “body machines,” “machine bodies,” machines of desire, computer (machines), and sex machines to define the relationship between humans and machines; Ruff’s art is a machine that produces images and thoughts. Ruff is a processor of images, who incorporates and transforms the found, collected, or generated raw materials of a multi-layered reality and allows them to flow freely onto large framed surfaces—hybrids of “dreams and nightmares, reality and illusion, facts and secrets”—or, as in the photograms, generates entirely new, completely virtual images. The images in Ruff’s Machines form the core the exhibition at the MAST PhotoGallery. Presented with them are other series by Ruff, including Nights, Houses, Other Portraits, Jpgs, Photograms, and Negatives. These works come together in a powerful choir of voices speaking of machines and energies. _____________________________________________________________ Thomas Ruff was born in Zell am Hamersbach (Germany), in 1958; he now lives and works in Düsseldorf. From 1977 to 1985 Ruff studied photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. In 1999 the Academy offered him a chair in photography: from 2000 to 2006 he found himself teaching the former “Becher class,” whose students became known as the “School of Düsseldorf,” one of the most significant groups in contemporary photography. As a whole, his work is directed towards the exploration of potential and the status of photography as a medium, in relation to specific themes: the paradigms of portrait photography, and architectural representation, the exploration of the world through infrared technology, and the possibilities and distortions of digital photography with its clearly visible pixel weave. Ruff often draws on photos of current events and archival images, as in his famous reinterpretations of photographs of Mars taken from the NASA archives. JOSEF KOUDELKA , CZECH REPUBLIC, naturalized FRANCE INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES Museo Civico Archeologico Via dell’Archiginnasio, 2 A celebrated master photographer, Josef Koudelka is a radically independent artist. Born in Moravia, at age 29, in the 1960s, he abandoned his career as an aeronautical engineer in Prague and dedicated himself to photography. Koudelka refused all press assignments in order to maintain complete freedom in his production, having only to cover the expenses for his cameras, films, and photographic works. In the 1970s, his famous shots of the invasion of Prague by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact forced him to leave Czechoslovakia. He applied for political asylum in Great Britain, became stateless and finally obtained the French citizenship. There he joined Magnum Photos. In 1975 Gitans, his book about the gypsies, was a big success. In 1988, his journeys throughout Europe formed the first edition of Exiles. His work, the fruit of his solitary and unfettered wandering, is characterized by great drama—indeed, the theater was a preferred subject of the artist in his early career. At the end of the 1980s, Koudelka completely overturned his approach to photography and turned most of his attention to landscapes and its transformations by contemporary man, for which he chose a panoramic format. He started to accept various invitations extended to him, particularly in France, from the DATAR territorial mission, from the Usinor/Sollac steel manufacturer, and from the Transmanche mission. He always demanded to visit the sites before accepting the commissions and to have complete freedom in making his pictures. Back in his own country after the Velvet Revolution, he went to the “Black Triangle” corner of Bohemia, devastated by mining operations. Then began a world tour, lasting ten years, of the limestone mills of the Lhoist group. In these grandiose sites, he found material for an extraordinary collection of new and spectacular graphic constructions, in a format that few photographs can rival. With their powerful solemnity, these images examine the massive transformations of the landscape generated by the industrial revolution. In his introduction to the book Black Triangle, playwright and former Czech president Vaclav Havel wrote that they illustrate that “Man is not an omniscient master of the planet who can get away with doing whatever he likes and whatever may suit him at the moment.” His best industrial landscape photographs are brought together at Foto/Industria for the first time. Since 1991, Josef Koudelka has applied himself to rediscover the beauty of the Greek and Roman world through the vestiges in the Mediterranean basin. (François Hébel) Josef Koudelka is represented by Magnum Photos ---------------------------------------------------- Josef Koudelka was born in 1938; Czech, naturalised French, he is now based in Paris and in Prague. Koudelka joined Magnum in 1971 after studying engineering at the Technical University in Prague and working as an aeronautical engineer, all the while photographing theatrical productions and gypsy communities in Czechoslovakia. His photographs of the invasion of Prague by Russian tanks in 1968 were awarded the 1969 Robert Capa Gold Medal, credited to an unnamed “Prague Photographer;” their creator was identified sixteen years later. Rendered stateless in 1970, Koudelka sought asylum in England. His work was presented in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1975, the year his book Gitans (Gypsies) was published, followed by Exiles in 1988. In 1986, he participated in the DATAR project, using a panoramic camera to document the urban and rural landscapes of France. In 1990 he returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time to photograph one of the most devastated landscapes of Central Europe, the “Black Triangle.” In 1999 he published the book Chaos, the culmination of his work dealing with his concern for how contemporary man has influenced the landscape. In 2006, his first retrospective book, published by Robert Delpire, came out in France and in seven other countries. In 2008, Invasion Prague 68 was published in thirteen countries. In 2011, a revised version of the book Gypsies was re-edited from the original 1968 dummy. The same year, the exhibition “Invasion Prague ’68” was presented for the first time in Moscow. Josef Koudelka has received a number of awards, including the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in France (1987), the Henri Cartier-Bresson award (1991), and the ICP Infinity Award (2004). LEE FRIEDLANDER, USA AT WORK Fondazione del Monte Palazzo Paltroni Via delle Donzelle, 2 Lee Friedlander is widely considered to be one of the most influential American photographer of the mid-twentieth century. Well known for having prolifically recorded the American social and urban landscape and the world of Jazz musicians, he is one of the rare authors of his generation to present as personal projects photographs taken on assignment from by corporations and curators inside the private world of big industries. They show America at work over sixteen years, beginning in the 1970’s, taken in various locations including factories, offices, and telemarketing centres. Friedlander maintained total artistic freedom during these commissions, all characterised by his very personal aesthetic. Beyond the quality of the photographs themselves, this testimony also produces a unique memory on work practices, tools, and relationships in professional settings. Lee Friedlander in represented by Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. _____________________________________________________________ Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, is a widely celebrated photographer of the urban, social, and natural landscape. With a rare ability to organise a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Friedlander is the author of humorous and poignant images. His work has encompassed such diverse subjects as television sets in lonely motel rooms, self- portraits, the street, nudes, and images taken from the inside of his car. One of Friedlander’s most acclaimed works consists in a series of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in the book Self Portrait – an exploration he returned to in the late 1990s, and published as a monograph by Fraenkel Gallery in 2000. In 1967 Friedlander’s work was included in the highly influential exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by John Szarkowski. His work has been the subject of around fifty monographs. CURATED BY JOAN FONTCUBERTA SPUTNIK: THE ODYSSEY OF THE SOYUZ 2 Palazzo Boncompagni Via del Monte, 8 The Sputnik Foundation is revisiting one of the most startling cases in the history of space exploration – when