Tag: photography

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Jeff Wall (continued)

Revered as a leading contemporary Canadian photographer, Jeff Wall’s work delves into the complexities of images, representation, and memory. His larger-than-life photographs embody the visual style of advertisement, employing backlit transparencies and grandeur in their presentation. Known to recreate everyday moments, fiction, and art history in a “cinematographic” manner, he aptly dubs his work as “near documentary”. With a deep-rooted connection to his personal experiences, Wall explains, “[Near documentary] signifies that my pictures are inspired by my own encounters, and that I strive to capture those moments with utmost precision and accuracy.”

Having been born on September 29, 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, Wall attained his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970. Dedicating his time to academia in the following decade, he pursued further education under the tutelage of renowned British historian T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. His background as a Conceptual artist and art historian paved the way for his exploration of diverse subjects, including Hokusai, Édouard Manet, and even novels like The Invisible Man. Garnering immense recognition, a print of his piece Dead Troops Talk (1993) shattered auction records at Christie’s in 2012 and was then the third highest-selling photograph ever.

Presently, his works are housed in the esteemed collections of Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, to name a few. Holding steadfast to his roots, Wall continues to reside and create in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Wall titles available.

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Edwin Zwakman (1969)

In his response to the excessive proliferation of images that bombard us daily and fabricate a simulated reality (as seen in the CNN coverage of the Gulf War), Edwin Zwakman crafts a carefully constructed, fictional scenario that nonetheless appears undeniably real. He employs clever tricks and fabricates falsehoods to reveal uncomfortable truths, in sharp contrast to the overt lies perpetuated by those in positions of power. Though power and authority are hinted at rather than explicitly portrayed, their stereotypical presence adds a potent impact. These pervasive stereotypes have been ingrained in our collective consciousness, which Zwakman masterfully juxtaposes to create contradictory scenes that stir up previously undefined but vaguely familiar anxieties. Through this dissonance between images, he unveils the true depth and magnitude of the abyss that lies just beneath the surface.

www.ftn-books.com has the van Abbemuseum catalog Façades now available.

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Lewis Baltz (1945-2014)

Lewis Baltz, a native of Newport Beach, California, pursued higher education at the San Francisco Art Institute and obtained an MFA from the esteemed Claremont Graduate School in 1971. A successful stint as a freelance photographer in California followed, during which he also imparted his expertise as a photography instructor at esteemed institutions such as the California Institute of the Arts, University of California (Riverside and Santa Cruz), Yale, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the Art Academy of Helsinki.

Baltz has been recognized for his contributions to the field of photography with prominent displays in major exhibitions, including the renowned New Topographics at George Eastman House in 1975 and Mirrors and Windows at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978. His accolades include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973 and 1977, as well as a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977. Additionally, Baltz has undertaken commissioned projects for esteemed institutions such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art, producing The Nation’s Capital in Photographs, and the Nevada State Arts Commission, resulting in Near Reno.

Since the mid-1980s, Baltz has been based in Europe and frequently jet sets across the globe. His photography typically revolves around a central theme or geographical focus and is often published in book form, exemplified by works such as The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California (1975), Nevada (1978), and Park City (1981). Baltz’s oeuvre, in sync with other artists associated with the New Topographics movement, challenges the conventional landscape photography style of the nineteenth century, as epitomized by icons like Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson. His perspective on the landscape traverses beyond its natural beauty, lending insight into the impact of contemporary culture and suburban development on the nation’s terrain. His books, Rule Without Exception (1991), Lewis Baltz: Politics of Bacteria, and Docile Bodies, Ronde de Nuit (1998), feature splendid color photography capturing Europe’s urban landscapes.

www.ftn-books.com has the Stedelijk Museum catalog for the Baltz exhibition now available.

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Thijs Wolzak (1965)

Thijs Wolzak (1965) has been working on an ever-expanding oeuvre since 1988, both commissioned and in independent projects. He proclaims to utilize all means at his disposal to meticulously control his images from top left to bottom right, but his approach is fundamentally documentary. His visuals encapsulate encounters: with a person, a place, or an object. They are typically intricate narrations, with a strong emphasis on the context of the subject at hand. Wolzak perfectly aligns with the school of staged documentary photography.

So, ‘encounters’. Every time, he would spend hours at their homes, trying to find the right angle. The interiors didn’t really interest him, he once said in an interview. It doesn’t matter to him how he lives himself: ‘I don’t need a certain environment to feel comfortable.’ During many photoshoots, he would often be left speechless when he saw how far people go in constructing their own space. What is astonishing or absurd to most viewers is completely natural to these residents. Their choices are the only logical ones for them.

With the exhibition on interiors and the encounters a magnificent has been published whichis now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Frank van der Salm (1964)

biography & cv

Frank van der Salm (1964)
Delft, The Netherlands

After studying Photography and Audio/Visual Design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands (1992), his main focus has been the Urban Landscape in it’s broadest sense. Over the years early influences of the New Topographics have evolved into a diverse oeuvre about the control of landscape, lack of space, infrastructural issues and the pressure on time and space in contemporary metropolises, reflecting our ways of communication and it’s speed.

Now that the world has developed from separate cities with local activities to one world of (re)-presentation, that is photography, video, film, internet, games, news and entertainment, reality exists in the images that represent it. Focussing on the specific vs. the ordinary and the original vs. the copy, his work elaborates on this medium’s dualistic position. Lately, attention has shifted to the new centers of economic power, resulting in projects next to but including the United States and Asia over the last couple of years. He’s also working with architects like OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron and MVRDV and on infrastructural and cultural projects like the Atelier HSL. Working with professionals in other media has influenced increasing diversity in approaching the contemporary environment. Thus, ‘The City’ is created with an ‘imaginery status’ of reality, where ‘real’ images are remporary. This ‘real’ is part of Sim-City: a micro-cosmos of urban existence. The city and it’s images are real and unreal at the same time. 

His photoworks and videos are published widely and have been exhibitied in galleries and museums around the world, among which the Biennale of Venice, Italy (2001), Haunch of Venison, Zürich, CH (2005), Akinci Gallery, Amsterdam, NL (2009), and the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, NL. These works of art are collected around the world. 

www.ftn-books.com has currently the MULTIPLICITY publication by van der Salm available.

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Erwin Olaf (1959-2023)

Erwin Olaf has passed away at the age of 64, his management informed the ANP news agency. He was one of the most famous photographers in the Netherlands. Olaf has been suffering from emphysema for many years and a few weeks ago he underwent a lung transplant.
Erwin Olaf started out as a documentary photographer, but he later focused on stage photography.

The family said in a statement that Wednesday morning’s death was unexpected. Although he recovered after a lung transplant, Olaf “suddenly became unwell and resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful.”

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John Szarkowski (1925-2007)

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Perhaps Szarkowski was more know for being curator at MOMA then for being one of the greatest photographers from last century.  Here is part of the text the Guardian place shortly after he had passed away.

Szarkowski was a good photographer, a great critic and an extraordinary curator. One could argue that he was the single most important force in American post-war photography.

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Like all good critics and curators, Szarkowski was both visionary and catalyst. When he succeeded the esteemed photographer Edward Steichen as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962, he was just 36, and must have been acutely aware of the long shadow cast by his predecessor. Steichen had curated the monumental group exhibition, The Family of Man, at Moma in 1955, which he described as ‘the culmination of his career”. Featuring 503 images by 273 photographers, famous and unknown, it had aimed to show the universality of human experience: death, love, childhood. The show had drawn huge crowds to the gallery and then toured the world, attracting an estimated 9 million viewers.

It was, as Steichen had no doubt intended, a hard act to follow. “We were different people”, Szarkowski later said, “with different talents, characters, limitations, histories, problems and axes to grind. We held the same job at very different times, which means that it was not really the same job.”

More revealingly, Szarkowski also said that Steichen and his predecessor, Beaumont Newhall, “consciously or otherwise, felt more compelled than I to be advocates for photography, whereas I – largely because of their work – could assume a more analytic, less apostolic attitude.” That difference in approach would prove to be a crucial one, and it underpinned a new photographic aesthetic that continues to shape our view of the world to this day.

When Szarkowski took over at Moma, there was not a single commercial gallery exhibiting photography in New York and, despite Steichen and Newhall’s pioneering work, the form had still not been accepted by most curators or critics. Szarkowski changed all that. He was the right person in the right place at the right time: a forward thinker who was given control of a major art institution at a moment when his democratic vision chimed with the rapidly changing cultural tastes of the time.

Szarkowski insisted on the democracy of the image, whether it be a formally composed Ansel Adams landscape, a snatched shot that caught the frenetic cut-and-thrust of a modern city or a vernacular subject like a road sign or a parking lot. “A skillful photographer can photograph anything well,” he once insisted.

In his still-challenging book, The Photographer’s Eye (1964), Szarkowski included snapshots alongside images by great photographers, and argued – brilliantly – that photography differed from any other art form because its history had been “less a journey than a growth”. “Its movement has not been linear and consecutive but centrifugal,” he suggested. “Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a centre; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.”

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www.ftn-books.com has the Szarkowski /Josef Albers Museum available

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Joachim Brohm (1955)

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I never had seen his photographs. The first time was when i encountered work by Brohm at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop ( poster available at www,ftn-books.com). I was impressed mand saw similarities with dutch 17th century painter Hendrik Avercamp.

Joachim Brohm was one of the first photographers in Germany to take pictures exclusively in color starting in the late 1970s. “Color lent my pictures credibility in the documentary sense,” he explains, defining at the same time his artistic credo. His approach went against the trend at the time in that it did not exhaust all of the possibilities of color photography: Joachim Brohm challenged omnipresent advertising aesthetics with his photographic naturalism, staged productions with documentation, picture effects with austerity, vibrant, high-contrast colors with his muted tones. As a student, he met with incomprehension from his professors, but photographic role models such as Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz, who would go on to enjoy world fame, encouraged him to continue on his chosen path. “The Americans presented seemingly trivial scenes, content and context appeared to be missing – many people were unable to make any sense of it.”

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Joachim Brohm brought this approach to a higher level: He combined mostly deserted landscape scenes with his interest in social interaction, turning his photographs into small-scale studies of society. They show how people change the landscape – and how the landscape changes people. He took his photographs of the Ruhr region at a time when theme parks and artificial lakes were being built to help cast off the image of a desolate mining region. Joachim Brohm shows this transition from work to leisure which accompanies the transformation from rural to urban from the perspective of a neutral observer. He sends the viewer on a mystery tour: “I wanted to show people in an environment undergoing change: What do they look like, what are they doing, what activities stand out?”

Joachim Brohm reveals structures in the landscape that would otherwise remain hidden. The camera’s elevated position, which is characteristic of many of his photographs, reinforces the impression of photographic surveillance which he himself describes as “all over”. The absence of a clear focus, and a depth of field that covers the entire image, mean that the individual scenes merge to form a situational snapshot. “The whole picture is the motif – the viewer can choose his or her focal point.” In this way, Joachim Brohm draws our attention to the big picture – with an excellent eye for detail.

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Paul Blanca (1958-2021)

Paul Blanca

Last Saturday dutch photographer Paul Blaca died. His body was worn out after years of drug and alcohol abuse. Without Blanca dutch photography would have been half as interesting as it is now. He was self taught and discovered and explored portrait photography in a very special and own way, transforming it and perfecting it into his preferred form of photography.

the following text comes from the Paul Blanca site:

Paul Blanca (1958) is a Dutch self-taught photographer who started with a Canon F1 and later switched to a 6×6 cm Haselblad camera. In the 80s he created a series of violent self-portraits inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) and Andres Serrano. Mapplethorpe introduced Blanca into the art world to artists like Grace Jones and Keith Haring stating “Paul Blanca is my only competitor”. Mapplethorpe’s favourite was Blanca’s self-portrait ‘Mother and Son’.

Hans van Maanen and Erwin Olaf call Paul Blanca the photographer of emotion. That ties in with his work. His self-portraits run like a thread through his overall work. For some things you can’t ask a model. For example, to hit a nail through someone’s hand. And like the self-portrait Mickey Mouse. In which a smiling Mickey Mouse is carved into his back with a thumb up.

For his series ‘Par la Pluie des Femmes’ women were captured in tears by thinking of their most traumatic experience. When he lived in Spain for 2 years, he stood with his camera at the front of the Spanish bullfighting arena. This resulted in the portfolio Sangre de Toro (Blood of the Bull): silk-screen prints with Bull’s blood.

In the beginning of the 90s he photographed the facial expression of speedball hookers for the series ‘Wit en Bruin’. Speedball is a very dangerous mixture of cocaine with heroin or morphine and has a substantial risk of overdose.

In the series ‘Deformation’ he was inspired by Rob Leer‘s SM scene. Models mutulated by fishline and hanging in the air, supported by the same fishline. This series was made for Amsterdam International Fashion Week (AIFW), in collaboration with fashion designer Hester Slaman, and exposed in Apart Gallery Amsterdam.

With the series ‘Kristal’ and ‘Mi Matties’ he had a double exhibition at Witzenhausen Gallery in 2008. Kristal is a series about the sweet and the bitter in relation with women. Presented in Witzenhausen Gallery Amsterdam in 2008. Mi Matties (my friends) is a series made in one of the neighborhoods of old Amsterdam. The portraits show young men who are presenting themselves as a group, sort of a gang.

In 2014 he created a self-portrait ‘Mother and Son’, 32 years after the first self-portrait, where he carries his mother, just like he carried her to bed for 4 years because she couldn‘t walk.

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Thomas Struth (1954)

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One of the aspects i noticed in the works by Thomas Strutch that this photographer includes in many of his photo’s another art object. Making this part of his own composition. An excellent example is this scene from the Chicago Art institute. Also just do a Google searcjh and notice the family group photographs which include in almost all cases another work of art.

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Thomas Struth was born 1954 in Geldern, Germany and currently lives and works in Berlin. He is best known for his genre-defying photographs, though he began originally with painting before he enrolled at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf in 1973. Struth has developed his individual photographic practice, often penetrating places of the human imagination in order to scrutinize the landscape of invention, technology, and beyond (as in his recent CERN and Animal images). Celebrated for his diverse body of work—Unconscious Places, Familienleben (Family Life), Museum Photographs, New Pictures from Paradise and Nature & Politics—Struth continues to advance his vocabulary with each new series, while maintaining the same principles core to his practice.

Recent comprehensive exhibitions of Struth’s work include the major touring exhibition Thomas Struth: Nature & Politics exhibited at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; the Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas; the St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri and the MAST Foundation Bolgna, Italy (2016-2019) as well as Figure Ground which opened at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany and traveled to the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (2017-2019).

www.ftn-books.com has the catalogue available which was published for his Stedelijk Museum exhibition.