bohoe
photography

NOT TO BE MISSED!

More at www.myspace.com/photo112

If you, as a geek that I am, have a GPS device, you may find useful ‘The European Speed Camera Database’ SCDB.info - the most up-to-date speed camera database in Europe for your GPS. Better stay informed!

SpaceCollective.org

Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction.

The much-anticipated new series of work by Jeff Bark, Woodpecker, is full of dark romanticism. Under the cover of a manufactured night, his young subjects indulge in moments of introspection and abandon, echoing Bark’s own memories of his near adulthood. A short film accompanies the photographs.

The subjects of Bark’s previous series, exhibited at Michael Hoppen Contemporary in 2006, were captured in moments of self-contained abandon in formally constructed urban interiors. In Woodpecker, his subjects are pictured in naturalistic outdoor tableaux, sometimes interacting in couples or groups but always with the suggestion an internal isolation. The rich detail, vivid self-contained illumination and the complexity of the constructed surroundings in these photographs draw the viewer into the dense pictorial allegory.

Occupying a space between the classical artistic categories of photography, painting and film – Bark moves against the lure of instantaneous photography. The collaborations, castings, set construction (the swamp took one month to sculpt in a Brooklyn studio) and illusionary narrative in the series bring the act of photo taking closer towards the highly considered processes of both the Old Master tableau and the younger art of cinema. Nothing is built by Bark beyond the edge of the frame and his subjects are snatched out of real time, so the audience is viewing an enactment, a constructed diorama rather than reality. Held together in a film, cinematically constructed, dissected and reassembled - the works can be looked at as individually structurally significant, and also as part of a larger extended narrative.

In these photographs, scenes of dream-like concoctions coexist with unembellished realism. The muted moonlit tones soften the human forms and the watery illumination lends them the appearance of otherworldly creatures indulging in their private fictions, desires and escape. The images are heavy with symbolism: the swamp, at the fringe of urban sprawl is a no mans land between civilization and the wilderness: the swan, recalling the erotic motif of ‘Leda and the swan’ but also signifying, light, self-transformation and the higher self. On first glance, the location is a rural idyll but on closer inspection urban debris is revealed - a pram, crates, tyres, mattresses, telephone wires, bed frames and a car are strewn amongst the rotting landscape. The corruption of the scenery is mirrored by the corruption of the youth - drugs, disillusionment, violence and sexual behavior, referencing Eric Fischl and his depictions of psychosexual malaise of American prosperity.

Jeff Bark (born 1963) lives and works in New York. Woodpecker is his second exhibition at Michael Hoppen Contemporary.

via Michael Hoppen Gallery

Can you please take two minutes today to send an urgent message to Europe’s Energy Commissioner, calling on him to oppose the plans for a new nuclear power plant in Bulgaria?

SEND A MESSAGE RIGHT NOW

The best piece of information in this video is when Edward Apsega says “Thats the true American innovator: someone that is not looking for something, he just finds it”.

A lot to reflect in that sentence.

Apart from this jewel, what a discovery!!

Slide Movie - Diafilmprojektor
an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller

Black cube installation: A film sequence (35mm motion picture, 24 frames/sec.) is cut up and the individual frames are mounted as slides. They’re then distributed among 24 slide projectors that are all focused on the same screen (the exact same point).
Via electronic control of the projectors, these individual images are then reassembled-in an extremely cumbersome way-into a chronological sequence.
The formula “one projector per frame” thus gives rise to something that at least rudimentarily (and inevitably very inaccurately, due to the lack of precision of the mechanical devices) suggests a motion picture. The film soundtrack emerges as a byproduct - the mechanical clattering of the projectors changing slides.

Via Gebhard Sengmüller

The new image in Italy 1932-1960

Neorealism, mainly associated with the films by Visconti, De Sica and Rossellini, was a heartfelt artistic response to the transformation of Italy in the course of the twentieth century. With the demise of Fascism, which had harnessed the mass media of photography and film for its own purposes and moulded a new aesthetic of reality, Neorealism surged to the fore. The newfound freedom of opinion and the need to forge a new Italian identity fuelled a feverish interest in documenting reality and exploring what it meant to be Italian. One after another, illustrated magazines were launched and photographic-ethnographic field studies undertaken on life in the country’s remote communities. Society needed photographs that captured all aspects of life in every situation.

The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together some 250 photographs by 75 different photographers, making this the first major in-depth presentation of photographic Neorealism. Six authors chart the development of Neorealism from its inception to the late 1950s, shedding light on the reciprocal influences of photography, film and literature.
The exhibition is curated by Enrica Viganò. It has been organised in collaboration with SEPIF s.a.s. (‹Studi e Progetti in Fotografia›), Turin, and La Fábrica, Madrid.

Fotomuseum Winterthur (Main Gallery and Gallery)