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Photographer of the Week: Danica O. Kus


591PhotographyBlog 26 May 2013, 6:00 pm CEST

The week with Danica O. Kus will be spent in company with the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who perhaps is most known for designing the buildings in Brasilia. Danica´s interpretation of his work is beautiful and imaginative. Her pictures were taken in Spain (Avilés) in 2011 and in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro - Niteroi, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Sao Paulo) in 2012 and 2013.
"I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire Universe, the curved Universe of Einstein."
- Niemeyer, Oscar, 2000, The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer (London: Phaidon), pp. 62 and 169-70
Danica O. Kus
Born in Slovenia, studied photography in Brussels at RhoK Academy  and Ecole des Arts d’Ixelles, holds also a degree in marketing from the University of Maribor – Faculty of Economy, Slovenia.
All photos © Danica O. Kus

Rachael Woodson: Band of Outsiders


L E N S C R A T C H 26 May 2013, 12:00 pm CEST

Today concludes Portrait Week.  Post contributed by Grant Gill.
Thinking about this entire week of portraits, it is amazing the different categories that can be defined within a specific type of photography.  Today, I end the week on slightly more somber note, presenting the work of Rachael Woodson.  Upon the death of her father, Rachael eventually did what most artists do, which was to turn her work inward.  She photographed her brothers, and by doing so she revealed beauty in one of the most difficult times in their lives. 
Born in 1984, Rachael Woodson is an American photographer based in Paris since 2009. She studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Her work has been exhibited in Paris and New York. She also photographs for clients including Rolling Stone, Airbnb, Nylon and Metal Magazine.
Band of Outsiders
The photographs in this series are reflections on family, psychology and the rejection of social conforms. Through portraits and photographs taken within the domestic realm, I followed the lives of my two younger brothers during the years after our father's death. The series gives glimpses into their experience while drawing on feelings of isolation from my own youth. The project challenges the notion of childhood as a period of naïveté and simplicity and explores moments of detachment that are experienced in times of fragility and uncertainty.
 
 

Klagar oavsett


/a swede in new york/ 26 May 2013, 3:03 am CEST

Det första man lär sig när man flyttar till New York är att kolla vädret innan man går ut. Det kan skifta något otroligt från en dag till en annan. Stor risk att klä sig fel alltså om man inte har koll. Försommarvärmen vi haft har nu utbytts till blåst, regn och kyla. Svensk som jag är så klagar jag på vädret oavsett vilken temperatur det är.

A great event in Venice


591PhotographyBlog 25 May 2013, 11:51 pm CEST

If you were on the way to spend some time in Venice, next week, think about the opportunity to visit this great festival: Photissima.
 
30 May 2013 – 2 June 2013
 

591 Exhibition: Life Goes On - Alan Martin


591PhotographyBlog 25 May 2013, 9:00 pm CEST

I am an amateur photographer based in Kent, England. I specialise in medium format analogue film photography, and strive for a dreamy vintage aesthetic in my photos. My main body of work centers around the ocean and the lifestyles surrounding it, most favored - surfing culture. I search for niche areas of interest and follies within the seaside and urban environments, and the people from those places bring all my work together and I have a equal passion for staged and candid portraiture.
Born(year): 1983 Lives in: Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom Coming, planned exhibition: About to exhibit a solo show at the Show Off Gallery, Whitstable, Kent, United Kingdom May 8th-14th Inspiration (photographers): Ryan Tatar, Dan Bass Inspiration (other): Surfing, the ocean, seaside nostalgia Website: www.alanmartinphotography.co.uk
Photos © Alan Martin

Poland


591PhotographyBlog 25 May 2013, 2:00 pm CEST

View from Złota 44 skyscraper (Liebeskind's project) during construction
Wisla
In front of cemetery, Gliwice
Warszawa,2008
Szobiszowice, 2004
Gliwice, Szobiszowice
Szobiszowice, Gliwice, upper Silesia
Kraków
Charcoal worker, Muczne, Bieszczady
Lutowiska, Bieszczady
Corpus Christi, Gliwice, 2009

From Balcerek project
All photos © Marcin Górski Personal blog Slow Photography:marcingorski.blogspot.com Website www.marcingorski.net/ Facebook site www.facebook.com/MGorski.photo

Nicol Vizioli: An Opening Song


L E N S C R A T C H 25 May 2013, 12:00 pm CEST

Portrait week continues. Today's post contributed by Grant Gill.
It is undeniable that one of the closest connections between photography and painting is portraiture.  From painting, photographic portraits have appropriated concept of composition, posture, gaze, and lighting to further exalt emotive or even evocative representations of a person.  For Nicol Vizioli, initially a painter, it is clear that the influence over her original practice has created a style and set a tone for her photography.  This series conjures a primal form of personal philosophy, which is transformed by a raw, yet theatrical, approach.
Nicol Vizioli began as a painter and gradually her fascination of still images developed in the form of a strong passion for photography. The insight of her work draws upon many different places, such as the natural and animal world, mythology, literature and finally painting: photography is therefore regarded as the convergence point, where all of them meet. Painting and photography are inseparable in her work, they influence each other, in a continuous, never-ending flow.
After a degree in cinema she moved to London, where she graduated from MA Fashion Photography at LCF, University of The Arts London, with first class honors in 2011.
Her work has been exhibited in several places and international art fairs such as Miami, Basel, Somerset House for the London World Photography Festival, the Zabludowicz Collection, The XV Biennale de la Mediterranée, Milan, Rome and many others.  Nicol has also been visiting as a guest lecturer at London College of Fashion (London, UK) and IED - Istituto Europeo di Design (Rome, IT).  Born in Rome, she lives and works in London. 
An Opening Song
In the 19th Century Arthur Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin propounded that phylogenetic branched trees derived from a single ancestor, which meant that all forms of life are tied by relationships of common descent. From a biological point of view, this is extremely “simple”; it suggests life as we know it was created with an original being. Thus with the first cry of each new birth, our collective memory resonates with that first piercing song of arrival. We are reminded our ancestral consciousness, we are reminded of our animal dimension.
Nicol Vizioli started her photographic project An opening song in April 2012. It all started with a dream, then a meeting in the crowd with the first woman bird, Helene; Nicol pursued birds of prey and found herself in the hauntingly beautiful English countryside. In the presence of these wild animals that dominate the wind and the currents, the artist’s soul was stirred and awakened. The artist recognizes that our souls are suppressed and inhibited to true expression if we don’t return to the breathe of life. This is something intangible, of wind and profound unity with nature, and only then, once we return, can our indomitable visceral pasts reawaken. That day in the English countryside, Nicol heard nature’s enchanting mysterious song as it breathed life.
A long period of reflection, readings, drawings and meetings with characters that are able to understand and share her journey, or that have it in their DNA, whom then become her models. Albino, twins, rebellious souls, old and woodland travelers.
It's the union of these varying vital strengths (the wild animal, the thinking animal and the prodigy animal) the strength of the photographic medium is unleashed in the hands of Nicol. She captures a simultaneous expressive fury and aesthetic balance to her photos which makes them able to speak to every individual and universally iconographic. Observers are encouraged to feel cognisant of the warm comforting protection of the womb alongside our fragile vulnerability facing the whirling enormity of Nature. Glimpses of Nature’s symbols since time immemorial are revealed.
Flawed, dirty, obscure, mysterious, aware of descending from the same progeny. Embodied in a tribal way, bodies covered with dust and soil bring the signs of the cost and of the fatigue to be reborn, a forfeit of that old legacy where we all belong.
The analogical portraits tell us about a return to life, a collective rite of passage from one dimension to another, from simply surviving, to living, they explore the holders of this primordial spark, this original force of which we all come from. That first song, which is impossible not to recognize in front of the photographs so dramatic of Nicol Vizioli, crosses us like a lost memory which is suddenly found again.
extract from An opening Song
catalogue published by Vanilla Edizioni, Milan
 text by Giovanni Cervi
(translation by Farhaan Mumtaz)

4 x Viktor & Niclas


591PhotographyBlog 25 May 2013, 10:45 am CEST

 "Krävs" means "demands".
 
 
"Ståplats" means "standing room".
"Vad som än krävs" means "whatever it takes".
Photos © Simon Johansson
Viktor Arvidsson and Niclas Burström, two young hockey players in the swedish team Skellefteå AIK.The team won the national league this year.

Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere


Lens 24 May 2013, 9:50 pm CEST

Photos from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, England and Oklahoma.

On Wheels


591PhotographyBlog 24 May 2013, 8:31 pm CEST

Photo © Michael Winnerholt

Madeiro


591PhotographyBlog 24 May 2013, 6:00 pm CEST

The Log of Infant Jesus is a millenarian tradition that's still alive, in this bleach of the 3rd milenium, in many places in the country-side and in all parishes of Idanha-a-Nova, as the presented photos, taken in December 2005 in Proença-a-Velha, are a good example.  Log, strump, trunk, andiron, "galheiro", fire, or simply Christmas fire, are names by which continue to be known in Portugal these vestiges of sacred rituals, that in antiquity were made in Winter solstice, when our ancestors lit fires in homage and prayer to the Sun, so it shine again strong and sovereign, after a period where cold, blackout and darknesses seemed to toke care of nature.  Pagan rituals that survived several centuries of social, religious and political transformations, and that still last today, in these borderer lands, in a full integration with christian rituals and traditions, as if they originate from it! 
Pagan rituals that survived several centuries of social, religious and political transformations, and that still last today, in these borderer lands, in a full integration with christian rituals and traditions, as if they originate from it! 
It's on Christmas Eve, in the night of Christmas supper, that the Log is lighted, so that the just-born God (the Sun of primitive peoples, Jesus of actual Christians), can be heated in this cold and frozen night, while young boys, around the fire or scouring the village streets, celebrate and sing hymns in Its glory! 
But, if it's true that's in the night of 24th that the old Log is lighten, that it should light until New Year's Eve, this is not, however, the Day of the Log! In the great majority of these villages the Day of the Log it's the 8th of December, the day where ceremoniously it enters the village, with people adhering in an enthusiastic form, applauding and celebrating its passage, incorporating and participating, as if this was a procession!
The entire population participates, but the organization of the Log belongs, according to tradition, to the single boys, young men of "lucks", those that in that year give their name to join the national troop! And, if is in troop that boys became men, as today people still say, we're here, without a doubt, in presence of an iniciation ritual, a fire and force proof of these "influents" of the Log, as they are called in Proença, in their passage to the group of men! Rituals of other ritual. 
In this forgotten and desert interior, due to the lack of "lucks" boys, the oldest assume the organisation responsibility, so that the ritual is kept and tradition persists! 
"Festum Osirid Nati" in old Egipt, "Wakening of Melqarth" in old Phenitia, "Natalis Solis invicti" in old Rome, are the ancestors of our actual "Log", as also are the "Ceppo" of Italy, the "Tréfoir" of France, the "Yule Clog" of England, or the Christmas fires of Letonia! The fire, the heat and the light of men, as an homage to fire, heat and Celestial light! 
Text: João Adolfo Geraldes
Translation: Sofia Quintas
Photos © Marcin Górski

Dramaturgy and Gut: Inside Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum


Inside/Out 24 May 2013, 4:00 pm CEST

Installation view of Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (April 14–August 5, 2013). Photo by Jason Mandella. © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view of Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (April 14–August 5, 2013). Photo by Jason Mandella. © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art

There are people sighing in the Mouse Museum. They are moaning, clucking, and cooing, too.(1) There’s no telling which objects elicit which murmured reaction, since part of Mouse Museum’s potency derives from affinities between things, and the repetition and variation among them. For those who haven’t seen it, Claes Oldenburg’s “Museum” is as it sounds: an exhibition space shaped in Mickey Mouse’s image (well, a geometric distillation of his iconic head, to be precise). Inside, an illuminated vitrine—filled with souvenirs, gadgets, and studies for sculptures—encircles the space. Heavy with faux food (pizza, hot dogs, ice cream sundaes), this display gives the impression of an aquarium made for a spoiled animal, a back-alley palace for a hungry mouse.

But to scurry through the Museum quickly would be to miss out on many of the subtleties within its densely ganged configurations. Indeed, the insights and pleasures on offer are different, and more gritty, than those of street food, nostalgia, or finger-pointing cultural critique. For me, it initially offered up a sensation similar to what I feel when I pack a lunch for my young cousins—a Tetris board of sandwich, granola bar, string cheese, goldfish crackers. Maybe even pudding. Placed just so, these industrially processed foods align in florid combinations of signification and absurdity. So too in the Mouse Museum: one gets the sense of a deliberate human—one exercising a brilliant eye for color and for the particularities of form—creating a civilization of things.

Certain tableaux amount to practical jokes and visual puns: plastic bananas next to dildos, two ruddy pig masks ogling a half-eaten plastic Oreo keychain, a stack of bread made of sponge. Other combinations encourage more nuanced readings. Take the two porcelain stamp-moisteners glistening behind a wax hamburger. These moisteners were made to replace tongues as the workplace means for wetting the glue on the back of a postage stamp. In this case, they seem to be salivating at the greasy provocation of the burger/candle. They thus accentuate the very qualities of a tongue (bodily, carnal, erotic) that they were presumably manufactured to avoid. In the same square foot of space sits a pair of pears, a pack of cigarettes, and strange little booties. In the foreground rests a hunk of something rose-colored and meaty. Juxtaposed with this lump, the burger becomes baroque. It suddenly seems just as likely that the stamp-moisteners are licking their lips at the fleshier object.

Here and throughout the Mouse Museum, what’s so challenging to summarize, and what’s responsible for so much pleasure, is this torqued and sustained cleavage between function and form. The objects seem willfully tangled between categories. In this way, the installation stays connected—in an intensified form—to certain familiar delights: figurative candy (Coke bottles, Swedish Fish); wearing a stem of cherries as a dangly earring; honey bears. Over time, these things have a tendency to get neutralized, their forms so taken for granted that they slip back into the realm of function. In contrast, the Mouse Museum’s objects do not settle down. This is Oldenburg’s currency: where expert play with form, scale, color, culture, incongruity, and category mistake makes room for new visibilities—for an expanded and fluctuating syntax.

(1) By and large, these utterances are whispered, audible only if you stand quite close (which, mind you, isn’t too difficult to pull off given the popularity of the compact display). The looped soundtrack of the artist washing rubber toys seems to play in harmony.

Joshua MacDonald: Suspension


L E N S C R A T C H 24 May 2013, 12:00 pm CEST


Joshua MacDonald is an artist based in Toronto Canada and holds a BFA from Ryerson School of Image Arts in Photography. His work has been exhibited at MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art) in Toronto among other venues. Joshua draws lighting, and colour from much of the photographic conventions of cinema. His interest in the arts is not limited to photography and is reflected in his work which spans of film, photography, and music. Joshua is currently investigating portraiture through documentary and travel.
 Suspension 
The process of acting creates complex states of identity within the performer: they split into a dual state of both themselves and the character they seek to represent. In this series “Suspension”, actors are photographed in this process of becoming someone other than themselves. Each actor was asked to choose a character and perform this character in their home, workplace, or another familiar setting. Despite the the fact that these portraits are staged, they are in a sense documentary photographs.
This work raises questions about the ontology of portraiture, as well as identity and self-image. The implication is that a traditional portrait, where one attempts to present themselves “truthfully”, communicates less about a subject than one where they are acting a character. At times, it seems we are all more comfortable acting as someone we are not.
Additional Images not in Suspension

Sacrifices Set in Adorned Stone


Lens 24 May 2013, 11:00 am CEST

During assignments at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, Luke Sharrett, whose cousin was killed in Iraq, began to notice the mementos left by friends and family.

Contribute to "Sibling Days"


591PhotographyBlog 24 May 2013, 9:00 am CEST

You can submit up to three photos of your own siblings.
Here are some "ancient" pics of me and my one and only sister Mona:
You can also submit up to three photos of other siblings (not your own).
Here are some pics of older sister Melanie and younger sister Sofia, my grandchildren:
The pictures should be max 1000 pixels on the longest side, 72 dpi.
The deadline for submissions is June 9.   The exhibit will debut on June 16.
Hosted by Phil Decker
Submit your Sibling pics to: sibling591@gmail.com
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