2009 Digital Photography Degree Show

Don’t miss the 2009 Degree Show for the BA (Hons) Digital Photography at the London South Bank University.

When: FRIDAY JUNE 5TH 5PM TO 9PM

Where: KEYWORTH MEDIA CENTRE, keyworth Street (Elephant & Castle)

Also showing their work: BA (Hons) Digital Media Arts, BA (Hons) Music and Sonic Media and BA (Hons) Game Cultures.

Exhibition open to public: Saturday 6th June, 1-5pm
Monday 8th June to Thursday 11th June, 10am – 5pm

peeping tom

peeping tom by thomas evans at the voyeur project view, pre-installation shot

 

peepshow exhibition

In partnership with the Lisbon-based Voyeur Project View gallery, da gallery -the digital art gallery at the London South Bank University- will be transformed into a digital peepshow for two weeks from September 25th.
Today peep show is mostly associated with the entertainment industry, but the beginnings of the peep show mechanism can be traced back to the work of Leon Battista Alberti (1437) and Filippo Brunelleschi (1418-20), Renaissance painters that started using the device of a box with an “eye” to present miniature scenes painted and /or built in perspective, as well as to Martin Engelbrecht (1730), author of peepshow miniature theatres for children, and Edison (1896), who launched the kinetoscope peep show, the first machine to bridge photography, film and peep show.

The project, an initiative of Rodrigo Vilhena with Paula Roush and the participants in the Photographic Art project of the Digital Photography program at the London South Bank University, is developed with a focus on screen-based work engaging with the themes of voyeurism, peep show, surveillance, and the gaze. Whilst the exhibition in the Voyeur Project View in Lisbon is shown in a series of display mechanisms purposefully built to simulate a peepshow effect, the exhibition in the da gallery in London will screen the video works as a running program.

Artists:

Kate Anthony, Helene Ohman, Karel Polt, Sindy Pussa, Aga Wierzbicka, Shea Rico, Paul Lincoln, Daniel Neves, Georgi Manolov, Alastair Sanchez, Jasmine Blatt, Thomas Evans, MJ Gumayagay, Liz Aspden, Natalie Cheung, Nicola Goodban, Jessica Kril, Nicola Penfold, Parveen Sahota, Lee Slaymaker, Mark Westlake.

Exhibition spaces
Voyeur Project View
Opening: Thursday, 18th 10pm-midnight
Show runs until october 19 2008
Address:Travessa do Convento de Jesus 12a -16a, Lisbon 1200-126
http://www.voyeurprojectview.org

da gallery, the digital art gallery at the London South Bank University
103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA.
Opening: Thursday, 25th 6p-9pm
Show runs until october 10th 2008

part of the in-struhk-shuhn programme: facebook event page

TITLE: TO BE CONFIRMED

photo by chris charalambous from the series paper cut.

7th-11th June 2007
End of the year show

Keyworth Centre
London South Bank University
Keyworth Street
Elephant & Castle London SE1 0AA
click here for map

PRIVATE VIEW
Thursday 7th June 5pm-9pm

Viewing times
8th-11th June 10am-9pm

DoGoSee

A photographic project based on participation and the mashup of technologies, from camera photography, to blogs and gps and an online base at DoGoSee.com, at the Leeds Met Gallery from 14 to 7 May 2007. In the image, the enactement of these instructions left on the blog: Walk on streets that spell “LEEDS”. Start on a street that begins with “L”, then go to the nearest street that begins with “E”, and so on. Carry big placards so people know which letter you’re on. Video these actions.

gursky+cibic

Two exhibitions ending this weekend not to miss (yr1: friday pm):

Jasmina Cibic (Slovenia) shows photos as site-specific interventions taken in airports, rural scenes and other locations in Slovenia. These are uncanny constructed scenes specific to Slovenia and more accurately Ljubljana. In the south-london (Deptford) gallery Bearspace.

Andreas Gursky at Central-london’s White Cube Mason’s Yard ina solo show of his latest large-scale work, incluidng the F1 series.

landscape photography

Caroline Christie and Bobby Lloyd, Painted Deserts, 2007

Henry Carroll, Big Bob; The World’s Oldest Rock, 2005

Two London photographic exhibitions exploring the meaning of landscape as a genre and evolving site for the production of spatial meaning.

At the East-London’s based Space Gallery, Caroline Christie and Bobby Lloyd allow the audience to sculpt a sandpit in the shape of east London’s Olympic site, an evolving space that is surrounded by their large scale photographic images of the Olympic area, between 3rd May and 23rd June.

At the South-London’s Wyer Gallery,Henry Carroll’s photographic landscapes are scale models designed to simulate American Places (the title of the exhibition), between 4th May and 2nd June.

found photography

Worth a visit (this friday for year 1) are the two exhibitions currently at the Photographer’s gallery, both dealing with the everyday, vernacular photography and in/formal archives: Joachim Schmid’s Selected Photoworks 1982-2007 developed with found photography (in the main gallery) and Found, Shared: The Magazine Photowork on photomagazines that publish found photography (in the cafe gallery).

Joachim Schmid presents projects developed with material found both in the streets and online, as well as reinterpretation of archives, both his own and institutional ones.

Works produced from material found in the streets include:

From the project Pictures from the street 1982-, Joachim Schmid

Pictures from the street (1982-): an ongoing collection of photos found in streets throughout the world, some reduced to fragments, others badly damaged, all placed on individual A4 sheets of paper pinned to the wall with the location and date of the finding on vynil lettering placed right underneath on the wall, fixing the finding to time-space coordinates that evolve to the moment of the exhibition with the latest finding as a polaroid from London, collected when the current exhibition was being installed.

From the project Belo Horizonte,Parque Municipal 1993-, Joachim Schmid

Belo Horizonte,Parque Municipal (1993), a black and white series of brasilian people’s photographs, developed after Joachim collected the negatives thrown away by street photographers that are the equivalent of photo booths, and produce “automatic photos” , right ont he spot for people to take away for id purposes. Enlarged and placed on a grid format, this found material gets a different dimension, like a detournement from street to gallery portraits.

Works produced with material from the Institute for Recycling Old Photos, an organisation created by the artist to recycle photography sent by people that want to dispose of their photographic possessions, include:

From the project Statics((pinup postcards), 1998, Joachim Schmid

Statics (1995-2003), a series of collages produced by assembling shredded photos and photopublications following specific thematics such as baseball cards and pinup cards;

From the project Photogenetic Drafts 1991, Joachim Schmid

and Photogenetic Drafts (1991), a series of collages produced from a collection of negatives from people’s portraits, sent by a professional photographer who sliced them in half to prevent them from being re-used; however their similarity of pose and framing suggested a possibility of creating combined portraits, juxtaposing front and back from different sitters;

From the project People and Things 2006, Joachim Schmid

In addition to working with material found in streets, Joachim also scavenges the internet for the sort of vernacular photography that is so abundant online. He has assembled this in a multichannel digital photo installation (2006). with 853 images assembled in a 58 minutes loop titled People and Things: 853 Pictures for the 21st Century with the material organised in 22 groups of images which include students ids, real estate, bycicles and corporate photography.

From the project Very Miscellaneous 1996, Joachim Schmid

Finally, two project revealing two diffferent approaches, complement the exhibition.Very Miscellaneous, (1996): created during a residency at the George Garland Archive at the West Sussex Records Office., is a recontextualisation of a collection of portraits of local people taken by the local studio photographer George Garland, with photographs taken by Joachim of pages from newspapers, where the effect blurr/sharp helps to abstract/ emphasise the newsprint.

From the project Thousand skies 2005, Joachim Schmid

Thousand skies (2005) is an archive of 1000 digital photographs taken by Joachim of helicopters flying over Berlin, when he was diagnosed with hyperacusis, a hearing problem that led to hyersensitivity to certain noises, namely of the helicopters; His painful reaction to the environment worked as a mechanism to take out his camera and shoot the skies everytime an helicopter crossed them above his head; part of the series are the many shots where he only succeded in taking the clouds, all images being shown in two monitors, as well as a small format 60 pages publication, produced to coincide with the exhibition.

Found, Shared: The Magazine Photowork is an installation culled from the archives of four magazines that publish found photos. All dealing with popular, found photography, they reveal however quite distinct stretegies. These are:

Found Magazine (USA), is a participatory printed and online project (www.foundmagazine.com) set up by Davy Rothbarth, to collect contributions from people who find things and want to share them with others, these including a propensity for photographic material; a sister publication Dirty Found, set up by Jason Bitner and Arthur Jones, specialises on the porno side of found photography;

Useful Photography (Netherlands), is a collaboration between Erik Kessels and Hans Aarsman, Hans Van Der Meer, Julian Germain and Claude de Cleen, and began publishing in Amsterdam in 2000. It marries usual A4 magazine size with an anti-glossy attitude, organising its issues around specific thematics that illustrate the vernacular uses of photography , such as shots of missing persons, or online photos of ebay articles. Edited about once a year.

Ohio (Germany), is a project by Uschi Huber and Jorg Paul Janka, the first six issues co-edited in collaboration with Hans-Peter Feldmann and consisting of photography only publications (no cpations, no editorial statements) of the editors’ personal collections of found photography, a concept that enlarged in the following issues to more systematic thematic collaborations with amateur photographers on topics such as corporate or hunting photography. Edited about twice a year.

Permanent Food (Italy-France) started as a collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Dominique Gonzalez Foerster (who now left the project), consisting of a photography magazine assembled from pages scanned from other glossy magazines, appropriating images from a variety of magazines circulating in the commercial market, it started in 1995 and is also available in a modified online version as Permanent Foam at: http://www.adaweb.com/context/pf/foam/toc.html, allowing visitors to compile a website from found websites.

manchester photography

Blogging from Manchester, sitting in the cafe at the Cornerhouse and browsing through the brochures of upcoming exhibitions I find these two photography exhibitions which make me think of a good reason to organise a field trip to Manchester with 1st and/or 2nd year students. Booking in advance through First Great Western it costs £32 return ticket. The exhibitions are:

Chain at the Chinese Arts centre, with work by
He Chengyao , Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang & Amy Cham. From 13 April to 17 June.

Do Not Refreeze: Photography behind the Berlin Wall with work by: Arno Fischer, Helga Paris, Evelyn Richter, Ulrich Wüst, Erasmus Scroeter, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Ursula Arnold, Maria Sewcz, Sibylle Bergemann, at the Cornerhouse Gallery From Fri 13 April to Sun 17 June.

moving archive

Camerawork archives
The work we are developing with the first year students in response to the camerawork photographic archives now hosted at the London South Bank University (see photographic index blog for description and updates) is an extremely relevant project for contemporary research on the meaning of archives for current artistic and curatorial practices. The twenty boxes, containing photopanels of cockpit gallery’s national touring exhibitions, function as historic documents at two complementary levels.

On one level, as a photographic archive that is representative of a strong vein of politically and socially engaged photographic practices developed in the 1980s London circle of conceptual photographic enquiry associated with the Camerawork and the Cockpit gallery; and on another level, as evidence of another parallel practice emerging side by side, that of the touring exhibition, questioning institutional practices of exhibition making and searching for alternative ways to circulate the work of photographers to community spaces beyond the gallery or the museum.

(not so) large scale archives
In the essay The archive everywhere included in the book The Manifesta decade- debates on contemporary art exhibitions and biennials in post wall europe, curator Barbara Vanderlinden argues that the problem with the history of biennials and other large-scale perennial exhibitions is the one of “remembrance and the material conditions of archivization “ and the only way to avoid this forgetfulness and erasure of histories from happening with exhibitions is “to bring together and study the material traces of these irreducibly ephemeral events”.

Shifting the focus from large-scale and ambitious international events curated by the Manifesta guest curators since the late 1990s to small and low-cost exhibitions such as the ones organised by camerawork gallery in the early1980s, it is worth noting the same concern for finding a viable way of preserving not only the artists work but also the ways of displaying it, the exhibition practices themselves, which are even harder to condense in a box.

Mobile displays
In the case of camerawork’s touring exhibition archives, what we have are the residues of a mobile, low-tech, do-it-yourself approach to exhibition making, in which each exhibition was pre-packed into a A1 box ready to circulate (the boxes were sent by train into the community centres, libraries and schools that requested them), with instructions for its installation. The photos themselves, already captioned and laminated into panels ready to hang, were supplemented by additional interpretative materials such text panels with the photographer’s statement, placing the work into the context of their investigative practice.

What I found most satisfying in Barbara’s text is when she states “ The documents of an exhibition should not be thought of as a dead mass of deactivated records or a closed history no longer of use. Even though they are the vestiges of past activities, exhibition archives can remain active resources for curators, artists, students and researchers involved in exhibition projects to come.”

future archived
And the reason this resonated with me has to do with all that has already happened since we started working with the contents of the box GS [Girls: Subcultures], the one we chose to inaugurate our long-term process of digitisation and reinterpretation of the archives. The box’s content- the touring exhibition The visible girls, by Anita Corbin is now online at flickr: visible girls, Anita has come to LSBU to talk about her project and she has worked with the students in a studio session, with them proposing contemporary subcultures for her camera (see flickr:subcultures). And finally, they are now engaged in their own research on youth cultures, which will result in new work for an upcoming exhibition.

Quoting Derrida’s observations in Archive Fever: “ The question of the archive is not a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal. An archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive, if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come; not tomorrow, but in times to come. Later on, or perhaps never.”