Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Culture event - Heimrad Backer MCA Denver
Culture event - Heimrad Backer MCA Denver
The photographer and poet Heimrad Bäcker (1925-2003) dedicated his life to documenting the remnants of Nazism and the Holocaust. Bäcker’s photographs look away from the scenes usually associated with the Shoah—barracks, gates, train tracks—and focus on the minute and incidental traces left behind in the Austrian landscape: indentations in stone, twisted steel rods, and concrete foundations. His examination of Austrian history is also a self-critical reflection on his enthusiastic participation, as a teenager, in the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Party. Landscape M focuses on Bäcker’s works related to Mauthausen, the largest concentration camp in Austria. MCA Denver’s exhibition is the first of Bäcker’s work in the US, and it is the first to show the body of work left behind after his death.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Life Through Lens --- Annie Leibovitz
Life Through Lens
Annie Leibovitz
Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.
In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatle graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.
When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz followed suit. “In school, I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught black-and-white,” she told ARTnews in 1992. “So I had to learn color myself.” Among her subjects from that period are Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, shirtless and gritty.
In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according toRolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.
Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, the photographer’s first book, was published in 1983. The same year Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk and Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. (The cover showing Moore — which then-editor Tina Brown initially balked at running — was named second best cover from the past 40 years.) Since then Leibovitz has photographed celebrities ranging from Brad Pitt to Mikhail Baryshnikov. She’s shot Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton. She’s shot Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley nude, with Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights; and, recently, the world’s long-awaited first glimpse of Suri Cruise, along with parents Tom and Katie. Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.
Among other honors, Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and toured internationally for six years. At the time she was only the second living portraitist — and the only woman — to be featured in an exhibition by the institution.
Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz said in an interview with The New York Times late last year. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag’s death in late 2004.
Sontag’s influence on Leibovitz was profound. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans, a trip that she admits she would not have taken without Sontag’s input. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on blood-smeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume.
Leibovitz’s most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, includes her trademark celebrity portraits. But it also features personal photographs from Leibovitz’s life: her parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews, and Sontag. Leibovitz, who has called the collection “a memoir in photographs,” was spurred to assemble it by the deaths of Sontag and her father, only weeks apart. The book even includes photos of Leibovitz herself, like the one that shows her nude and eight months pregnant, à la Demi Moore. That picture was taken in 2001, shortly before Leibovitz gave birth to daughter Sarah. Daughters Susan and Samuelle, named in honor of Susan and Leibovitz’s father, were born to a surrogate in 2005.
Leibovitz composed these personal photographs with materials that she used when she was first starting out in the ’70s: a 35-millimeter camera, black-and-white Tri X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Still, she told the Times, this book is the “most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”
What Remains --- Sally Mann
What Remains
Sally Mann
As one of the world's preeminent photographers, Sally Mann creates artwork that challenges viewers' values and moral attitudes. Described by Time magazine as "America's greatest photographer," she first came to international prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex and enigmatic pictures of her three children. What Remains--Mann's recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay--is the subject of this eponymously titled documentary. Filmed at her Virginia farm, Mann is surrounded by her husband and now-grown children, and her willingness to reveal her artistic process allows the viewer to gain exclusive entrance to her world. Never one to compromise, she reflects on her own personal feelings about mortality as she continues to examine the boundaries of contemporary art. Spanning five years, What Remains contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann's work, and is a rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist.
Sally Mann's powerful new body of work explores mortality, both the separation of the body from the soul and the scars left behind in the process. Mann masterfully utilizes the wet-plate collodion technique to convey her vision in both visceral and ethereal terms. She photographs the implied spirits of a Civil War battlefield, the physical processes of decomposition at a forensic site, the disfigurement to her family land as the result of a police chase, her skinned greyhound, and her now-grown children. This is Mann's first major book in several years. Watch for the HBO special on her life and photography that will air later next year.
Presentation on Henri Cartier Bresson
Henri
Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French
photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an
early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped
develop the street photography or life reportage style that was coined The Decisive Moment that has influenced
generations of photographers who followed.
Cartier-Bresson was born
in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France, the oldest of five children. His
father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a
staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family were cotton merchants and
landowners from Normandy, where he spent part of his childhood. The
Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, near Place
de l'Europe. His parents were able to provide him with financial support to
develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of
his contemporaries. Cartier-Bresson also sketched in his spare time.
As a young boy,
Cartier-Bresson owned a Box Brownie, using it for taking holiday snapshots; he
later experimented with a 3×4 inch view camera. He was raised in a traditional
French bourgeois fashion, required to address his parents using the formal vous rather than the familiar tu. His father assumed that his son
would take up the family business, but the youth was strong-willed and upset by
this prospect.
He attended École
Fénelon, a Catholic school that prepared students to attend Lycée Condorcet.
The proctor caught him reading a book by Rimbaud or Mallarmé, and reprimanded
him: "Let's have no disorder in your studies!" Cartier-Bresson said,
"He used the informal 'tu'-which usually meant you were about to get a
good thrashing. But he went on: 'You're going to read in my office.' Well, that
wasn't an offer he had to repeat.
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