Thomas Ruff

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Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), known for his deadpan portraits and gorgeous views of the night sky and architecture, is one of Germany's leading contemporary artist/photographers. Among his work is an exploration of the internet, that parallel visual universe teeming with sexuality of every flavor and variety. He gathers from that virtual playground erotic and often pornographic photographs that he subsequently manipulates in his computer, making beautiful--and disturbing--artwork from visual material that, for better or worse, is probably more abundant than any other type of image in our world today. The pictures, which are graphic and abstract at the same time, are accompanied by an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose work is similarly influenced by the sex industry. Reviewing the series in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz wrote: "Ruff may think these images are analytic or objective, but they're also sweetly, luxuriantly visual...Sex slips into something ravishingly, optically comfortable, and these everyday, off-world images morph into parapaintings from the Planet Love."

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks

Ralph Eugene Meatyard is not one of the most familiar names in photographic history, but his impact on the field, belatedly recognized, is significant. An optician in Lexington, Kentucky, Meatyard sustained a lifelong interest in visual perception. Well read and deeply connected to a circle of poets and philosophers, he made photographs rich in literary allusion. In his last decade, Meatyard kept returning to the tropes of dolls and masks, often photographing his children posed in abandoned houses and landscapes in the environs of his home. These pictures put an uncanny spin on family photography, exploring the contrasts between youth and age, childhood and mortality, intimacy and unknowability, sharing and hiding. Drawn from the photographer’s estate, and including three prints recently acquired by the Fine Arts Museums, this exhibition of almost 60 photographs examines dolls and masks across different bodies of work as a window onto this enigmatic photographer’s larger practice. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks is currently on view at the de Young in San Francisco until February 26.

Melody Nelson

Artnet Auctions announces the sale of nine rare and beautiful works by photographer Tony Frank (French, b.1945) to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the legendary album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, by iconic French singer and artist Serge Gainsbourg. This photographic sale includes the memorable album cover, which contributed to Melody Nelson’s stature in French culture, and will only be on artnet Auctions until November 16, 2011.

Plossu Retrospective At Camera Obscura

Camera Obscura Gallery in Paris, who represents the French photographer Bernard Plossu is currently presenting Parcours dans l’œuvre de Bernard Plossu, du Mexique à l’Ardèche, a retrospective of sorts in two parts through two bodies of work, entitled “voyage en Mexique” (1965-1966) and “le pays des petites routes (2008-2010) en Ardèche”. In 1965 Plossu arrived in Mexico and took photographs of the landscapes and of the people to create his series “Voyage Mexicaine." Plossu also traveled to Africa in 1975 and then lived in New Mexico before moving to France in 1985. In the 1970s, he invented a simple and neutral photographic style, without depriving the sentimentality from his pictures. The photographer is mainly recognized for his black and white pictures, however at the exhibition, spectators have the opportunity to discover his color photography as well.  It should be noted also that this exhibition is displaying never before published works by Plossu.  On view until December 23. 

KC Ortiz & POSE: Whitewash

On Saturday, November 19, graffiti artist POSE and photojournalist KC Ortiz will unveil Whitewash, their second exhibition at Known Gallery in Los Angeles, and their most cohesive to date. For POSE, Whitewash references society’s attempt to eradicate graffiti and stifle human expression. “Shortly after I started writing graffiti, Chicago took an extremely hard-line stance on its eradication, outlawing the sale of spraypaint and implementing Mayor Dayley’s Graffiti Blasters program,” POSE explains. With this exhibition, POSE will recall a time before the buff. “I am digging into my fondest childhood memories of riding the train and seeing all the colors, letters and cartoon characters along the lines. Making these paintings has been an incredibly rich process, and it makes me thankful that no city official can eradicate my memories.” POSE will show 15 new works in the main gallery. For KC, Whitewash is about the people and places he photographs. “Much of the work I do covers those who have been ‘whitewashed,’ so to speak, by history and policy,” KC notes. “Specifically, the work I will be exhibiting is from West Papua and Burma. You won’t find either of those ‘nations’ on the map, as both have been essentially ‘whitewashed’ away. Burma has been renamed Myanmar by its ruling junta in order to establish the fantasy of a unified nation, and West Papua has been occupied by Indonesia since 1963 after a very controversial handover from the Dutch that was orchestrated by the United States.” In the project room, KC will show 12 photographs of West Papua and Burma’s armed struggles. Whitewash will be on view from November 19 to to December 1o at Known Gallery. 

Eugène Atget exhibit at MoMA

MoMA in New York will soon host from 6 February to 9 April next year, a retrospective on French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). The title of the exhibition, “Documents pour artistes”, refers to the sign which hung on the door of Atget’s studio in Paris. Atget officially started photography in 1890, and aimed to capture the city of Paris in order to offer the material documentation to other artists.

Ans Westra: Washday at the Pa

NEW ZEALAND – Forty-seven years ago Ans Westra provided the text and forty-four images for a Department of Education journal made for primary schools. Titled Washday at the Pa the book followed a day in the life of a rural Maori family of eight children awaiting relocation to a state house in the city. Following protests by the Maori Women Welfare League Washday at the Pa was controversially withdrawn from circulation by the Department of Education. The League condemned Westra's depiction of the poor, rural Maori family living in sub-standard housing as untruthful and inaccurate. Westra defended the integrity of the images and as copyright owner later in 1964 published the second edition through the Caxton Press. Westra took this opportunity to add twenty-two new images, some introducing whole new episodes to the story. An new exhibition at the Suite Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand supports the publication of a new edition of Washday at the Pa, which features images made for the 1964 first and second editions of the book as well as images made by Westra in 1998 as part of a subsequent project: Washday at the Pa Revisited.Accompanying Westra's 35 uncropped images is text by Mark Amery. Washday at the Pa is on view at the Suite Gallery until November 26.

The Radical Camera

Sid Grossman, Coney Island, 1947

In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera, on view starting tomorrow at the Jewish Museum in New York, presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951 is on view November 4 through March 25.

FRED HERZOG: PHOTOGRAPHS

Herzog: Mexico City with Chevy, 1963

Hezog: Lucy, Georgia, 1968

The definitive book about the stunning oeuvre of a pioneer of colour photography—Vancouver's Fred Herzog.For more than five decades, Fred Herzog has focused his lens on street life, and his striking colour photographs—of vacant lots, second-hand shops, neon signs and working-class people—evoke nostalgia in an older generation and inspire wide-eyed revelation in a younger one. The images that we now consider iconic once relegated Herzog to the margins: his bold use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and ’60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black-and-white imagery. Fred Herzog has worked with Kodachrome slide film for over 50 years, but only in the past few years has technology allowed him to make archival pigment photographic prints of exceptional colour and intensity. Fred Herzog: Photographs, a new book out now by Douglas & McIntyre, showcases this innovative artist’s impressive collection in a beautifully crafted volume.

The Mexican Suitcase

Robert Capa, [Ernest Hemingway (third from the left), New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews (second from the left) and two Republican soldiers, Teruel, Spain], late December 1937

The Mexican Suitcase will for the first time give the public an opportunity to experience images drawn from this famous collection of recovered negatives. In December 2007, three boxes filled with rolls of film, containing 4,500 35mm negatives of the Spanish Civil War by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour)—which had been considered lost since 1939—arrived at the International Center of Photography. These three photographers, who lived in Paris, worked in Spain, and published internationally, laid the foundation for modern war photography. Their work has long been considered some of the most innovative and passionate coverage of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Many of the contact sheets made from the negatives will be on view as part of the exhibition, which will look closely at some of the major stories by Capa, Taro, and Chim as interpreted through the individual frames. These images will be seen alongside the magazines of the period in which they were published and with the photographers' own contact notebooks. On view now at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya until January 15.

Tobias Zielony: Manitoba

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On view at the MMK ZOLLAMT – Tobias Zielony's “Manitoba” is a series of works capturing the lives of teenage gang members of Native American origin in their urban surroundings in Winnipeg, the provincial capital of the Canadian state of Manitoba. In the tradition of the classical photojournalistic feature, Zielony makes use here of various pictorial genres, presenting individual portraits and group photos in which the gang members pose, as well as views of the architecture and landscape in Winnipeg and on a reservation. Apart from his subjects’ globalized dress codes and gestures, what interests the artist most are the specific regional histories of the Native Americans in their socio-economic context. Likewise to be shown at the MMK Zollamt, the film The Deboard (2008) is dedicated to the story of a gang member’s withdrawal from his gang. The term “deboard” refers to the exit ritual a person must subject himself to before he can begin a new life as a free man. In his film, Zielony impressively combines coarse-grained black-and-white scenes of the ex-convict’s environment with the subject’s own account of his withdrawal from the gang.The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue documenting the artist’s working process. Tobias Zielony: Manitoba will be on view at the MMK Zollamt from November 12 to January 15.

Cecil Beaton: The New York Years

From the 1920s through the ‘60s, Manhattan’s artistic and social circles embraced British-born photographer and designer Cecil Beaton (1904-80). Opening today, Cecil Beaton: The New York Yearsbrings together extraordinary photographs, drawings, and costumes by Beaton to chronicle his impact on the city’s cultural life. Beaton’s relentless energy and curiosity spurred him to pursue new fields, from fashion and portrait photography to costume and scenic design for Broadway, ballet, and opera, and to put his own aesthetic stamp on each of these endeavors. Cecil Beaton: The New York Years is on view at the Museum of the City of New York until February 20, 2012.