Gered Mankowitz Retrospective

Prolific music photographer and documentarian Gered Mankowitz is to be the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Snap Gallery in London. The exhibition features over 100 photographs from Gered’s entire career, spanning four decades of music photography. This is the largest collection of photographs Gered has ever exhibited, and it is his first career retrospective. Gered is best known for his 1960s photographs of The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, and both subjects feature in this exhibition. During the 60s he also photographed Marianne Faithfull, Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Small Faces, Donovan, Spencer Davies group and PP Arnold to name a few, before moving into the progressive end of the decade with Free, Soft Machine, Traffic and The Nice. Gered Mankowitz: A Retrospective will be on view until June 16 at the Snap Gallery, 12 Piccadilly Arcade, London.

Ryan McGinley's Animals

Team Gallery in New York presents Ryan McGinley's Animals which consists of the artist's color studio portraits of live animals with nude models. The exhibition is his first made up exclusively of selections from this growing, and ambitious, body of work. The artist visited various sanctuaries, zoos, and rescue establishments across the United States, erecting a mobile studio wherever possible and working with a number of pre-eminent animal trainers. The animals are not mere props in photographs of people; on the contrary, McGinley considers them the subjects of these images. There exists both tension and tenderness between the models and wild animals, as they claw, clutch, nibble, and hug one another. These photographs are studies in animal bodies, their strangeness and seductivity. Animals will be on view concurrently with McGinley's Grid show both Team Gallery locations in NYC from May 2 to June 2, 2012.

Warhol in Flowers

American photographer William John Kennedy’s exhibition of newly published prints of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana is believed to be the only such images in existence capturing the artists with their works, among them Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Indiana’s LOVE. After almost half a century in storage, a select number of the nearly forgotten images were carefully chosen, and are now being published for the first time as a collection. On view now until May 29 at Site 109 Gallery in NYC.

Dark Sky

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On 6 June 2012 the second and the last transit of Venus of the century will occur. Departing from this extraordinary phenomenon, the Adam Art Gallery, in New Zealand, presents the exhibition Dark Sky which delves into the relationship between photography and astronomy to examine the intriguing photographic consequences and new territories discovered from capturing the skies. The exhibition has been timed to coincide with the 2012 Transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event when Venus passes between the Earth and the sun. The exhibition will be complemented by a public programme, including talks by scientists, artists and writers, including the German and New Zealand poets who have been commissioned by the International Institute of Modern Letters and the New Zealand Goethe-Institut to write about the Transit of Venus. Dark Sky will be on view from May 1 to June 8, at the Adam Art Gallery Victoria University, Gate 3, Kelburn Parade.

Contains Nudity

Opening today in Los Angeles, an exhibition entitled Contains Nudity, is a retrospective of the nude fashion photography of Dazed & Confused Magazine co-founder Rankin. It includes some models with such household names as Kate Moss, Helena Christensen, Erin O’Connor, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Yasmin Le Bon and the former Mrs Seal, Heidi Klum. It will run for six weeks,until May 26th at the Rankin Gallery which is located at 8070 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, California.

Theater of the Street

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Since the invention of small hand-held cameras and faster films in the late 19th century, photographers have been fascinated with capturing everyday life in the urban environment. An exhibition of nearly 90 works will celebrate how photographers such as Harry Callahan, Bruce Davidson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Beat Streuli creatively pursued a new genre of street photography, capturing the diversity and rapid pace of modern life.I Spy: Photography and the Theater of the Street, 1938–2010 is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. from April 22 to August 5, 2012.  

Disco Angola

David Zwirner gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Stan Douglas, titled Disco Angola, Douglas has again assumed the fictional character of a photo-journalist, this time a regular in the burgeoning disco underground of the early 1970s New York. For Douglas’s alter-ego, the new scene offered a cathartic respite from urban grittiness in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Evolving out of funk and soul, the disco lifestyle mobilized the gay community in particular, and its self-conscious embrace of glamour and fashion represented a departure from the previous decade’s counterculture. Disco Angola is on view at the David Zwirner gallery until April 28, 525 West 19th Street.

The Shaping of New Visions

Valie Export, Einkreisung (Encirclement) from the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations). 1976.

The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, on view this month at the MOMA in New York, covers the period from 1910 to today, offers a critical reassessment of photography's role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements—with a special emphasis on the medium's relation to Dada, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, Conceptual, and Post-Conceptual art—and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as "New Vision" photography bore the obvious influence of "lens-based" and "time-based" works. El Lissitzky best summarized its ethos: "The new world will not need little pictures," he wrote in The Conquest of Art (1922). "If it needs a mirror, it has the photograph and the cinema." The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary art from April 18 to April 29, 2013.

Giverny

The Hole gallery in New York presents the exhibition Giverny, a collaboration between E.V. Day and Kembra Pfahler. The artists created photographic works in the famous French gardens built and immortalized in paint by Claude Monet, and will be exhibiting them for the first time here on the Bowery. Playboy.com has generously funded this massive exhibition, for the duration of which the Hole will be transformed into a living, breathing garden—with a lily-padded pond traversed by Monet’s signature green Japanese arched bridge, and scattered with the indigenous plants he is famous for painting. The walls of the exhibition will be printed with the almost claustrophobically green willow trees that surround this historic French site, and your first step into the gallery will be onto grass. Giverny will be on view until April 24 at the Hole Gallery.

Naked Before the Camera

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Hermaphrodite, Nadar, 1860

"Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have...triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—when a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail." Naked before the Camera, on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveys the history of this subject and examines some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its expression.

Robert Carrithers: The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited

Prague – On view now at the Fotograf Gallery in Prague: rediscovered photographs by Robert Carrithers of Basquiat, Haring, the New York scene in the 1980s and the infamous Club 57.“One staircase led to heaven the other to hell” says Robert Carrithers of a building in New York’s St. Mark’s Place Street, number 57. The building whose basement housed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Club 57 – a creative laboratory for all non-conformists and free-thinkers from the East Village – actually belonged to the central offices of the Polish Catholic Church. The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited will be on view until April 20 at the Fotograf Gallery in Prague, Školská 28, Prague 1.

The Nudes of Lord Lichfield

Thomas Patrick John Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield (25 April 1939 – 11 November 2005) was an English photographer. He inherited the Earldom of Lichfield in 1960 from his paternal grandfather. In his professional practice he was known as Patrick Lichfield.  This above image, taken in 1990, features a model looking across Central Park from the balcony of Rock Hudson’s former flat. Lichfield was an internationally renowned photographer who worked  for all the major magazines, exhibited worldwide, and published several books during his career. The National Portrait Gallery dedicated a retrospective exhibition to the first  twenty years of his work in 2002. His great break was when he was summoned by Diana  Vreeland, the doyenne of fashion editors, to photograph the Duke and Duchess of  Windsor, and given a five year contract with American Vogue. In 1981 he was appointed  official photographer at the wedding of his cousin, The Prince of Wales, and  Lady Diana Spencer.  He is lesser known for his nude work which will be exhibited for the first time at the Little Black Gallery in London from April 24 to May 26.