Photography

The Light at the End of the Tunnel is an Oncoming Train

Today from the archives we bring you an article by Danielle Sommers titled The Light at the End of the Tunnel is an Oncoming Train. The article was originally published on September 11th, 2011 as part of our biweekly series #Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Politics, Arts, and Culture. ——————— #Hashtags: Viral Thoughts on Politics, Arts, and Culture #Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and[…..]

SEE/SAW :Collective Practice in China Now

Today, we are excited to bring you coverage of SEE/SAW: Collective Practice in China Now at The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing, from our partner ArtSpy, a website based in Beijing, P.R.China that is committed to establishing a platform for global artistic information. This article has been translated from Chinese to English. SEE/SAW :Collective Practice in China Now was an exhibition held at Ullens Center[…..]

Enrique Metinides: Chronicling Catastrophe

Mexico City, April 29, 1979 © Enrique Metindies, Courtesy 212berlin

The journalistic expression “If it bleeds; it leads” is particularly resonant in Mexico, where an entire subgenre of daily tabloids, devoted to crime and disaster, cover train wrecks and murders in lurid detail. Enrique Metinides made a career as a crime photographer for these nota roja (“bloody news”), earning the sobriquet the “Mexican Weegee” for his obsessive chronicling of accidents and crime scenes throughout Mexico[…..]

#Hashtags: What Is Reflected/Where We Meet

Watching “Five Broken Cameras” and “How to Survive a Plague”—two outstanding documentaries nominated for yesterday’s Academy Awards—it’s easy to be reminded of what a gift this kind of attention can be for the community or person being featured. Yet watching Emad Burnat’s young son Gibreel stand center stage with his own camera, filming the Docuday audience during Saturday’s question-and-answer session, it’s also hard to shake[…..]

Geng Jianyi: The Artist Researcher

Born in 1962 of parents who were attached to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, Geng Jianyi grew up in a country shaped by rigid, state-mandated structures that had, by the late 1960s to the early ‘70s, fallen a long way short of the idealistic socialist Chinese state that Mao Zedong had envisioned. Where solidary socialism was intended to create commitment to the system by way[…..]

Hidden In Plain Sight

Artist Jeremy Bolen brought back a lot of pictures from his trip to Geneva, Switzerland last year, which are currently on view at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago. Bolen’s one-man show titled CERN, features conceptual photography that is driven by unique processes of exposing film, processes which point toward challenging questions about the veracity of art. The Geneva photos aren’t exactly your standard images of a bucolic European countryside,[…..]

A Sense of Noir: Bill Armstrong at ClampArt

Untitled (Film Noir #1414), Type-C print, 2012.

Standing before the photographs from Bill Armstrong’s Infinity series, resistance is futile. Intense washes of color and uncertain, alluring forms beckon yet elude one’s grasp, and the encounter between viewer and work becomes a question not of looking but, more powerfully, of experiencing. Critical distance is collapsed, vision becomes a channel for sensation, and image expands into an all-encompassing, alternative reality. Such is the effect[…..]