Photography
theartsdesk
The historians of punk are in full flow. Jon Savage's book England's Dreaming and the BBC Four's documentary series Punk Britannia have documented much of what needs to be said. But punk was as much a visual statement of intent as a musical one, which is why a new book of photographs by Sheila Rock is such a welcome addition to the punk library. Rock was there at the start, taking pictures for NME, Smash Hits and, most importantly, The Face, where her images did much to establish its commitment to style. Nick Logan worked with Rock on all of those publications. In his introduction to Read more ...
theartsdesk
Mick Rock was the court photographer of glam. Among the (un)usual suspects found in his lens were Lou Reed, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. But no one played up for his camera quite like Iggy Pop.The proof is in the six images released today as limited-edition art prints to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Raw Power. Each of the editions is overlaid with handwritten lyrics from "Raw Power" and "Death Trip", and are individually hand signed by both Rock and Pop.Jasper Rees on Mick RockThe photographs capture the feral intensity of Iggy as shaman showman. But from this distance they also Read more ...
mark.hudson
Travelling through Canada by train – more decades ago than I care to divulge here – I bought a book of Man Ray photographs at Banff in the heart of the Rockies. I spent the rest of the journey with one eye on the majestic mountains, and the other glued to the luminous, edgy, ineffably stylish images of the American surrealist in Paris.Those images were pretty well-known then. They’re infinitely better known now. The "Ingres" woman with violin marks on her back (pictured below, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924), the pale-faced Parisian beauty with the African mask, the solarised profile of Lee Miller Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Crossover isn’t the half of it. Not since Helmut Newton has a photographer operated so successfully in both the worlds of celebrity high fashion and the world of art. In Juergen Teller’s case there is an emotional warmth that is particularly engaging, meaning the art world’s embrace is free of the occasional smugness that comes with its acceptance of the success in the “real” world of someone like Mario Testino. Teller makes everything highly personal, and we respond subliminally to his attachment to whatever he is photographing. There is always a sense of specific biography or Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" TS Eliot’s line could well stand as an epitaph to Jacqui and David Morris’s troublingly thoughtful film about British photographer Don McCullin, whose haunting images of conflict across the world over half a century have defined our perception of modern warfare (though his range of subjects goes far beyond that). The softly-spoken McCullin is our guide here to some of the stories behind this lifetime’s achievement, which is no less well summarized in his own words: “Seeing and looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.”It Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This compilation of nearly 90 photographs by 30 photographers from 13 different countries of the Middle East is literally and metaphorically illuminating. The Paris-based Iranian photographer Abbas puts it thus: “I write with light.”Framed in three different labelled sections - Recording, Reframing, Resisting – the exhibition is an unusual and welcome collaboration between the Victoria & Albert and British Museums, with support to the tune of £100,000 from the Art Fund. The gift was shared between the two museums who each bought for their own collections. The results, dating from Read more ...
theartsdesk
For the past 10 years Brian David Stevens has been taking photographic portraits of veterans on Remembrance Sunday. The images play on the notion of the unknown soldier. Each subject is portrayed without the distinguishing marks of regiment or rank or even any clue to the part of the Armed Forces in which they served. “Faces, only,” says Stevens. “Each deep-etched with who they are and what they did, that we might look, and think - and thank them.”Brian David Stevens' websiteClick on the images to enlarge.
Marina Vaizey
The Taylor Wessing Photographic… well, you get the drift. It's quite a long title for what is now one of the most fascinating and wide-ranging exhibitions of photographs mounted in London, and which goes out on tour nationally next year. It is described as a snapshot of contemporary portrait photography, and this is one of the strongest iterations yet, 60 photographs selected from an international submission of over 5,000 images from more than 2,000 photographers, all taken within the last year or so. Each has been chosen blind, as the photographer was not identified during the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"From today, painting is dead" was the forlorn conclusion of French painter Paul Delaroche on seeing a photograph for the first time in 1839. His gloomy prediction was premature, of course; more than 170 years on, the battle for supremacy is still raging.Divided into genres such as Portraiture, The Figure and Still Life, the National Gallery’s first exhibition of photography follows the twists and turns of this ongoing war. The main casualty of the clash turns out not to be painting but engraving, the medium most often used to disseminate images prior to the invention of the camera. One of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
William Klein’s exhibition opens with Broadway by Light (1958), a celluloid elegy to advertising made in the days before neon. Myriad bulbs flash the names of brands like Coca Cola, Camel, Budweiser and Pepsi across New York’s night sky. Silhouetted against vast hoardings, men perch on ladders to hang letters outside Broadway theatres or screw in brightly coloured bulbs that create gaudy, syncopated patterns which, when reflected in rainwater puddles, ripple and shimmer with the subtlety of abstract paintings.Dubbed the first pop art film, it has a celebratory mood that is in stark contrast Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Take the day, and a stiff drink afterwards, as you’ll need it for this thoughtful and deeply disturbing exhibition. A picture, goes the cliché, is worth a thousand words, and nowhere more so than in this heartbreaking, beautiful and affecting anthology, which manages to speak with unparalleled directness, yet with nuanced subtlety.Here are over 400 photographs by 12 artists, spanning the world, and shown with outstanding clarity, helpful pacing and variety. It is a self initiated record of perhaps the greatest turning points of the last century as the world moved on from centuries of Read more ...
josh.spero
There are two exhibitions of Cy Twombly's work at Gagosian Gallery right now. One is fine and will detain you for a few minutes. The other is exactly the revelation we want to refresh and enhance Twombly for his afterlife.In its main gallery are Twombly's Last Paintings (Untitled, pictured below), given the titular terminal reverence of something like Strauss' Four Last Songs. The mere title suggests the paintings have a life-summing profundity, that last works are last works because the artist uses them as the deliberate culmination of a lifetime's thought, not because the artist happens to Read more ...