With the end of 2019 in sight, we thought this a good time to look back at the past twelve months and put together a selection of favourite articles from 2019. Including articles from five of our online issues of Photography+, featuring Liz Johnson Artur, René Burri, Michael Danner, John Divola, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Vinca Petersen, Barbara Probst amongst others.
1. Michael Danner -#1 Europe
Text by Julia Bunnemann
To watch the media’s day-to-day coverage of migration is to see how it displays only the phenomenon’s negative connotations, showing mainly neediness and passivity. German photographer Michael Danner has tried to distance himself from the collective imagery, however, and instead emphasise migration’s active part: the hope for a better future, the willingness to change and succeed.
Read the full article here
2. John Divola – #5 Architecture
Text by Mark Rawlinson
At the time of its making, the San Fernando Valley series was well received, with critics reading the photographs as a commentary on the banality of the suburbs and the lives of those who lived there. However, this critical interpretation irked Divola. His interest was not in the photograph as metaphor or straightforward document, but rather in the more complex and puzzling set of issues and problems surrounding photography as process.
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3. Vinca Petersen – #2 Dance
They used to be inspired entirely by what was going on around me. Living in a community that operated outside the ‘norms’ of society was fascinating on all levels, including the visual. I recorded what was going on, and within each image I captured people I loved, places that were beautiful to me, and events that were often extraordinary. Now my ideas come mainly from within my own mind. I am fascinated with the concept of a state of being in which humans seem to be electric – it can be a place somewhere between a protest and a celebration, or it can be a more dreamlike, emotionally connected state. I used to want to record that, and now I also want to create it.
Read the full article here
4. Cross Channel Photographic Mission – #1 Europe
Originally delivered as a lecture to coincide with the Cross Channel Photographic Mission (CCPM) exhibition held during the Brighton Photo Biennial. Anne McNeill looks back on the groundbreaking CCPM, which would become Photoworks, the organisation she ran from 1995 to 1997.
Read the full article here
5. Barbara Probst – #4 Staged
Text by Shoair Mavlian
When viewing photographs, we are used to seeing things from a single perspective, a frozen moment captured by one lens. Although the camera often allows us to see beyond what is visible to the human eye, the singular photographic viewpoint can also limit perceptions.In the series Exposures, Barbara Probst attempts to break apart and expand this singular viewpoint by presenting multiple perspectives of the same incident side by side.
Read the full article here
6. La lune à un mètre! – #3 Space
Text by Inès de Bordas
Staged images of the lunar surface by 19th century amateur astronomer James Nasmyth, anaglyph stereoscopic prints invented by Louis Ducos du Hauron and the first images of the moon in colour and in 3D by Léon Gimpel are explored in an article by Inès de Bordas.
Read the full article here
7. Dead Ends – #5 Architecture
Text by Claudia Lynch
Like many places the Berlin Wall now exists in people’s consciousness largely through photographs. It was captured from countless viewpoints over the course of its existence, and these images depict both the Wall itself and the history that it symbolises. Each set of photographs tells a slightly different story, shaped by the focus of the photographer and by the time in which the images were made.
8. René Burri – #3 Space
Text by Simon Baker
So far so normal for what only appears, in retrospect, to be what is now called a ‘photo-book’. Indeed, given the political framework of the textual component of the publication, it is tempting to imagine that Burri’s elegant and restrained photographic responses to the architectural ruins and nostalgic propaganda of NASA’s facilities constitute an elegiac subtext, the American dream referenced in the title of the book worn down, by 1986, by a brutal Cold War nightmare. There is much of his intelligence and panache in the photographic sequence, which bridges everyday incident, human interest, political symbolism, and architectural formalism – all the elements present throughout Burri’s long and varied career, resolved into one ambitious project.
Read the full article here
9. Philip-Lorca diCorcia: A Storybook Life – #4 Staged Archive
Text by Val Williams
For our Photography+ #4 Staged, we look back into our archives to the first issue of Photoworks Annual and Val Williams reviewing Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2003.
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10. Liz Johnson Artur – #2 Dance
Text by Drew Sawyer
Johnson Artur’s desire to relate to others through photography began in 1986, when she visited New York for the first time, staying with a Russian family in a predominantly black neighbourhood in Brooklyn. The journey was a defining experience. ‘It was the first place I arrived with a camera. Everything overwhelmed me, the place and the people,’ says Johnson Artur, who was born to a Russian mother and a Ghanaian father in Bulgaria, and subsequently grew up in Germany with her mother. She became eager to meet – and see pictures of – other people and communities across the African diaspora.
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