From Photogenic Drafts, 1991 By Stephen Bull, Essay included in Vigovisións. Colección fotográfica do Concello de Vigo, Vigo 2003 Joachim Schmid is a thief and a liar. For twenty years Schmid has been taking other peoples’ photographs and using them for his own purposes. He has even gone so far as to falsely claim that […]
Photography in Düsseldorf By Douglas Eklund Bernd and Hilla Becher began their collaborative project in 1959 (and were married shortly thereafter), at a time when German photography was mired in the same collective paralysis as the culture at large. The most prominent photographer at that time was Otto Steinert, whose Subjective Photography movement attempted to […]
“In a way I wanted to blot out any traces or information about the person in front of the camera. I also wanted to indicate that the viewer is not face-to-face with a real person.” Gil Blank with Thomas Ruff, originally published in Influence Magazine, Issue 2, 2004 Gil Blank: Many of the portraits […]
By Michael Schmidt, Camera Magazine #3, March, 1979 Photography was invented to enable us to portray reality with complete precision to the last detail. There is no other medium – apart from media which derive from the invention of photography (e.g. film and television) – which is in a position to document reality exactly as […]
ASX CHANNEL: Helmut Newton
“To be sure, that is also the expression of a particular vital consciousness.” (Essay excerpt from Der Rote Bulli ,Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography 2010, brought to ASX by NRW-Forum Düsseldorf) By Christoph Schaden, NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, 2010 The typical historical account of the effect a body of photography exercises on its viewers unfolds […]
Episode #108: Florian Maier-Aichen likens his use of infrared film to an in-between state, discussing photography’s role in picturing the American West and its ability to confound past and present. Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, […]
“This is why I continue accepting commissions, even though economically I don’t have to. Because making money gives me a kick, but also because 1 think it’s important for me to have the discipline, to work for somebody within a given frame. At least from time to time.” – Helmut Newton Frank Horvat with Helmut […]
U-ni-ty merges two artistic traditions, treating photography both as a medium for describing personal experience and as a vast, impersonal resource created by the mass media. In its entirety, the exhibition explores the emotional weight of history, the power of ideological symbols, and the relationship of the individual to the body politic. Michael Schmidt’s first […]
David Hockney smoking, Bridlington, 2008 If one is properly exposed to it and assuming that one has an “eye” for these things, Juergen Teller’s “aesthetic” becomes very recognizable. Not quite so much as to harm the effectiveness but much. Yes, in his case, this is a good thing. If pressed for a brief description, one […]
Interview: Gil Blank with Thomas Struth Originally published in Whitewall Magazine, Volume 6, 2007 Gil Blank: I’d like to begin by asking how you perceive the nature of subjectivity within contemporary imagemaking. The concept of subjectivity, and even the word itself, is a loaded one within current artistic discourse, so I think it would be […]