Little Black Book of Art

Photographs by Caroline Irby
7 May – 30 August 2010

Photographer Caroline Irby spent one year tracking down a child born in every country in the world, then photographed and interviewed each one.

Caroline found children from 185 of the world’s 192 nations and asked each to tell their story in their own words. The children’s unique accounts of leaving their countries of origin, their hopes for a new life in the UK and their observations of cultural differences, provide a thought-provoking and often humorous insight into the effects of globalisation.

A selection of Irby’s visually and emotionally engaging photographs will be on display alongside a series of short films the artist made for Channel 4, which features a number of interviews with the children.

V&A Museum of Childhood
Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9PA
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)20 8983 5200
Email: moc@vam.ac.uk

FREE admission

Open 10.00-17.45 Monday-Sunday (last admission 17.30) including 10.00-21.00 on the first Thursday of every month.

Caroline Irby Biography

Caroline Irby (b.1977) had her most intense photographic lesson at 18 when she worked at Magnum in Paris three months immersed in great composition and surrounded by her heroes. After graduating in French and Philosophy from Edinburgh University in 2000, she entered the world of photography. She has been published in The Sunday Times Magazine, The Guardian Magazine, The Observer Magazine, Marie Claire, and The Independent among others. Caroline also works for aid agencies including Save the Children, UNICEF and Oxfam alongside commercial assignments. Her  work has received awards from the Observer Hodge, the BBC and The Commonwealth Photographic Awards and has been exhibited in the UK and internationally. Caroline was a member of Network Photographers until 2005 and is now represented by Abby Johnston.

For more information about Caroline’s work, please visit www.carolineirby.com

Text credit: Verve Photo

An exhibition of work by documentary photographers recording Britain’s state of transition and unrest between the 1960s and 1980s.

No Such Thing As Society brings together 150 photographs by photographers including Martin Parr, Keith Arnatt and Victor Burgin. The exhibition takes its name from Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement, “Society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The exhibition includes a shot by Tish Murtha, taken in the 1980s, of teenagers in Newcastle’s West end which originally included the caption, ‘They see no real future for themselves.’

The show runs from 31 Ocotber 2009 – 07 February 2010 at the Laing Art Gallery, New Bridge Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear, NE1 8AG.

Telephone: 0191 232 7734

‘Fraulein’ by Ellen von Unwerth :  23 October – 21 November 2009

Born in 1954, Ellen von Unwerth is a German photographer and director who began her career working as a fashion model before she picked up a camera.

She initially found recognition in the late 80’s when she first photographed Claudia Schiffer, Carré Otis, Eva Herzigova and Drew Barrymore for the Guess? Jeans advertorial campaign. Ever since then top journals such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Arena, Interview, L’uomo Vogue and I-D have been clamoring to publish her striking images of models, film and music stars.

Her career as a model has given her a particularly good advantage when taking pictures – knowing how to make women look good, celebrating their femininity and creating deeply stylish and sexy images without being lascivious or objectifying.

Ellen has also been responsible for the production of several photography books (see list below) and has directed short films and music videos for the likes of Janet Jackson, Britney Spears and Duran Duran to name but a few.

“The Michael Hoppen Gallery is delighted to announce ‘Fräulein’; a show of personal favorites and never previously seen images from the last 15 years. The exhibition at Michael Hoppen will take place in collaboration with TASCHEN who will be publishing a major monograph of Ellen von Unwerth’s work, also entitled Fräulein. The text is written by Ingrid Sischy, the former editor in chief of Interview magazine and currently fashion critic at the New Yorker and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.

Known for her casual, playful attitude on shoots, her lack of pretense is the key to why her photographs resonate – they feel warm, human and fun. Von Unwerth’s photography revels in sexual intrigue, femininity and sheer joie de vivre.

Fashion and fantasy are enthrallingly combined in a way no male photographer could dare.” MH

Ellen von Unwerth’s signed limited edition prints will be on display over two floors, celebrating female icons in a variety of poses such as Claudia Schiffer, Vanessa Paradis, Kate Moss, Carla Bruni, Natalie Portman among many others.

Ellen Von Unwerth Publications

• Snaps, 1994, (ISBN 0-944092-29-2)
• Wicked, 1999, (ISBN 3-88814-899-5)
• Couples, 1998, (ISBN 3-8238-0367-0)
• Revenge, 2003, (ISBN 1-931885-14-1)
• Omahyra & Boyd, 2005, (ISBN 2-914171-20-X)
• Plumes et Dentelles, 2005, (ISBN 2-84114-772-X)

Open See documents the experiences of people who travel from war torn, socially and economically devastated countries, to make new lives in Europe. They have left often violent, oppressive, poverty-stricken or AIDS ravaged communities, in search of stability and the promise of a better future. Originating from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, these ‘new Europeans’ have met violence and brutality as well as hope and liberation in their new homes.

Since 2003, Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg (b.1953, USA) has been photographing and collecting stories through a range of media: Polaroids, video, written text, ephemera, large and medium format photographs. The exhibition installation reflects his dynamic approach to documentary through dense displays of images, objects and text.

 The Polaroids on show have often been defaced and written on by the people they portray. The words and images combine to tell intimate stories of past and present experiences. Faces and features are sometimes scratched out, coloured in, or marked in some way. Larger-scale colour photographs depicting landscapes from the subjects’ countries of origin appear both poetic and dystopic in equal measure. One image shows a young family walking along a sunlit road, while another is of a man standing on a vast rubbish tip holding a dead goat salvaged from the debris.

Part of an ongoing project by Goldberg, Open See confronts us with the realities of migration and the conditions for desiring escape.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Magnum Photos (www.magnumphotos.com) and  runs from 15 October 2009 – 31 January 2010.

The Photographers Gallery
16-18 Ramilies Street
London
W1F 7LF

Telephone: 0845 262 1618

“The beloved Polaroid, in all its clunky, hands-on, hit-and-miss old-fashionedness, is a pre-digital classic that is refusing to die quietly”
The Observer

Early last year, the Polaroid corporation ceased to produce its iconic film.

The 9 October 2009 sees a Polaroid exhibition called ‘Polaroid EXP.09.10.09′ opening at the Atlas Gallery and featuring all the greats…

Nobuyoshi Araki
David Bailey
Peter Blake
Elliott Erwitt
Walker Evans
Jim Goldberg
Philippe Halsman
Barbara Kasten
André Kertesz
William Klein
David Leventhal
Robert Mapplethorpe
Mary Ellen Mark
Steven Meisel
Helmut Newton
Marc Quinn

The exhibition at the Atlas gallery on Dorset Street, London W1 will see the final ‘use by’ or expiration date of the last batch of Polaroid film manufactured. A wide selection of Polaroid prints by photographers who have either worked directly with the Polaroid Corporation as part of their research program or who have become famous for the quality of their Polaroid prints either alongside or independent from their traditional camera-based work. It traces the development and use of this unique medium up to the present day.

Artist Marc Quinn writes of this experience, “What I like about Polaroids is that they are like a sculpture of a photograph. In other words, when you press the button, the Polaroid comes out of the camera, and image is transformed into an object”

Text Credit: Atlas Gallery Press release

Do you remember Polaroids? The satisfying cause-and-effect of the click followed by that sticky plastic sliver sliding out of the front of the machine; the distinctive abrupt buzz that accompanied its arrival and the grey square that morphed, as you watched, into an image, like a well-loved building looming out of thick fog. Digital photography is all very clever, of course, but you don’t hold anything in your hand at the end of the process that you didn’t at the beginning. Man cannot live by virtual reality alone, especially as ‘virtual’, lest we forget, means ‘almost’.

Now that Polaroid is defunct – the UK branch of the company in administration, the last batch of film just expired – two galleries are trying to do for the instant camera what it once did for the world: fix it in our memories. It helps that a lot of interesting artists experimented with the medium at various points, although Polaroid can be grimly unforgiving. Andy Warhol, who has pictures at both the Atlas and the Pumphouse galleries, doesn’t show well, and nor does Nobuyoshi Araki, since his trussed nudes look even seedier, if that’s possible, on this small scale.

Why is Polaroid so uncompromising? Because it’s so limited. Size can vary (Roe Etheridge’s giant ‘Popcorn Factory’ has an uneasy banality that is strikingly different from the crisp examination of the ordinary in Walker Evans’s tiny street signs) but there’s no zoom, no wide-angle. The medium, invented by Edwin H Land in 1947, was especially useless for landscape photography. Hockney’s disparaging comment about photography, that it ‘is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops’, may be grossly unfair to the genre, but it works for Polaroid.

Which is not to say that the instant camera has nothing to offer, quite the contrary. Limitations are artistic Viagra – even a paralysed Cyclops can imagine, or dream. David Bailey manages to superimpose a sharply delineated statue on the trademark Polaroid fog; Marc Quinn paints on the tiles; Bourdin somehow recreates his own world – the gorgeous, ghostly girl, the glorious background, the pervasive miasma of imminent unhappiness – in images that are formed in a finger’s click. Andre Kertesz, working just after his wife died, creates extraordinary, ineffably sad images of loneliness and vanished happiness using glass statues and an out-of-focus background that feels Parisian (despite the fact that the pictures were actually taken in New York); Michael Snow takes a mirror and sticks on it an assemblage of Polaroids so brilliantly self-referential it even incorporates the viewer’s puzzled frown, staring back from behind monochrome images of Snow taking Polaroids in a mirror.

Pumphouse has a 1972 film by Charles and Ray Eames which flags up the simple Polaroid ethos of ‘point, click, shoot’ – then offers such bewildering detail on the machine’s inner workings you’d need a science degree to understand it, and both these exhibitions also veer between the simple (Storm modelling agency casting shots and found photography annotated with tawdry, disconsolate messages of forever love) and the intensely complicated, although many of the images – Jim Goldberg’s Liberians and Bangladeshis, Lucas Samaras’s smeared self-portraits – incorporate a little of both, just as a Polaroid image combines the desire to make lasting art with the craving for the instant visual hit.

Of all the well-known artists who have played around with this beguiling, difficult format, surely the most interesting is David Hockney, whose comments about paralysed Cyclops haven’t prevented him from experimenting with all kinds of photography. Hockney has long complained that most photos can only be looked at for about the same time as it takes to create them, so in the early 1980s, he took up the challenge to get ‘lived time’ into the medium. The results, as his composite image of Nicholas Wilder demonstrates, are descended directly from Cubism.

Polaroids from artists including Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Walker Evans Nobuyoshi Araki , Guy Bourdin , Tim Braden, Roe Ethridge , Walker Evans, David Hockney, André Kertész , John Latham, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jonathan Monk, Lisa Oppenheim , Lucas Samaras , Michael Snow, Juergen Teller , Wim Wenders are on display at the Pump House Gallery starting on 6 Ocotber 2009, and coincides with the October 2009 expiry date of the last batch of Polaroid film. This exhibition runs until 13 December 2009.

Pump House Gallery
Battersea Park
London
SW11 4NJ

Text credit: Nina Caplan