RENE BURRI – LARGER THAN LIFE

Posted on 2012-05-07

Having worked for the prestigious Magnum agency since 1982, producing some of the most iconic photographs of our age. The Swiss photographer’s work has been collected and exhibited worldwide as well as being in nearly every major magazine for over the last 60 years. Larger than Life features René Burri’s most iconic and celebrated works presented for the first time in a monumental size and limited edition.

Born in Zurich in 1933, Burri studied design and composition, and worked as a documentary filmmaker before turning to photography during military service. In 1955 Burri had made his first contact with Magnum through Werner Bischof, when his first reportage was on deaf-mute children, which was published in LIFE as well as other European magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson famously sent Burri away to work on a defining body of work. The resulting work was taken over a six month period, which was a photographic poem on the life of Gauchos on the Argentinian Pampas, which consequently cemented his membership of Magnum in 1959. Burri was 26 when eventually Gauchos was published in 1968. He achieved international recognition with the publication of Die Deutschen (The Germans) in 1962 displaying a powerful portrait of a changing nation in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in the style of Robert Frank’s Americans, at a time when the memory of the war and the consequences of defeat were still evident and recovery was just beginning.

Opposite – São Paulo, Brazil, 1960

Exhibition runs through till June 9th, 2012

Atlas Gallery
49 Dorset Street
London
W1U 7NF
United Kingdom

www.atlasgallery.com

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ANTON CORBIJN – INWARDS AND ONWARDS

Posted on 2012-05-07

The large-format portraits featured in the exhibition »Inwards and Onwards« testify to the substantial body of artistic work that Anton Corbijn has created.Apart from striking photographs of true music legends such as Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith or Tom Waits, who have always fascinated Corbijn, the photographer has focussed in his recent work on modern personifications of artistic inspiration such as Marlene Dumas, Gilbert & George or Jeff Koons. Working only in black and white with a Hasselblad camera, Anton Corbijn aims to reduce his photo shoots to the essential. He uses his subjects’ familiar environments as settings and works on his own with available light – assistants or artificial lighting are off-limits for him. Corbijn understands the camera as a means to an end – ultimately, he tries to capture the personality and the character hidden deep within the person portrayed beyond any kind of superficial staging although some playfulness is sometimes apparent as with Damien Hirst’s photograph and that of Jeff Koons.

Opposite – Kate Moss, New York, 1996

Exhibition runs through till June 9th, 2012

Galerie Camera Work
Kantstraße 149
10623
Berlin
Germany

www.camerawork.de

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TARYN SIMON

Posted on 2012-05-07

This exhibition is the U.S. premiere of Taryn Simon’s (b. 1975, New York) photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII. The work was produced over a four-year period (2008–11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and documenting bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the 18 “chapters” that make up the work, external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate.

Simon’s project is divided into 18 chapters, nine of which will be presented at MoMA. Each chapter is comprised of three segments: one of a large portrait series depicting bloodline members (portrait panel); a second featuring text (annotation panel); and a third containing photographic evidence (footnote panel).

Exhibition runs through till September 3rd, 2012

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York
NY
10019

www.moma.org

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