REYNER BANHAM – AMERICA

Posted on 2017-07-10

British architectural historian Peter Reyner Banham was not only a vivid writer but also a compulsive snapshot photographer who described himself as an ‘observational historian.’ Banham repeatedly visited and recorded buildings, cities and landscapes with one of his many cameras and several Ecktachrome and Kodachrome films. This exhibition gives an insight into his America to which he moved in 1976 to join the University of New York in Buffalo. Industrial landscapes, car lots, ordinary houses, a view of the road; these photographs are only a selection of his hundreds of 35mm colour slides housed at the AA Photo Library that reveal his distinct photographic body of work.

Peter Reyner Banham was an English architectural critic and prolific writer best known for his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
Banham was based in London, but lived primarily in the United States from the late 1960s until the end of his life.

Opposite – Bus depot, Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz, California

Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2017

Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture
36 Bedford Square
London
WC1B 3ES

www.aaschool.ac.uk

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MICHAEL LESY – LOOKING BACKWARD

Posted on 2017-07-10

Michael Lesy: Looking Backward looks at how the United States viewed the world at the dawn of the twentieth century. Presented in tandem with the release of Lesy’s book, Looking Backward: Images of the World at the Beginning of the 20th Century, published by W.W. Norton in conjunction with the California Museum of Photography, the exhibition is drawn from scholar Michael Lesy’s 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, which he spent researching in the museum’s Keystone-Mast Collection, the largest surviving archive of stereoscopic photographs.

The photographs featured in the exhibition Michael Lesy: Looking Backward are featured in the book. Presented in the gallery, they will utilize various stereoscopic devices that engage images’ sense of three-dimensional depth. These viewing methods include stereoscopes like one might have found in a Victorian parlor, including several historic devices drawn from the California Museum of Photography’s extensive photographic technology collections, as well as 3-D projection, like one might encounter in a 3-D movie today, and the View-Master, a stereoscopic viewer ubiquitous in the second half of the twentieth century.

Opposite – San Francisco Earthquake, 1906

Exhibition runs through to July 15th, 2017

California Museum of Photography
3824 Main Street
Riverside
California
CA 92501

artsblock.ucr.edu

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MADE IN BRIXTON

Posted on 2017-07-03

“Made in Brixton” features the work of seven Photofusion members; Mark Aitken, Katie Barlow, Carole Evans, Camille Mack, Chris Moyse, Nik Strangelove, and Alys Tomlinson. The seven projects that will hang together in Photofusion’s gallery celebrate, in one way or another, their community.

Exhibition runs through to July 15th, 2017

Photofusion Photography Centre
17A Electric Lane
London
Brixton
SW9 8LA

www.photofusion.org

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MICHAEL KENNA – CONFESSIONALS/ABRUZZO

Posted on 2017-07-03

‘Confessionals’ is a departure from the landscape work for which Kenna has become known and is the culmination of over 10-years work, travelling through Reggio Emilia, a city in northern Italy, to document hundreds of Catholic confessional booths. These will be shown alongside new photographs of the Abruzzo landscape from his new book, published by Nazraeli Press.

‘Confessionals’ is a typology of confessional booths from a distinct geographical region, documenting booths from the 13th century to the present. Shot in black and white, each booth is uniformly the focal point of each image, framed by the details of the church interior which happen to be in shot albeit a crucifix, pillar or ladder offering small clues as to the church’s architecture and context in which the booth is placed.

Kenna’s careful composition of the booths symbolises what he continues to search for in his photography, ‘the invisible with the visible, the intangible contained with the tangible, the illusion of reality’. Kenna is not interested in documenting man’s physical presence, but rather the traces that he has left behind and he believes Confessionals to be containers of memories and hidden secrets . Each photograph displays immaculate detail and continues ongoing fascination with capturing memories and stories, viewing the booths as containers of memory and hidden secrets.

Opposite – Confessional, Study 68, Chiesa Di San Filippo Neri, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2016

Exhibition runs through to July 15th, 2017

Beetles+Huxley
3-5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE

www.beetlesandhuxley.com

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MONICA DE MIRANDA – PANORAMA

Posted on 2017-07-03

The exhibition takes its title from the Hotel Panorama in Luanda, but also refers to the ownership and power implied by the construction of views of landscapes. In de Miranda’s photographic work, we see visions of the past and present of Angola as witnessed through its architectural geography: hotels, swimming pools and cinemas, mid-century modernist buildings which once served as monuments to colonial leisure, have been abandoned, repurposed, and are being silently reclaimed by the lush natural landscape. These urban spaces bear witness to the country’s troubled history of colonization, decolonization, civil war, gentrification and globalization.

Opposite – Ticket Office, 2017

Exhibition runs through to July 13th, 2017

Tyburn Gallery
26 Barrett Street
London
W1U 1BG

www.tyburngallery.com

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IVAR WIGAN – YOUNG LOVE

Posted on 2017-06-26

Building on the runaway success of his first solo exhibition with PM/AM: The Gods in 2015, Ivar Wigan returns with a new body of work documenting two years living in Jamaica.
Expanding on the artist’s long standing relationship with the island, first encountered in his youth whilst living nomadically with his family, Young Love is both documentation and celebration of a culture Wigan holds in deep affection. His organic response to the idiosyncrasies of the island capture the spirit of youthful energy, sexual freedom and resourcefulness against adversity. Images shift effortlessly between the domestic, the jubilant and the bizarre, whilst the subtle beauty of daily life is juxtaposed with raucous party scenes and unflinching portraiture.

Opposite – Girl and Dog, 2017

Exhibition runs June 30th through September 11th, 2017

PM/AM
259-269 Old Marylebone Road
London
NW1 5RA

www.pmam.org

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