PIETER HUGO

Posted on 2013-01-07

This new series of photographs (2011 – 2012), on show for the first time, consists of nearly one hundred close-up portraits of the artist and his friends, all of whom have made South Africa their home or who are from there. Through a digital process of converting colour images to black and white while manipulating the colour channels, Hugo emphasizes the pigment (melanin) in his sitters’ skins so they appear heavily marked by blemishes and sun damage. Damages that are common to all human beings. As the result, these images denounce the contradictions of racial distinctions based on skin colour. Discriminations that, from Hugo’s point of view, remain ineradicable even in hell, as Morrissey says in his ominous song: “Our skin | And our blood | And our bones | Don’get in your way | Making you ill | The way they did | When we lived | Oh, There is a place | A place in hell | Reserved | For me and my friends”.

Opposite – Yasser Booley, 2011

Exhibition runs through till January 19th, 2013

Extraspazio Gallery
Via San Francesco di Sales 16/a
I – 00165
Rome
Italy

www.extraspazio.it

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E.O. HOPPE – LONDON

Posted on 2013-01-07

Hoppé was one of the most renowned portrait photographers of his day, as well as a brilliant landscape and travel photographer. His strikingly modernist portraits describe a virtual Who’s Who of important personalities in the arts, literature, and politics in Great Britain and the US between the wars. Among the hundreds of well-known figures he photographed were George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, G.K. Chesterton, Leon Bakst, Vaslav Nijinsky and the dancers of the Ballets Russes, and Queen Mary, King George, and other members of the Royal Family.

Beginning art photography in 1903 Hoppé was admitted as a member of the Royal Photographic Society where, over the next four years, he regularly exhibited his amateur photographic works. In this same year Hoppé was also associated with The Linked Ring Brotherhood and fellow members Alvin Langdon Coburn, Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), and George Davidson (1854-1930), who played an important role in international art photography, maintaining close ties with continental and American groups including the Vienna Camera Club and the Photo Secession, New York.

Opposite – St James Park towards Westminister, London, 1935

Exhibition runs from January 15th to January 19th, 2013

Craig Krull Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Avenue
Building B-3
Santa Monica
California
90404

www.craigkrullgallery.com

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DOMINGO MILELLA

Posted on 2013-01-07

Over the last ten years, Milella’s subjects have been cities and their borders, cemeteries and villages, caves and homes, tombs and hieroglyphs – in short, signs of man’s presence on earth. His interest lies in the overlap between civilization and nature and how landscape and architecture are invested with individual and collective memory.

In the ancient Turkish city, Myra, Milella has photographed the spectacular tombs that are carved into stone cliffs, as if they are part of the mountain. The carved facades appear almost like a cluster of homes, the design reflecting how the wooden houses of the period would have looked. In another image, Milella has photographed a sanctuary in Phrygia, a lime stone formation filled with ancient holes, shaped by both natural and human interaction. A place of refuge, of spiritual purpose and sacrifice, the sanctuary encapsulates Milella’s enquiry into an identity which is simultaneously archaic and contemporary.

The fallen ruins of the Greco-Roman theatre of Termessos stand at 1600m above sea level and almost appears to be part of and contained by the Taurus mountains that surround them. They have endured over two thousand years of elemental weathering, frozen in time on the day the city was abandoned. The idea of durability and the passage of time on language and culture are also present in the image of the cemetery at Van, a city on the border between Turkey and Iran. Muslim graves stand in a snowy field. Their height and dark, monolithic presence make them appear like the skyline of a modern city. Inscribed with Selgiuchid writings, the graves are an architectural model of time, of memory and of survival.

Opposite – Phrygian Sanctuary, Turkey, 2012

Exhibition runs through till January 26th, 2013

Brancolini Grimaldi
43 – 44 Albemarle Street
First floor
London
W1S 4JJ

www.brancolinigrimaldi.com

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HOME -YPA MENTORING 2012

Posted on 2012-12-31

The Young Photographers’ Alliance (www.ypauk.org) charity was created to nurture young photographic talent, helping photographers aged between 18 and 29 to develop both the technical skills and business acumen required to build successful and sustainable careers.
“Home”: YPA Mentoring 2012 showcases the images from this year’s YPA Mentoring Programme. The Mentoring Programme links emerging artists with established photographers and picture editors/ art buyers, teaching the mentees how to work to a brief while honing their technical skills and creative approach.

The small teams of young photographers are collectively assigned a common brief and they are given two months to deliver their final projects. The mentors meet regularly with their teams, offering support and guidance from the initial conceptual stage through to the final editing process.
The theme for the 2012 Mentoring Programme was “Home”. In the UK, YPA hosted teams in Bristol, Glasgow, and London (a Commercial and an Editorial team). The mentors included McCann London Head Art Buyer, Sophie Chapman-Andrews, Independent on Sunday Picture Editor, Sophie Batterbury, and leading reportage photographer, Justin Sutcliffe. The British Mentoring Programme ran in conjunction with the charity’s North American scheme, creating 18 teams across the US, Britain, and Asia.

Exhibition runs from January 8th to January 17th, 2013

Margaret Street Gallery
63 Margaret Street
London
W1W 8SW

margaretstreetgallery.com

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E. CHAMBRE HARDMAN

Posted on 2012-12-31

Irish-born Edward Chambré Hardman (b.1898 d.1988) is best known for his photograph The Birth of the Ark Royal (1950) and for the highly successful commercial portrait studio that he ran on Liverpool’s Bold Street from 1923, and Rodney Street from 1949.
The early 1930s marked a turning point for Hardman as he began to develop his passion for picturing the varied British landscape – from the wilderness to the pastoral, in a style that moved him away from the soft focus of Pictorialism.

In 1979 Hardman’s entire photographic output would have been lost were it not for the intervention of Peter Hagerty, the Open Eye Gallery’s then Director. Hagerty played a pivotal role in saving this archive, dedicating many years to cataloguing, conserving, and contextualising Hardman’s work.
This exhibition brings together a selection of E. Chambré Hardman’s landscapes taken over a forty-year period. Curated by Julia García Hernández, it is delivered in partnership with the National Trust.

Exhibition runs through till February 17th, 2013

Open Eye Gallery
19 Mann Island
Liverpool Waterfront
Liverpool
L3 1BP

www.openeye.org.uk

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DAVID HILLIARD – THE TALE IS TRUE

Posted on 2012-12-31

In this new body of work, Hilliard continues to deconstruct issues surrounding familial relation-ships, and the struggle to secure a sense of self and place in a chaotic world. For over 20 years Hilliard has intermittently made photographs of his father, often including himself, exploring their relationship and the process of aging. In The Tale is True, Hilliard returns to the father-son narrative, using his multi-panel panoramas (polyptychs) to explore a family’s perseverance as they struggle to avoid an entropic slide toward ruin. Their Cape Cod family home, a legacy of generations of Yankee prosperity and tradition, serves as a symbol of identity, entrapment and history. Within these photographs, Hilliard unfolds the story of a father and son trying to maintain their physical and emotional footing while being swept up in the confluence of a complicated past and uncertain future. The tension between disillusionment and hope pervades this narrative, and is further punctuated by allegorical and symbolist cues within Hilliard’s multi-panel arrangements.

Much like the polyptychs of Renaissance ecclesiastical painting, each of Hilliard’s photographs offers the viewer the opportunity to explore from panel to panel the universal story of man’s frailty, and travails of the human spirit. Just as earlier paintings displayed stories or religious histories coupled with the mystical and mythological, Hilliard utilizes narrative and metaphor to reveal philosophical and spiritual themes of fate and faith, and the necessity of patience in adversity.

Exhibition runs from January 10th to February 16th, 2013

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York
NY
10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

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