silverpoetics

“Nothing is too amazing to be true”

Hand tinted image. Otaue shinji (Rice planting rites) in Sumiyoshi taisha in Osaka.

visit Mrs Deane blog at :

http://www.beikey.net/mrs-deane/

Streepulse, a blog initiated by Olivier Thebaud

photography, street photography, streetculture…

© Kent Klich

© Junku Nishimura

© Gus Powell

© Olivier Thebaud

http://streetpulse.wordpress.com

“Time Zone” project is introduced by a group of photographers, living in different time zones.

Pablo Carrera Oser

This project explores, through photography, the sense of time, especially the
instantaneous time of our life and our society. The photographers decided to
share their free interpretations of being in the world, in this common space
called “Time Zone”.

Filippo Romano

Some of them searched wether inside the intimate or in the collective memory, others worked on sociological and architectural environments. All of them tried to find an authentic sense of time, suspended between the contemporary imposition of the immediacy of consumerism and medias, and the biological schedule of life.

collection David Damoison

The project is a deep and poetic reaction to the modern evolution of
culture and of humanist values. “Time Zone” is not just a diary of nostalgic photographers, but a group project made out of different visual experiences, gathered under the same open question about time and the concern of the photographer as witness and actor of his contemporary time.

Olivier Thebaud / Arte

Time Zone is initiated by Tangophoto members and guests Vincent Delbrouck, Lorenzo Castore, Marc Cellier, SevenTProject and Bamako African photography biennale’s workshop.

Timezone online

Robert Adams
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
16 novembre 2007 - 27 janvier 2008

Christophe Bourguedieu
Les passagers. ed Le Point du Jour

Sans titre, 2005, photo, © et courtesy: Christophe Bourguedieu, tous droits reservés

Figure discrète de la scène artistique française mais à l’audience sans cesse grandissante auprès de la plus jeune génération, Christophe Bourguedieu a publié Le Cartographe (2000), Tavastia (2002) et Eden (2004), fidèle à son éditeur Le Point du Jour. Son quatrième ouvrage est consacré à son voyage australien. L’univers qu’il construit au fur et à mesure de ses livres accorde une place essentielle aux atmosphères et à la psychologie de personnages dont les existences nous restent inaccessibles, mais dont on sent profondément l’incertitude face au destin. Inspiré aussi bien par le cinéma, la littérature que la musique, Bourguedieu travaille à ciseler le genre mineur un peu à la manière, pour les amateurs, du chanteur américain Daniel Johnston. En permanence conscient de l’échec qui menace l’ambition à faire œuvre, son art consiste à ne jamais se dérober devant la trivialité de la photographie et a mesurer la distance psychologique par la couleur et l’optique de manière à prendre la position la plus équitable face aux personnages qu’il façonne. Car, contrairement à ce que pourrait d’abord laisser croire les photographies de Christophe Bourguedieu, il ne s’agit en rien d’une approche naturaliste mais bien d’une construction où lieux et personnages bâtissent dans l’œuvre elle-même leur relations. Loin du photoreportage esthétisé, du documentaire social trash ou bien encore du tableau de la photographie “contemporaine”, l’œuvre de Bourguedieu s’inscrit dans la région humaine de l’art que l’on approche en lisant Raymond Carver ou en écoutant une mélodie des Kinks.
Michel Poivert

Filippo Romano / tangophoto
Pesareri Award 2007

Concrete China, 2005-2007

Edited by Michel Hurst and Robert Swope
powerHouse Books

Hardcover, 8 x 10 inches, 156 pages, 120 four-color and
black-and-white photographs
ISBN 1-57687-241-6

Some time ago, while at a New York flea market, inveterate collectors Michel Hurst and Robert Swope discovered a large body of snapshots: album after aged album of well-preserved images, taken roughly between the mid-50s and mid-60s, depicting a group of cross-dressers united around a place called Casa Susanna, a rather large and charmingly banal Victorian-style house in small-town New Jersey. The inhabitants, visitors, guests, and hosts used it as a weekend headquarters for a regular “girl’s life.” Someone—probably “Susanna” or the matriarch—nailed a wonder board on a tree proclaiming it “Casa Susanna,” and thus a Queendom was born.



Through these wonderfully intimate shots—perhaps never intended to see the light of day outside the sanctum of the “house”—Susanna and her gorgeous friends styled era-specific fashion shows and dress-up Christmas and tea parties. As gloriously primped as these documentary snaps are, it is in the more private and intimate life at Casa Susanna, where the girls sweep the front porch, cook, knit, play Scrabble, relax at the nearby lake and, of course, dress for the occasion, that the stunning insight to a very private club becomes nothing less than brilliant and awe inspiring in its pre-glam, pre-drag-pose ordinariness and nascent preening and posturing in new identities. It is not glamour for the stage but for each other, like other women who dress up to spend time with friends, flaunting their own sense of style. There is an evident pleasure of being here, at Casa Susanna, that is a liberation, a simplification of the conflicts inherent in a double life.

Armelle Hiance

from the serie Eis tin Poli

Laura Henno, nominated by Alain Fleischer, is the 2007 Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award’s laureate

Summer Crossing, 2007. C-print on aluminium, 100×128 cm

Anyone who ever witnessed a total eclipse remembers the disturbing and yet fascinating moment that precedes the darkness: animals fall silent and cease all movement, everything seems halted, hanging fire. Laura Henno’s photographs trigger the same kind of feeling: the impression that time has been suspended, frozen; and that during this intervening period, human beings are delivered up to some invisible, mysterious force.
Here we see teenagers or very young people lost in their musings or suddenly immobilised by something out of our perception. They indubitably appear to us as characters from a narrative, but we will never know anything about their history, about what they are looking at or what they are thinking of. Sometimes we shall not even see their faces, when they turn their backs on us or are engulfed by darkness. Laura Henno’s photographs are mostly built on pronounced chiaroscuro: the character is alone in the light while the surroundings are deliberately left in shadow. When the entire scene is lit, as in Freezing, in which an icy white pallor covers the landscape, there remains what we might call the “out of field mystery”, the conviction that there is something there of which we know nothing, but which exerts an irresistible pull on the character.
These photographs are not portraits, and psychology is not their concern. Laura Henno’s mises en scène place characters in meticulously chosen settings from which they seem indissociable: they give themselves up to their surroundings, letting themselves be aspirated and maybe engulfed by darkness or murky, viscous water.
In these images, we sense the photographer’s painstaking work with each model: finding just the right pose for the body, the right movement for a hand or a neck, the right expression in the eyes. And what in turn captures our eye is the tension of the character towards a presence which is invisible to our eyes.  
The distinctiveness of these photographs doubtlessly reflects both Laura Henno’s profound modesty and intense ambition: she makes no claim to capture the “soul” of a character in a “decisive moment”, she rather succeeds in preserving the mystery of places and beings, because she transcends the trivial and knows what to leave obscure or unsaid.

Marie-Thérèse Champesme

Untitled, 2007. C-print on aluminium, 74×94 cm

http://www.laurahenno.com

Edwin Zwackman

It will certainly one day become evident, if it is not already the case, that photography’s claim on objectivity, as an index to the “real”, was nothing but an anormaly, a growing pain in the history of the medium’s legitimisation process. For Edwin Zwakman, the justification of constructed photography is no longer dependent on its subtle fractures with “photographic evidence”. That critical front, initiated over 30 years ago in conceptual photographic practises and finally synthesized and popularised in the large scale photographs of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, has run its historical course.

For Zwackman and other young photographers emerging in the digital age, there is an absolute acceptance of the constructed image at every level of cultural production, and a celebration of its visual effects over claims to its genealogy with the “real”.

Zwakman pulls his camera back to reveal the lights and stagecraft behins his elaborate sets, not out of a self-conscious modernist disposition, but to demonstrate the absolute equivalence between the scene depicted by the the maquette and the instrumentality of the photographic act the business of the constructed image as usual.

What is unique to Zwakman’s photographs is the way in which his laborious construction methodology re-enacts the overdetemined environmental design processes particular to the Dutch landscape he depicts. It is this doubly constructed effect that give his images their critical edge. The residue of utopian modernist ideals that permeate the sujects of his photographs are slowly and critically undone through their obsessive reconstruction as images.

The problematic inherent in the effect of Zwakman’s laborious production method is that it solicits a slow and allegorically paced reading that may no longer be ready accessible in a globally modelled universe immersed in fast image turnovers and the depreciation of the complex layered languages bases of cultural specificity. In this regard, his photographs are resistant to the constructed photographic methodology of advertising. In response, they register a desire for a symetry between the labor of artisitc production and the labor of receivership. “Time”, with all its false starts, delays and expenditures, is their ultimate subjects. For both Zwakman and his viewers no stone should be left unturned.

Dennis Adams, 1998.

Galerie Akinci