HAN BING - URBAN AMBER

In Urban Amber, Han Bing’s visual interventions also raise questions about the paradoxes of desire. Desire for Han Bing is an irreducibly bifurcated modality, that is, it has powerful manifestations and effects that can be both beautiful and poisonous. In his conceptual photography series of single-exposure images, Urban Amber, this paradox takes on a different form. The spectre of glamorous high-rises, those icons of middle-class China’s dreams of home and a better life, are juxtaposed to the rundown, temporary dwellings of the urban poor living in their shadows. These fantasy high-rises appear resplendent and dream-like until you realize that their inverted images are reflected in Beijing’s ubiquitous, industrial-waste and garbage-infested “stinky rivers.” Like amber, these rivers capture the sediment of the times, showing us through a mirror darkly, the underbelly of China’s fantasy of modernity.


IMAGES © HAN BING

Bepi Ghiotti, Sources, Centr for Contemporary Art, Rivara.

ghiotti castellodirivara.it

The origins of life are shrouded in myth, while modern man 

forgoes the sense of time, of nature and of history in the 

unrelenting and time lasting progression of the desert, 

mostly and mainly the interior one, dissipating supreme 

values and loosing the image of nature itself.

The annihilation of the invisible and sacred has reached 

the visible too, followed by the sunset of nature’s manifestation.

Due to the absence of the human figure, as a time and 

space descriptive element, these photographs represent a 

fragment of something bigger: the pix of nature, which 

becomes a temple.

However the spontaneous act of giving importance to the 

narrative void, revealing the assets of present condition, 

is aimed to a time travel backwards up to the essence and 

record an apparently anonymous and banal heritage predicting 

one of the biggest problems of the future, therefore building 

a sort of encyclopedia of what actually is the status of main 

water resources on our planet today. 

Hosted in the Medieval Castle, home of the Museum of Italian Art 1985-2010,  Sources of Bepi Ghiotti is an open project born in 2007 as a reflection on the necessity of a greater awareness on the importance of water on Earth.

Intertwining technique and contents, the series of ten large photographic pieces unveils the essential, the origin, the source: the point, unique, from which everything is originated.

   

ghiotti castellodirivara.it

All images © Bepi Ghiotti, cortesy by Castello di Rivara, Centr for Contemporary Art 

THOMAS STRUTH - NEW WORKS - GALERIE MAX HETZLER - BERLIN

Thomas Struth - New Works - Galerie Max Hetzler - Berlin - 7 October - 27 November 2010

Simon Norfolk

Simon Norfolk, Great-Britain, 1963, focuses on war and all the consequences that come from it. 

Instead of showing us the horrors in bloody manors, he chooses to make stunning photographs 

that look at the aftermaths, the belongings people have lost and the technology behind the wars. 

In his series Archaeological Teasures from the Tigris Valley he performed excavations at battlefield 

sites and photographed the objects found in an improvised studio on site. 

The following images come from the series Afghanistan: Chronotopia, Archaeological Treasures from the Tigris Valley and The LHC: The Spirit of Enquiry.

all  images © by Simon Norfolk

Website: www.simonnorfolk.com

ZHANG XIAO

© ZHANG XIAO

SOURCES, BEPI GHIOTTI, CASTELLO DI RIVARA - CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY AR

ghiotti castellodirivara.it

Hosted in the Medieval Castle, home of the Museum of Italian Art 1985-2010, Sources of Bepi Ghiotti is an open project born in 2007 as a reflection on the necessity of a greater awareness on the importance of water on Earth. Intertwining technique 

and contents, the series of ten large photographic pieces unveils the essential, the origin, the source: the point, unique, from which everything is originated.

   

ghiotti castellodirivara.it

All images © Bepi Ghiotti, cortesy by Castello di Rivara, Centr for Contemporary Art 

Alec Soth and Martin Parr in conversation

http://vimeo.com/15438368


In this month's multimedia feature Martin Parr interviews acclaimed
photographer Alec Soth. As part of the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010,
Soth was commissioned by Photoworks to be included in the exhibition
"Strange and Familiar." For his contribution to the show, Soth
collaborated with his daughter, Carmen, to produced a project titled
"Brighton Picture Hunt," for which the father-daughter team explored
and photographed the towns of Brighton & Hove in Southern England.
Please feel free to embed this video on your own site.
Daylight Multimedia Podcast - Brighton Photo Biennial - Alec Soth & Martin Parr in conversation, produced and published by Daylight Multimedia.








artprospect

Florian Maier-Aichen

Florian Maier-Aichen is a 36 year-old German photographer whose interesting experimental landscape work positions him somewhere very different from his more famous peers, such as Gursky and Strüth. Based between California and Cologne, his images are an individual, unique reinterpretation of classic landscape and cityscape photography. Referencing the work of masters of the field such as Carleton Watkins or Ansel Adams, Maier-Aichen often shoots clichéd scenes but does something strange with them. Aerial views, subtle comping of pictures, or odd effects applied to the final print create images that feel both familiar and ‘off’, playing with our sense of perception.

Using different techniques for different projects, Maier-Aichen questions what an idealized landscape photograph should look like. In 2005 he shot images in California on colour infra-red film, rendering well-known American vistas like the Pacific Coast Highway or the popular tourist location Lake June as inhospitable, martian landscapes. His 2004 photograph of Long Beach is like an industrialized Ansel Adams take on a huge, mechanized city; a view no human eye could ever see. Deliberately choosing the industrial backside of Los Angeles and adding the mountain range in post-production, Maier-Aichen, shows us a strange, dystopian, sprawling view of an instantly recognisable city in a new and unexpected way.

In ‘Chamonix, 2007’ he mimics a Kodachrome postcard of an idyllic alpine scene, but shoots the image from a dirt car park, complete with tyre tracks in the foreground. Another mountain scene from that year shows a winding alpine pass zig-zagging under a sky whose clouds are all printed out of register, creating a psychedelic sky above the snowy peaks.

Other images are shot at night from the air, with only twinkling lights alluding to the presence of a city, or in an alpine valley in the middle of a snowstorm, all but obscuring the view. The Maersk tanker photographs are also disconcerting – one showing a vessel seemingly reflected in glassily calm water, the other showing a capsized tanker with its cargo bobbing in the ocean…or does it?

Unfortunately a computer screen really doesn’t do these photographs justice. Some of the prints are 1 or 2 meters wide, and the level of detail is breathtaking. If you’re ever somewhere like The Whitney, MOCA or the Saatchi Gallery they are definitely worth seeing in person.

Untitled, 2005

Above Lake June, 2005

Untitled, 2005

Untitled, 2005

Untitled (Long Beach), 2004

Untitled, 2007

Untitled, 2005

Spiral Jetty, 2009

Chamonix, 2007

Untitled (Capsized), 2001

Untitled (Maersk), 2001

The Best General View, 2007

Untitled, 2007

All images © Florian Maier-Aichen