fototazo: Marc Feustel

Showing posts with label Marc Feustel. Show all posts

2.13.2014

Reading Shortlist 2.13.14

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with an eclectic listing of recommended sites, readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous shortlists, please visit the site links page.

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Colors Magazine, All Official Portraiture of North Korea's Reigning Kim Family Is Made by Mansudae Art Studio. A little about how to become an official North Korean painter of Kim Jung-un images, North Korean symbology and Mansudae's (generally disastrous) excursions into African public sculpture projects.

Marc Feustel, Amercian Suburb X, Takashi Homma: Adrift in the City of Superflat. Feustel is one of my favorite online writers. He's obviously very well-informed about East Asian photography and he combines clean text with pinpointing ideas and issues. Here he talks about Homma as one of the photographers in the post-Provoke era who searched for a different photography vocabulary to explore the explosion of suburbs and modernization projects in Tokyo after the 1980s economic boom.

John Foster, The Design Observer Group, The Renewed Art of Embroidered Photographs. Here Foster presents both historic embroidered postcards as well as the work of two contemporary photographers who have revived the practice, Maurizio Anzeri and Hinke Schreuders, whose work is below.

Fotografía Magazine. “Photography is wandering in the universe by yourself” – From a letter by Sergio Larrain. Larrain gives advice to his nephew, who wants to become a photographer, about where to start.

Interview with Judith Joy Ross. Ross speaking about her beginnings in photography, her experience under the dark cloth, meeting John Szarkowski, her relationship with her subjects and her personal reasons for developing her various projects. The interview was done in connection with her exhibition at Foundation A Stichting.

Video still from Interview with Judith Joy Ross

Pasaporte al Arte. ¿Qué está sucediendo con la fotografía en Colombia? Colombian photographers Jorge Panchoaga, Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo and Federico Rios organized a talk at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín on the contemporary photography landscape in Colombia as a response to the series Alec Soth and I have been running on the question. In Spanish. Better audio quality coming next week.

Louisiana Channel, Dayanita Singh, Stealing in the night. Interview with Singh about her project based on a burglary in which the burglars stole her exposed rolls of film from under her bed.

Issei Suda at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art in Portland, Oregon. Hat tip to Kevin Thrasher - I'm enjoying getting to know Suda's work.

TateShots: Lewis Baltz. Can you tell I'm watching lots of photo videos these days? One more video interview, this time with Baltz about his start in photography and his reasons for photographing, the role of the viewer in art, photography as the only "deductive art" and the world as divided between those who like Matisse and those who like Duchamp.

2.10.2012

Reading Shortlist 2.12.12

The Reading Shortlist is an occasional post with a listing of recommended readings and links. A recommendation does not necessarily suggest an agreement with the contents of the post. For previous lists, please visit the site links page.

Blake Andrews, B, Reject. Andrews on his vast personal collection of rejection letters, his new approach to show applications, whether or not this is all worth it, and a copy of Robert Frank's Guggenheim application for good measure.

Sharon Boothroyd, Photoparley, Marc Feustel on Social Media. eyecurious' Feustel on the decline of photoblogging, on the impact of blogs on the exposure of new talent, and on the online photographic community.

Pete Brook, Wired, In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them. Photographer Paul Shambroom talks about his motivations for moving from his long and distinguished career making large-format images on America's infrastructure to working with found online images.

Featured Speaker John Gossage / SPE Conference at Light Work. An hour long lecture by Gossage that's part of the excellent SPE Conference lecture series that also includes talks by Ken Schles and Thilde Jensen as well as a roundtable hosted by Andy Adams about Photography 2.0.

Richard Mosse, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Through the Glass Brightly: Eastern Congo by Infrared. An excerpt of Mosse's essay from his new book, Infra. A powerful and well-thought through essay that serves as a model for anyone looking to work on their statement.

Claire O'Neill, NPR's The Picture Show, Deborah Luster: The Power of a Picture. An audio conversation with Luster who began photographing prisoners in rural Louisiana as a way to make visual one of the reasons the local countryside had become de-populated and as a way of coping with her mother's murder.

Colin Pantall, Introspective, navel-gazing nitpickers. Pantall on the problems in the contemporary photobook market and in the consumption of photobooks, especially the tendency to blindly follow tastemakers.

Adriana Teresa, New York Times Lens Blog, A Moment With Larry Fink. Teresa, co-founder of FotoVisura and publisher of Visura Magazine, conducts a interview with Fink that's biographic and that also includes questions on Fink's specific projects.

12.13.2011

A Question About: Provoke

The question: What was Provoke magazine and why was it important?

The respondent: Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: A Self-Portrait, Photographs 1945-1964 (Flammarion, 2004) and the founder of Studio Equis, an organisation devoted to broadening access to the visual arts between different cultures, with a focus on the relationship between Japan and the West. He writes for several photographic publications including European Photography, Foam, Fantom, Look and VU MAG and blogs at www.eyecurious.com.

The response: Provoke was a magazine founded in Japan in 1968 by the photographer and writer Takuma Nakahira, the poet Takahiko Okada, the photographer Yutaka Takanashi and the art critic Koji Taki (although Daido Moriyama is maybe the name most commonly associated with Provoke, he didn't come on board until the second issue of the magazine). Araki famously said that he was "jealous of Provoke" and wanted to join them but wasn't allowed. Although it was very short-lived, lasting only three issues, it came to define a generation of Japanese photography. The style associated with Provoke was known as are, bure, bokeh (rough, blurry, out-of-focus), a style which lasted far beyond Provoke's short lifetime and which is still used by many photographers today. Beyond the are, bure, bokeh aesthetic, the philosophy of the magazine was based on the same rough, disruptive approach, mirroring the extremely turbulent social and political climate of the late 1960s. Rather than the magazines itself, Provoke is maybe best characterised by two books by Provoke photographers: Moriyama's Shashin yo sayonara (Bye Bye Photography) and Takuma Nakahira's Kitarubeki Kotoba no Tameni (For a Language to Come). Both of these books were an attempt to stretch the limits of the language of vocabulary and to break the existing mould of photography.

Provoke was undoubtedly important, but sometimes I think its importance is overstated as there are many other dynamic periods in Japanese photography (both before and after Provoke), that receive far less attention. For example Shomei Tomatsu, Kikuji Kawada, Ikko Narahara and other photographers of the generation just before Provoke had already rejected the objective associated with documentary photography in the post-war years, creating a "subjective documentary" that laid the ground for the photographers of the Provoke generation. Nonetheless the impact of Provoke on Japanese photography is undeniable. Takashi Homma, one of the most prominent photographers in Japan today, compares the photographic landscape after Provoke to a "burned field," likening it's impact to that of an atomic bomb.

7.24.2011

f100: Marie Quéau, Erik van der Weijde

fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.

Today we resume the series after a summer break with responses from Marc Feustel.

We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann, Bryan Formhals, Richard Mosse, Shane Lavalette, Amy Stein, Amani Willett, Wayne Ford, S. Billie Mandle, Leslie K. Brown and Gordon Stettinius.

Respondent: Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: A Self-Portrait, Photographs 1945-1964 (Flammarion, 2004) and the founder of Studio Equis (www.studioequis.net), an organisation devoted to broadening access to the visual arts between different cultures, with a focus on the relationship between Japan and the West. He writes for several photographic publications including European Photography, Foam, Fantom, Look and VU MAG and blogs at www.eyecurious.com.

Selections: Marie Quéau and Erik van der Weijde

I first discovered Marie Quéau's series Gojira at the Hyères Photography Festival. I was intrigued by the way the series combines a very wide range of different imagery to explore an abstract concept: the myth of Godzilla. Although she uses all sorts of images for this project—'classic' landscape, solarised abstraction, photo-montage, lo-fi gif—which come from sometimes totally unrelated sources, the result is extremely coherent and evocative without resorting to obvious references. The series is still a work in progress and it will be fascinating to see how it develops.

Erik van der Weijde is a prolific bookmaker (you can see a list of all his publications at www.4478zine.com). His work is all about the book form and his latest publication is a 5-part series of zines where he mixes his own images with work by five other photographers (Erik Kessels, Linus Bill, Takashi Homma, Eric Tabuchi and Paul Kooiker). He has a mischievous and irreverent sense of humour (the collaboration with Tabuchi is subtitled "modernist churches in France and the wife's butt") but his books also force us to think about the many decisions that are taken when making a book and how images relate to each other within that form.