Germany

Chi non conosce August Sander?

/ saramunari / 6 commenti

Ciao a tutti,

avevamo già parlato di questo importante fotografo tedesco del 900 e dei suoi ritratti in questo articolo.

Approfondiamo un po’ la sua conoscenza.

Ciao

Anna

 

Antlitz der Zeit: Sechzig Aufnahmen Deutscher Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts by Sander, August

August Sander (Herdorf, 17 novembre 1876 – Colonia, 20 aprile 1964) è stato un fotografo tedesco.

Sander era figlio di un carpentiere che lavorava nell’industria mineraria. Mentre lavorava in una miniera locale, Sander imparò i primi rudimenti della fotografia assistendo un fotografo che stava lavorando per la compagnia mineraria. Col supporto finanziario di suo zio comprò l’attrezzatura fotografica e allestì una sua camera oscura. Svolse il servizio militare (1897 – 1899) come assistente di un fotografo, e gli anni successivi viaggiò attraverso la Germania. Nel 1901 iniziò a lavorare per uno studio fotografico a Linz, diventandone prima socio (1902) e poi unico proprietario. Nel 1910 lasciò Graz e aprì un nuovo studio a Colonia.

Nei primi anni venti Sander si unì al “Gruppo degli Artisti Progressivi” di Colonia e cominciò a pianificare un catalogo della società contemporanea attraverso una serie di ritratti. Nel 1927 Sander, insieme allo scrittore Ludwig Mathar, viaggiò per la Sardegna per tre mesi, scattando circa 500 fotografie. Comunque, un diario dettagliato dei suoi viaggi non fu mai completato.

Il primo libro di Sander Face of our Time fu pubblicato nel 1929. Contiene una selezione di 60 ritratti tratti dalla serie People of the Twentieth Century (Ritratti del Ventesimo Secolo). Sotto il regime nazista, il suo lavoro e la sua vita personale furono pesantemente limitati. Suo figlio Erich, che era un membro del partito di sinistra Sozialistischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SAP), fu arrestato nel 1934 e condannato a 10 anni di prigione, dove morì nel 1944, poco prima della fine della sua condanna. Il libro di Sander Face of our Time fu sequestrato nel 1936 e le lastre furono distrutte, in quanto l’uomo proposto dal fotografo non corrispondeva al modello proposto dal regime nazista.

Durante il decennio successivo il lavoro di Sander fu rivolto primariamente alla natura e alla fotografia di paesaggio. Quando esplose la seconda guerra mondiale lasciò Colonia e si trasferì in campagna, permettendo così di salvare la maggior parte dei suoi negativi. Il suo studio fu distrutto nel 1944 durante un bombardamento.

Il lavoro di Sander comprende paesaggi, natura, foto di architettura e street photography, ma è famoso soprattutto per i suoi ritratti, come esemplificati dalla serie Uomini del Ventesimo Secolo. In questa serie egli cerca di offrire un catalogo della società tedesca durante la Repubblica di Weimar. La serie è divisa in sette sezioni: i Contadini, i Commercianti, le Donne, Classi e Professioni, gli Artisti, le Città e gli Ultimi (homeless, veterani, ecc.).

Fonte “Wikipedia”

August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander’s first book Face of our Time (German: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as “the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century.

Sander was born in Herdorf, the son of a carpenter working in the mining industry. While working at a local mine, Sander first learned about photography by assisting a photographer who was working for a mining company. With financial support from his uncle, he bought photographic equipment and set up his own darkroom.

He spent his military service (1897–99) as a photographer’s assistant and the next years wandering across Germany. In 1901, he started working for a photo studio in Linz, Austria, eventually becoming a partner (1902), and then its sole proprietor (1904). He left Linz at the end of 1909 and set up a new studio in Cologne.

In 1911, Sander began with the first series of portraits for his work People of the 20th Century. In the early 1920s, he came in contact with the (Cologne Progressives) a radical group of artists linked to the workers’ movement which, as Wieland Schmied put it, “sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity […] “.In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Mathar travelled through Sardinia for three months, where he took around 500 photographs. However, a planned book detailing his travels was not completed.

Sander’s Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Döblin titled “On Faces, Pictures, and their Truth.” Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of his sentence. Sander’s book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed. Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid. Thirty thousand of Sander’s roughly forty-thousand negatives survived the war, only to perish in an accidental fire in Cologne in 1946. Sander practically ceased to work as a photographer after World War II. He died in Cologne in 1964.

His work includes landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography, but he is best known for his portraits, as exemplified by his series People of the 20th Century. In this series, he aims to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar Republic. The series is divided into seven sections: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander’s archive included over 40,000 images.

In 2002, the August Sander Archive and scholar Susanne Lange published a seven-volume collection comprising some 650 of Sander’s photographs, August Sander: People of the 20th Century. In 2008, the Mercury crater Sander was named after him.

Source “Wikipedia”

A me Jessica Backhaus piace molto. A voi?

/ saramunari / 8 commenti

Jessica Backhaus è nata a Cuxhaven, in Germania, nel 1970 ed è cresciuta in una famiglia di artisti.

All’età di 16 anni, si è trasferita a Parigi, dove ha poi studiato fotografia e comunicazione visiva. Qui è avvenuto l’incontro con Gisèle Freund, che poi divenne la sua mentore.

Nel 1995, la sua passione per la fotografia l’ha guidata verso New York, dove ha lavorato come assistente per diversi fotografi, ha seguito i propri progetti ed ha vissuto fino al 2009.

Jessica Backhaus è considerata una delle voci più significative nella fotografia contemporanea tedesca oggi.

I suoi lavori sono stati esposti in numerose mostre personali e collettive, tra cui la National Portrait Gallery, Londra, e il Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlino. Le sue fotyografie fanno parte di molte collezioni d’arte, tra cui Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany, ING Art Collection, Belgium, Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA and the Margulies Collection, Miami, USA.

Attualmente basata a Berlino, Jessica divide il suo tempo e la sua vita tra Europa e Stati Uniti. Ha pubblicato sei libri con Kehrer Verlag: Jesus and the Cherries (2005), What Still Remains (2008), One Day in November (2008, dedicato a Gisèle Freund), I Wanted to See the World (2010), ONE DAY – Ten Photographers (2010), Once, Still and Forever (2012).

Oltre alle monografie pubblicate con Kehrer Verlag, il lavoro di Jessica Backhaus è incluso in:
Women Photographers. From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman di Boris Friedewald – Le 55 donne fotografe più influenti nella storia (Prestel, 2014)
The Photographers’ Sketchbooks di Stephen McLaren and Bryan Formhals (Thames & Hudson, 2014) – Un libro che illustra i processi creativi dell’era fotografica moderna; tra gli autorio anche Alec Soth e Trent Parke.

Jessica Backhaus was born in Cuxhaven, Germany in 1970 and grew up in an artistic family.

At the age of sixteen, she moved to Paris, where she later studied photography and visual communications. Here she met Gisèle Freund in 1992, who became her mentor.

In 1995 her passion for photography drew her to New York, where she assisted photographers, pursued her own projects and lived until 2009.

Jessica Backhaus is regarded as one of the most distinguished voices in contemporary photography in Germany today. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Her photographs are in many prominent art collections including Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Germany, ING Art Collection, Belgium, Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA and the Margulies Collection, Miami, USA. Based in Berlin, Jessica divides her time and life between Europe and the United States. She has published six books with Kehrer Verlag: Jesus and the Cherries (2005), What Still Remains (2008), One Day in November (2008, dedicated to Gisèle Freund), I Wanted to See the World (2010), ONE DAY – Ten Photographers (2010), Once, Still and Forever (2012).

Jessica Backhaus is based in Berlin and is currently working on a new project,

In addition to the monographies published with Kehrer Verlag, Jessica Backhaus’s work is also included in:

Women Photographers. From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman by Boris Friedewald
The 55 most influential women photographers in history. (Prestel, 2014)

The Photographers’ Sketchbooks by Stephen McLaren and Bryan Formhals (Thames & Hudson, 2014)
A book that celebrates the creative processes of the modern photographic era; among the authors also Alec Soth and Trent Parke.

An interview

http://www.jessicabackhaus.net/

Anna “°”

Andreas Gursky, è sua la foto più costosa della storia

/ saramunari / 7 commenti

Andreas Gursky (Lipsia, 15 gennaio 1955) è un fotografo tedesco considerato uno dei maggiori artisti al mondo famoso per le fotografie di grande formato.
Insieme a Axel Hütte, Jörg Sasse, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer e Thomas Ruff fa parte della Becher-Schüler.
Nel 2011 la sua opera Rhein II viene battuta all’asta da Christie’s per la somma record di 4.338.500 dollari. Lunga tre metri e mezzo, è una veduta del Reno scattata nel 1999.

Andreas Gursky nasce in Germania, a Lipsia, nel 1955, figlio di un fotografo commerciale, ma trascorre i primi anni a Düsseldorf. Dal 1978 all’1981 studia alla Folkwang Universität, università a indirizzo artistico nella vicina Essen, dove ha come professore il fotografo Otto Steinert. Tra il 1981 e il 1987 all’accademia di belle arti di Düsseldorf (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf), Gursky riceve una forte influenza dai suoi professori Hilla e Bernd Becher, un team fotografico che si contraddistinse per il loro spassionato catalogare di macchinari industriali e architettura, tipicamente in bianco e nero.] Gursky mostra un simile approccio metodico con le sue fotografie in grande scala. Altri autori che lo hanno influenzato sono probabilmente il fotografo di panorami inglese John Davies e l’americano Joel Sternfeld.

I primi successi tuttavia sono incentrati su panorami e luoghi di relax e hanno dimensioni medio-piccole, non oltre i 50×60 cm. Solo attorno ai 25 anni Gursky si dedica al grande formato e si converte alla fotografia a colori, spesso molto vivaci e vari, immortalando soggetti di grandi dimensioni come edifici (Paris, Montparnasse, 1993), luoghi ordinatamente affollati come gli scaffali dei supermercati (99 Cent II Diptychon, 2001), affollate sale di contrattazione finanziaria (Chicago Board of Trade II, 1999 e Tokyo Stock Exchange, 1990), un concerto del primo maggio (May Day IV, 2000) etc.

Perchè la sua Foto è la più costosa della storia?  Qui una spiegazione.

Andreas Gursky (born January 15, 1955) is a German photographer and Professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often employing a high point of view. Gursky shares a studio with Laurenz Berges, Thomas Ruff and Axel Hütte on the Hansaallee, in Düsseldorf. The building, a former electricity station, was transformed into an artists studio and living quarters, in 2001, by architects Herzog & de Meuron, of Tate Modern fame. In 2010-11, the architects worked again on the building, designing a gallery in the basement.

Gursky was born in Leipzig, Former East Germany in 1955. His family relocated to West Germany, moving to Essen and then Düsseldorf by the end of 1957. From 1978 to 1981, he attended Folkwangschule, Essen, where he is said to have studied under Otto Steinert. However, it has been disputed that this can’t really be the case, as Steinert died in 1978. Between 1981-1987 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gursky received strong training and influence from his teachers Hilla and Bernd Becher, a photographic team known for their distinctive, dispassionate method of systematically cataloging industrial machinery and architecture. Gursky demonstrates a similarly methodical approach in his own larger-scale photography. Other notable influences are the British landscape photographer John Davies, whose highly detailed high vantage point images had a strong effect on the street level photographs Gursky was then making, and to a lesser degree the American photographer Joel Sternfeld.

Before the 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate his images. In the years since, Gursky has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed.[citation needed] Writing in The New Yorker magazine, the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures “vast,” “splashy,” “entertaining,” and “literally unbelievable.” In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the “two masters” of the “Düsseldorf” school. In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of confronting one of Gursky’s large works:

“The first time I saw photographs by Andreas Gursky…I had the disorienting sensation that something was happening—happening to me, I suppose, although it felt more generalized than that. Gursky’s huge, panoramic colour prints—some of them up to six feet high by ten feet long—had the presence, the formal power, and in several cases the majestic aura of nineteenth-century landscape paintings, without losing any of their meticulously detailed immediacy as photographs. Their subject matter was the contemporary world, seen dispassionately and from a distance.”
The perspective in many of Gursky’s photographs is drawn from an elevated vantage point. This position enables the viewer to encounter scenes, encompassing both centre and periphery, which are ordinarily beyond reach. Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big box retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York’s Museum of Modern Art described the artist’s work, “a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky’s fictions that we recognize his world as our own.” Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.

Gursky’s Dance Valley festival photograph, taken near Amsterdam in 1995, depicts attendees facing a DJ stand in a large arena, beneath strobe lighting effects. The pouring smoke resembles a human hand, holding the crowd in stasis. After completing the print, Gursky explained the only music he now listens to is the anonymous, beat-heavy style known as Trance, as its symmetry and simplicity echoes his own work—while playing towards a deeper, more visceral emotion.[citation needed] The photograph 99 Cent (1999) was taken at a 99 Cents Only store on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and depicts its interior as a stretched horizontal composition of parallel shelves, intersected by vertical white columns, in which the abundance of “neatly labeled packets are transformed into fields of colour, generated by endless arrays of identical products, reflecting off the shiny ceiling” (Wyatt Mason). The Rhine II (1999), depicts a stretch of the river Rhine outside Düsseldorf, immediately legible as a view of a straight stretch of water, but also as an abstract configuration of horizontal bands of colour of varying widths. In his six-part series Ocean I-VI (2009-2010), Gursky used high-definition satellite photographs which he augmented from various picture sources on the Internet.

Gursky first exhibited his work in Germany in 1985 and has subsequently exhibited throughout Europe. His first solo gallery show was held at Galerie Johnen & Schöttle, Cologne, in 1988. Gursky’s first one-person museum exhibition in the United States opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1998, and his work was the subject of a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, touring to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2001–2002. Further museum exhibitions include “Werke-Works 80-08”, Kunstmuseen Krefeld (2008, touring to Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Vancouver Art Gallery in 2009); Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2007); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007, touring to Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Sharjah Art Museum, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and Ekaterina Foundation, Moscow in 2007–2008). His work has been seen in international exhibitions, including the Internationale Foto-Triennale in Esslingen (1989 and 1995), the Venice Biennale (1990 and 2004), and the Biennale of Sydney (1996 and 2000).

Ten things you need to know about Andreas Gursky

http://whitecube.com/artists/andreas_gursky/

Anna “°”