45
Get to Know Your Photography
gupmagazine.com
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intro
portfolios Regula Bochsler Brandon Juhasz
7 books
100 18 Ditching School By Lorne Darnell
So What Can We Believe in Now?! By Erik Vroons
112 22 Saying Something about Life An Interview with Alec Soth
38 portfolios Dave Imms Natan Dvir Yann Mingard
74 Do Drones Dream of Simulated Celebrities? By Katherine Oktober Matthews
CONTENTS © Alec Soth COVER © Joan Fontcuberta
portfolios Jan Rosseel Matthew Swarts Fernando Moleres Danila Tkachenko
161 guide
Evolution Guide to Unique Photography #45 “Change alone is unchanging,” spoke the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. And so it goes. Nearly 2500 years after his death, our world is incomprehensibly changed but the truth of his statement holds steady. How are we to understand the changes that have taken place over time? How are we even to see them? Looking from one moment to the next, or one image to the next, it’s difficult to identify the moment of change. The ‘before’ and ‘after’ are clearly visible, but where exactly does the evolution occur? Could photography – that brilliant medium of ‘capturing time’ and ‘freezing moments’ – give us a glimpse into the arcane? Photography has given us a great gift of persistent, shared vision, enabling us to jump around in time, visit our deceased relatives and countrymen, travel the planet and meet microscopically small life forms and distant stars. It allows us the privileged beauty of looking back to see landmarks of our evolution in progress – signs so complex it takes us a long time to be able to read them. Yet photography, too, changes. What will happen first: will we discover that photography is no longer sufficient to communicate the complex messages that we want to convey, or will our images outgrow us, reaching capabilities we cannot even comprehend? Will there be a time when we cannot read our own photographic maps? As the medium of photography morphs from its analogue, alchemical roots into new digital forms and various experimental methods, we take a step back and wonder to ourselves about survival of the fittest. What do we lose? What do we gain? All the while, all together, we are changing. Katherine Oktober Matthews, Chief Editor
Š Christian Berthelot, CESAR #9, Mael - born December 13, 2013 at 4:52 p.m. 
2kg 800 - 18 seconds of life
Window-Shopping Through the Iron Curtain David Hlynsky
Hardback 208 pages 240 x 165 mm Thames and Hudson, 2015 ISBN 9780500252116 £14.95
Canada-based photographer and writer David Hlynsky (1947), born to Eastern European parents, started visiting the Soviet Union in the ‘80s, out of a curiosity for where his family came from. What impressed him the most during his travels to Prague, Krakow, Moscow and other locations still behind the Iron Curtain of communism, was the absence of advertising in the streets and shops. So, instead of photographing events or people, he found himself capturing the minimalist shop windows. The window’s straightforward presentation of items for sale and the absence of sexual titillation in advertising read as strikingly anachronistic to eyes attuned to Western notions of advertising. In 170 photos, Hlynsky’s book portrays a colourful and almost childlike world now absent. Globalization pushed these windows with characteristic charm into the cold, though the photographs remind us that we are not so far removed from our ideas of old. thamesandhudson.com
Š Eva Roefs
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1972 Noritaka Minami
Hardback 92 pages 240 x 280 mm Kehrer Verlag, June 2015
In the year 1972, the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo was completed. The tower is an experimental apartment complex designed with 140 removable capsules, embodying the future of urban living, as envisioned by architect Kisho Kurokawa at that moment in post-war Japan. In the book 1972, Noritaka Minami photographs the building as it stands today, both exterior and interior. Smooth and indeed capsule-like, the minimalist interiors are efficient and blandly repetitive. Some images display the residents’ belongings, offering a sense of how the space can be used, while others demonstrate the blank slate of an empty room. The building, shown through Minami’s elegantly understated images, appears simultaneously modern, aging and already old. The capsules, greyish and geometric, serve as a monument to the vision of the future in 1972.
ISBN 9783868285482 €35
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SIMPLY THE BEST.
Private Institute of Photography www.thefotofactory.nl - +31 (0) 20 7766 766 - Keizersgracht 82-bg - 1015 CT Amsterdam
BABEL Ordinary Landscapes Taishi Hirokawa
“Since the dawn of history, human beings have existed as part of an endless cycle of creation and destruction wrought by themselves and destruction wrought by nature,” writes photographer Taishi Hirokawa (1950, Japan) in his new book BABEL. Species come and go, landscapes change, and we end up inevitably here. In a series of elaborately detailed colour landscapes, Hirokawa shows evidence of mankind interacting with the earth, reshaping it as he chooses. With construction sites, villages built into mountainsides, bridges over rivers and power cables sweeping above trees, the ‘ordinary landscapes’ portrayed here are indeed unremarkable sites in and of themselves – and that is exactly the thing to which Hirokawa directs our attention. These changes are not marked by any particular judgement, or proposed necessarily as good or bad events, but are quiet observations about a world in transition.
Hardback 96 pages 262×285 mm Akaaka, March 2015 ISBN 9784865410310
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Olympus GUP Exploring the New
Olympus and GUP Magazine are on the look out for New photography talent. Ambitious talent looking to work with the finest equipment. We therefor challenge you to submit your 10 photo portfolio. The GUP editorial team will award the most ambitious talent with a full Olympus OMD-EM10 camera including a 14–42mm pancake zoomlens (800 euro), and perhaps Olympus will embrace you as one of their new ambassadors. Submit your portfolio to newtalent@gupmagazine.com before June 15, 2015
Š Ronald Koster, ronaldkoster.com | Olympus Ambassador
www.olympus.nl
from Sleeping by the Mississippi
Saying Something about Life An Interview with Alec Soth by Nora Uitterlinden In 2004, Alec Soth self-published Sleeping By The Mississippi, a series of large format portraits and landscapes he took along the Mississippi River. That same year, a photo from the project was used as the poster for the Whitney Biennial: he had arrived. His most recent publication, Songbook (MACK, 2015), the product of another road trip, explores the extent to which people in America socialise offline in communities. Soth speaks with us in this interview about transforming experiences on the road into photographs, how words and music mix with images, and how photo projects can speak about life.
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from Sleeping by the Mississippi
Dave Imms World War 1 Battle Reenactment Soldiers
July 1, 1916. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme, one of the more bloody battles during WW1. It’s nearly a hundred years ago, which means few people are alive now that experienced the news of that day – but some points in history take on such significance that they echo throughout time, across generations. In this series of portraits, London-based photographer Dave Imms (1985, UK) represents men who choose to reenact battles from the pages of history. Dressed in period-appropriate clothes and battle regalia, they ‘play war’ without the consequences of actual war. Aside from a few ex-military and police force attendees, the reenactment soldiers were mostly under-30s. Imms observes of the men: “They weren’t just performers but genuine throwbacks to days gone by.” Shooting his images in the style of soldier portraiture in the early 1900s – black and white with subtle camera shake and minimal focal latitude – Imms captures the essence of time, both flattened and repeating, referential yet impossible to reproduce.
daveimms.com
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Natan Dvir Belief
With technological innovation and global communication, our world changes faster than we can fully process – and yet, religious beliefs continue to hold firm value for individuals and societies, irrespective of culture or the specifics of particular religions. While it’s increasingly common to argue for the scientific improbability or absurdity of gods, and many educated people claim that religion is obsolete, a tendency towards belief seems in many ways to be hard-wired into the human experience. Israeli photographer Natan Dvir (1972) explains of his series that, having grown up in Israel, he was regularly exposed to people with strong religious, social and political ideas from an early age. These beliefs can be the source of great love and community, a means of accessing transcendence, or they can be the source of great hatred and destruction. In looking towards belief as it is now, Dvir taps into our way of living with each other and with ideas that we cannot directly see – parts of humanity that evolve so slowly, we can hardly see time passing at all.
natandvir.com
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Zoo Basel, Basel, Switzerland, 2013. Malayan sun bear biopsy.
Yann Mingard Deposit Yann Mingard (1973, Switzerland) delves deep into the real and perceived threats to human survival, and the emerging technologies that promise security. From 2009 to 2013, Mingard visited 21 locations in Europe where organic and digital data are gathered and stored. He photographed both the interior spaces of these seed banks, vaults and laboratories and the organisms themselves, the containers they are stored in and the instruments used for development and research. These are often privately owned bunker spaces within which individuals, companies and even nation-states secure their most precious code, papers, and in some cases, genetic material. Mingard’s sombre, large-format photographs convey the secretiveness and the inaccessibility of this natural heritage. Though finely crafted views of these subterranean sites, his images do not function per se as a tribute to them.
yannmingard.ch
Hardcover 279 pages 160 x 230 mm Steidl, March 2014 â‚Ź35 steidl.de
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CRYOS International, Aarhus, Denmark, 2010. Private human sperm bank.
Future Health Biobank, Nottingham, United Kingdom, 2013. Milk tooth.
Regula Bochsler The Rendering Eye Machines don’t see the way we do, that much is clear. In these urban, suburban and natural vistas taken from Apple Maps, which uses a form of 3D imaging, we see a visual representation of landscapes that’s far different from our own. Based on an incredible stream of photographic data generated by Apple’s cartography division, nicknamed Sputnik, they are based on fact yet feel false. Clumsy and inarticulate, with distorted lines and misunderstood representation of space, the images are bemusing in their misread of reality. Swiss journalist, historian and documentary filmmaker Regula Bochsler (1958) took screen captures of this distorted, digitally mapped world, identifying also one of the more intriguing aspects about this moment in time: as advanced as the technology is, it simultaneously looks like it’s already obsolete. Essentially, it illustrates a way-point in development, the comically imperfect first steps of a new movement, soon to be replaced by something smoother. Focusing on scenes with a certain dark loneliness, offering urban landscapes emptied of their former occupants, Bochsler’s images point to the ultimate obsolescence of all things – our cities, all the things we make, even us.
renderingeye.net
The Rendering Eye: Urban America Revisited Regula Bochsler / Philipp Sarasin Hardcover 288 pages 216 x 330 mm Edition Patrick Frey, 2014 €54 editionpatrickfrey.com
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Brandon Juhasz American Bigfoot is Monkey Suit Occasionally, evidence comes in to destroy the flights of our imagination. Based on a BBC headline in which an alleged Bigfoot was discovered to be actually just a man in a monkey suit, this series from Brandon Juhasz (1976, USA) reacts with bold and humorous cynicism to a world that has a tenuous relationship with reality, at best. Juhasz explains that he started the series around the time that he turned 30, and was thinking about life and expectations. The discovery of the fake Bigfoot became emblematic of his feelings at the time. He says: “Here is this amazing mythical rare animal people search for and believe in, but in the end it turns out to be just a monkey suit.” Turning his disillusionment towards the medium of photography, Juhasz based his work in photography’s power to shape worldviews and produce desire, despite it being fundamentally a media that he refers to as having “not real” properties. He began to experiment with transforming images into objects and then re-photographing them. The finished works create a multi-faceted vision of photography as well as reality itself, with the awkwardly three-dimensional images taking on a kind of Futurist texture with Postmodern irony. Bizarrely vibrant and playfully caustic, Juhasz’s series points to one of the landmarks on the timeline of photography: the point when we started to ask, does the world of images have to be flat?
brandonjuhasz.com
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So What Can We Believe in Now?! Fontcuberta and a Broader Scope of ‘Reportage’ By Erik Vroons
What we require today is an evolving adaptation to a changing media environment, within which photojournalism must also find its course. For what we are dealing with is a continuous deformation of photography as an objective medium – as so brilliantly emphasized by Joan Fontcuberta (1955, Barcelona) in his artistic practice since the early 1980s.
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Jan Rosseel Litho Belgica If time is the variable that lets us see change at work, then it is perhaps inevitable that we look to objects from different points in time as a way of writing the story of evolution. In this series from Jan Rosseel (1979, Belgium), we see a collection of archival and new images that reference the novel War and Turpentine, written by Stefan Hertmans, spanning decades in an interpretation of the memories that we pass down from one generation to another. Hertmans the author based his story on notebooks left behind by his grandfather – memoirs that were themselves written fifty years after the original events took place. Personal stories of the grandfather, told through the hazy gauze of memory, combine with the fictions and interpretations of Hertmans in his novel, which are then re-interpreted and re-combined with contemporarily produced images by the photographer Rosseel. With a complex navigation that jumps back and forth through time, Rosseel’s images form narratives that dance right across that ridiculous line of credulity between memory’s fact and fiction.
janrosseel.com
With thanks to the family archive of author Stefan Hertmans.
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Matthew Swarts Beth and The Alternatives We’ve all witnessed our memories evolve over time as they echo around our minds, clouding over details, adding fabrications and subtracting facts, but never before have we had so much visual documentation of our lives. Photographic evidence is available now for most of us within instant reach in pocket-sized devices, a digital record of the lives we’ve been living. So how do we learn to process these external memories? Following a break-up, American photographer Matthew Swarts (1970, USA) began to process his feelings of loss by processing photographs of his former partner, resulting in the series Beth. Later, after he entered a new relationship, the work evolved into a second series, The Alternatives, in which Swarts processed images of his new partner, layering the images with optical illusion patterns for an increasingly distorted view of the original image. The images shown here, a selection from the two series (produced 2014-2015) often read as a re-write of personal history, a destruction of the past, though Swarts insists that’s not his ambition. He says: “To me the images are more about memorializing how perception changes over time and shifts in context.”
matthewswarts.com
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Fernando Moleres Internet Gaming Addicts No other nation in the world has as many Internet users as China – more than 600 million. However, with this new technology, now accessible at home, at work, in cybercafés and on the go through mobile devices, has also come a troubling tendency towards addiction. Jacked in to network gaming, sometimes days at a time, the addicts end up with severely damaged family relationships and social networks. Sometimes they even die. Fernando Moleres (1963, Bilbao) documented a facility geared towards treatment for Internet addiction, with patients ranging from 12-year-old adolescents to adults in their thirties. This program, started by Tao Ran, a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and a psychiatrist specializing in addictions, combines psychological and medical treatment along with strict military training. Though addiction itself is nothing new, the introduction of new technologies has a variety of new impacts, which we must learn through experience, and we find ourselves sometimes surprised at the extreme and unexpected consequences. Moleres’s dramatic images illuminate the growing field of understanding what it means to lose ourselves within machines.
fernandomoleres.com
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Danila Tkachenko Restricted Areas
In the relentless pursuit of technological progress, seemingly one of humanity’s innate drives, many formerly great works are left behind, a graveyard of the past’s future. Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko (1989) travelled in search of places that used to have great importance for progress, but are now deserted. He says: “Those places lost their significance together with the utopian ideology which is now obsolete.” With scenes of pump jacks on a spent oil field, the headquarters of the Communist Party, and former residential buildings in a deserted polar town dedicated to biological research, the series offers a sobering view of our sometimes quaint notions of advancement. Drenched in the whites of snow, the images do not console, but perhaps in their isolating atmosphere, inspire us away from thoughts of permanence, motivating us instead towards pursuing the progress of tomorrow.
danilatkachenko.com
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©
C A S P E R FA A S S E N
Š Ryan McGinley, Fireworks, 2002. Courtesy: Ryan McGinley / Team Gallery on display at Kunsthal KAdE (see also page 167)
Guide
world class photography events highlighted more events: gupmagazine.com
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Invisible City/Night Walk 1983-1989 Ken Schles
April 4 – June 7 Noorderlicht fotogalerie Akerhof 12 Groningen The Netherlands noorderlicht.com/fotogalerie
Try to imagine the New York Lower East side in the ‘80s. A town bedeviled by violence, crime and where drug addicts and artists are part of the downtown scene. Ken Schles photographed this mythical period and translated it into a rough and intriguing portrait. The exhibition Invisible City/Night Walk 1983-1989 © Ken Schles - Claudia Lights Up, 1985
will show more than 100 black and white photographs. Fun fact: the exhibition coincides with a new monograph by Schles: Night Walk (Steidl, 2014), a book that is very much in line with the underground cult classic Invisible City. The exhibition is open until June 7 at the Noorderlicht Gallery. Oh, and did we tell you that entrance is completely free?
Spain
© Ana Casas Broda
PHotoEspaña 2015
The 18th Edition of PHotoEspaña will be a celebration of Latin American
June 3 – August 30
photography. With the focus on a single geographical area, new director Maria Garcia Yelo wishes to explore the evolution of photography
Various locations
through the confluences, connections and disjunctions within the area’s
Madrid, Spain
visual language. Major photographers, such as Mario Cravo Neto, will be celebrated in retrospectives as icons of the region’s photographic history. The more complex interplay and contextualisation of the work will be explored through group shows where the focus will also be on less established and more contemporary work.
phe.es
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