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DAILY NEWS, VIEWS, REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS
CRITICS' PICKS, OPENINGS, YOUR VIDEOS, YOUR BLOGS
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Following on from its landmark publication Vitamin P, a highly acclaimed survey of contemporary painting edited by the critic Barry Schwabsky, Phaidon this month pulls off another triumph with Vitamin Ph, an equivalent examination of current trends in photography. 122 photographers feature in the book, each of whom were nominated by an international panel of writers, critics, curators and artists. The range of artists is as international as the panel, with photographers based in over 40 countries. A hugely useful work of reference, the book is arranged in alphabetical order with each photographer's work accompanied by a 500-word text by a leading critic, curator, or art historian.
Not surprisingly, what emerges from the book is how wide-ranging and varied the medium currently is. Established names such as Gergory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, David Goldblatt, Catherine Opie, Catherine Yass, Sharon Lockhart and Santiago Sierra, whose work ranges from the documentary to the staged to the conceptual, make it into the book, as do a number of well-known artists better known for other, non-photographic work, such as Olafur Eliasson, who whilst creating site-specific installations, has for the last 10 years been working on a less well-known ongoing series of photographs documenting his native Iceland.
Among the many younger and less well-known artists included in the book is Idris Kahn, a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, whose work offers a commentary on the photographic canon itself. Khan's practice involves a painstaking, devotional layering of photographers by canonical figures in the history of the medium such as the Bechers, Roland Barthes and Karl Blossfeldt. In every... Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholders (2004), Khan pays homage to the Dusseldorf photography masters while at the same time playing with the idea of the photograph as a still image. Khan transforms the medium used by the Bechers to capture architectural types in a straightforward, archival way, into a form with a remarkable sense of movement, a three-dimensional quality absent from the Becher's own photographs.
For London-based Danny Treacy photography is a medium through which the artist is able to put himself in the shoes, quite literally, of strangers. For his ongoing series Them, which he began in 2002, Treacy clothes himself in other people's attire collected, even stolen, from streets, back gardens and car parks. Treacey refashions these items of clothing into strange, incongruous outfits - in one picture a pink quilted nylon dressing-gown sits uncomfortably with a filthy man's jacket, while in another, the gendering of a man's oily boiler suit is confused by what at first glance looks like a Muslim woman's veil - on closer inspection it turns out to be a baby's dirty blanket. 'When I'm in these constructed suits,' says Treacy, ' in which people have lived and functioned and may have fucked or died, I put myself in closest proximity to them. Proximity motivates me, plus the intimacy gained and its subversion.'
Another young artist currently making some of the most exciting conceptual photography is An-My Le, originally from Vietnam but now living in the US. Her large-format black and white photographs examine the representation of war and specifcially America's complicated with two wars - Vietnam and Iraq. Her 1994-98 series 'Viet Nam' focused on Vietnam battle recreation societies, documenting a group of men in Virginia re-enacting battles. In '29 Palms' (2003-4) An-My Le responds to the war in Iraq with a series of photographs of marines carrying out manoeuvres in a mock training camp in the Californian desert. Her work explores the relationship between fact and fiction, the imagined and the real, and references the staged photographic works of artists such as Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson as well as the war pictures of photographers such as Roger Fenton and Robert Capa.
Vitamin Ph, introduction by T J Demos (Phaidon Press), is now on sale priced at £39.95 / €69.95.
Rebecca Wilson |
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Idris Khan, every... Bernd and Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholders (2004),
Danny Treacy, from 'Them', ongoing series
An-My Le, from 'Viet Nam' series (1994-98) |
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| Published on 20-11-2006 |
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