All posts tagged: Photography

The big picture: a pileup of pugs | Photography

The big picture: a pileup of pugs | Photography

Published by skeptic

Neal Slavin took this picture of pugs and their owners in 2005 for an advertising campaign. The Brooklyn-born Slavin was by then a master of the group portrait. His book When Two Or More Are Gathered Together first came out in 1974 and featured bodybuilders and gravediggers, hotdog vendors and firefighters, a unique collective portrait of Americans (which he followed up with Britons a few years later). His vocation came to him, he says, when he was looking through some family portraits and came across a picture of a scout troop. “Some were laughing, some clowning, some gazing solemnly into the camera lens, but all exuded an extraordinary humanness, a unique individuality. I wondered about each boy, about what happened after that photo was taken.” Slavin is now 83. An updated 50th anniversary edition of When Two Or More… will be published later this year. Speaking to me recently from New York, he described how he liked his groups to find their own composition. “People assume I arrange everyone and get back to my camera,” …

The big picture: precarious lives and playfulness in a London square | Photography

The big picture: precarious lives and playfulness in a London square | Photography

Published by skeptic

This picture is the cover image of Dominoes, a new photobook by Roland Ramanan that tells the story of a unique public space in east London, Gillett Square. The square was opened in Hackney, in one of the most deprived wards in the UK, by London mayor Ken Livingstone in 2006, on a site that was previously a car park. Neighbouring derelict factory premises were redeveloped by a local co-operative as a culture centre, and a series of small business units were created around the new space. The ambition was to establish a communal area “with the potential to become something specific – or remain not really anything at all… a place to see, hear, feel, smell, taste and discover wonderful and incredible things”. Since 2012, Ramanan has been documenting how those civic hopes and ambitions turned out. He has watched as life of that square became “an ecosystem in which skateboarders, parents, children, hula-hoopers, domino players, DJs, drinkers and addicts all intermingle”. His book is a microcosm of urban life through the years of …

Up on the roof: the homespun art of rural Punjab – in pictures | Art and design

Up on the roof: the homespun art of rural Punjab – in pictures | Art and design

Published by skeptic

When Mumbai-based photographer Rajesh Vora travelled to Punjab state in 2014, he was struck by the enormous cartoonish sculptures that adorned rooftops across the region’s rural villages. Known as “showpieces”, the artworks double as water tanks and are part of a custom beginning in the 1970s, wherein Punjabi citizens who had immigrated to other parts of the world erected them on top of the homes they’d kept in their native country as a symbol of prosperity. “I was in awe of their grandiosity, elaborate ornamentation and emotional exuberance,” says Vora, who has spent the past few years travelling to more than 150 villages to capture rooftops embellished with everything from aeroplanes to footballers. Everyday Baroque, a collection of these images on display at the Arles festival of photography, tells the story of how “these icons of aspiration are often entwined with the personal histories of their owners”. Source link

Keep on Kicken! 50 years photographing Berlin and beyond – in pictures | Art and design

Keep on Kicken! 50 years photographing Berlin and beyond – in pictures | Art and design

Published by skeptic

Young policeman wearing sunglasses at the open house of the police academy in Ruhleben, Berlin, 1975 by Gabriele and Helmut Nothhelfer From 19th century pictorialism to the interwar avant-garde of Bauhaus, Kicken’s collections include the new vision and new objectivity, the influential Czech modernism, the international movement of subjective photography originating in Germany in the 1950s, American new colour photography and the artistic documentary movements in both East and West Germany since the 1970s, to name but a few Photograph: Courtesy VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024 Source link

Protest, resistance and dissent: a retrospective of the art of Peter Kennard | Photography

Protest, resistance and dissent: a retrospective of the art of Peter Kennard | Photography

Published by skeptic

Even as he hangs work for a retrospective at one of his childhood haunts, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Peter Kennard seems beset by misgivings. Archive of Dissent is a celebration of 50 years of work by the UK’s foremost political artist, yet he admits to a “ sense of failure of making work like this”. He rallies despite himself, saying “but that is also the impetus to go on making it”. Kennard is responsible for some of the past half-century’s most potent images of protest, resistance and dissent. Radicalised as a student by the events of 1968 and the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, he began making photomontages in the early 70s, going on to produce graphic, insurgent work for a range of left-wing causes and organisations, human rights groups, and environmental concerns, including CND, Amnesty International, the Stop the War coalition and the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Naomi Klein said his work “perfectly captures the brutal asymmetries of our age”. John Berger described him as a “master of the medium of photomontage” whose art cannot be …