art blog since 2009
The eye, and the mind, of author Geoff Dyer are easily sparked and perpetually active. That appears as true if he finds himself encountering a billboard shot by Dayanita Singh, at Delhi airport in 2006, or at home poring over Fred Sigman’s book Motel Vegas, or even Googling photos by Luigi Ghirri. All three ‘exhibits’ …
April 16, 2021
Publisher: Goldsmiths Press // Pages: 240 // Date: Dec 2020 In 2011, a contemporary artist and a US council of war both made use of a series of photographs taken from satellite imagery. The artist was Mishka Henner; his Libyan Oil Fields appropriated the aerial views of petroleum extraction in that country which are freely …
February 18, 2021
Brighton Photo Biennial 2016 will look at the way photography fosters our understanding of style, the body, gender and subcultures. It is arguably the biggest visual art event on the city’s calendar, and this year the month-long festival issued a call out to BA students on Brighton Uni’s acclaimed photography course. Four chosen artists, who appear …
September 14, 2016
Long after his death, forensic photographer Luigi Tomellini has become an ‘artist’. Producer Stefano Amoretti and photographer Mino Tristovskij have put him in a book and a show. This could not have happened had not his analogue photography lost its value as evidence gathering. The very obsolescence of the medium gives these documents a certain …
February 26, 2016
The years of lead (or anni di piombo for you Italian speakers) lasted from the late 60s to the early 80s. Thanks to festivals in Venice and the anni di amore are still in full effect. As a result this is one of the only exhibitions where you can reasonably expect to find photos of …
October 31, 2014
Artists often go too far. Sometimes it can seem that any art worth its salt has to do just that, to show some form of excess, to do something inordinately repetitive, or of course skilled. Jakob Dahlgren’s thirteen year-long durational project will have many scratching their heads, asking what is the point? But to provoke …
April 9, 2014
Patti Smith, writing in her memoir Just Kids, says that by walking a city you can come to own the very streets. She and lover Robert Mapplethorpe attempted and achieved as much in New York City. But that was Manhattan and, to point out by way of a cliché, nobody sane walks anywhere in urban …
October 25, 2013
This surely isn’t a complete picture of Swindon in the 1990s. And the town’s name sits at a variance with many of the other locations where Sean Smith has been to work. A current show in Kensal Green takes visitors to Palestine, Beruit, Johannesburg, Sarajevo and Kabul. But this town in South West England has …
May 31, 2013
Like many a good artist’s studio, that of Lucian Freud required a mirror. And when David Dawson was in the studio it would have become a rich metaphor. Freud‘s longterm assistant was also a painter. The master would also paint Dawson. And Dawson in turn made portraits of his employer – photographic, like the one …
March 21, 2012
To those who say, I could have done that when faced with contemporary art, here is a project that you really could have done. The catalogue provides instructions. Mocksim’s show comprised some 200 photos of illegally parked cars. 1) check the parking ticket; 2) visit the Penalty Charging Notice website; 3) enter a code; and …
August 30, 2011