special envoy to London
The women were in the spotlight of this 5th edition of Photo London, which was held from 16 to 19 may in the historic walls of Somerset House between the Thames and The Strand, avenue of bandwidth and intensely active London (42.500 visitors from 40,000 in 2018). This time, the radiant sun was the opening of the exhibition on Wednesday, and was a lustre to the charm of this young fair-britain intends to put photo as comfortable as at home, between the living room fireplace well briquée and the maze of galleries arranged as rooms. We go from one to the other, as one traverses a sequence. And this fluidity , if it adds to the confusion of spaces, makes it a certain sweetness to the practice of the amateur.
as Soon as you enter the walled compound of Somerset House, three women photographers, Mary mccartney, Rachel Louise Brown, and Susan Meiselas, reading their visions decided the outer walls of the central pavilion, dedicated to Women in Photography . The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans opened in 2016, the 100-metre walls white in the open air.
“Paul McCartney in Jamaica” in 1972 by Linda
Mary McCartney, a fine liana of 49 years, is a true “royal” from the English scene, because the first biological child of the couple rock photographer Linda Eastman McCartney and Paul McCartney, the charmer of the Beatles. His appearance at the press conference, in a chic combination of pumping gas blue jeans and sneakers pristine lace bright red, has at least as much electrified the audience that the presence of Stephen Shore, 77 years old, a legend of american photography, pioneer of color and contemplator of its banality eloquent (more than 25 published books, including Uncommon Places , 1982, American Surfaces , 1999, from “road trips” of the 1970’s). An exhibition greeted, all the way down to Somerset House, at the level of the river Thames, the course of this “master of photography”, with a series of large-format unpublished in the United Kingdom, and a historical series of 1969, Los Angeles , unfortunately not vintage.
the Right as a dancer, Mary McCartney , an experienced rider since childhood, has presented his work behind the scenes at the Royal Ballet in London ( Off-Peak after A Photographic Study of the Royal Ballet After Hours ). In the privacy of ballerinas, dancers, small rats, she composes images sour-sweet, bouquet of flowers deposited trivially in a nasty sink, when this is not the micro dancer herself who dips his feet bruised, nudity, assumed as an athlete of Antiquity, conscious of the effort and of the perfect body, hieratic scene and laughter and childish in the lodges. His dearest mother, Linda mccartney, was well-represented at James Hyman Photography in London, its self-Portrait in the studio of Francis Bacon , London, 1997 (draw deck, 49,4 x 40 cm, edition of 25, 5500 £ excluding VAT) for the portrait of Paul McCartney in Jamaica in 1972 (the draw deck, 40.6 x 60, 4 cm, edition of 25, 5500 £ excluding VAT).
Rachel Louise Brown, “The Mermaid, Weeki Wachee Springs”, 2017. Rachel Louise Brown
The young Rachel Louise Brown, born in 1985, graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 2011. She has already won several awards which have earned him exhibitions and residences abroad. The one at the Palm Beach Photographic Center in Florida has inspired this series, Simulations , a work completed over four years where the sirens were masks to breathe under the water, where the girls would dress in lobster red, where the cakes are in strange colors, and the night still shrouded as a dream chromo. This is the first time that is shown in Great Britain for this search, full of wisdom and humor on the environments created for the amusement of the consumer society. From a speech by Jean Baudrillard in 1981 on Simulacra and Stimulation , this photographer has ventured into the american night and reported visions of a completely supernatural, the clown threatening to the Kissing Booth (commissioner Maggie O’regan, a project defended by Sea Containers London, who exhibited at his gallery). Rosy cheeks and hair the blond peroxidated, she was spontaneously in front of his photos in XXL format.
Finally, the great Susan Meiselas, 70 years, photojournalist an american and a member of the agency Magnum photos since 1976, was A Room of Their Own , multimedia work, of the testimony at the image, which gave shape to the lives of women who have survived domestic violence (published by Multistory and Here Press). “Each room, like each life, is unique. The image of a space is a memory and also a sort of mirror. The woman is absent, and yet present,” explained 2017 Susan Meiselas, including the Jeu de Paume and its director, the Catalan Marta Gili, exhibited the rough Mediation in the spring of 2018 in Paris.
Beautiful sex and safe sex
Fariba Farshad, and Michael Benson, the founder of Photo London, welcomed to see this place of honour given to women of photography. “Photo London has always had a strong commitment to women, artists, curatrices or gallery owners. This year, more than 40% of the participants are women. To compare with the 24% that are the norm in the art fairs”, stressed Michael Benson, a prototype of the big guy English, smiling but determined to win (Paris Photo, the historical legitimacy and the profusion of vintage, is his main rival). Once evacuated, the questions left unanswered by “Brexit” failed “deal,” he said voluntary, and european, “since the number of european galleries has grown on our total of 114 galleries in 2019, since more than 70% of the exhibitors have been with us for many years, as more have joined us this year.” It could therefore be tracked. And without penalty! Because the artists of the fair sex are also those of the stronger sex.
Nothing beats the eccentricity, full of natural in the English scene. Sam Wright/ Photo London 2019
evidenced By Flor Garduño was born in 1957 in Mexico city, land of the great Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902-2002), and his wife Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993), who made beautiful portraits of Frida Kahlo, the time of the splendour like that of the wheelchair. His beautiful compositions in black-and-white silver gelatin sprinkled the fair, her poetry rooted in the life , like this young indigenous woman whose basket of white lilies becomes a cuff ( Canasta de Luz, Guatemala , 1989, 5200 £ in Huxley-Parlour of the Mayfair in London at the stand, beautifully designed). We found his prints at Peter Fetterman Gallery of Santa Monica in Los Angeles, next to the compositions uncluttereds and sculptures of the Hungarian Noell Oszvald, born in 1990, who lives and works in Budapest (big silver gelatin prints, 2013, edition of 12, the$ 10,000 non-framed). The best-selling Mujer Angel, Sonoran Desert , 1979, the Mexican Graciela Iturbide, 77 years old, recalled the power and sensuality of this Latin America, and if female (photogravure, signed, edition of 30, with$ 10,000).
Aho & Soldan, a dynasty of photographers in finland. Aho & Soldan Photo and Film Foundation
evidenced By the Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová, born in 1944 in Prague, whose photographs taken in Slovakia, as in Britain, are anything but sugarcoated. Wind surreal, between admiration and suspicion of a discomfort in Edward with clock , 1989, portrait of the grotesque, theatrical and vintage silver at Augusta Edwards Fine Arts in London, one of the few vintages of this fair, rather focused on the modern prints and large formats more decorative.
In further evidence of the iranian artist in New York, Shirin Neshat, and its images drawn from Women Without Men , 2008 ( Faezeh , draw 2018, digital C-Print, edition of 20 + 5 EA, signed and numbered by the artist, 3000 $ at Aperture in New York).
evidenced By Claire Aho, daughter of a dynasty of Finnish photographers, a pioneer of the color, including images of the 1950s have intrigued the public of Photo London, in the same way that photos of nudist country of her father Heikki Aho with Björn Soldan (the son of Claire Aho represents the Aho & Soldan Photo and Film Foundation, which reserves the vintages for the museum; the Centre Pompidou has already purchased ten years ago, thanks to its curator, department photo, Clément Chéroux).
The mystery of Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier (1926-2009), American of French descent, nurse, sometimes terribly crabby, occupation, and photographer unknown until discovered almost by accident, was the great heroine of this vintage, thanks to the exhibition almost as a museum of the Howard Greenberg Gallery (rain of red dots on his portraits and self-portraits, in the wake of the closures created by the The Color Work , his colour photographs are revealed to the Showers Gallery, Paris, from 19 January to 30 march 2019). The publisher and arts patron Vera Michalski-Hoffmann started his visit Photograph London by this exhibition of striking images taken by stealth, Street Scenes that tell the America and portraits, turn-based front-end and without complacency, or sketched as the shadow of a cloud. The writer Gaëlle Josse tells the life of an invisible, erased, dead at the age of 83 in the highest degree of anonymity, “losing wonderful,” she says, in A woman in against the day , which comes out at Notabilia.
The gallery owners French were there and well there. For its first participation in Photo London, Sophie Scheidecker had hung a set of vintage fabulous, of sensuality and eroticism, Erwin Blumenfeld Hans Bellmer, and a wall-to-flower skin of the american photographer Stephanie Pfriender Stylander ( The Untamed eye ). This time in the heart of the central pavilion and its passage chic, Esther Woerdehoff had dared to hang on the studies of the disturbing horse black and white arm, of the great photographer Spanish Isabel Muñoz, adventurous woman who practices photography as a follower of El Rocío, the most important pilgrimage of Spain to the Pentecost in Andalusia.
Nathalie Obadia, new addition to Photo London, had seen large both by the surface than by the formats (Valérie Belin, Luc Delahaye, Seydou Keita) and reserved a more intimate space of the late Agnès Varda ( Ulysses (VINTAGE2) , 1954), woman in the original version, to which Olga Sviblova and her MAMM (Museum of multimedia art), devoted a large exhibition to Moscow until may 22. Miranda Salt, the Australian in Paris who defended the eroticism formal California Jo Ann Callis Paris Photo to 2018, described the experimental work of the american photographer Ellen Carey, who is venerated in the United States for his photograms, abstract, made without a camera by placing objects directly on photographic paper and the rubbing was bringing out the color, but still unknown in the United Kingdom.
All the charm of the Big Island in its rowers and hats of spring. Sam Wright/ Photo London 2019 Landscapes “dystopian”
Present in all the main events of photography, Martin Parr, a pillar of Magnum, master of the cliché acid celebrated until may 27 at the National Portrait Gallery in London ( Only Human: Photographs by Martin Parr ) and guest-star in the new photography season of the Trianon in the palace of Versailles, heading immediately toward the Crane Kalman Gallery in Brighton, “in search of new currents”. It is also a great collector. The French girl from the scene in new york, Karine Laval, exposed his landscapes “dystopian” , the fruit of his manipulation of color and light in the wake of the poet of the Old South, William Eggleston (series Heterotopia , 2019, edition of 5, 4850£ excluding VAT). The British Ellie Davies, born in 1976, lives and works in Dorset: in his series Fires , she confronts the heat of the man and the forest that preceded it (large format 120 x 80 cm, edition of 7 + 2 EA, 1750 £ excluding VAT).
And then, there are all the women photographed by men, naiads rolled in the sand by Edward Weston ( Nude on the Dune (Back) or (Front) , 1936, vintage silver print, 10,000 pounds, Danzinger Gallery), workers black to beautiful hands worn by the late David Goldblatt ( Woman at home, Coffee Bay, Transkei , 1975, 50 x 50 cm, print of 10, Goodman Gallery Cape Town), she-devil of the body to body by Yoshihiro Tatsuki ( Student 4 , 1970, silver gelatin print, 1980, 35 x 35 cm, 5325 £ box at Ibasho of Antwerp). Again, women are not small things fragile.
