Showing posts with label photoautomat. Show all posts

Sunday, 16 March 2014

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Tim Hetherington. (5 December 1970 – 20 April 2011).

British-American photojournalist, filmmaker.

If you've been following this past two week's Photoautomat you've probably already have a clear idea of Tim Hetherington's stand of war photography; about his urge to look further and add humanity and that day-to-day feeling to conflict. Maybe becuase that is exactly what conflict take away from us... it takes away our humanity and it takes away the sense, the possibility of doing anything aside from being in conflict.

Third Part.

Inner Light: Portraits of the Blind, Sierra Leone 1999- 2003

The civil war in Sierra Leone left many people with serious medical conditions. In 2004, Hetherington wrote that in addition to amputations, “the fighters of the Revolutionary Front (RUF) also terrorized people by cutting their eyes out. Others lost their eyes to shrapnel or as a result of being caught up in combat. Many simply lost their eyesight because they did not have access to a doctor and therefore a simple medical condition developed and went untreated.”

Born in 1970 in Liverpool, Tim Hetherington graduated from Oxford University and later studied at Cardiff University. A contributing photographer at Vanity Fair, Tim received numerous awards including a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (2000 – 2004), a Hasselblad Foundation Grant (2002), the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year, the Rory Peck Award for Features (2008), an Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Award (2009), as well as an Academy Award nomination and the Leadership in Entertainment Award by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America for the film Restrepo(2011). Hetherington’s photographs are held in several museum collections, including Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. After his death, the largest town square in Ajdabiya, Libya was renamed Tim Hetherington Square by anti-Qaddafi rebels.

Hetherington and fellow photographer Chris Hondros were killed while covering the conflict in Misrata, Libya on April 20, 2011.

This is the lik to his Trust: http://www.timhetheringtontrust.org/

An interesting arcticle in American Photo Magazine. Another one in The Guardian.

Trailer for documentary: "Which way is the front line from here?"

Trailer for "Restrepo".

Have a look at the previous posts on Hetherington here: Part I and Part II

The PhotoAutomat section is edited by the Brooklyn-based photographer Andreína Restrepo.

Sunday, 9 March 2014

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Buno, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan,2008.

Tim Hetherington. (5 December 1970 – 20 April 2011).

British-American photojournalist, filmmaker.

Second Part.

When shooting the war documentary Restrepo with Sebastian Junger in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. He created a series of photographs of man bonding and the sleeping soldiers. Most of these intimate photographs depict American soldiers in , while others capture images from the Liberian civil war. As Junger puts it, “the artistic choices he made were incredibly risky, but he was very sure of himself and wound up completely re-inventing his craft. The title of my film, Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, refers as much to Tim’s artistic instincts as to any combat situation he may have been in.” (Read full article here).

"...the war machine is too put a group of man together in extreme circumstances, and get them to bond together and they will kill and be killed for each other"

"at the end of the day you realize that it was just a group of young men that were pout in this mountain and they are trying to do is survive just looking after for each (...), and that was it really, nothing to do with war, nothing to do with politics."

-What are you doing?

-Don't you get it?

-(...)this is what the american publics never gets to see, (...) we want to see the soldiers as strong, we don't wanna know that they are also this vulnerable boys."

Murphy, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008.

Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008.

The PhotoAutomat section is edited by the Brooklyn-based photographer Andreína Restrepo.

Sunday, 2 March 2014

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Tim Hetherington

Other side of war photography

Libya, April 9, 2011. (Self-portrait by Tim Hetherington. - ©TIM HETHERINGTON / MAGNUM)

Tim Hetherington (5 December 1970 – 20 April 2011).

British-American photojournalist, filmmaker.

"Hetherington was known primarily for his coverage of conflicts in West Africa and the Middle East, employing photography, writing, and film to bring awareness to the human side of war and the suffering it invokes. His work was humanistic, foregoing any attempt at a holistic view of conflict. Instead, Hetherington worked to portray the lives of soldiers and civilians who were caught in the unfolding drama of political and social unrest." By Lindsay Comstock on April 12, 2012 for American Photo Mag.

We are used to see very graphic images when we think of war photography, that somewhat dehumanizes people and make them fit into stereotypes of the good and the evil, and fulfill the characters everyone expect to see: the victims, the assassins, the corpses, the blood, the misery. What separated Tim Hetherington from this, was the urge to look further; to look deep into the life these people lived while surviving conflicts, find their humanity, show their routines. He looked for camaraderie in soldiers, for the human side of warrior children, the consequences of war in the series and how they overcame it.

This month will be dedicated to Tim Hetherington and in this first post I share with you one of the things that I consider helped him convey his message, his search: the used of medium format.

Photos taken in Liberia, 2003-2004. Via YOSSI MILO GALLERY, NEW YORK.

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The PhotoAutomat section is edited by the Brooklyn-based photographer Andreína Restrepo.

Sunday, 9 February 2014

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Hedi Slimane. Born in Paris in 1968 from a Tunisian father and an Italian mother (dress maker), discover photography when he got his first camera at 11. Five years later he started making his own clothes -inherit trade from mom maybe- later he went to the École du Louvre and studied Art History. Organically he become involved in the fashion world, evolving and creating amazing pieces and changing menswear making it darker, more exciting and all together more rock.

I got to know him for his super contrasted Black & White online photos, a few years ago. Later I learned that he was taking a break from a very successful career as Artistic Director of Dior Homme, a fact that was described by Fashion Wire Daily (2007) this way: “Slimane leaves Dior with the well-earned reputation as the single most influential men’s designer this century, the most copied of his peers and the only one to achieve the status of a rock star.” You can read about this here and here.

Before abandoning the fashion world in 2007, in that hiatus from Yves Saint Laurent in early 2000 he moved to Berlin and started a residency at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, where he fell in love with photography again and started publishing books.

In his website you can loose yourself browsing the endless gallery of young musicians, models, artists and actors. Consistently with his inclination towards menswear his photos of guys are more frequent and very intimate.

Men stand out and are deeply moving in an unusual way while being photographed in soft, ethereal, almost too feminine poses, while remaining manly and sexy. Women are also sexy but strong, is a powerful combination of ambiguity and modernity with no space for cliches.

Go ahead take a walk in Hedi Slimane's world, and read Austin Considine's wonderful piece about him in The New Yorker: A Fashion Designer's Second Act.

The PhotoAutomat section is edited by the Brooklyn-based photographer Andreína Restrepo.

Sunday, 19 January 2014

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Francesca Woodman (April 3, 1958 – January 19, 1981)

Was an american photographer born in a family of artists, she started taking pictures at the sweet age of 11, enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design and lived in Italy for a year where she became hugely inspired. She returned to live in NYC, where she worked as an assistant to fashion photographers, while continuing to develop her personal and prolific body of work.

Even though she tragically decided to end her life at the age of 22 (exactly 33 years ago this week), she left behind a very mature and insightful photographic legacy. Her most notable pieces are her self-portraits.

The first time I came in direct contact with Francesca Woodman's work, it was at the exhibit at the Guggenheim, a couple of years ago. These beautiful huge blueprints were my absolute favorite in the whole show, in them you can see the influence of the Italian renaissance art had on her.

“Caryatid” (1980). Credit: Courtesy George and Betty Woodman

The thing I like the most about her work is how mature it was for her age. Her photographs had a certain naive yet bold character that made them unique and absolutely personal. They are a reflection of that time in life, between childhood and adult life. That brief period when you are for the first time in real contact with true yourself, discovering who you are, and exploring your limits.

If you want to know and see more of her work, here the article in The New York Times and about the Guggenheim exhibit that I was lucky to visit; the official Guggenheim video about the exhibit called Through the Lens of Francesca Woodman that examines the relation between the still and moving image in Francesca Woodman's and other artists' production during the 1970s, particularly as associated with Post-Minimalism, performance, and video; and finally the trailer of a documentary about her family entitled The Woodmans, describe as an inspiring portrait of one family's fall and redemption in the often brutal world of art.

The PhotoAutomat section is edited by the Brooklyn-based photographer Andreína Restrepo.

Sunday, 12 January 2014

PHOTOAUTOMAT

"The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention" Julia Margaret Cameron
British photographer, born in Calcuta India in 1838.

Cameron started her career as a photographer very late in her life after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. Even tho it only lasted over a decade she developed a style that is being imitated even know, specially her amazing soft portraits. She was consider part of the photographic movement called Pictorialism, under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite but her work wasn’t recognized until she was already gone.

“It was this boldness of interpretation and confidence in treating a difficult subject which made Cameron not merely derivative as an artist. She created a style in which she could work out her cultural conflicts visually, and so offer imaginative solutions to moral and religious questions.”

She came from a very aristocratic family, and her great-niece was the writer Virginia Woolf.

Woolf's mother: Julia Jackson.

You can read more about her work in this article of Masters of Photography, and a very complete biography in this article in The Guardian.

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The PhotoAutomat section is curated by the Brooklyn-based photographer Andreína Restrepo.

Sunday, 15 December 2013

PHOTOAUTOMAT

Hello everyone. For this next three weeks of holiday procrastination this are some cool photo exhibits you can see in NYC in December/January. Hope to see you there!

ICP Museum

1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036