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[Books / International] Conditions by Andres Marroquin Winkleman

"Conditions", Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann from Meier und Müller on Vimeo.

At the age of 20, photographer Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann left his native Peru and the society he grew up in. Arriving in Berlin, he encountered socio-cultural patterns of behavior that were alien to him. Winkelmann noticed that in Berlin, borders had meanings of their own - they didn’t act as walls, made to prevent people from developing their own personality. On the contrary: It seemed as if people were actually striving to find borders. It was as if being different helped people to evoke their own identity. This is the background of "Conditions". The book examines what it means to choose one’s own way of life. It portrays people who lead a free and independent life, and who have to learn how to cope with freedom, to find their own unique way. "Conditions" shows pictures of people who long to be socially accepted without having to conform, people who are “on the road”, searching, hoping and doubting. The images are lyrical compositions that tell us about Winkelmann´s thoughts and personal experiences: they are more than simple reproductions of incidental events. Adam Bartos served as editor for the book, an essay by Jörg Colberg reflects on what it means for a person to find her own place in a city like Berlin. For further information please follow the link bellow.

[Open Calls / International] Call for works / proposals for KAUNAS PHOTO 2012

Deadline: April 15, 2012 The 9th KAUNAS PHOTO festival launch week will be September 4-8, 2012. The group exhibition "About Photography" will be in the heart of KAUNAS PHOTO festival 2012 program. It will open on September 6, 2012 at the most important venue for contemporary art in Kaunas, M.Žilinskas Art Gallery of the National M.K.Čiurlionis Art Museum. Artists and photographers regardless of their nationality, age, profile (professional: press photographers, conceptual artists, studio photographers, advanced amatures, scientists & scolars using photography) are invited to submit works on the theme of photography.

[Open Calls / International] Philadelphia Museum of Art Photography Portfolio Competition 2012

THE WOMEN'S COMMITTEE OF THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART is pleased to announce its second Photography Portfolio Competition. The competition is open to all photographers age 18 or older. A jury of nationally recognized experts will select one photograph by each of six artists for inclusion in a 16" x 20" portfolio to be published in an edition of 25 in fall 2012. Peter Barberie, The Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, will select one additional curator's choice entry to be sold as an individual print in a limited edition. The Museum will exhibit the portfolio and the individual print in fall 2012 and a First Look event will be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on October 11, 2012, to celebrate the production of the portfolio. 2012 COMPETITION All applications must be submitted by May 4, 2012. For more information please follow the link below

[Open Calls / International] THE VIP AWARDS 2012

KUNSTNETZWERK (modern contemporary art gallery and network) and founder Raed Bawayah (photographer), in collaboration with « Eyes-On » the European Month of Photography Vienna will organize the first Vienna International Photographic Awards « VIPA » in 2012 for documentary photography. Our mission is to salute the achievements of the world’s finest photographers, to discover new and emerging talents, and to promote and enhance contemporary photography in Austria and all over the world. The « VIPA » conduct an annual competition for professional, non-professional and student photographers. Besides the total value of 7.000 EUR in money prizes the short-listed winners will be able to take part in a group exhibition in November 2012 in Vienna (during the European Month of Photography) as well as in the publication of VIPA’s official catalogue. The awards will be divided into three sections: 1st prize (4.000 EUR), 2nd prize (2.000 EUR) and 3rd prize (1.000 EUR). The awards of the prices, the presentation of the official catalogue as well the opening of the group exhibition will be held on the 15th November 2012 in Vienna. Participants will choose the theme of their photo series submission. The competition will be judged by a board of highly esteemed photo editors, curators, art directors and other luminaries from the international photography community.

[Open Calls / International] International Photobook Dummy Award 2012

Submit your unpublished photobook for a chance to win a complete book production. A preliminary jury will select the best 50 dummies from all entries for the exhibition at Le Bal. The winners will be chosen from this selection. Photographers are invited to present their so far unpublished photobooks to an international expert jury. The best 50 books will be exhibited as part of the festival in Paris. From these 50 titles, the winners will be awarded at the location. The first prize is a complete book production by publishers Seltmann+Soehne. The registrations costs are 32 Euros. Entries close on 31 March 2012. Entries for the Photobook Dummy close on 5 April 2012 (post marked). The 50 exhibited books will be selected by a pre-jury. This pre-jury comprises Markus Schaden (Bookseller, Publisher, Cologne), Sebastian Hau (Le Bal Books, Paris), Inga Schneider (International Photobook Festival, Cologne), Laurence Vecten (Lozen Up, Paris), Dieter Neubert (International Photobook Festival, Kassel). The main jury comprises Gerry Badger (Critic, Photographer, London), Todd Hido (Photographer, USA), Markus Schaden (Bookseller, Publisher, Cologne), Dieter Neubert (International Photobook Festival, Kassel), Oliver Seltmann (Publisher, Berlin), Diane Dufour (Director Le Bal, Paris), Andreas Müller-Pohle, European Photography, Berlin), Sebastian Hau (Le Bal Books, Paris), Laurence Vecten (Lozen Up, Paris). The winning book will be produced by our printing and publishing partner seltmann+soehne. This work will also be presented in the art magazine European Photography. The 2nd and 3rd prizes will be supplied by our partner blurb: the 2nd prize is books to the value of 500 Euros, the 3rd prize books to the value of 300 Euros. One of the aims of the dummy award is to raise the quality of the photographic book. We appreciate all ideas and suggestions which support this goal. http://2012.fotobookfestival.org/en/dummy_award/#preist

[Artists / International] Sassen, Viviane

Viviane Sassen was born in Amsterdam in 1972. She studied fashion design and photography before receiving an MFA from Ateliers Arnhem, the Netherlands. Some of her earliest memories are of life in Kenya, where she spent three years as a child. When her family returned to the Netherlands in 1978, Sassen was troubled: “I didn’t feel like I belonged in Europe, and yet I knew I was a foreigner in Africa,” she says. Ten years later, at age sixteen, Sassen revisited Kenya, and she has been traveling and working in Africa ever since. She made Parasomnia, her newest body of work, in a number of intentionally unidentified African countries, featuring anonymous subjects. Parasomnia is a category of sleep disorder whose symptoms include abnormal dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking. Sassen has established a visual vocabulary that is stylized, symbolic and mysterious. Her aesthetic combines a sense of childhood memory, where scenes are crystallized and highly saturated with color with a photographer's sensitivity to the body and surface. The strong presence of shadow and darkness in Sassen's images provokes more questions than answers. Her portraits combine the spontaneous with the staged, and often come out of ideas that Sassen carries in a sketchbook of inspirations for future compositions. These ideas are shared with her subjects as the starting point for each photograph.

[Artists / International] Adams, Robert

Are there affirmable days or places in our deteriorating world? Are there scenes in life, right now, for which we might conceivably be thankful? Is there a basis for joy or serenity, even if felt only occasionally? Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile? ROBERT ADAMS Robert Adams is an American photographer and was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1937. For over four decades he has photographed the changing landscape of the American West, finding there a fragile beauty that endures despite our troubled relationship with nature, and with ourselves. His photographs are distinguished not only by their economy and lucidity, but also by their mixture of grief and hope. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy,” Adams wrote. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.” Adams has also written insightful and eloquent essays on the practice and goals of art, which have been collected in the volumes Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981) and Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (1994). Since 1997, he has lived in Oregon, the landscape of which has been the setting of his last 20 years of work. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through the book The New West (1974) and the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. In 2009, he received the Hasselblad Award for his achievements in photography. He is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.

[Books / International] Alex Soth, "Broken Manual"

Created over four years (2006-10), Alec Soth's newest book represents a significant departure from his three previous Steidl publications. Entitled Broken Manual, Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization. Soth photographs monks, survivalist, hermits and runaways, but this isn't a conventional documentary book on life "off the grid." Instead, working with the writer Lester B. Morrison, the authors have created an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives.

[Artists / International] HIDO, TODD

Todd Hido (b. 1968, Kent, Ohio) is a San Francisco Bay area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, Eyemazing, Metropolis, The Face, I-D, and Vanity Fair. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as in many other public and private collections. He is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California. Much of Hido’s work involves portraiture and urban and suburban housing across the U.S., of which the artist produces large, highly detailed and luminous color photographs.

[Theory / Essays] John Szarkowski, Introduction to William Eggleston's Guide

At this writing I have not yet visited Memphis, or northern Mississippi, and thus have no basis for judging how closely the photographs in this book might seem to resemble that part of the world and the life that is lived there. I have, however, visited other places described by works of art, and have observed that the poem or picture is likely to seem a faithful document if we get to know it first and the unedited reality afterwards - whereas a new work of art that describes something we had known well is likely to seem as unfamiliar and arbitrary as our own passport photos. Thus if a stranger sought out in good season the people and places described here they would probably seem clearly similar to their pictures, and the stranger would assume that the pictures mirrored real life. It would be marvelous if this were the case, if the place itself, and not merely the pictures, were the work of art. It would be marvelous to think that the ordinary, vernacular life in and around Memphis might be in its quality more sharply incised, formally clear, fictive, and mysteriously purposeful than it appears elsewhere, endowing the least pretentious of raw materials with ineffable dramatic possibilities. Unfortunately, the character of our skepticism makes this difficult to believe; we are accustomed to believing instead that the meaning in a work of art is due altogether to the imagination and legerdemain of the artist. Artists themselves tend to take absolutist and unhelpful positions when addressing themselves to questions of content, pretending with Degas that the work has nothing to do with ballet dancers, or pretending with James Agee that it has nothing to do with artifice. Both positions have the virtue of neatness, and allow the artist to answer unanswerable questions briefly and then get back to work. If an artist were to admit that he was uncertain as to what part of the content of his work answered to life and what part to art, and was perhaps even uncertain as to precisely where the boundary between them lay, we would probably consider him incompetent. For full text please follow the link.