Swiss Photo Award

On February 7th was the last round of jurying the participants in this year's Swiss Photo Award / ewz selection. Curator Hélène Joye-Cagnard and I were invited to judge the "Fine Art" category for the award, along with 12 additional judges for the other 6 categories. We all met at the future location of Photobastei 2.0 on Sihlquai 125 in Zürich. After viewing prints of all the finalists' works in the various categories, we were asked to select a winner and two runners-up in our respective categories. In January, Hélène and I had already sorted through 116 contestants in the "Fine Art" category and were now down to the last 12.  The top nine in each categories will be exhibited in May and the winners announced on the opening day, May 13th. I think the final three in the "Fine Art" category are quite strong, with a sound concept, proven technical skills and a good photo-historical understanding. All three winners show the courage to explore topics of critical importance and execute them in a visually arresting style.

Viewing all finalists for all categories

After a tasty lunch, we broke into our category judging pairs for duty

Judging the winners for each category comes to a close in the late afternoon

At Ostkreuzschule

It took a few cups of coffee and tea

On January 10th, I was invited by Ute Mahler to speak to her postgraduate class at Ostkreuzschule about commercial galleries and the photography market in general, and how it may or may not affect a photographer's practice and career. It had been a while that I gave a lecture in front of a class, which by the way was a refreshingly diverse one (although interestingly almost exclusively female), and it reminded just how much I enjoy teaching photography. As for the topic, I felt a bit uncomfortable "teaching" art/photo students about the commercial art world, given that eyeing the market distracts from one's art practice and subsequently compromises one's art. Therefore, I chose to invite questions by the students beforehand and answer them as honest as possible. I tried to avoid sugar coating the topic and disenchant the art market. Instead I tried to encourage the students to keep producing the work without compromise. Also, as a key point I tried to stress that they should

... get acquainted with curators/critics/dealers of your own generation and foster those relationships, because they are still seeking artists to “discover” and support. In a way, you are building a mutually interested network that will yield the strongest ties and most sustainable benefits within the next 5 to 10 years and beyond. The success of now famous gallerists/critics/curators and artists is a result of an early relationship.

Ute Mahler and her husband and collaborator, Werner Mahler, had invited the postgraduate class, guest professor Robert Lyons and me for the day to their private home 30 minutes north of Berlin. This setting gave the class a more intimate atmosphere and interesting exchanges. My lecture was followed by a discussion about artist/photo books and a work critique. It was long after midnight when I finally crawled into my bed after such a rewarding day.

Robert Lyons and Ute Mahler talk to students about photo books after I gave my lecture

Fotografieren II

Essay for new Sissi Farassat book

I wrote an introductory essay for Sissi Farassat's new book "Sequence", published by Fotohof. The original, full length essay can be found here on academia.edu.

Fotografieren

Panel Discussion on Fashion Photography

On August 21st, I was invited to a panel discussion on "Fashion Photography - Art or Commerce?" which was organized in conjunction with the exhibition "Zeitlos schön: 100 Jahre Modefotografie von Man Ray bis Mario Testino", curated by Nathalie Hirschdorfer from the image archive of Condé Nast, at the Museum Bellerive in Zürich, Switzerland. Aside from the curator of the exhibition, who also moderated the discussion, the other invited panelist was the gallerist Christophe Guye. It was an interesting discussion on the merits of embracing fashion photography, or at least some of its positions, by the art world and/or the art market.

Work

Found in NYC (summer 2014)

Valuing Labor in the Arts

My graphic from 2009, in which I propose a system to afford all working visual artists a basic income through redistribution of capital gains in the art market, has been included in the current issue of Art Practical (5.4), Valuing Labor in the Arts. It's listed under Value/Labor/Arts: The Manifestos. Here the section's introduction:

"On April 19, 2014, The Arts Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley will stage a day-long Practicum entitled Valuing Labor in the Arts. The gathering invites registered participants to select from the 8 Artist-led Workshops; each is a small-group practicum devised to spur dialogue, action, and art-making around questions of art, labor, and economics. They will also spend some portion of their day in “The Power of Demands and Transparency,” working to develop a Bay Area cultural survey and to expand their own thinking in relation to the Bay Area’s broader labor history. In the early evening, registered participants will re-convene together en masse at the David Brower Center to debrief, to share insights, and to share a meal. In addition to the workshop prompts and featured essays in this issue, we have included here a selection (and a reminder) of some recent and some not-so-very-old manifestos of artists who found themselves asking how they wanted to be valued and wondering whether the available value systems were up to the task. Some worried about authorship and ownership, some about invisibility, some about whether an artists’ union could combat a highly individuating art market that kept artists from working with each other."

(By Shannon Jackson, Helena Keeffe)

"Dederon – The Fabric of the East" at e-flux' Agency of Unrealized Projects

One of my projects that hasn't seen the light of public display is "Dederon - The Fabric of the East" has been included in e-flux' Agency of Unrealized Projects. Here my project description:

One of the most complex and yet unrealized projects of mine is “Dederon – The Fabric of the East” (2003-present), which literally uses the (polyester) thread named after the DDR (engl.: G.D.R.) to trace the initially noble and ambitious project of establishing “socialism on German soil”, with particular emphasis on materialism at the intersection of industrial production and everyday life. Here, the synthetic fiber Dederon functions as a metaphor for the categorical Modernist belief in progress and how it defined the social, political, economical and cultural fabric of East Germany before and after 1989. Besides my own photographs (etcetera), I have collected information and visual material from a diverse number of found sources over the years, including film, texts, fiber and fabric samples, posters, advertisements and brochures, with the intent to weave together an installation-collage that presents a critical and somewhat epistemological account of life lived in the “real-existierenden Sozialismus”. Two films, “The Divided Heaven” (Christa Wolf and Konrad Wolf, 1964) and “Good-bye Lenin” (Wolfgang Becker, 2003) represented by screenshots, will function as the conceptual ‘bookends’ in which the two main female film characters miss the construction and dismantling, respectively, of the Berlin Wall while hospitalized due to a state of unconsciousness. In between these two place-and-time holders, “Dederon – The Fabric of the East” will explore issues of production, fashion, gender and representation, political belief systems and ideology, the public and private, memory and melancholia. It is meant as a look back at the successes and failures of the 20th Century’s socialist projects as well as a proposal for rescuing its best ideas and implementations for a future beyond our current and crisis-ridden capitalism. Thus, I seek to reinsert a consideration of future into a world that seems increasingly preoccupied with the present only. But perhaps the unrealized nature of this project of mine is also indicative of the utopian nature of such a progressive alternative? We shall see ...

Photobastei Images

Me with my work in the background (Photo: © Photobastei, 2014)

Viewing my work (Photo: © Photobastei, 2014)