Jun Takahashi’s UNDERCOVER label drops a canvas sneaker in both a blue and black colorway. Donning the brand’s “U” logo upon its side panel, the shoes are simple and feature a vulcanized rubber waffle sole and high top construction. The blue pair is complemented with a white sole and laces, while the black pair feature an allover black construction.
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This exhibition is a rare chance to see the work of social documentary photographer Shirley Baker, and a portrait of the urban decline of late twentieth century Britain.
It focuses on Baker’s depictions of the urban clearance programmes of inner-city Manchester and Salford during 1961 – 1981 and the work documents what Baker saw as the needless destruction of working class communities.
Despite being the only woman practicing street photography in Britain at the time, Shirley Baker’s humanist documentary work received little attention throughout her sixty-five year career.
She claimed never to have posed her pictures, an action inimical to her documentarist ideals, yet her multi-layered images and exacting compositions imply dwelling on a scene until each element falls into place. Her visual puns, often the result of juxtaposing ‘chance’ elements in her field of vision, result in a humour and everyday surrealism that would have eluded most passers-by.
Objects and scenes take on significance beyond their literal appearance. Half demolished walls and peeling wallpaper resound with lives once lived. Her meticulous focus on graffiti brings the plain brickwork to life and generates backdrops for scenarios in which her ordinary subjects, in their functional environments, become momentarily extraordinary.
Opposite – Manchester, 1967
Exhibition runs through to September 20th, 2015
Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies St
London
W1F 7LW
www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk
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In 1975 Nixon commented, “The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it.” To present the world as he sees it Nixon has consistently used large, unwieldy cameras, with negatives measuring 8 x 10 inches or 11 x 14 inches, to describe life in precise, compelling detail.
His recurring themes—portraits of the very young and the very old, cities seen up close and afar, people on their porches, etc.—at first may appear to be unrelated strands. But, in retrospect, the photographs are woven together by the artist’s singular sensibility: a feeling of intimacy gained by clear-eyed, lucid description. In the frame of his camera, Nixon revels in the rich variation of surfaces and textures and the specific characteristics that give his subjects life.
Whether photographing landscape, couples making love, extreme close-ups of hair and skin, or family groups, Nixon’s work captures fleeting moments and gestures in an extended pause. His photographs seem to suspend time while evidencing a palpable consciousness of its passage.
Opposite – View of Essex Street, Near the Massachusetts Turnpike, Boston, 1976
Exhibition runs from September 10th through to October 24th, 2015
Fraenkel Gallery
49 Geary Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco
CA 94108
www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk
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At the centre of the exhibition is an assemblage of plaster heads, installed like a mass of remains on the gallery floor. In this work, Parmiggiani engages with classical iconography and fragments of antiquity, using the figures and motifs of an imaginary archaeology to rewrite and evoke the effect of ancient ruins. Another new work consists of paper painted with the constellation of the stars and pierced with a burn. Its materials are charred but memories of their presence remain. Moving between homage, transgression and estrangement, the echo of the ancient world is charged with mystery as the artist gives form to ephemeral notions of time, silence, memory, absence and dreams through sculptural installations, paintings and Delocazioni that resonate with imaginative tension.
Using relics, fire, ashes, pigment, dust, shadow, Parmiggiani’s work is exquisitely and brutally material but retains the longing for a transcendent dimension, a desire to render infinities, abstractions and what is burrowed in the world but nameless and without noise. First exhibited in 1970, Parmiggiani’s iconic Delocazioni use powder, smoke and fire to make shadows and imprints on paper and board. In order to create his Delocazioni, Parmiggiani builds an installation and sets it on fire through the combustion of tyres. When the objects are removed, what remains are their negative outlines in soot, revealing their trace and memory, silhouettes immortalised using smoke. In this landscape of shadows and light, bodies and objects, the whole universe of life is evoked in absentia.
Opposite – Untitled, 2013-2015
Exhibition runs through to August 29th, 2015
Simon Lee Gallery
304, 3F The Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street, Central
Hong Kong
China
The title chosen for the exhibition, El traslado, refers to the movement of religious carvings in the days leading up to Easter, when the sculptures are moved from their place of worship to the sorority houses to then go in procession by being walked through the streets of the city. At the origin of this project we find an idea of Manuel León that hast to do with his exercise to explain, as he has previously done in numerous occasions, the conceptual starting point of his painting and the need to move permanently to another place. Both his work and his thought are transitive, which is reflected in this latest series of paintings that consider the principle of transit, an aspect that has not frequently been treated throughout the history of painting, not only in Spain but also internationally. After the suggestions proposed by the exhibition curator Fer Francés, León decided to change the scale of the appropriationists black and white watercolors in where he “paid tribute”, sometimes in an ironic key, to which for him were the greatest works of European Baroque or at least seemed to be more appropriate to raise new narratives from others that were known by him. Through these works he realized that he could take advantage of the reflection made by past masters to draw analogies with the reality of the moment he had been faced to live in. However, in a logical evolution after intervening on the work of previous artists, and with the hope of further developing his own new form of painting, he began to compose different images as a collage, which concluded with a rewarding job but at the same time over-demanding, compared to the one he had aimed for.
Opposite – ¿Dónde está el problema real?, 2015
Exhibition runs through to September 9th, 2015
Galeria Javier Lopez
Guecho, 12 B
28023 Madrid
Spain
In 1980, the American photographer Larry Fink received a grant from the Seattle Museum of Art, or as he tells the story, ‘My star was starting to rise. I was called’ and so, already a logger of sorts himself, Fink made a natural transition into photographing the rugged breed of men who selectively pillaged the deep, virgin forest of the Olympic Peninsula, in western Washington.
Fink was assigned to ‘a gypo logger’ Davey McCardle, who would prove a significant character in the story of making ‘Opening the Sky’. Fink recalls,’ Back up the mountain with a flash in hand and a bag of forty pounds, a Mamiya C330 and a Leica M2 as my cameras, I was living a tentative life, jumping over logs rolling at me and sidestepping crevices and snakes, at the same time photographing the logging.’
‘Think of the sound from the back of a long tunnel. A whooooosh and slow silent rumble, then the gnawing ra-ta- tat-ta of the saw. Its whine, searing as is lacerates three hundred and fifty years of slow time growth with quick time destruction or production. Finally a great aching arch, a crack, a whir, and a long dark roar. Gravity takes its toll, hallow of time, silence then. A silence without time. The massive tree settled in a bed of mosses, ripped and startled into submission. Looking through a camera is not looking at danger in the same way as straight on.’
The resulting images, published in a beautiful limited edition hard back cloth covered book, are majestic, poetic and fearless — Fink at his finest.
A limited edition wooden box set, including a signed silver print produced in collaboration with the artist will also be available priced at £450.
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