Saturday 27 April 2013

Natalia Wiernik - Student Focus Winner, Sony World Photography Awards

I am so impressed by the work of Natalia Wiernik, winner of the Student Focus Photographer of the Year  in the Sony World Photography Awards (see below) that I have given her an entry here all to herself!
Wiernik is a student at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland; the finalists in the competition were asked to shoot a series of photographs on the theme of 'family'. The work, along with that of other finalists can be seen at Somerset House until 12 May.
Click on images to enlarge.

Sony World Photography Awards - Somerset House


Ernest Goh, Headshot #55 - 2nd place: Nature & Wildlife
The 2013 Sony World Photography Awards have been announced - the winners and shortlisted work will be on show at Somerset House until 12 May.
Below is a selection of the winning images - find full details of all winners and all the images on the World Photography Organisation website. Click on images to enlarge.
Andrea Gjestvang – winner, L'Iris d'Or (Photographer of the Year)
Valerio Bispuri, Prisons of South America - Winner: Contemporary Issues
Ilya Pitalev, North Korean soldiers and civilians on the stand of the Kim Il-sung stadium - Winner: Current Affairs
Myriam Meloni, from The Limousine series - Winner: Arts & Culture
Elmar Akhmetov - Winner: Low Light (Open Competition)
Natalia Wiernik, Thanksgiving - Student Focus Award
Vanessa Colareta, Still life with oranges, lemons and bread - Winner: Still Life
Klaus Thymann, i-D Iceland - Winner: Fashion & Beauty

Christian Åslund, from advertising campaign for Jim Rickey shoes - Winner: Campaign
Jens Juul, Six Degrees of Copenhagen - Winner: Portraiture
Roman Pyatkovka, Soviet Photo - Winner: Conceptual

Turner Prize 2013 - shortlist

David Shrigley, Untitled, 2012

The artists shortlisted for this year's Turner Prize are: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, David Shrigley, Tino Seghal and Laure Prouvost
Read Adrian Searle's assessment of the shortlist.
Work by the shortlisted artists will be shown at Ebrington in Derry, Londonderry as part of the UK City of Culture 2013, opening on 23 October 2013. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on Monday 2 December 2013. (Profiles below are from the Tate Gallery website.)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is nominated for her exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Extracts and Verses.
Yiadom-Boakye’s painted portraits of imaginary people use invented pre-histories and raise pertinent questions about how we read pictures in general, particularly with regard to black subjects.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Liberation Two-Piece, 2013
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Complication, 2013
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Midnight, Cadiz, 2013
David Shrigley is nominated for his solo exhibition at Hayward Gallery David Shrigley: Brain Activity.
The exhibition of Shrigley’s well-loved drawings with his photography, sculpture and film offered a comprehensive overview and new perspectives on his work, revealing his black humour, macabre intelligence and infinite jest.
David Shrigley, I'm Dead, 2010
David Shrigley, Gravestone, 2008
David Shrigley, Headless Drummer, 2012
Tino Seghal is nominated for his project at documenta (XIII) This Variation, and at Tate Modern These Associations.
Seghal’s intimate works are at once structured and improvised, consisting purely of live encounters between people with a keen sensitivity to their institutional context. Through participation they test the limits of artistic material and audience perception.
Tino Sehgal and participants of These Associations at Tate Modern Turbine Hall
Tino Seghal, These Associations, 2012
Tino Seghal, These Associations, 2012
Laure Prouvost is nominated for her Tate and Grizedale Arts commission Wantee, and her two-part installation for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women Farfromwords.
Prouvost’s unique approach to filmmaking, often situated within atmospheric installations, employs strong story telling, quick cuts, montage and deliberate misuse of language to create surprising and unpredictable work.
Laure Prouvost, installation at Whitechapel Gallery, 2013
Laure Prouvost, Wantee, 2013
Laure Prouvost, Wantee, 2013

Sunday 21 April 2013

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013

Christina de Middel, The Afronauts, 2012
Work by the artists shortlisted for the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize is on display at The Photographers' Gallery until 30 June 2013. The artists are: Broomberg & Chanarin, Mishka Henner, Chistina de Middel and Chris Killip. Together they represent as diverse an approach to photography as you could wish for: 
Broomberg & Chanarin juxtapose contemporary news images with Bertolt Brecht's newspaper clippings of Second World War photographs accompanied by his brief poems; Mishka Henner appropriates images of sex workers around the world caught on Google Street View;  Christina de Middel constructs a semi-fictional documentary account of the Zambian space programme; Chris Killip's social documentary pictures record working-class life in the north-east of England in the 1970s and 80s.

Read reviews by Adrian Searle,and Richard Dorment; watch a video in which Sean O'Hagan introduces the artists. Download a copy of Broomberg & Chanarin's book War Primer 2.

See below for entries on the 2012 and 2011 prizes.

The brief biographies below are from The Photographers' Gallery website.

Adam Broomberg (b. 1970, South Africa) and Oliver Chanarin (b. 1971, UK) are nominated for their publication War Primer 2 (MACK, 2012).
War Primer 2 is a limited edition book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertold Brecht’s remarkable 1955 publication War Primer. Brecht’s photo-essay comprises 85 images, photographic fragments or collected newspaper clippings, that were placed next to a four-line poem, called ‘photo-epigrams’. Broomberg and Chanarin layered Google search results for the poems over Brecht’s originals.
Broomberg & Chanarin, War Primer 2, 2012
Broomberg & Chanarin, War Primer 2, 2012
Broomberg & Chanarin, War Primer 2, 2012
Broomberg & Chanarin, War Primer 2, 2012

Mishka Henner (b. 1976, UK) is nominated for his exhibition No Man’s Land at Fotografia Festival Internazionale di Roma, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (20 September – 28 October 2012).
No Man's Land represents isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments. Shot entirely with Google Street View, Henner's method of online intelligence-gathering results in an unsettling reflection on surveillance, voyeurism and the contemporary landscape.
Mishka Henner, No Man's Land, 2011
Mishka Henner, No Man's Land, 2011
Mishka Henner, No Man's Land, 2011
Mishka Henner, No Man's Land, 2011

Cristina De Middel (b.1975, Spain) is nominated for her publication The Afronauts (self-published, 2011).
In her first book, The Afronauts, De Middel engages with myths and truths, reality and fiction. In 1964, after gaining independence, Zambia started a space programme in order to send the first African astronaut to the moon.
De Middel sequences her beautiful colour photography with manipulated documents, drawings and reproductions of letters, presenting them as almost folkloric inlays alongside fashion illustrations and technical sketches.
Christina de Middel, The Afronauts, 2012
Christina de Middel, The Afronauts, 2012
Christina de Middel, The Afronauts, 2012
Christina de Middel, The Afronauts, 2012
Chris Killip (b. 1946, UK) is nominated for his exhibition What Happened – Great Britain 1970 –1990 at LE BAL, Paris (12 May – 19 August 2012).
British born Killip has been taking photographs for nearly five decades. What Happened – Great Britain comprises black and white images of working people in the north of England, taken by Killip in the 1970s and 1980s. After spending months immersed in several communities, Killip documented the disintegration of the industrial past with a poetic and highly personal point of view.
Chris Killip, Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976
Chris Killip, Boo and his rabbit, Lynemouth, 1983
Chris Killip, Bever's First Day Out, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, 1982
Chris Killip, Helen and her hoola-hoop, Lynemouth, 1984