Photoart
The Garden
Aug 3rd
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
These photos where published in a series of photo books called “Boy Photo”
You can find a lot more of them in these albums made by chipai at imgsrc.
Please ask him for the password, I’m not allowed to make it public.
Bernard Faucon
Jul 16th
Born in 1950, Bernard Faucon created his photographic oeuvre between 1976 and 1995. It is one of the most original and important bodies of work of the late 20th century. Often exhibited, reproduced, borrowed, and collected, Faucon’s work, paradoxically, remains little known, and its place in contemporary creation is still ill defined. This is due as much to its singularity, it is a poetic, metaphysical, highly personal body of work, as to the diverse group inspired by it, from the most classic and orthodox in the photographic world to avant-garde artists, as well as novelist, directors, psychoanalysts, Japanese fashion designers.
Over the past 25 years, Bernard Faucon has shown in nearly 250 solo exhibitions and as many group shows, from Leo Castelli in New York City to Yvon Lambert in Paris, in large museums as well as small institutions, because Bernard Faucon says "yes" more easily than "no". It seems important today, ten years after the voluntary interruption of his work, to present it in its entirety, to reveal the rigor and logic behind the surprising innovation of his metamorphoses. His themes and obsessions evolve with an economy of means that increases up until the last series, entitled La fin de l’image (The end of the image): an intentional and decisive closure from which Bernard Faucon has not returned
Identity
Jun 29th
In January 2004, while the French government was debating banning religious and political symbols from schools, Catherine Balet began taking pictures of signs, labels, codes and icons that have social and aesthetic significance in the teenage world. As she extended that project from Paris to London, Berlin, Barcelona and Milan, it quickly became a record of the dress codes in European schools, a reference work on tribal subdivisions there. Teenagers in their struggle for identity and self-esteem, troubled by an urgent desire to be different, usually adopt the codes of a group, often inspired by music trends and always tweaked by circumstance, conscious individuation or both. In each city, Balet discovered the same music, fashion, brands, bands and labels. Only the details differed, reflecting the complexity of the history of each country or the influence of its migrant populations. In London and Barcelona, where the uniform is a school institution, details are all that students have by which to define themselves: Balet captures the way’s in which these students customize their outfits. Her large, richly descriptive portraits, set in the street, combine documentary style with poetic sensibility, capturing the complex mix of youth and age inherent to adolescence, its fragility and determination, and the era’s new mix of global homogenization and local individuation.
Nude Art Inquiry dropped
Jun 7th
Australian police have dropped an obscenity investigation into photos of nude children at an art gallery that sparked a major debate on censorship. Investigators said no charges would be brought over Bill Henson’s portraits, which feature naked 13-year-olds. The decision appeared to clear the way for reopening his exhibit, shut on 22 May, at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.
Pornography or Art? The Controversial Photography of Bill Henson
Over the last fortnight Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery was scheduled to host an exhibition showcasing the work of acclaimed Australian photographer, Bill Henson. However, just hours prior to its programmed debut, the gallery was stormed by police confiscating 12 works on display and another 20 from the storeroom, while the gallery website was also forced to remove the offending imagery from its server. Such censorship was in play due to the depiction of naked adolescents within many of Henson’s prints.
Raphaël Neal
May 5th
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Pregnant Boy
Apr 14th
Tim Macpherson, "Pregnant Boy on a Skateboard" Nominated for the Sony World Photography Award
Ryan McGinley
Feb 9th
Official Website | Documentation Video
Ryan McGinley is an unabashed voyeur, focusing his camera on the raw and personal lives of his friends in snapshots.
Anthony Goicolea
Oct 20th
Anthony Goicolea’s entire body of work can be described as a fictional autobiography. Similar to artist Gregory Crewdson, Goicolea creates elaborate mises en scènes, painstakingly produced for each work, resulting in moody, sinister stages where his characters interact and create undefined stories. His videos, as well as his photographs, always depict groups of boys engaging in games, or rather, in ambiguous activities: one boy pinning another to a bed and spitting in his face; boys wearing hoods and running scared in a forest; boys cleaning a pool full of floating bodies; a boy obsessively biting his nails; school boys mischievously posing as if in a class photograph; and uniformed boys eating gluttonously around a table. These are among the many examples of boyhood behavior captured by this artist since 1996 in photographs and videos, and most recently, also in installations and drawings.
Upon closer notice, the viewer realizes the boys depicted in these unusual actions are all the same, and in real life, the artist. Goicolea’s youthful looks have been described by many as “uncanny”. Although the artist was born in 1971, with makeup and costume he oftentimes passes for a teenager. This physical trait serves the artist as a tool in an exploration of boyhood themes and behavior. Goicolea draws less from his cultural heritage, than from gender identity and sexuality issues, especially the ambiguous period of a pre-pubescent and adolescent male and the complex rites of passage in the search for identity, self-esteem and a sense of self.
Inspiration: Kollio | Text: Cubiná | Video: Goicolea | Music: Sigur Rós
