Round Up Week of March 8
/The Producer’s picks for this week’s news relevant to the photography, art, design and production industries:
1) “This is Gender” Photography Competition – In Pictures
Photograph: Dhrubajyoti Bhattacharjee/Global Health 50/50
Gender permeates all aspects of our lives, stratifying society, defining opportunities and shaping our identity. Global Health 50/50, housed at the UCL Centre for Gender and Global Health launched the #Thisisgender competition in response to the lack of representational diversity and critically reflective images of gender in global health and development, asking photographers to capture what gender means to them and looks like in their communities
This is Gender photo exhibition is free and open to all - see it at UCL North Cloisters in London from 9 - 23 March
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2) National Winners Revealed in the 2020 Sony World Photography Awards
Abbas Alkhamis, Saudi Arabia, Winner, National Awards, 2020 Sony World Photography Awards
One of the largest and most prestigious photo contests in the world has revealed its first wave of 2020 winners. The Sony World Photography Awards National winners focus on the best regional talent across more than 60 countries around the globe.
The 2020 Sony World Photography Awards received a record breaking 350,000 submissions, with 190,000 entries into its Open category. The Open category spans a number of thematic sections, all seeking the best single photograph from either amateur or professional photographers.
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3) After Spending Decades Examining the Effects of War, this Photographer Found New Inspiration in the Atlantic Ocean
From “The Crossing” by Marissa Roth. (Marissa Roth)
Marissa Roth spent much of her career photographing traumatic events. She covered the 1992 Los Angeles riots while on staff at the Los Angeles Times, garnering a Pulitzer Prize, and devoted nearly four decades to a personal essay, “One Person Crying: Women and War,” examining the impact of war on women in countries and cultures around the world.
“The Crossing,” one of her latest projects, now available as a book, is a departure yet still connected to her work on women and war.
While Roth was working on women and war, she found she also was accumulating knowledge about her own family’s history with war.
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4) The Photography of Carol Jerrems Boasts Australia's Highest-Priced Photo – In Pictures
Vale Street (1975), Carol Jerrems’ most famous image
Carol Jerrems was a Melbourne-based photographer who died in 1980, at just 30 years old. Last November her work rocked the art world when a print of Vale Street (1975) sold for $122,000 ($1,00,000 hammer price) at a Sotheby’s Australia (now operating as Smith & Singer) auction. In her short and intense career she focused on figurative compositions that were intensely personal and informative of a life lived in Melbourne in the 70s.
Smith & Singer is exhibiting 26 of the revered photographer’s works in the exhibition Carol Jerrems: Portrait of a Decade, at 14-16 Collins Street Melbourne, 27 February to 20 March 2020, and then 26 March to 17 April 2020 at 30 Queen Street Woollahra, Sydney.
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5) The Greatest Fashion Photographer You’ve Never Heard Of
Dora Kallmus may be the greatest fashion photographer you’ve never heard of.
The Marquis de Cuevas with dancer Vladimir Skouratoff, circa 1954-55
c - Nachlass Madame d’Ora, Museum für Kunst and Gewerbe Hamburg
Born in 1881 in Vienna, she focused on that city’s royals and Rothschilds before moving to Paris, where she befriended fashion’s elite: Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Chanel, Lanvin. Not only did she photograph them and their fashions, but — under the name Madame d’Ora — she also shot the most famous painters, writers and philosophers of her day.
But in 1940, the Nazis seized Paris, and Kallmus, who was Jewish, went into hiding. When she emerged, some three years later, many of her family and friends were dead. For the rest of her life, she trained her lens on the displaced, the desperate and the dying.
Few people have had a second act as dramatic as hers, let alone a portfolio as varied. You’ll get a good sense of it at the Neue Galerie, whose new show, “Madame d’Ora,” includes roughly 100 photographs — both the elegant and the agonizing.
Kallmus had a gift, says curator Monika Faber, for making her subjects more attractive than they actually were. A century before Photoshopping, society women and artists cried, “Make me beautiful, Madame d’Ora!” and were pleased with the results.
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6) Wolfgang Tillmans Wants You to Find Spirituality in Photography
When photographer Wolfgang Tillmans was young, he loved the stars. At age 10, he found a book on astronomy nestled in his parents’ bookshelf, which sparked a zealous appetite for observing what lay beyond the Earth. He spent days and nights in his German hometown of Remscheid with his eyes turned toward the skies. “I wasn’t a particularly popular boy in school, and in the face of extreme loneliness of the universe, I felt somewhat held,” Tillmans said during a recent talk with Aperture editor Michael Famighetti. “A lot of people are scared by infinity, [but] it gave me something to hold onto.”
When Famighetti recently invited Tillmans to guest edit the winter 2019 issue of Aperture, the photographer chose the theme of spirituality as the basis for the collected photo stories and texts. “I immediately knew that it should be spirituality because I strongly sense that the political shifts in Western society in the last ten years stem from…a lack of meaning in the capitalist world,” he wrote in the issue.
Tillmans has been outspoken about his qualms with organized religion, so his focus on spirituality may seem surprising. Yet his early fascination with astronomy, along with his deep love for club culture and queer kinship, shaped his secular approach to the subject. In his own photography, Tillmans embraces diverse subjects that often reflect very earthly concerns: rave subcultures, sexuality, and the mundane. Tillmans defines spirituality not by what murky afterlife may await us, but by how we form connections with each other while we are still here.