Photography Reading Shortlist – 10.23.12
Aperture aggregates the best in online photography news and commentary.
Zoe Crosher, print from The Disappearance of Michelle DuBois Volume 4
›› London’s Tate Modern Museum opens Moriyama + Klein, the first exhibition to look at the relationships between Daido Moriyama and William Klein—two photographers whose gritty, urgent contributions to street photography are inextricably linked. Time magazine’s LightBox has launched William Klein + Diado Moriyama: Double Feature, a pair of video profiles featuring Klein and Moriyama, shot in and around the studios of the men themselves, as The Guardian and The Telegraph (which also offers a review and conversation with Moriyama) take a look at William Klein and Daido Moriyama: in pictures.
“If Eggleston is the 1970s TV sitcom with toilets tucked safely out of view, American Surfaces is Big Brother, the uncut version. This is what democracy looks like.”
›› Extremes of the banal and the sublime in the American landscape were under investigation in a post by Blake Andrews—who takes a closer look at the filthy photographs of Stephen Shore—and in Flak Photo’s Looking at the Land, a web-based exhibition looking at current ideas about photographing landscape and the tradition of picturing place.
›› The New Photography 2012 exhibition is on at MoMA, featuring the work of Michele Abeles, Anne Collier, Zoe Crosher (whose The Disappearance of Michelle DuBois Volume 4 has just been released), Shirana Shahbazi, and the collective Birdhead (Ji Weiyu and Song Tao), artists who, in MoMA’s words, “speak to the diverse permutations of photography in an era when the definition of the medium is continually changing.” LightBox and Photo Booth posted slideshow previews of the work in the exhibition.
“It’s easy to forget now, but instant camera maker Polaroid once matched the mythos — and ubiquity — of Apple”
›› New York Magazine senior editor Christopher Bonanos maps the rise and near-collapse of Polaroid in a new book, offering up a concise cultural history of the brand and its visionary leader. Wired catches up with the Instant writer for “Why Polaroid Was the Apple of Its Time,” which inevitably addresses why it was the Instagram of its time as well. Also inspired by Instant: The Story of Polaroid, The Atlantic launches the headline “Before Sexting, There Was Polaroid,” a prelude to an excerpt from the book addressing privacy and intimacy in the age of instant film.
›› Books were celebrated and considered at the New York Art Book Fair late last month, in a Photo Booth slideshow of “Books as Muses,” and in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards shortlist, which will be narrowed down to winners in the First PhotoBook and PhotoBook of the Year categories and announced at Paris Photo on November 14. On the subject of photobooks, this clip of Life’s the Beach photographer Martin Parr introducing his latest limited-edition monograph has “viral” written all over it, no?
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Image: Zoe Crosher, print from The Disappearance of Michelle DuBois Volume 4
