Milan: Stefano de Luigi "Televisiva"

Stefano De Luigi's unpublished project "Televisiva" will open at the Other Size Gallery by Workness in Milan on February 5, 2020.

© Stefano De Luigi / VII

The 32 black and white photos, on view until April 10, focus on the Italian television universe of the nineties, its history, backstages, and characters, returning the still image of an epoch that speaks to us in a dramatically current way even today.

Between satire and restlessness, De Luigi's photography scrutinizes the sequined surface of the television show, represented as a carnival microcosm of showmen, dancers and circus creatures born from the imagination of the TV authors, and returns a grotesque human representation that becomes a metaphor for the politics and society of today's Italy. Twenty-five years after its birth, as a prophecy, "Televisiva" denounces the system of screamed words and fake news, of easy sensationalism and of behavior patterns which, between fascination and demagogy, has been translated from the virtual dimension of television to political debate and everyday life in the real country.

© Stefano De Luigi / VII

 

 

More information: HERE
Find more photo exhibitions: HERE

Switzerland: René Burri, Explosiion of Sight at the Musée de l'Elysée

René Burri, Albisguetli, Zürich, Suisse, 1980 © René Burri / Magnum Photos. Fondation René Burri, Courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

René Burri was born in 1933 and died in 2014 in Zurich, Switzerland. Throughout his life, he was on the front line of global history. He joined Magnum Photos in 1955, becoming one of its members in 1959. Over the course of his career spanning almost sixty years, he travelled to Europe, the Middle East, North, Central and South America, Japan and China, recording with lucidity and acuity most of the momentous events of the second half of the 20th century. Numerous influential people were also captured by his lens including Picasso, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, Barragan, Giacometti and Tinguely. In 1963, he produced his iconic portrait of “Che au cigare” (Che with Cigar), which brought him to the attention of the public.

From January to May 2020, curated by Marc Donnadieu and Mélanie Bétrisey, the institution has scheduled a new retrospective of his life’s work entitled René Burri, Explosions of Sight. The bonds between René Burri and the Musée de l’Elysée are strong, and anchored in the institution’s history. In 1985, when it was opened as a “museum for photography”, Burri attended for his friend Charles-Henri Favrod. Two years later, his photographic project “Les Ruines du futur” (The Ruins of the Future) was presented. In 2004, the museum hosted his first retrospective. In 2013, Burri decided to set up a foundation in his name at the Musée de l’Elysée.

This new exhibition is the culmination of diligent research and studies carried out by the Musée de l’Elysée teams since 2013 on the entire René Burri collection in family archives and the Magnum Photos archives in Paris and New York. It aims to offer a new perspective on all Burri’s myriad creative activities throughout his life. It reveals a more personal and secret side to one of the most influential photojournalists of our time with a great many often previously unpublished documents: contact sheets, study prints, films, models for books, exhibition projects, notebooks, collages, watercolours, drawings, etc.

Based on a long, chronological “Lifeline” leading visitors through the nine rooms of the Musée de l’Elysée’s two exhibition levels, this project develops twelve “Focal Points”, each showcasing a decisive element of Burri’s creative process in the broadest sense of the term: Cinema; Structures; Myself and the Others; Che; China; Television; Magnum; Book; One World; Colour; Collages; Drawings. In this exhibition, René Burri is shown to be modern and inventive, committed and facetious, curious and generous, unifying and a mentor, a rebel and poet, impassioned and fascinating and above all, particularly explosive!

René Burri, Autoportrait, Coronado, Nouveau-Mexique, 1973-1983 © René Burri/Magnum Photos. Fondation René Burri courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

More information: Museum Website

Sweden: Daido Moriyama A Diary

The exhibition A Diary is a room filled with many layers of a real life, and an (artist’s) “I”. Daido Moriyama’s life is his images. He works insistently every day, collecting what he sees, does and passes by. He has been on
a journey his whole life, at times extremely local, photo-graphing his neighbourhood in Tokyo, but also on long trips to America and Europe. The different parts of the world are treated with the same honesty, especially the same frenetic movement forwards. Stop and take a photo, move on. There is no hierarchical idea in his choice of motifs and this is reflected in the works in the exhibition. Certain photographs are raw, almost dissol-ving into abstraction but they still share a distinctive photographic expression with the quiet, contemplative street scenes or self-portraits in hotel rooms. He has a way of creating decadent still lifes out of the most banal objects, giving them an almost fetishist quality.

Daido Moriyama earned himself a reputation early on as a provocative street photographer, but his work also bears witness to the fact that a life contains many days of so many different encounters and emotional states, from despair to tenderness, from the dirty to the clean. The photographs in this exhibition stems from nearly fifty years of image creation, which cannot be read chronologically or in thematic groupings. The reproduc-tive characteristics of photography are important to Daido Moriyama. He sometimes takes photos of his own photos, which he in turn photographs, in something that resembles a game with his own body of work. His photographs have been reproduced on coffee mugs, skateboards and t-shirts. The images are there to be encountered by many people, both in exhibition spaces and publications – they should never be exclusive.

It seems particularly appropriate that a photographer as prolific, popular and influential as Daido Moriyama is this year’s Hasselblad Award winner, since the Hasselblad Foundation’s support and presentation of photographic art is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Curators: Sara Walker & Louise Wolthers
The exhibition consists of photographs taken since the 1960s until the present. They are all lambda prints produced 2019.

Until February 9, 2020
Götaplatsen 6, 412 56 Göteborg, Sweden
More information Hasselblad Foundation

 

 

France: Sebastiao Salgado at Polka Galerie

January 31 - March 14, 2020

Serra Pelada, State of Para, Brazil, 1986

Following his studies at São Paulo University in Brazil and at Vanderbilt University in the United States, Sebastião Salgado worked with the International Coffee Organization for which he traveled extensively. It is during these trips that he started taking pictures, and in 1973, he left his job to begin a career in photography. He has never stopped travelling since. He partnered with photo agencies such as Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos up until 1994, at which point he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded the Amazonas Images agency.

His projects are conceived and created as long-term endeavors, and presented in exhibitions and books which are characterized by a strong visual coherence. From 1977 to 1984, Salgado journeyed through Latin America and visited its most remote mountain villages. The resulting photographs were published in Otras Americas in 1986. Salgado began another extensive project that same year examining the global production system, and for which he traveled to twenty-six countries. His goal was to reveal and explain the evolution of manual labor. Published under the French title “La main de l’homme”, the book Workers was released in 1993.

In 1994, Salgado started focusing on the constant increase in human migration caused by political events. Throughout the rest of the decade, he published thirty-six stories on this serious topic. He assembled them in Migration, published in 2000 along with The Children, which highlighted the plight of the youngest of these refugees.

His photo essays have been largely rewarded. For instance, he received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant in Humanistic Photography in 1982, a World Press Photo in 1985, and a Visa d'Or at the Visa pour l'Image festival in 1990.

Salgado's commitment goes beyond his photographs. In 1998, he successfully converted the land he had inherited from his family in Brazil into a nature reserve and created the Instituto Terra, whose aim is to replenish the country's depleted Atlantic forest. Furthermore, having collaborated with Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization on numerous occasions, he was named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2001.

Since 2004, Salgado has been working on a new monumental project entitled Genesis; a collection of black and white photographs of landscapes, fauna, flora, and communities who still live according to ancestral ways and traditions. 

Serra Pelada, State of Para, Brazil, 1986

 

 

More about the exhibition: HERE

12, rue Saint-Gilles
75003 Paris, France