Amsterdam: Vivian Maier - Works in Color

Now at Foam 1 June - 13 September 2020

This spring Foam presents the colourful works of Vivian Maier in the new exhibition Works in Color.

Mostly known for her black and white photography, Vivian Maier is an icon in American street photography. A genre mainly dominated by photographers such as Robert Frank, Joel Meyerowitz and Lee Friedlander. Maier’s observant eye as an unknown outsider and as a woman makes her work a significant addition to the canon of photography. This exhibition at Foam focuses on a lesser-known aspect of her work: over 60 colour photographs from the period between 1956 – 1986.

Works in Color shows street scenes in Chicago, - the city where Maier lived for much of her life - featuring people, objects, billboards and shop windows. Her work in colour seems altogether playful and tongue in cheek.

ABOUT VIVIAN MAIER
Vivian Maier (New York, 1926 – 2009) spent her entire life taking photographs, alongside her work as an au-pair. Her photographic work was not discovered until after her death when a box of negatives was offered for sale at a local auction. Maier spent a large part of her youth in France, giving her an outsider perspective on daily life in the United States. This exhibition follows the previous exhibition Vivian Maier – Street Photographer, which showed her black and white photographic work in 2014 at Foam.

© Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howar, Location unknown 1956

This exhibition is made possible in collaboration with the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.

More about the exhibition here

Amsterdam: Brassaï

Foam is proud to present the first retrospective of Brassaï in the Netherlands. The French photographer of Hungarian descent is considered a key figure of 20th-century photography.

Brassaï (1899- 1984) created countless iconic images of 1930s Parisian life. He was famous for capturing the grittier aspects of the city, but also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals - among them his friends and contemporaries like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse. The exhibition at Foam traces his career with over 170 vintage prints, plus a selection of drawings, a sculpture and documentary material.

Brassaï gathers many of the artistic facets of the photographer, from photos to drawings of female nudes. It is organized in twelve thematic sections: Paris by Day, and by Night, Minotaure, Graffiti, Society, Places and Things, Personages, Sleep, Pleasures, Body of a Woman, Portraits – Artists, Writers, Friends and The Street. Each is very different from the next – reflecting the diversity of Brassaï’s photographic work.

Brassaï is organised by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Foam.

More information: Foam Museum
More exhibitions: All About Photo

Amsterdam, NL: Santu Mofokeng Stories

February 15 - April 28, 2019
foam Fotografiemuseum
Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam
pressoffice@foam.org
www.foam.org

This year marks the 25th anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president.

From the Series Train Church. Photograph by Santu Mofokeng (b.1956) © Santu Mofokeng Foundation. Image courtesy of Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg and Steidl GmbH.

South African photographer Santu Mofokeng (b. 1956) famously documented daily life during and after apartheid. Foam presents a large-scale retrospective, containing a selection of his most important visual essays and featuring many unpublished works from the artist’s private archives.

The exhibition Santu Mofokeng – Stories brings together a number of important photographic essays by Mofokeng made in his native South Africa. Amongst the series on show is his first and most celebrated visual essay Train Church (1986), portraying the spontaneous religious rituals that occurred on the Soweto-Johannesburg commuter train. Other (many yet unknown) images portray life in the townships of Soweto and Dukathole; political protests leading up to the abolition of apartheid, and the historic election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994. Together, the series narrates how the rapidly changing political climate in South Africa affected daily life across the country. Raised in the township of Soweto, Mofokeng photographed South African communities from the inside, painting a nuanced and dynamic portrait of a complex society in transition.

More information: HERE
More about exhibitions on All About Photo

Amsterdam NL: Erwin Blumenfeld in Color

From 15 February, Foam will be showing the colour photography of the influential German photographer Erwin Blumenfeld.

Pat Blake for Vogue NY, 1954 © The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld

Blumenfeld (1897-1969) was born in Germany. He mastered photography in the Netherlands, where he shot portraits. After he went to Paris he built a career in fashion photography for a few years and he only worked in black and white. He liked to experiment with various techniques such as double exposure, distortion and solarisation. But from the moment that colour photography was introduced to the world, he transformed his original compositions in black and white into colour.

His special repertoire of shapes and colours that he developed after he left for the United States in 1941 made him one of the most original fashion photographers in New York. The female body and death were his main sources of inspiration. Despite the fashionable frivolity, he distinguished himself by the surreal nature of his subjects; the goal of his search was not realism, but the mystery of reality. He worked freelance for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Life and Vogue. The exhibition of his work in Foam focuses on colour photography that he developed in his period in New York (1941-1960) and gave him worldwide recognition.

The exhibition will be opened by granddaughter Nadia Blumenfeld-Charbit on 14 February 2019. You are welcome from 5.30pm onwards.

More information: HERE
Find out more about exhibitions on All About Photo

"Rage for color", Look, October 15th, 1958.
(models from the left to right : Renée Breton, Tess Mall, Dolores Hawkins, Anne St. Marie, Bani Yelverton)
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld