Andre Kertesz "My France" in Stockholm

                                         Andre Kertesz | "Rue des Ursins", 1931

Upcoming exhibition || Andre Kertesz "My France" [16/3-27/5] opens on friday at Fotografiska in Stockholm.  Kertesz´s outstanding experiments with artificial light, his perfect balance of the composition, angles and more revolutionized photography [and even influenced German expressionist filmmakers like Fritz Lang, F.W.Murnau, Robert Weine].  More about Kertesz here -----------|>

                              "Untitled" .. from Kertesz´s best book, "Polaroids" [1979]

Lee Jeffries and the homeless

                                                 Photo | Lee Jeffries 

 In 2008, former accountant and self-taught amateur photographer Lee Jeffries [from Manchester] was in London to participate in a marathon. While walking around in the streets of London he took some photos of a young homeless girl who was huddled in a sleeping bag. The young girl spotted him and started to scream ... instead of just walk away he approached the eighteen-year old girl and had a conversation with her. Her story had a profound effect on him and changed his artistic approach ... the homeless population now became the subject of his art. His haunting portraits are getting more and more noticed in media and internet ... soon a book will be published [YellowKorner]. Check out his portfolio at Flickr

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Rememberance .....

It is one year since the disaster "The Great Higashinhon Earthquake" and tsunami which killed over 19.000 thousand people and left small communities like Kesennuma, Rikuzen-Takada, Kamaishi devastated. In the beginning of the ninetíes respected Japanese photographer Koji Onaka travelled around and photographed this area of Sanriku, in the northern east cost of Japan. He collected some of these photographs in a book entitled Umimachi [SuperLabo, 2011]. Highly recommendable!

                                            Sanriku area immortalized by Koji Onaka´s photos

Paul Graham - 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner

"The Hasselblad Foundation is pleased to announce British photographer Paul Graham as the recipient of the 2012 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for SEK 1,000,000 (approximately GBP 95,000, US$150,000), The award ceremony will take place in London on March 8, 2012. An exhibition of his work, Paul Graham – 2012 Hasselblad Award Winner will open on October 26, 2012 at the Hasselblad Center at the Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden, in connection with which, one or more seminars will be arranged with the award winner"....

Paul Graham

                                                              Banksy

W Eugene Smith

                                                    W Eugene Smith
From the bookshelf  ||
W Eugene Smith, one of photography´s legendary figures, published a series of memorable newspaper articles/photo-essays and books in his lifetime. The images from Nurse Midwife, Country Doctor, Albert Schweitzer - A Man of Mercy, Spanish Village and Minamata are of course unforgettable. Smith´s almost fanatically dedication to his mission as a photographer is remarkable... his obsession with the Pittsburgh project that turned a three week assignment into a never ending drama .. or his jazz loft project at 821 Sixth Avenue - posthumously immortalized in the books "Dream Street - W Eugene Smith´s Pittsburgh Project" [Sam Stephenson, 2001] and "The Jazz Loft Project" [Sam Stephenson, 2009] .... Read more about the Jazz Loft Project here.

Alexandre Orion | "Skulls of Sao Paolo"

Couldn´t resist Part 6 | Brazilian graffiti artist/photographer Alexandre Orions amazing reverse graffiti mural inside the Max Feffer street-Tunnel in Sao Paolo [2007]. This project, "Skulls of Sao Paolo", is Orions attempt in getting a greener world ... How can we with easy methods fight against the heavy pollution that is a growing problem in the urban landscape. Orion´s method in this project is simple but at the same time genius .. his choice of medium, reverse graffiti, is in fact cleaning, removal of dirt... With a wet rag he scrubbed away parts of the layer of soot from the walls inside the tunnel until the white surface stared through as a eerie catacomb of skulls. The Sao Paolo state police tried, of course, to arrest him but quickly realised that he was actually cleaning the wall/city ... something the goverment should have done years ago. As they washed and removed the art .. Orion kept working on the rest of the tunnel .. resulting in a clean-up of the whole tunnel. Just in a few weeks after the city started a clean-up campaign in the city ......

Andreas Gursky .. Is photography dead?

                           Rhein II - Andreas Gursky ... probably a good investment

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark opened 2012 with a monster exhibition by photographys own Damien Hirst, the german uber-star photographer Andreas Gursky [Jan. 13th - May 13th].
"The exhibition spans the whole of Gursky’s oeuvre up to the very latest photographs presented this autumn in the artist’s gallery, Gagosian Gallery in New York – and thus gives the viewer the opportunity to follow the transformations and transformative powers of the images through more than two decades". Before I went to the exhibition I tried to do my homework to understand Gurskys photographs and "visual art". But unfortunately, this very ambitious exhibition told me nothing. Maybe I didn´t do my homework well .. but to me, it seems that Gursky is becoming more of a brand than what I call an artist [or photographer]. And of course, an exhibition like this, reminds me of the debates over the whole concept photography, not only if analog photography is dead. SFMOMA has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since it´s opening and has always been dedicated to the examination of the medium in all its form. In April 2010, they arranged a major symposium, "Is Photography Over", on the current state of photography. Follow some interesting conversation here.

And ... if you visit Louisiana ... don´t miss Yayoi Kusama´s hypnotic "Gleaming Lights of the Souls" .. and her exhibitions at Tate Modern and The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

                                    Shine on you cray diamond ....

Yayoi Kusama