Tokyo Limited

  Born in Venice in 1983, Renato D’Agostin is a young photographer I can get behind. His beautiful abstract series of street images from Tokyo really succeed in taking an overly familiar subject and making it seem fresh.     Legendary photographer Ralph Gibson, for whom D’Agostin assisted during his time in New York, puts …

The Hunger for a Story

At a loose end this weekend I joined the throngs of people who decided to watch ‘The Hunger Games’. Now I’ll always try and watch at least one blockbuster a year but one thing that usually strikes me is how noisy they are. Just watching the trailers advertising the latest round of big budget mega …

Woodman at the Guggenheim

Words like haunting, ethereal, spooky, eerie spring to mind when viewing the ghostlike images of Francesca Woodman. Indeed that is the kind of language that pops up in all the reviews I have read, turning her into a cliché – the doomed romantic icon. Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath belong to the same canon. The …

An Artist in his Studio

I have a confession. I feel asleep during the first 15 minutes of ‘Gerhard Richter Painting’. I was tired but also if I’m totally honest I was expecting a bit of a snorefest. The very idea of seeing it seemed to have me overcome with drowsiness and was not helped by the use of minimalist …

Evidence

Mona Kuhn’s large format photographs of French naturists are some of the best and most interesting nudes I’ve seen in recent years. The large format prints are much sort after by collectors and it’s not hard to see why. They have an easy, soft lit languorous quality which makes the nude figures that populate the …

Undefeated

  It’s a very long time since I went to the cinema and found myself welling up. Oscar winning ‘Undefeated’ does that to you. You don’t want to respond to this tale of an inner city football team battling to beat the odds but the characters are so compelling and the story so touching that …

Mountain Man

Just discovered these wonderful early landscapes of mountain ranges taken by Italian photographer and mountaineer, Vittorio Sella. He was lucky enough to know the Duke of Abruzzi, a man who seemed determined to visit every great mountain range in the world. Handily for Sella, he needed an expedition photographer for these trips and Vittorio happily …

The Places we wouldn’t want to live

The latest photography book to be added to my burgeoning collection is Jonas Bendiksen’s The Places Where we Live’ It’s a really beautiful series of images that highlights the plight of many of the world’s slum dwellers, from Caracas to Jakarta. A visit to http://www.theplaceswelive.com gives you a great overview of the subject and features …

Ghost in the Machine

Just went to see Matthew Pillsbury’s ‘City Stages’ at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery on 57th street. For those unfamiliar with his work many of his large format black and white shots feature blurry ghost-like human beings in the midst of monumental cityscapes, be they the interior of a museum or an apartment in a skyscraper. …

War: Pink in tooth and claw

I went to see Richard Mosse (pronounced like a regular Moss with a silent e’’, in case you were wondering) give a lecture on his’ Infra’ series of photos last night at the Aperture gallery in New York Considering it was a freezing cold night in NYC the attendance was impressive and reflects the buzz …