In 2012, Paris Photo entrusted David Lynch, the multi-award winning American Film-maker, with the task of choosing from among the works exhibited by the gallery owners, 99 photographs to personally champion. You view the works exhibited as David Lynch would have, making for a unique way to contemplate these works whilst at the same time discovering David’s aesthetic universe. In his own right as an artist he has been dubbed with his very own unique cinematic style – known for disturbing, offending and mystifying an audience. [via Paris Photo]
David Lynch by Nadav Kander.
David Lynch and Isabella Rossellini on the set of Blue Velvet, 1986 by Helmut Newton
Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 70s, working primarily with 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.
Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.
Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, he was paid only $25 for her 1979 set, and in 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.
Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His art used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern life.
Photographer An-My Lê was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. The Fellowship is a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more. Learn more at www.macfound.org/fellows.
"When I became a photographer one of the first things I learned from speaking to other artists who had more experience was that unless you’re a conceptual artist it’s best to draw from what you know the most. And what did I know the most? It was how much of a mess my life was, and trying to make sense of it and the questions of war and destruction- how things are still unresolved with the Vietnam War in America. That’s something I wanted to touch, as well as the representation of war in movies and, now, the war in Iraq."
Poetic and sublime are the words that come to mind when viewing the astonishing works of Gregory Colbert.
Colbert was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1960. He began his career in Paris in 1983 making documentary films on social issues. His first exhibition, Timewaves, opened in 1992 at the Museum of Elysée in Switzerland to wide critical acclaim. For the next ten years, Colbert did not publicly share his art or show any films. Instead, he traveled to such places as India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Dominica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tonga, Namibia, and Antarctica to film and photograph interactions between human beings and animals. Since 1992, he has launched expeditions on every continent and has collaborated with over 150 species. Elephants, whales, manatees, sacred ibis, Antigone cranes, royal eagles, Gyr falcons, rhinoceros hornbills, cheetahs, leopards, African wild dogs, caracals, baboons, eland, meerkats, gibbons, orangutans, penguins, pandas, and saltwater crocodiles are among the animals he has filmed and photographed. Human subjects include Burmese monks, San bushmen, Tsaatan reindeer herders, the Masai, Lissu, Long-necked Karen, Mong, and Chong tribes, and people from other indigenous tribes around the world.
Colbert debuted Ashes and Snow at the Arsenale in Venice, Italy, in 2002. The exhibition went on to open in the first Nomadic Museum in 2005 in New York City. Ashes and Snow and the Nomadic Museum then traveled to Santa Monica in 2006, Tokyo in 2007, and Mexico City in 2008. It is charted to travel the globe indefinitely.
Ashes and Snow has been a critical and popular success. Photo magazine declared, “A new master is born.” Ashes and Snow has been described as "extraordinary" by the Economist, and "distinctive . . . monumental in every sense" by the Wall Street Journal. Stern magazine described the photographs as "fascinating," and Vanity Fair declared Gregory Colbert "Best of the Best." The New York Times, in an article by Alan Riding, stated, “The power of the images comes less from their formal beauty than from the way they envelop the viewer in their mood. . . .They are simply windows to a world in which silence and patience govern time.”
To date, Ashes and Snow has attracted over 10 million visitors, making it the most attended exhibition by a living artist in history. [via Gregory Colbert's official bio ]
"I have been tusked by an elephant, almost eaten by a sperm whale, knocked off my feet by a rhinoceros, embraced by a jaguar, given a haircut by a tiger shark, chased by a hippo and a black mamba, brought to my knees by malaria and dengue. But I was able to avoid the greatest danger of all. Never stop exploring the things that open you, or that you love."
