Toxic Wastes from A to Z (coming after you and me) by John Fekner is a parody of a children’s alphabet learning aid which runs alphabetically through a list of toxic pollutants. Martin Nisenholtz invites John Fekner, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and others to experiment with an early interactive computer graphics system (Telidon) at New York University’s Alternate Media Center (Interactive Telecommunications Program). Fekner generates colorful shapes and patterns in a deceptively simple lighthearted manner to engage the attention of the viewer concerning the seriousness of hazardous waste and the effect on both the general public and the environment. Under the direction of Don Leicht, students in his class at P. S. 161 in the South Bronx participate on the rap chant of the video’s title. Using reconfigured audio toys, Fekner and Steve Grivas supplied the additional background sounds. Fekner received his first international award at Toronto’s Video Culture Festival in the Videotex category.

2min 12sec. color, sound, 8-bit computer graphics

©1981 John Fekner

Whitney Houston I Wanna Dance With Somebody (C) 1987 Arista Records

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times.
A woman hugs a wounded relative inside a mosque use as a hospital by Anti-Saleh demonstrators, during clashes on 15 October 2011 in Sanaa, Yemen.

19 January – 25 February 2012

STEVENSON is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Viviane Sassen, her second at the gallery following Moshi in 2010. The show brings together photographs from her recent Parasomnia series and some from her previous series, Flamboya.

Sassen spent her childhood years in East Africa. She describes that, on her family’s return to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland but knew that she had also been an outsider in Africa. Parasomnia animates these feelings of dislocation between home and away, night and day, life and dreams. The series comprises photographs taken in West and East Africa over the past two years, as well as a few taken in Europe, which frame her enigmatic and often haunting narratives.

As a New York Times critic recently noted (in a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography exhibition), Sassen’s images ‘convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception’. Her photographs constantly disrupt our usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed while others are incidental scenes she encounters on her travels, leaving us unsure which are her imaginary fictions and which scenes from life. Her distinct visual language is articulated by a deep awareness of the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography, as well as an acute sense of colour and the optical resonances of pattern and design.

The exhibition is accompanied by her latest book, titled Parasomnia (published by Prestel, 2011, and featuring a short story by Moses Isegawa). This book follows Flamboya (first published by Contrasto in 2008) which has been widely acclaimed.

Sassen was born in 1972 in Amsterdam, where she now lives. She first studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Ateliers Arnhem. Her work was first published in avant-garde fashion magazines and is regularly commissioned by prominent designers. She was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York’s Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. She is one of six artists selected for the 2011 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Solo exhibitions have taken place at FORMA in Milan (2009) and FOAM in Amsterdam (2008), among other venues. Recent group shows include No Fashion, Please! Photography between gender and lifestyle at the Vienna Kunsthalle (2011); Figure and Ground: Dynamic Landscape at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto as part of the Contact Photography Festival (2011); and the 2010 Brighton Photo Biennale, curated by Martin Parr.

Set in Marrakesh, Morocco, Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Sofia Coppola has directed this commercial for the Marni at H&M collection.

Director of Photography: Harris Savides
Stylists: Lucinda Chambers and Michelle Rafferty
Models/actors: Imogen Poots and Sam Hayes. Antonine Peduzzi, Nicolas Peduzzi, Annabelle Dexter Jones, Charlie Klarsfeld , Liu Wen, Jonatan Frenck and Langley Fox
Featured song: “Avalon”, by Bryan Ferry.

Marni at H&M is available in selected stores and online on March 8th, except in Japan and Singapore where the collection launch is scheduled for March 10th, 2012

Guy Bourdin Archives, January 1978.

Pentax Calendar 1980 © Guy Bourdin

From 02.02.12 till 10.03.12

Guy Bourdin, born in Paris in 1928, was one of the most radical and influential fashion photographers of the twentieth century. His unique blend of surreal and erotic imagery filled the pages of international magazines such as French Vogue during the 1970s and also became synonymous with the revolutionary advertising campaigns for Charles Jourdan. Rejecting the typical ‘product’ shot in favour of staging unsettling scenarios that hint at consumption, sex and desire, his photographs sought to shock and play on viewer’s curiosities.

This exhibition introduces rarely-seen before, limited edition work of some of his most captivating images – including a selection from his renowned series for the Pentax Calendar of 1980. Michael Hoppen Gallery is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Guy Bourdin.

Guinevere sitting on table, Paris 2004

03 February – 31 March 2012

Paolo Roversi is one of the most esteemed fashion photographers currently working. His preference for work in his Paris studio, a backdrop of a ragged grey blanket, bare timber boards and a selection of beaten up chairs and stools providing the only set required by Roversi, has enabled photographs which; in the most minimal way, catch the heart and mind of his subjects. For his first solo exhibition at The Wapping Project Bankside, Roversi has focussed on his much loved studio and his muse Guinevere, a selection of photographs which includes material from both the celebrated Nudi and Studio series.

Born in Ravenna in 1947, Paolo Roversi has collaborated with Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Dior, Valentino and many more influential designers. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Hara Museum, Tokyo; Centre Pompidou and Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum, New York and the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Yves Saint Laurent Resort 2012 directed by Maciek Kobielski

Photography by Xavier Encinas

Haunted Air
Anonymous Halloween photographs from c.1875–1955—truly haunting Americana, with a foreword by David Lynch

The roots of Hallowe’en lie in the ancient pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain, a feast to mark the death of the old year and the birth of the new. It was believed that on this night the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead grew thin and ruptured, allowing spirits to pass through and walk unseen but not unheard amongst men. The advent of Christianity saw the pagan festival subsumed in All Souls’ Day, when across Europe the dead were mourned and venerated. Children and the poor, often masked or in outlandish costume, wandered the night begging ‘soul cakes’ in exchange for prayers, and fires burned to keep malevolent phantoms at bay.

From Europe, the haunted tradition would quickly take root and flourish in the fertile soil of the New World. Feeding hungrily on fresh lore, consuming half-remembered tales of its own shadowy origins and rituals, Hallowe’en was reborn in America. The pumpkin supplanted the carved turnip; costumes grew ever stranger, and celebrants both rural and urban seized gleefully on the festival’s intoxicating, lawless spirit. For one wild night, the dead stared into the faces of the living and the
living, ghoulishly masked and clad in tattered backwoods baroque, stared back.

The photographs in Haunted Air provide an extraordinary glimpse into the traditions of this macabre festival from ages past, and form an important document of photographic history. These are the pictures of the dead: family portraits, mementoes of the treasured, now unrecognisable, other. Torn from album pages, sold piecemeal for pennies and scattered, abandoned to melancholy chance and the hands of strangers.

Jamie Hawkesworth and Smile and show your teeth.

Image System, Geoffroy de Boismenu – 72 polaroïds / USA 1993-1995

Image System is the name of the Polaroid Camera that Geoffroy de Boismenu used while he lived in the US, in the 90’s. With it he gathered a collection of hundreds of snapshots, that he edited 15 years later. His vision of a chaotic country is emphacized by the layout. Because of the size of the book, the reader looses the scale of the polaroids, but is charmed by the uniqueness of this now-considered vintage technic.
co-published with Janvier

148 pages
72 color photographs
19,3X31,6cm
Soft Cover Publication
date: Jully 2011
ISBN: 979-10-90306-01-1
Price: 35€

Available for purchase over at RVB Books

Book signature Thursday October 13rd from 7pm to 10pm
at Le Bal Book,
6, Impasse de la Défense 75018 Paris

Photography by Lauren Cooper for Under The Influence.

Arizona Muse

Photography by Lauren Cooper for Under The Influence.

Ellen Von Unwerth

Photography by Lauren Cooper for Under The Influence.

Photography by Lauren Cooper for Under The Influence.

Photo: Marcio Madeira/firstVIEW

Photo: Marcio Madeira/firstVIEW

A collection of Helmut Newton’s test Polaroids

Polaroids occupy a special place in the hearts of many photo enthusiasts who remember a time when “instant photography” meant one-of-a-kind prints that developed within minutes of clicking the shutter. What was once a crucial tool for photographers to test their shots before shooting on film has now become obsolete in the face of digital photography. Luckily for us, legendary photographer Helmut Newton saved his test Polaroids, allowing a privileged and rare chance to see the tests from a selection of his greatest shoots over a period of decades, including many from the TASCHEN titles SUMO, A Gun for Hire, and Work. Selected by his widow, June Newton, from over 300 photos featured at the 2011 exhibition “Helmut Newton Polaroids” at the Museum für Fotografie in Berlin, this collection captures the magic of Helmut Newton photo shoots as only Polaroids can.

€ 39.99 over at Tashen’s