Photographer Of The Week: Michael Ackermann

Michael Ackerman, 1967, Israel, works and lives in Berlin. Ackerman’s atmospheric world of dark, gritty B&W imagery, create an intimate and knowable, but also, at times, a furtive and mysterious visual experience for his viewer. His work often oscillates between his own story and the broader sweep social and cultural history. His third book Half Life, containing images that focus on Poland and Berlin, form a narrative in which the past and present, the temporal and geographical blend together subjectively. He invites us to witness a purely photographic act that extracts palpable sensations from the places, the societies and the reality he explores.

Ackerman received the Nadar Award for his book "End Time City" in 1999, and the Infinity Award for Young Photographer by the International Center of Photography in 1998. Since his first exhibition, in 1999, Ackerman has made his mark by bringing a new, radical and unique approach. Half Life is Michael Ackermanʼs third opus. After “End Time City” (1999), a crazy journey through the city of Varanasi, India, and then “Fiction” (2001), where unity of place is shattered into a sequence of images that seem to have been made in haste between New York and Europe, “Half Life” fills in the outlines of a territory that Michael Ackerman has depicted as his life has progressed, in recent years focusing on Poland and Berlin.

For more of Ackermanns work: http://www.agencyvu.com/

Link of the Week: Visura Magazine (Issue 11)

Visura Magazine is an excellent online magazine and resourse for contemporary photography.

Issue 11 contains works by Eleanor Carrucci, who we looked for the theme 'Approaches to Self-Portraiture' and for the 1st year theme/task; "I Am My World". It also contains work by Jeff Jacobson, Larry Fink and Richard Mosse, amongst others. 

http://www.visuramagazine.com/cover/issue-11.html

OPEN DAY: TUESDAY 25th JAN (10am-4pm)

St Kevins College provide a number of Full-Time & Part-Time Courses in Photography and Media Studies:

BTEC Higher National Diploma (Photography) (2 Years)
FETAC Advanced Certificate in Photography EPHOT Level 6 (2 Years)
FETAC National Certificate in Media Production EMPXX Level 5 (1 Year)

This one or two year highly practical programme will equip students with the advanced technical, personal and interpersonal skills necessary to pursue a career in the medium of photography and other related visual media or to proceed with a high degree of competency to degree level through established links.

http://stkevinscollege.ie/photography.php

Contemporary View: Some Considerations On The Scene Of The Crime

Consider these two bodies of work, both dealing with a similar photographic territory - namely, the 'return' to a crime-scene. Consider how both photographers conceptualize, approach and treat their topic.

Taryn Simons “The Innocents” documents the stories of individuals who served time in prison for violent crimes they did not commit. Simon photographed these men at sites that had particular significance to their illegitimate conviction - the scene of misidentification, the scene of arrest, the scene of the crime or the scene of the alibi. All of these locations hold contradictory meanings for the subjects. The scene of arrest marks the starting point of a reality based in fiction. The scene of the crime is at once arbitrary and crucial: this place, to which many of them have never been, changed their lives forever. In these photographs, Simon confronts photography's ability to blur truth and fiction-an ambiguity that can have severe, even lethal consequences.

Angela Strassheim's project Evidence hybridizes aspects of criminology and photography into an eerie, often visually savage body of work. Through a long and painstaking research process, Strassheim (a former forensic photographer) mapped out the exact locations where violent, often horrific (domestic) crimes were perpetrated. She convinced new owners and tenants, some unaware of the violent history of their residences, to revisit the unnoticed, unseen past. Strassheim captures the tracing of a final struggle or violent moment,  revealing the silent yet omniscient memory of everyday living spaces. The physical result of her work is a series of luscious, large black and white prints, which attract the viewer like stills from a film noir with their eerie seduction and mysterious quality.

Both works can be found on the artists' websites:

http://www.tarynsimon.com/
http://angelastrassheim.com/

Link of the Week: Burn Magazine

burn. Magazine is an evolving journal of contemporary and emerging photographers, curated and edited by Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey.

http://www.burnmagazine.org/

Photographer of the Week: Anders Petersen

Anders Petersen, one of the most important European photographers living today. His book, Café Lehmitz, is now widely considered a seminal work in the development of European photography - a raw and intimate exploration of late-night Hamburg in the 1960s.

Petersen forces us to regard — often from an uncomfortably close vantage point, situations and subjects that most of us would avoid at all costs. What he reveals is tenderness, beauty, and common humanity.


"Petersens work speaks of voyeurism, curiosity, vulnerability, longing, and humanity - qualities that allows him to earn friendship and collaboration with strangers all over the world" — Jim Casper (Lens Culture)

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