By John Szarkowski, originally published in Dot Zero, Spring 1967

The basic effect of modern mass media on photography has been to erode the creative independence and the accountability of the photographer who has worked for them. This is not a value judgement (except from the point of view of the photographer) but rather a recognition of a shift in effective authority.

Within the memory of middle-aged photographers, photography was in itself a kind of mass medium. Photographers made pictures in response to stated or assumed needs, edited them, produced prints and with luck sold them. Only in the 1920s did the photomechanical reproduction of photographs begin to rival in importance the production of original photographs. With the development of picture advertising, picture journalism, television, etc., the photographer progressively lost his formal role as an independent small publisher, and became one of many dependent contributors to the large publishers.

The advantages of mass publishing have been well explained:

JOHN SZARKOWSKI: “Photography and the Mass Media” (1967)

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Richard Prince BROOKE SHIELDS (SPIRITUAL AMERICA), 1983 Ektacolor print, 24 by 20 inches (after an original by commercial photographer Garry Gross) edition of 10 + 1 AP, executed in 1983 courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

RICHARD PRINCE, Interview by Brian Appel, 2007

BRIAN APPEL: Hope you had a chance to read my review of your last show at Barbara Gladstone.

RICHARD PRINCE: Yes I did. Who are you? Do you write like this a lot? I’m amazed by your text on the auctions. Anyway, I thought it was pretty good.

BA: I think it was about 10 days ago or so that I saw you talking with Barbara Gladstone and a collector at the group show presently up at Barbara’s Gallery. I was with my daughter Li. She was enjoying John Dogg’s “The Final Curtain”.

RP: Hey, I remember you – especially your little girl. She was so great and seemed to be having so much fun running

INTERVIEW: “RICHARD PRINCE” (2007)

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 Sergei Vasiliev

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Print No.12 2010 Giclée print 165 x 112 cm

©Sergei Vasiliev, 2010

Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London

By Laetitia Martinez & David Price, ASX UK, March 2013

Walking through affluent Sloane Square into the stately building that houses the Saatchi Gallery, directly into the opening salvo of GAIETY IS THE MOST OUTSTANDING FEATURE OF THE SOVIET UNION: Art from Russia is a visceral experience.

Sergei Vasiliev’s large scale monochrome series of heavily tattooed Russian prisoners is an ensemble of shock-and-awe rawness with its depictions of haunted eyes, scarred, broken faces and stumps of amputated fingers, proudly displayed like a child who just lost his first baby tooth. However, among the thousand yard stares and improvised piss, blood and septic ink tattoos of Stalin, religious icons, naive Disneyland-style Kremlins, skulls and pinup girls, there emerges a dignity that elevates the subjects to near saintliness.

EXHIBITION REVIEW – LONDON: “GAIETY IS THE MOST OUTSTANDING FEATURE OF THE SOVIET UNION: ‘Art from Russia’ at the Saatchi Gallery (2013)

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Back In The Days documents the emerging hip-hop scene from 1980-1989 – before it became what is today’s multi-million-dollar multinational industry. Back in the days, gangs would battle not with guns, but by breakdancing. Back in the days, the streets – not corporate planning – set the standards for style.

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Vivienne Westwood No.2, London, 2009 © Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller, ‘Woo!’, 23 January 2013 – 17 March 2013, at ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

By Fanny Landstrom, ASX London, March 2013

When greeted by a large-sized triptych of a nude Vivienne Westwood effortlessly lushed out on a plush sofa, a black and white print of Kurt Cobain cuddling up with his guitar, and a same sized print of a grey fluffy kitten in a blossomy summer garden you know you’ve entered the world of a wayward.

The first impression of the next section of the exhibition, the ‘Reading room’, is one of entering a ‘too-cool-for-school’ East London hipster’s bedroom and having a look at his cut out images from trendy fashion- & art magazines. The second impression is one that lasts longer.

Prints are smothered onto the wall from floor to ceiling stacked on top of each other – mixed and matched together as kids on summer

EXHIBITION REVIEW – LONDON: Juergen Teller – “Woo!” at ICA (2013)

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Louis Faurer (August 28, 1916 – March 2, 2001) was an American fashion photographer and a master of candid or street photography. A quiet artist who never achieved the broad public recognition of his best-known contemporaries, the significance and caliber of his work were lauded by insiders, among them Robert Frank, William Eggleston, and Edward Steichen, who included his work in the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions In and Out of Focus (1948) and The Family of Man (1955).

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This woman, nicknamed “La Destroyer”, was famous for helping those who had fallen in battle to die a more rapid and less painful death. Ca. 1915. Augustin Victor Casasola.

Agustín Víctor Casasola (July 28. 1874 – March 30. 1938) was a Mexican photographer and partial founder of the Mexican Association of Press Photographers.

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Untitled, (Adela Legarreta Rivas is struck by a white Datsun on Avenida Chapultepec, Mexico City, 29 April 1979)

101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, February 20 – April 20, 2013

By Vladimir Gintoff, ASX NYC, March 2013

In an age of unparalleled media saturation, the diversity of ways we experience tragedy, real, imagined, or virtual, have risen exponentially. Enrique Metinides (b. Mexico City, 1934) was a media photographer for over fifty years. Working for Mexico’s infamous nota roja crime magazines, he chronicled the gore and grist of life, and has often been called the Mexican Weegee. The exhibit at Aperture Gallery, 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides, is a dossier of planes, trains, cars and trucks, shown crashed, crumpled, submerged, and on-fire. There are broken limbs, gunshot wounds, electrocutions, drownings and suicides, among other unfortunate events.

Aperture’s exhibition is a selection of choice images. It is the first time Metinides has curated his own work. Many of the photographs

EXHIBITION REVIEW – NYC: Enrique Metinides – “101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides” at Aperture (2013)

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Elbowing, Out of Town Newstand, New York, 1954

Louis Stettner at Bonni Benrubi. The Fuller Building, 41 E 57 St, NYC

By Lew Schwartz, ASX NYC, March 2013

The first image you see in this small show, Out of Town, Newsstand, is of a neatly tailored woman, perhaps a model, looking down into the last pages of what may have been the latest edition of Vogue. Framing her is the dark rectangle of the newsstand’s enclosure, and, to our left, are tiers of out of town newspapers. This image, one of Stettner’s most famous, was chosen by him to lead off this retrospective show. It’s an odd choice given his life long interest in humanistic photography, yet it tells us much about the dichotomy he finds between Paris and New York. The woman is confident and self-assured in her fashionable clothing, not empathetic or vulnerable at all – she’s a Hitchcock heroine early in the movie,

EXHIBITION REVIEW – NYC: Louis Stettner – “Louis Stettner” at Bonni Benrubi (2013)

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By Benjamin Tree, ASX UK, February 2013

Jitka Hanzlová’s first retrospective exhibition in Britain unifies eight of Hanzlová’s photographic projects via an understanding of their common concerns: that is, what place means to the individual. The exhibit begins with Rokytník, a photo-series which documents the village inhabitants of Hanzlová’s familial homeland, a place she had not returned to for eight years (Hanzlová defected from Czechoslovakia to Essen, Germany in 1982, returning with the collapse of the communist regime). Absorbed in muted tones, these portraits and quiescent scenes of an everyday rurality create a sense of reflective nostalgia, as Hanzlová is both caught between belonging inside of the community and observing it from outside.

These are poignant documents about the act of returning and an endeavor to belong. It is mostly because Hanzlová seems concerned with reticent every day scenes that she inevitably evokes an idyllic time of stasis, concerns that liken her work with the nostalgic. Rokytník, as

EXHIBITION REVIEW – UK: Jitka Hanzlová – “Retrospective” (2013)

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Der 1968 gegründete Steidl Verlag in Göttingen (Deutschland) ist dank der verlegerischen und gestalterischen Tätigkeit von Gerhard Steidl (geb. 1950) zu einer der weltweit führenden Adressen im Bereich Fotobücher avanciert. Die Ausstellung „Die Künst, Bücher mit Künstlern zu machen. Steidl und die handwerkliche Dimension des Verlegens” präsentiert eine Auswahl dieser einzigartigen Arbeiten. Im Vordergrund stehen dabei die handwerkliche Dimension des Buchmachens sowie die enge Zusammenarbeit mit den Künstlern.

Fundada en 1968, la editorial Steidl de Göttingen (Alemania) se ha convertido en una de las más destacadas en la publicación de libros fotográficos, gracias a la labor editorial y de diseño de Gerhard Steidl (1950). La exposición “El arte de hacer libros con artistas. Steidl o la dimensión artesanal de la edición” muestra una selección de este trabajo único. El enfoque está en la dimensión artesanal de la edición de libros y en la estrecha colaboración con los artistas.

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CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHIE IN THE USA

- Cinematic workshop discussions about an art form in our day and age.

Documented photographers: Robert Frank, Duane Michals, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Thomas Roma, Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Lisette Model, Ralph Gibson, Mark Cohen, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore

English – Colour – PAL or NTSC – 4:3 – 52 Minuten – Germany 1982

DVD available at www.michaelengler.de

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CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHIE IN THE USA

- Cinematic workshop discussions about an art form in our day and age.

Documented photographers: Robert Frank, Duane Michals, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Thomas Roma, Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Lisette Model, Ralph Gibson, Mark Cohen, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore

English – Colour – PAL or NTSC – 4:3 – 52 Minuten – Germany 1982

DVD available at www.michaelengler.de

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CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHIE IN THE USA

- Cinematic workshop discussions about an art form in our day and age.

Documented photographers: Robert Frank, Duane Michals, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Thomas Roma, Alfred Stieglitz, Harry Callahan, Lisette Model, Ralph Gibson, Mark Cohen, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore

English – Colour – PAL or NTSC – 4:3 – 52 Minuten – Germany 1982

DVD available at www.michaelengler.de

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The Making of the Most Expensive Book. A film by Julian Benedikt (2000).

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Un instant de silenci etern, 2010

Self-portrait, a unique exhibition dedicated entirely to García-Alix

By Cristina Izquierdo Sastre, ASX Barcelona, March 2013

“A way of seeing is a way of being”, says  in the video From Where There is no return. And this is exactly what this exhibition is about. Through his camera, García-Alix (León, Spain, 1956) has documented his life as a way of finding himself, as a way of being.

Self-portrait is the first major exhibition entirely dedicated to Alberto García-Alix in Barcelona. García-Alix is an international renamed contemporary photographer who based his 40 years of career in documenting his environment, photographing his friends, his bikes, his lovers, his places, and himself.

And here he is. Here, in these self-referential pieces of work we can get into his poetical universe, his generated reality, submerging with him, with his work, and trully enjoying by watching, imagining, reading and feeling.

Despite the name of the exhibition, Self-portrait

EXHIBITION REVIEW – BARCELONA: Alberto García-Alix – “Self-portrait” (2013)

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By Christin Aucunas, ASX UK, March 2013

The Magnum photographer Martin Parr returns to the medium of film to explore, capture, and celebrate the vibrant communities of the Black Country in his documentary Teddy Gary’s Sweet Factory Film. Parr explores Teddy Gray’s, a fifth generation family owned sweet factory in Dudley in the West Midlands. The film was commissioned as part of a larger series of work by Multistory, an arts organization based in Sandwell, as a means of reinventing the creative documentation of working class Britain. Depictions of the working class have a long-standing photographic tradition with artists like Bill Brandt, Chris Killip and Graham Smith. Parr’s film shies away, as does most of his work, from the weighted tropes of the gritty coal miner or barefoot council house mum left to fend for themselves in Thatcher’s Britain and represents the oddities and quirks that make up contemporary Midland’s society.

Teddy Gray’s Factory Film in a moment of

ASX.TV: Martin Parr – “Teddy Gray’s: Sweet Nostalgia in the Globalized World” (2013)

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Fred Herzog (b. September 21, 1930, Stuttgart, Germany) is a photographer known primarily for his photos of life in Vancouver, Canada. He was employed as a medical photographer by day, and on evenings and weekends he took his camera to the streets, documenting daily life as he observed it.

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By Sören Schuhmacher, ASX Berlin, March 2013

For the first time in Germany, C/O Berlin presents a retrospective of the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918-2002).

Christer Strömholm . Post Scriptum, is at the same time the last exhibition hosted in the unique spaces of the Postfuhramt.

Roughly 150 vintage black and white prints are presented on two floors, together with contact sheets, work materials, magazines and a documentary. The exhibition is structured by subject matter, such as “Classics”, “Paris, Spain, USA” or “The Friends of Place Blanche”. The chronological sequence plays no role; also none of the photographs have titles, which lets the images speak for themselves. Christer Strömholm was far more interested in images than technique. He coined the term “existing light” and thought that the photographer should immerse him or herself into the environment and become part of the photograph. It is not surprising that right at the beginning of the exhibition, visitors are confronted first with

EXHIBITION REVIEW – BERLIN: “Christer Strömholm” at C/O Berlin (2013)

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