Tag Archives: PH21 photography exhibit

Vision and Expression @ Barcelona

We support a ceasefire in Palestine

Pandemic Shadows 116

Laurie says:

I am in a marvelous exhibition at the Valid World Hall Gallery in Barcelona, curated by Zsolt Bátori, from April 3-10, 2024.

Zsolt chose two of my Pandemic Shadows photographs; one taken in Estonia, one taken in Berkeley.

Although photography initially emerged as a technological invention, it quickly evolved into an expressive artistic practice. Pictorialist photographs from the nineteenth century were crafted to resemble paintings, while proponents of straight photography in the early twentieth century aimed for a purely photographic approach to conveying meaning. Street photographers dedicated the medium to capturing fleeting moments, and in the latter part of the twentieth century, many photographers embraced staging and directing to employ photography as a means of artistic visual communication. Straight photography derives expressive meaning from the observed scene, while directorial, or staged photography involves creating a scene based on a preconceived notion. Art photography today encompasses various genres and creative practices, ranging from portraiture, landscape, and still life to staged, abstract, and conceptual photography. More recently, AI-generated photo-based images have also asserted their presence in the art photography scene. In this exhibition, contemporary photographers demonstrate their understanding of photography as an expressive fine art practice in the twenty-first century. (Curated by Zsolt Bátori.)

This PH21 Gallery exhibition is presented in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, in collaboration with Valid World Hall Gallery, a renowned centre for the visual arts.

Pandemic Shadows 132

I was particularly pleased to be in this exhibition, because the abstract expressionist movement of the 1950s is a strong influence on my work, though not always an obvious one. 132 is an indoor shadow taken in Estonia, and 116 was taken in a walk around Berkeley.

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Follow Laurie’s Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.

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Upside Down

Laurie says:

The Upside Down exhibition is in the PH21 Gallery in Budapest. It opens on March 7th and I’ll write about it then. But it was also a revelatory experience and I’m writing about that now.

One of the images that I submitted for this exhibition was from my Pandemic Shadows project and it was permanently changed because the reverse image was a better composition.

The two images are below. Please click on them for the best quality image.

This is the original Pandemic Shadows #36 – shadows on a mailbox

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And this is the “upside down” version, which is to me, more beautiful.

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I was amazed at how much I was even more delighted with the composition. In part because I was very satisfied with the original.

While photographs are valued for their depictive potential and representative content, the non-depictive, non-representational aspects of photographic works are also strongly related to their aesthetic significance. In this spirit, art photography has always aimed for the unity of form and content. Abstract photography has gone even further, celebrating abstract compositions for their own sake, without the need for appreciating or even recognising depictive content in the images. Turning a photograph upside down tends to strip it from its representative function, because the depicted scene and objects are difficult if not impossible to recognise when the image is turned to its side or upside down. However, the formal, compositional aspects of photographs become more pronounced that way, as our attention is steered away from scene and object recognition. In our Upside down exhibition, we would like to show photographs that are indeed turned upside down. Any photograph is eligible if the artist is willing to show it in this unusual way. Abstract photographs might be considered to be the most suitable candidates for this experimental exhibiting method, but there are many depictive works as well whose compositional qualities might also be appreciated in novel ways when turning them upside down, thus liberating us from studying and concentrating on their representational content. Landscapes, bodyscapes, symmetrical compositions, or even architectural and street photography may be good candidates for turning images upside down, but images in other photographic genres may also be considered for this exhibition.

PH21 Zsolt Bátori

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Debbie is no longer active on Twitter. Watch this space to follow her on Mastodon.

Follow Laurie’s Pandemic Shadows photos on Instagram.

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