Tag Archives: PH21

Photo in Exhibition in Barcelona

I’m delighted that this photo from Women En Large:  Images of Fat Nudes is in The Art of Photography – Barcelona  at the Valid World Hall Gallery. It’s a renowned center for the visual arts.

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Although photography first emerged as a technological invention, it was also quickly conceived as an artistic practice as well. Pictorialist photographs in the nineteenth century were created to look like paintings, while advocates of straight photography in the first part of the twentieth century strived for the purely photographic means of creating photographic meaning. Street photographers devoted the medium to capturing the fleeting moment, while in the last part of the twentieth century many photographers turned to staging and directing in order to utilize photography for artistic visual communication. Art photography also includes numerous genres and creative practices from portraiture, landscape and still life to abstract and conceptual photography. In this exhibition we asked contemporary photographers to show how they understand photography as a fine art practice in the twenty first century. — Zsolt Batori, curator of the exhibition.

The diversity of the exhibition is impressive, but so is the breadth of 21st Century photography

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Bodyscapes Exhibition in Budapest

Laurie says:

I gave the opening talk at the opening of the Bodyscapes exhibition at the PH21 Gallery in Budapest. The opening was on line (Google Meets). And I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the exhibition.

Bodyscapes is a varied and rich group of photographs curated by Zsolt Batori with Borbála Jász. The meanings of many of these images is nuanced and complex, and resides in the eye of the beholder as much as the artist’s intent. Looking at the Bodyscape photos had me reconsidering the nude in its complexity.

One way to characterize Bodyscapes is bodies in landscapes and bodies as landscapes. That’s really too simple, but it does create a useful framework.
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Humanopolis #4, by Jose Ignacio Laburu, the juror’s choice, is an excellent example of bodies in landscapes. It’s an otherwise abstract composition transformed by a nude figure that lies on an edge, calling to the eye and changing the emphasis of the image.
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There are numerous images in the show of bodies as landscapes. Possibly the most radical are images by Elizabeth Brown, including Traces #3, where images of skin and scars are textural, creating a human reality parallel to the abstract composition.
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Street photos like A Conversation, by Jim McKinness, can also be bodyscapes. Movement and clothed people become bodies in urban landscapes.

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Anelyn Radulescu’s 2 honorable mention photos are: first, You Can Not See Them, where a nude is partly covered and surrounded by what appear to be family photos; in the second, I Was Here, the nude has departed, and only the scattered pictures remain. It’s an excellent example of work whose meaning will be reflected through the individual viewer. Personally, I see a woman leaving her family behind.

Nude art can, among other things, be political, aesthetic, constructed, erotic, reflective of classic modes, or challenging or confirming of “conventional beauty” and attitudes. Commentary on the body as landscapes and in landscapes can lead to a multitude of meanings. Other than the erotic, there is no overarching meaning to the nude — it’s what makes the exhibition so fascinating.

Here’s the link to the web exhibit.

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