His humor, his clarity, and his vision shaped many discussions across the agency and within the wider photographic world. This exhibition pays homage to the unique vision of Martin Parr, whose sharp eye for contemporary society and prominent role within Magnum Photos have left an enduring mark on photography.
Maira Kalman painted a vase exploding with flowers, capturing the anticipatory air the season brings. She cited Gustav Mahler's 'Das Lied von der Erde' ('The Song of the Earth') as her inspiration: 'Dark is life. Spring is here. The birds are singing.' What more do we need to know?
I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera. Parks recognized photography's potential as a tool for social change and advocacy, viewing the medium not merely as documentation but as an active means of confronting systemic injustices and giving visibility to marginalized communities.
Around the Sign o' the Times album he called to say he was joining Prince's band, and said: I'm gonna take you with me. He showed Prince some of my artwork, which he apparently liked. I was asked to paint a stage for him that was the first job I did, and one day he asked: Have you ever taken photos? I was in the right place at the right time.
Fashion is more than a visual medium. The thoughts, ideas and voices of designers drive our industry also. For the past quarter-century, we have been fortunate enough to speak to its greatest names, those who have defined and redefined their metier in the 21st century.
I recently gained a new obsession, and I'm ready to share it with the world: finding and analyzing rare vintage images. A picture speaks a thousand words, and these photographs tell us more about history than a textbook chapter ever could. So even if you think history is boring, I'm well-equipped to change your mind, and give you some delicious food for your brain to chew on today.
Forty years after The Last Resort photobook was first published, the photographs that brought the late Martin Parr to international attention-and criticism at home-will be the focus of an exhibition at his foundation in Bristol. Timed to coincide with the anniversary of the photobook and its exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1986, the show marks the foundation's reopening following the British photographer's death late last year.
1. The very first iteration of Ronald McDonald was created by Willard Scott in 1963: 2. The two people depicted in Grant Wood's "American Gothic" actually exist. This is what they looked like: 3. This is Margaret Gorman, the woman who won the very first Miss America competition in 1921: 6. This is Conrad Veidt, the man whose performance in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs inspired the look of the iconic villain the Joker:
Like half-remembered dreams, her curious pastoral visions displace familiarity in search of wilder fantasies, where humans are nowhere to be found. Against Nature, the London-based artist's second solo show at Pilar Corrias, establishes Wilson at the helm of a flourishing artistic engagement with the para-pastoral in contemporary painting. Hers is an altogether strange, uncanny variant of the British countryside that resists the canonical entrapments of a bucolic idyll.
Euan Uglow, they say, is an artist's artist, and therein lies the problem. If you were approaching his painstaking canvases out of curiosity how to construct the figure, capture precise perspective, proportions I can see how their visible workings (complex little dashes and crosses and plumb lines and geometric grids) would prove revelatory. But lots of us come to art to be inspired, transported, to feel. And for all their technical prowess, Uglow's 70-odd regimented paintings at MK Gallery leave me cold.
In the story of art history-the art and artists, movements and trends-a select number of galleries have played a defining role in the evolution and trajectory of art itself. Among them, the Mayor Gallery in London is surely one, as it has maintained a position fostering and promoting some of the most significant developments in art for an astounding 100 years.
For her formative 1985 work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin eschewed the traditions of exhibiting photography by compiling her images the number of which ran close to 700 into a slideshow, and screening it alongside a soundtrack featuring, among others, Yoko Ono, Maria Callas and Dionne Warwick. The 45-minute long show has since been screened in galleries and museums all over the world, and is lauded for its searing candour and highly personal subject matter the series comprises photographs taken by Goldin of her friends, family and burgeoning subcultures in cities like Boston, New York and Berlin.
One of Vija Celmins's wonderful Night Sky works. Maybe one of her charcoal drawings of the cosmos, with a comet flaring across the surface. She conjures up such immensity, and such intimacy, with countless tiny points of light shining out of the darkness. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world? In a word, Paris. After I left school, I spent several weeks working in Paris and discovered the pleasures of looking, on my own, for myself.