Martin Parr: Black Country Stories

Martin Parr
Black Country Stories
The New Art Gallery Walsall

«The New Art Gallery Walsall is a modern and contemporary art gallery sited in the centre of the West Midlands town of Walsall, England. It was built with £21 million of public funding, including £15.75 million from the UK National Lottery and additional money from the European Regional Development Fund and City Challenge. Its first Director was Peter Jenkinson. In May 2005, former BALTIC director Stephen Snoddy was appointed as Director.»

«Over the last 4 years, Magnum photographer, Martin Parr, has created a photographic portrait and archive of life in the Black Country through photography, film and oral histories.

Martin has made many visits to Walsall, Wolverhampton, Sandwell and Dudley, meeting a wide range of local people. He has visited shops and markets, places of worship, football grounds, factories, pubs and clubs, dances and parties, cafés and restaurants, dog training classes, summer fêtes and street parties celebrating the Royal Wedding and Diamond Jubilee.» [... MORE ...]

At least in China you can still smoke inside public spaces... not like in the demagogue Western free world!

«Martin Parr was born in Epsom, Surrey, UK, in 1952. Martin Parr studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic, from 1970 to 1973. Since that time, Martin Parr has worked on numerous photographic projects. He has developed an international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary, and his input to photographic culture within the UK and abroad. In 1994 he became a full member of Magnum Photographic Corporation. Martin developed an interest in filmmaking, and has started to use his photography within different conventions, such as fashion and advertising. In 2002 the Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum initiated a large retrospective of Martin Parr’s work. Martin Parr was Professor of Photography at The University of Wales Newport campus from 2004 to 2012, and Guest Artistic Director for Rencontres D’Arles in 2004. In 2006 Martin Parr was awarded the Erich Salomon Prize and the resulting Assorted Cocktail show opens at Photokina. In 2008 Martin Parr was guest curator at New York Photo Festival, curating the New Typologies exhibition. Parrworld opened at Haus de Kunst, Mucich, in 2008. The show exhibited Parr’s own collection of objects, postcards, his personal photography collection of both British and International artists, photo books and finally his own photographs. At PhotoEspana, 2008, wins the Baume et Mercier award in recognition of his professional career and contributions to contemporary photography. More recently Martin has just completed a 4-year project documenting the Black Country, an area of the English West Midlands, in conjunction with Multistory. Phaidon have published the third volume of the highly influential History of the Photobook in Spring 2014 and Martin is also working on a book about the History of Chinese Photobooks to be published by Aperture in Spring 2015. Martin Parr has published over 80 books of his own work and edited another 30.» [... MORE ...]

David Korty: Have/Had

«David Korty’s latest exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ presents a series of eight new paintings alongside a series of ceramic sculptures which mark a dramatic new departure for the artist. Employing collage, ink and pencil, Korty’s latest paintings are sizeable in scale and coolly understated in palette. Collectively titled Blue Shelf, they are each divided into multiple ‘tiers’, their crisply delineated compartments calling to mind the exacting proportions of Donald Judd’s plywood boxes as well as the gridded or subdivided fields of various abstract painters. Yet Korty has arrayed these tiers with an assortment of monochrome shapes, conveyed in dilute ink and silhouetted against a midnight blue ground. Through a rhythmic interplay of line, shape and colour, he distances the paintings dramatically from their sources (mostly Korty’s own drawings), creating images that are pregnant with ambivalence, lurching between representational and abstract modes.

The miscellaneous forms housed on Korty’s ‘shelves’ range from recognisable ornaments (masks, busts, globes) to boxed-in sections of pattern, geometric cut-outs and gestural riffs. Certain works evoke the ephemera of the artist’s studio – propped up studies and drawings, rows of books and nondescript containers.» [... MORE ...]

David Korty (b. California, 1971) trained at the Rhode Island School of design and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions including those at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2013), and Kimmerich, New York (2012). His work has featured in group shows including the Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow, UK (2012); Painting Codes: I Codici della Pittura, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Italy (2006); and Painting on the Move, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Kunsthalle Basel (2002). In 2008 a new book on the artist's work featuring a text by Rachel Kushner was published by Sadie Coles HQ, Michael Kohn Gallery and Koenig Books.

The Photographers' Gallery

The Wall: #citizencurators: An archive of London2012
Mass Observation: This Is Your Photo
Mark Neville - Deeds Not Words
The Photographers' Gallery

Mass Observation: This is Your Photo offers an examination of the role of photography in the Mass Observation Archive. Mass Observation (MO) was founded in 1937 as a radical experiment in social science, art and documentary. Its founders aimed to create a new kind of realism in response to the economic and political conditions leading up to World War II, aiming to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ through artistic means and by collecting anecdotal evidence from people’s everyday lives and experiences. The Archive, currently held at the University of Sussex, consists of extensive written accounts of daily life, ephemera and photographs, while other works now form part of national museum collections. [...]

How does social media transform the way we record, share and ultimately remember major events?

#citizencurators is a Twitter project which documents the way Londoners responded to the Olympics of 2012. It aims to show how the contemporary history of London2012 could be recorded by the people who experienced it without the filtering of an institution.

In the project, any citizen of London could become a curator using social networking and tweet their responses in words or images with the hashtag #citizencurators. These were then collected and archived by the Museum of London.

Through this method, the project extended the idea of community participation espoused by Mass Observation and extended it into the realm of crowd sourcing and citizen journalism. On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Games, The Photographers' Gallery presents and reanimates the many photographs and tweets created by #citizencurators.

Deeds Not Words is an experimental documentary and an urgent intervention. For 18 months Mark Neville photographed the town of Corby in Northamptonshire: its people, its culture and the effects of environmental pollution that led to several babies being born with serious birth defects.

Neville followed The Corby 16 as they fought, successfully, to indict the local council for negligent disposal of waste from the town’s steel mills, which had closed in the 1980s. In 2011 Neville produced a book comprised of his photographs, scientific findings and a summary of the case. This was not for sale, but was sent to each of the 433 local authorities in the UK and to environmental agencies internationally, to raise awareness of issues around the handling of toxic waste and the reuse of contaminated land. [...]