A power cut that kindled fears and aroused the imagination.
The date was 9th November 1965 and over 25 million people were thrust into the dark in an area that covered New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Jersey and some parts of Ontario in Canada.
 

Renè Burri, out and about in the streets during that strange “black magic” created a photographic report that captured many aspects of the great metropolis in the dark. This suggestive mix of the weird and wonderful can now be viewed in the volume Blackout New York, published by Moser Verlag Gmbh with a limited print run.
 

Monumental yet fragile structures a breath away from destruction: Belgian artist Frederic Geurts explores the extremes of the law of gravity. He enjoys experimenting with sculptures at the very limits of what could be called constructional stability. Poised halfway between an inspired architect and an artist besotted with the constructional calculations and the resilience and properties of building materials.
 

The lion’s share of her work focuses on themes of power and man’s relationship with nature. The results are images which the photographer Maria Friberg uses to play with issues of social hierarchy, identity and subjection.
 

“I seek a meditative state to help me accept and reflect on isolation and solitude, two of our current epoch’s “gifts”, the artist says about her work. “My men fight against this as they strive to find balance in a world that’s all chaotic and turbulent”.

To give form to something that does not have it. In this case, dust. This is the latest concept from photographer Ujin Lee. For example the dust from a field – a white cloud, or dust from a sawmill or even from a museum. Instantaneous shots that cleverly capture what can never be repeated in a suspended and poetic manner.
 

Considered one of the greatest portrait artists of modern-day photography, for more than a decade Pierre Gonnord has worked and investigated the psychological force that springs forth from a face. His favourite subjects are street people – silent witnesses hovering on the margins of society – whom he portrays with fidelity and colour reminiscent of the oil paintings of Goya and Caravaggio.

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Kilian Rüthemann makes the most of the sculptural potential of materials and objects. He inserts them into spaces to then break them in order to focus the spectator’s attention on the more specific characteristics of each single material from both physical and symbolic perspectives.

Born in 1979, the Swiss artist forces the viewer’s attention on to the geometric reconstruction of fragments and on to the geometrical causality of the sudden breaking of material.
 

A project to shatter the rigidness of a material such as cement and make it seem mercurial and fragile.

Erika Hock (born in 1981) is a young German artist who likes to break walls as she plays with their resistance. All that’s needed in fact is a belt to damage the clean and rigid geometry of a hunk of wall.

An approach that may well contest the “infrastructural ideas” that currently permeate modern art.

He comes from Ecuador and is now recognized as one of the young new artists emerging from the Latin-American scene. Born in 1980 Oscar Santillan creates poetic, fragile compositions – made of details and original perspectives that favour white tones and shades of grey.

A materials-based, dream-like project to be observed with care.
 

These rare photographs shot backstage, portray famous young musicians at the start of their careers. The images express all the energy and passion of a rock band on stage.

“Who shot Rock and Roll?” is an exhibition and celebration that sets out to evoke the force, energy and sexiness of rock music in 1960s and 1970s – an electrifying and dynamic period when for many fans and musicians alike, rock music was a way of life rather than just an art form. These were the years when rock music took on its own visual identity and became a conduit for cultural and social change.

Images such as Paul Simonon of The Clash smashing his guitar, immortalized by Pennie Smith, a sweat-drenched Tina Turner and a coquettish Mick Jagger singing “Satisfaction” with a microphone stuck into his pants. These images helped to create icons; photographers who knew how to make a cultural manifesto from a simple piece of paper.

The caption accompanying the photograph taken by Pennie Smith in 1979 reads “Rockers are warriors out of their heads who fight hypocrisy and use their instruments as weapons of defence”.

The exhibition’s 105 artists and 175 works, many previously unpublished, celebrate the finest photographs that went to create rock music’s visual identity. Rock culture touched hordes of youngsters and moulded models for entire generations.

By Richard Avedon, Albert Watson, Leibovitz, David Lachapelle.

Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present

Until 31st January gennaio 2010
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY

A white box filled with lights, shadows, silence, sounds and images.
A space that recites a poem and stages an real theatrical production based on the light-filled world of Enzo Catellani (Catellani & Smith) – all with the simplicity of a gesture: lights that come on and go out and which create interactions between objects and spaces.
Everything is brought to life and choreographed by the lighting designer Filippo Cannata and these effects are accompanied by a short emotion-filled film by the young director Francesco Torricella.

An intense light-filled experience capable of involving and touching all the senses.

Evoking.
Inspiring.
Communicating.

From 17 November IL RIGHELLO in Milan is staging stages an out and out theatrical production made up of emotions and play between shades and lights – all in atmosphere that is at times silent, at times without light and at times without lamps.