Born in 1968, German artist and photographer Claudia Rogge has an obsession for crowds made up of practically identical people, all dressed in the same way and holding the same pose to create a unique mass identity.
He constructs both fascinating and disturbing scenarios that always contain three elements: individualism, reproducibility and mass.
The result is a balance between expressive rigidness and corporeal actions, a play of full and empty concepts that regale the viewer’s imagination with sensations of tension, action and a special dose of mystery.
These are works that set out to lend a mass an aesthetic quality to the idea of mass – no longer an indistinct and homogenous element but one made up of minuscule differences that need to be sought out carefully in each single photograph.
A tower that rises up eleven metres constructed entirely of books. Those who’ve been inside say it is a destabilizing experience thanks to the small space inside. This is multiplied and complicated by a series of mirrors that reflect a disorienting reality but also to its weight of culture.
If we consider the fact the same quantity of books and knowledge can these days so easily be moved around, consulted and read – or simply ignored – in our new iPad, then such a physical, awkward and unusual structure such as this can act as the starting-point for a wider reflection connected to our daily lives but also to our future and the way knowledge is transmitted. Is it all, as the artist himself suggests, just an optical illusion that tricks our perception?
This heartfelt and sincere portrait documents love affairs, ideals, fears and the hang-ups of an epoch during a key phase of life.
In the summer of 1959 Bruce Davidson decided to cross over the Brooklyn Bridge and document in photographs the kids in the local gangs: literate and rebellious teenagers, uneasy about everyday loneliness and the uncertainties of a generation on the threshold of adulthood.
In an age that stands out for its primness and innocence, Bruce Davidson’s photographs provide vital witness to myths, ways of behaving and being part of an entire generation. He displays a journalist’s perspective, detached yet curious: the indelible mark that characterizes all his work.
“When I seek out a story, I eke it out in my relationship with the subject – it has to be a story that tells me something rather than just a story I’m telling..”
Bruce Davidson, a Magnum photographer since 1958, lives and works in New York.
Effects born from what is empty and what is full – light and dark shades, brightness and night. The Greek photographer Vangelis Paterakis portrays and gives shape to the human shadow that immaterial element of us all – an evanescent and indefinite subject that appears when light strikes a surface only to then melt away and blend in with the surrounding surfaces.
The photographs of “Shadow Life” remind us of an intangible, immaterial ballet made up of interactions and endless shades of grey. It’s a fascinating theme that leaves space for philosophical reflections. As th great Carl Justav Jung once said: “Contact with our shadows allows us to identify more closely with ourselves and touch a profound part of very being.”
His work continually strikes a balance between East and West – or rather between the cultures of China where the artist was born, and the USA, where he is now based. Cui Fei seeks out the essence of things – something real and permanent that cannot be altered by cultures or differing political or geographical circumstances.
Nature is his greatest source of inspiration and creation – a means through which to express a thought, a therapeutic medium for healing a chaotic world. And so vines, leaves and thorns become tools for highlighting cultural and social change in China compared to corresponding aspects of American culture. In his work “A Manuscript of Nature”, Cui Fei makes use of natural forms to create a calligraphy built from universal signs that transcend nationality, culture, race and religion. “Writing a manuscript with Chinese ideograms lets those who don’t understand, recognize the materials with which it is made in a continuous metaphor of life.”
Conceptual sculptures made with dresses and clothes squeezed and condensed and then transformed into building blocks that become raw materials for creation: walls, books, white shapes and forms. Naoko Yoshimoto’s art is a world in itself in which fabric and clothing become the means to create pieces of unique art. Discover it in this gallery.
Known for his sets of photographs that masterfully balance the aesthetic seduction of the Orient with western creativeness, Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese artist and photographer who uses black and white and an old-fashioned accordion-type.
His works are composed of silences and light – images that capture the passage of time in a flash to showcase mathematical concepts such as zero and the infinite and pinpoint the essential structures of objects while pushing out the boundaries of human imagination. On display at the 17th version of the Sydney Biennial, his latest work is another balancing act of light, energy and power in a kind of parabola of human life – trees of life, rivers of a thousand tributaries, arterial ramifications.
Lightning Fields is pure energy impressed on photographic plates. To create these graphic and highly sophisticated photographs, Sugimoto uses electricity produced by a 400,000 volt Van de Graaff generator then directed onto photo-sensitive surfaces. Lightning flashes moulded into pure form.
A project put together with infinite patience that exercises an amazingly strong visual impact. The man behind this miniature metropolis (6mt x 3mt) is the artist Peter Root. He used over 100,000 metal studs and took more than 40 hours to complete the work.
His simple and playful experiment touches on themes such as transiency, repetition and nano-architecture but above all it teaches us how the smallest and most unusual things, when seen and rearranged with creative eye and hand, can become true works of art.
Unusual, dynamic, original and at times surreal: Philippe Halsman’s photography will never leave you feeling untouched or indifferent. This twentieth-century legend got to shoot personalities with rare confidence of the calibre of Richard Nixon, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe – and in the most unusual of poses and. His pictures both amaze and surprise – they clearly reflect the strong influence of Hollywood cinema and the study of psychoanalysis so in vogue in the mid-part of the last century.
Marilyn Monroe
Martha Graham
Many of Halsman’s photographs made the front cover of LIFE such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor caught in the vivacious act of jumping and featured in Philippe Halsman’s Jump Book. This tome was an out and out celebration of “Jumpology” the notion whereby the very act of jumping is believed to have the power to distract us from everything else thus revealing the real traits of our face – wholly stripped of conventions and social masks.
So next time you see a photo-shoot involving “flying” models, just remember where it all started and where this dynamic approach had its origins. From Halsman way back!
Beauty and sustainability form the basis of an ambitious project for the 2016 Olympic Games: Solar City Tower – by the RAFAA Architectural Studio – is a 16-metre high house covered entirely with solar panels as a symbol,of the Games and also to create energy . Part of the power generated by the panels will serve to force sea water to the top of the tower.
Then as it tumbles down, further energy will be generated and used around the circuit of the Games.
This zero-impact project is to be installed in Guanabara Bay. Like Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer, Solar City Tower will come to symbolize the city – a perfect fusion of architecture and nature that underscores and strengthens the image of Brazil as world leader in safeguarding the environment.
costumenational.com