Thursday 29 January 2009

Richard Barnes | Unabomber Cabin


Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, philosopher/terrorist, serving life in prison for crimes either committed out of dedication to a cause, or madness or both, had not only been extracted from his rural home but the home itself has been incarcerated. The cabin was shipped across the country to be used as evidence in his trial. Barnes's work looks at historical and contemporary artifacts (in this case the cabin and its site), and using the imagery and methods of architecture /archaeology it attempts to bridge the gap between the banal and the extraordinary, the cult of celebrity and the seductiveness of the infamous. This work was exhibited at the Henry Urbach Gallery in New York in January 1999, traveled to the Triannual of Photography in Hamburg, Germany in May of 1999 and was the subject of a one person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art in August of 2000.

Thursday 22 January 2009

Weird Beauty at the International Centre of Photography

There are days when it seems as if you’ve been subscribing to all the wrong fashion magazines. A little bit of your world crumbles, or maybe a lot. A visit to the International Center of Photography may cause such a day. The center is inaugurating a year of fashion photography exhibitions called “2009 Year of Fashion” with four synergistic exhibitions. They culminate in an engrossing survey of pictures from Edward Steichen’s years at Condé Nast (1923-37), when that pioneer photographer more or less invented fashion photography and celebrity portraiture.

Slideshow