Gender and art

Ilse Bing, Garden wire. 1953.

Between the late 1920s and the late 1950s, Ilse Bing (US, born Germany, 1899 – 1998) worked as an artist and commercial photographer in Germany, Paris, and New York. Self-taught, she became an early pioneer of shooting with the 35 mm Leica hand-held camera, creating bold architectural compositions and touching observations of everyday life.

Ilse Bing: Modern Photographer
May 2 - October 11, 2015

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

https://henryart.org/

Realism in Rawiya presents the work of Rawiya, the first all female photographic collective to emerge from the Middle East. With a specific focus on gender and identity, the exhibition presents a thoughtful view of a region in flux, balancing its contradictions while reflecting on social and political issues and stereotypes.

Rawiya, which translates from Arabic to mean ‘she who tells a story’, is made up of artists who established their individual careers as photojournalists by working for news agencies and publications across the Arab world. By living and reporting in the region, they gained an insider’s view of the extremities of these settings, whilst also observing how their reportage could become reframed in the international media’s final edit of events.

Realism in Rawiya: Photographic Stories from the Middle East

18th Feb - 16th May 2015

Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK

"Though her photographic portraits are often compared to seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, Rineke Dijkstra’s latest works—namely, two short films shot in Russian schools and commissioned by the 2014 edition of Manifesta—more readily conjure Degas’s Impressionist-era ballerinas.

In Marianna (The Fairy Doll) (all works 2014), the titular subject is an angelic ten-year-old ballet-school prodigy. Outfitted in pink leggings and accessorized with Hello Kitty earrings, her girlishness is all the more emphatic within the dollhouse-esque pink studio in which she practices. [...]"

Rineke Dijkstra

January 13–February 21, 2015

Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris

http://artforum.com/picks/id=49902

Sabine Weiss, Paris, 1955.

"In anticipation of Christmas Holidays The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography and Lumiere Brothers Gallery present the solo exhibition of a Swiss-French photographer Sabine Weiss. The exhibition is arranged to coincide with Sabine Weiss’ 90th anniversary that she celebrated this summer.

Most of the pictures, featured at the exhibition, were taken in France in the 1950s-80s. This period was crucial for formation of Sabine’s individual style. Apart from French photographs, The Center presents shots taken during the photographer’s trips to Burma, Morocco, Portugal and Malta."

At the end of April 2014, Shirana Shahbazi undertook a three-month road trip with her family, from Zürich to Tehran, making many stops along the way. The images the artist brought back are straightforward holiday photos of her daughters, friends, relatives and strangers, scenic views, the odd-looking building, etc.

Shirana Shahbazi
MONSTERA
25 October – 7 December 2014

Kunsthalle Bern

TORONTO.- A provocateur behind and in front of the lens, internationally acclaimed artist Suzy Lake has been examining and critiquing ideals of the body, gender and identity since the late 1960s. In her photographs, videos and performances, Lake draws attention to social norms and constraints and aims to diminish the barrier between the viewer and the artwork. Despite Lake’s significant international success, her work has yet to receive a career-survey exhibition—until now. Introducing Suzy Lake opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Nov. 5, 2014.

http://www.ago.net/introducing-suzy-lake

Höfer - Musée du Louvre Paris, 2005 

"We take a closer look at the life and work of influential German architectural photographer, Candida Hofer.

The work of German photographer Candida Höfer can be found in many of the leading galleries in the world. Her photographs of libraries, galleries and zoos are free of people, creating a dreamy ambience prompting contemplation of architectural forms and the role of the missing inhabitants. Höfer’s works do not however, demand or impress upon the viewer any particular interpretation or meaning, instead encouraging self-exploration."

"With more than seven hundred photographs, the internationally renowned photographer Dayanita Singh is providing in-depth insights into the past thirty years of her artistic work.

Her exhibition “Go Away Closer” is a museum in a museum: in installations she calls “museum structures”, Singh arranges her photographs and presents them in structures she had developed as her form. These archives structures stand in the exhibition like open oversize books. Each of the expansive, multiply convertible wooden structures holds between 70 and 140 black-and-white photographs – series of works edited and arranged in sequences by the artist, but theoretically capable of being rearranged and supplemented in any number of ways."

Dayanita Singh "Go Away Closer"

27 September 2014 - 4 January 2015

Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de/en/ausstellung/current-exhibitions/exhibition-details/exhibition_uid/13063/

Helen Post, [Young girl pushing baby carriage], ca. 1936-1942.

FORT WORTH, TX.- The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announces that it has cataloged, digitized and published online more than 35,000 artworks of eight prominent American photographers of the 20th century—Carlotta Corpron (1901–1988), Nell Dorr (1893–1988), Laura Gilpin (1891–1979), Eliot Porter (1901–1990), Helen Post (1907–1979), Clara Sipprell (1885–1975), Erwin E. Smith (1886–1947) and Karl Struss (1886–1981).

Gertrude Käsebier and Rinko Kawauchi have two things in common: they’re women and they’re photographers. Käsebier was an early American photographer who took portraits of Native American medicine men and worked with Alfred Steiglitz. Kawauchi is a contemporary Japanese artist who makes abstracted images inspired by Shintoism.

Nonetheless, they sit right next to each other in the aptly titled Women Photographers: From Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman, Boris Friedwald’s survey of female photographers published by Prestel this past spring.

Margaret Bourke-White. Boy with a hammer, Magnitogorsk, Soviet Union 1931.

In the male-dominated world of early twentieth-century photojournalism, Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was a striking exception to the rule. She was the first woman to work for Fortune and Life magazine. In Russia, she photographed a smiling Stalin and in Georgia the aged mother of the dictator. In 1941, when the first German bombs fell on Moscow, Bourke-White was the only foreign photojournalist in the city. Fearlessly, she covered the work of medical teams behind the front line. Many of her images are unforgettable, like the ones she took following the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by American troops. This exhibition comprises over 180 original vintage photographs taken in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Germany, England and Italy in the 1930s and 40s.

Margaret Bourke-White - Moments in History

August 19 - October 19, 2014

Syracuse University Art Galleries

With their cameras and their galleries, women are helping to build appreciation for a still-marginal art form in Turkey. Along the way, they are also bringing visibility to women's issues and history.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sous Les Etoiles Gallery presents “Not above a whisper,” featuring work by Scandinavian photographers Susanne Wellm and Eeva Hannula. [...]
Selections from Wellm’s series Inner Landscapes and Hannula’s The Structure of Uncertainty highlight the nebulous relationship between past and present, real and imagined. The photographers compose visual poems and stories from the extraordinary vantage point of the unconscious through personal, found and historic archive materials, painting, drawing, and film still photography.

http://souslesetoilesgallery.net/

Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the leading and most innovative photographers of the nineteenth century. She is probably best known for her powerful portraits. She also placed the models she asked to sit for her – friends, relatives and servants – in a Biblical, historical and allegorical context. Her photographs were groundbreaking for several reasons: Cameron deliberately made them blurred and out of focus, containing small scratches, spots and other marks of the production process. Although she was criticized for her unconventional approach, the beauty of her compositions and her dedication to photography as an art form also earned her considerable admiration.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), pioneer of photography

14.03.2015 - 14.06.2015

Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium

"NEW YORK, NY.- Over the course of four years (2010 - 2014), Polish Canadian photographer Gabriela Maj travelled throughout Afghanistan to collect portraits and stories from inside the country's women's prisons, including the most notorious penitentiary for women, Badam Bagh, located on the outskirts of Kabul.

[...]

The majority of the prisoners Maj documented were incarcerated for what are known in Afghanistan as "moral crimes," a term to describe the ways a person may be accused of "zina," or sex between two people who are not married. The offenses these women were accused of include running away from forced marriages, being sold into prostitution, domestic slavery, physical violence generally conducted by their husbands, and rape and involuntary pregnancy."

Honeymoon period 3, 2014, Julie Cockburn.

LONDON.- On view at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road 28 November-10 January is a new series of appropriated portrait photography, transformed by embroidered and painted embellishments to the photographic print. Julie Cockburn’s exhibition of hand- altered photographs Waiting Room explores the social territory of everyday encounters between strangers. 

http://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/flowers/2014/julie-cockburn/works#16061

The New-York Historical Society celebrates a renowned photographer’s creative eye and unique cultural perspective in Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage. On view at New-York Historical from November 21, 2014 through February 22, 2015, this is the final stop on the national tour of Pilgrimage, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Pilgrimage charts a new direction for Annie Leibovitz, one of America’s best-known living photographers. Unlike her staged and carefully lit portraits made on assignment for magazines and advertising clients, the photographs in this exhibition were taken simply because Leibovitz was moved by the subject.

Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage

November 21, 2014 - February 22, 2015

http://www.nyhistory.org/exhibitions/annie-leibovitz-pilgrimage

Where did all the people go? Libraries, museums, palaces and opera houses – since the 1970s Candida Höfer (b. 1944) has been photographing places where numerous people usually come together. But her large-format, symmetrical pictures are deserted and focus entirely on architecture. Candida Höfer’s photographs are characterised by a keen interest in spatial structures and a cool objectivity. Under the title Düsseldorf the exhibition brings together works which are specifically connected with that particular city, but which are also quintessentially representative of Candida Höfer’s work.

Candida Höfer - Düsseldorf

01.11.2014 - 08.02.2015

Kunstmuseum Luzern

Alexandra Demenkova et Dana Popa illustrent chacune à leur manière le style documentaire. Toutes deux relèguent le discours métaphorique au second plan et se concentrent sur la transcription du réel en éliminant tout artifice formel. L’exposition propose de découvrir deux approches, qui traitent avec la même sensibilité de la condition féminine.

Kristin Skees' portraits reveal dynamic relationships between our identities and the people, things and places we love. The photographs from her Cozy series are playful yet charged and complex; much like relationships themselves.

Kristin Skees - Cozy Up

September 12 to December 28, 2014

Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York 1979-1980.

LONDON.- Victoria Miro Mayfair presents the first solo exhibition of Francesca Woodman's work at the Mayfair gallery. In her short career Woodman produced an extraordinary body of work - over 800 photographs - acclaimed for its singularity of style and range of innovative techniques.

This exhibition considers the zigzag and other abstract geometrical forms as recurring visual themes in Woodman’s work. Woodman’s practice is often discussed in terms of its surreal and symbolic imagery, but her work was grounded in a sophisticated understanding of form. Her photography exemplified strong compositional motifs, and the repetitive, regular shape of the zigzag, with its strong lines and angles, was a form she used in images of disparate subjects.

Francesca Woodman / Zigzag

9 September - 4 October 2014
Victoria Miro Mayfair Gallery, London

http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/463/

NEW YORK, NY.- Her celebrated photograph “Migrant Mother” is one of the most recognized and arresting images in the world, a haunting portrait that came to represent the suffering of America’s Great Depression. Yet few know the story, struggles and profound body of work of the woman behind the camera: Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – Oct. 11, 1965).

American Masters — Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning, premiering nationwide Friday, August 29, 9-11 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), explores the life, passions and uncompromising vision of the influential photographer. Her enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese American internment camps.

A DVD will be available October 21, 2014, from PBS Distribution. The film’s companion book, Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (Chronicle Books) by Elizabeth Partridge, is available now.

Jessica Wohl, “White Mask” (2012), embroidery on found photograph.

"New York’s art world seems to be experiencing a newfound love affair with art made by hand — art that has, dare I say, “craft” in it.

[...]

The latest craft art making a strong appearance is embroidery, at Robert Mann Gallery, which has mounted a stunning exhibition of artists who embroider on top of photographs. Curated by Orly Cogan, who has included herself in the show, The Embroidered Image features the work of 11 artists who have found creative ways to meld two unlikely mediums."

The Embroidered Image continues at Robert Mann Gallery (525 W 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through August 15.

http://www.robertmann.com/exhibitions/current.html