MoMa: Mikhael Subotzky / Nan Goldin

After I visited the MoMa in early November, i wanted to blog about 2 photographers. First one is Mikhael Subotzky, who is featured in MoMa’s New photography 2008, together with Josephine Meckseper. He shows a series called Beaufort West, and both the prints as well as the way this young south african photographer found his own style of documentary-reportage photography really impressed me.

See MoMa’s online feature here.

More pictures and interview about another related project here at aperture’s website

Check out his website here.

In 2004, Moma acquired a 45 minutes long slideshow by famous photographer Nan Goldin, called “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency ” I guess that for most of you Nan Goldin is a well known photographer, and her photographs have influenced lots of young artists. So I knew her books before, but I had never seen the original slide show which, instead of the book, was the original way of presentation. And allthough I love photobooks and see them very much as an important medium for photographers, I was really appealed much more to her slideshow than to her books. To me, this slideshow was something very special and moving, because the whole ambience in this dark slideshow room, with the music coming with the pictures, felt quite intimate and immediate. The message and intensity of Goldins photographs was so much stronger in the slide show than in her books (at least so different!). So what I want to point out is that it is very important not only to see photographs online (bad!), in a magazine (better!) or in a well-printed books (good!), but to go into museums and galleries and see the original way the artists wanted to show his art work, as the way of the presentation (print, size, way of mounting or framing, slidewshow, beamer etc ….) can give the work a completely different evidence.