The exhibition “Dress Codes”at ICP New York showed some interesting photographs, among them a tableau of Yto Barrada called “The belt”  from the series “The smugglers”.

It shows a elderly marrocan woman who smuggles frequently fabrics from Spain to Marroco, hiding the smuggled items under her blue djellaba.  The tableau shows how she looks with and without the smuggled stuff, revealing layer by layer what the djellaba protects. A longer text on this and other exhibited works of “Dress Codes” can be seen here (check also Richard Learoyd with his room sized camera obscura, Lorna Simpson with her photo booth portraits or Hank Willies Thomas series “Unbranded”).

Next Friday a great group show will open at TZR Gallery, Duesseldorf. I’ll show my new work “Sundy morning”.

Vernissage starts at 6 pm -10 pm – hope to see you there! Also for the first time, I’ll show the brandnew book of “Sunday morning”!

And here some of the photographs I’m going to exhibit:

From the 17-19 July, students show their diploma / thesis projects at the FH Dortmund. More infos here.

Only a click away is the online Thesis Show of the School of Visual Arts, New York City – see their projects here.

Contact Press Images have re-designed their website and they have a bunch of  “digital exhibitons” online now.

I especially liked the Contact/s exhibition where photojournalists show their actual contact sheets on whom they made their edit.

Last sunday I travelled to  the city of Darmstadt where the “Darmstadt days of photography” took place for the 5th time.
I had never been there before and I need to say that it’s really a great festival which combines interesting locations, sympathic organizers and international photography with lots of new stuff to discover (though I heard that not all lectures on saturday where that interesting.)

See some photos and installations shots here.

My friends Patrick Hamilton’s and Mark Ansorg’s photographs where selected for the exhibition, but didn’t win the “Merck Price” (5000 Euro). The winner was Nils Klinger with his series “Demarkation” that is about the former inner-german border and about people who tried to escape the socialistic East Germany. In his presenation, Nils Klinger connected photographs of places (e.g. a tunnel in Berlin that was used to reach West-Berlin through the undergroud) with text that gives some background information on the people who escaped then (not all had sucess – some where shot during the escape).This work totally deserved the price, it was among the best in the show.

I also liked the work of Michelle Sank very much. There’s a lot to discover on her website – big talent.

After 2005, in 2009 the Epson Art Photo Award again goes to my school, the FH Dortmund! The winner class consists of 7 of my friends & fellow students:

Stefan Becker
Kathi Ficek
Patrick Hamilton
Jonas Holthaus
Olga Kessler
Lennart Selle
Christine Steiner

So, allthough our school is officially not an “art academy” the FH Dortmund was again very succesfull with this Epson photo ART Award…15.000 Euro to the winner class- congratulations!

I also want to mention Albert Palowska and Vanessa Leissring who were among the selected works in the exhibiton that is on display at the Art Cologne right now.

My (and I’m not alone with this opinion!) favourite series was the one of Anja Engelke, art student from the university of Bremen. She was among the best selected works, too. In her work, she takes famous, iconic photographs, and bakes models of it that she then photographs. Unfortunately they are not online yet, and when you see the whole series it’s probably easier to understand…

This one was Gursky, but she also did a Ruff and a Sternfield and a Tillmanns. Sorry for the crappy image quality…

Some friends of me have a 2 day exhibition in Dortmund, starting Saturday 6 pm. See you there!

projekt-zwischenzeit.de

First of all, my friend Jenny Braun brought an interesting website to my attention:  25books.com , the website of a photo book store in Berlin.  They recommend some really interesting, non-mainstream books in small editions. I will definitely visit the store itself when I’m again in Berlin, hopefully soon! Seems to be a nice place.

As I was clicking through that website, I found a dutch publisher called kesselskramer, on 25books currently represented with a new book called “In every single picture 7″ . I found their books and the concepts behind them very entertaining/fresh/innovative and even funny, their programm is really worth checking out – and they are not even really expensive.

2 more things related to photo books: From the 15th-17th of may, there will be the FOTOBOOK FESTIVAL in Kassel with lectures, exhibitions and lots of photo book dummies (hopefully, one of my projects will be on disply there, too).

And then a note that comes quite late…at our school, the FH Dortmund, students in different courses produce quite a lot of books every year (photography, illustration, conceptual stuff or design in general). A selection of these books will be shown every year on the FH Dortmund booth at the book fair in Frankfurt. The selection 2008 has it’s own website with all selected books, unfortunately, only in german. See it here.

They also made a short video when selecting the books, here.

From Friday to Sunday, “schauraum” shows diploma works from 38 students of my school, the FH Dortmund. Among them my friends Julia Holtkoetter, Katharina Ficek and Maurice Kohl, who did a wonderful book showing portraits of young mongolian people, athletes, musicians etc.

Schauraum., FH Fortmund, Max-Ophüls-Platz 2, 44139 Dortmund, opening Friday, 13th of Feb, 12 p.m. , Sa & So 12 p.m.-6 p.m. www.schau-raum.net

Here some of Maurice’s work – he’ll update his website soon, so check it out.