“I began (through Beyond the Family Album) to reverse the process of the way I had been constructed as a woman by deconstructing myself visually in an attempt to identify the process by which I had been ‘put together’. I still feel that personal is political. There is no way I could have understood fully the political implications of trying to represent other people (however well intentioned) if I had not first of all begun to explore how I had built a view of myself through other people’s representations of me.” Jo Spence
Between 1981 and 1991, the artist Thomas Ruff collected over 2500 newspaper photographs from German daily and weekly publications. Covering a broad range of topics such as politics, finance, sport, history, culture, science and technology, the images were chosen because they struck Ruff as unusual or odd in some way. It wasn’t until 1990, motivated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, that Ruff started to re-photograph these images to create his Newspaper Photographs series.
The Punk Project is one of over a dozen series of photographs in which Korean-born New York photographer Nikki Lee pushes the boundaries of identity and place, of who we are and how others see us in proximity to the people we choose to surround ourselves with. She places herself within the frame of her images, transforming herself into the documented subject after constructing the context and setting the stage. She performs identity – reinventing herself with the stereotypes, media hype, codes, and clues that look into and out from a given community, infiltrates that community, and presents us with a new version of herself. She is a respectful tourist shopping for who she is within a subculture, stretching the very skin of her own identity to find a fit. Her images dig deep into the construction of community and ego, of social roles and what it means to be self-defined and/or categorized by someone else. She ultimately asks, are personal identity and communal identity fluid?
Fernando Lemos é uma espécie de arquiteto às avessas. “Tenho apreço por tudo que é demolição, mas deveria ser construção”, diz o artista português. “Tudo que é demolido se torna um novo projeto. Eu procuro o que não se construiu, aquilo que se perdeu.” Ele descreve dessa forma a engenharia por trás de suas imagens, fotografias e desenhos que expõe agora em duas mostras simultâneas em São Paulo, onde se radicou. Enquanto na galeria Fass está uma série de fotografias com intervenções do artista, imagens violentadas com lâminas e outros materiais para revelar turbilhões insuspeitados de cores, o oposto da destruição está agora no Consulado Geral de Portugal.
Album Lixo es una acumulación de fotografías desechadas y encontradas al final del día en la Feira da Ladra (Lisboa). Las categorías de este depósito son contingentes. Formando parte del cúmulo, el objeto fotográfico. Fotos sobre papel leptográfico, en formato tarjeta de visita, calotipos desvaneciéndose, fotos reveladas sobre una fina capa de poliestireno, gestadas por películas rápidas, por carretes de cámaras automáticas revelados sobre papel positivo, polaroid, tiras de fotomatón, impresiones digitales.
Contemporary Photography Index 