Notes
Jean-Christian Bourcart (born in 1960 in Colmar) first gained attention in France, his native country, for "Infertile Madonnas" (1992), a series of photographs taken in Frankfurt brothels, which was widely exhibited and also published with an introduction by Nan Goldin. He has been living and working in New York since 1997. He also published "Forbidden City" (1999), an investigation of swinging and S&M clubs taken with a hidden camera;[1] "Traffic," a study of commuters caught in traffic jams (2004);[2] and "Sinon la mort te gagnait" ("if not, Death would have overtaken you"), an autobiography mixing text and photographs. His last bodies of works include "Stardust," in which he photographed the image on the glass that separates the projection room from the audience in movie theaters, and "Collateral", in which he projected photographs of Iraqi war victims on houses, churches and supermarkets in the American countryside. In 2009, he documented himself about the city of Camden, N.J., which is one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the U.S.A., trying to understand and witness what is the real life behind the statistics and trying to develop strategies that bring something back to the communities. In September 2011, he documented the 10-year September 11 Commemorations in New York for the French photography organization 24h.com.
Nancy "Nan" Goldin (born, September 12, 1953, Washington, D.C.) is an American photographer.
Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington, to middle class Jewish parents whose ideas, moderately liberal and progressive, were put to the test when on April 12, 1965 their eldest daughter Barbara Holly, at the age of eighteen, committed suicide. After attending the nearby Lexington High School, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968. Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints. Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency -- a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.[1] These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years."[2] In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: "I'll Be Your Mirror" (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico album) and "All By Myself." Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public.[3] Goldin's work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life. Goldin lives in New York and Paris--one reason the French Pompidou Centre mounted a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past. In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the disturbing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through a numerous amount of images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her graviation towards working with films.[4] She was presented the 2007 Hasselblad Award [5] on 10 November 2007.[6] She has been represented in America exclusively by Matthew Marks Gallery since 1992 and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.
Thomas Ruff (born 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach) is an internationally renowned German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf.
Thomas Ruff, one of six children, was born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach in the Black Forest, Germany. Ruff was an academic child excelling in maths and science. At an early age he became interested in astronomy and bought a small telescope. In the summer of 1974 Ruff acquired his first camera and after attending an evening class in the basic techniques of photography he started to experiment, taking shots similar to those he had seen in many amateur photography magazines.[1] Ruff studied photography from 1977 to 1985 with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy), where fellow students included the photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Reinhard Mucha, Klaus Rinke, Thomas Struth, Angelika Wengler, and Petra Wunderlich. In 1982, he spent six months at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. In 1993 he was a scholar at Villa Massimo in Rome. Ruff names Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Karl Blossfeld, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston as his main influences.[2] From 2000 to 2005 Ruff taught Photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
In 1979, to finance his studies, Ruff worked for a commercial photographer who made brochures for the building industry. During his studies in Düsseldorf and inspired by the lectures of Benjamin HD Buchloh, Ruff developed his method of conceptual serial photography. Ruff began photographing landscapes, but while he was still a student he transitioned to the interiors of German living quarters, with typical features of the 1950s to 1970s. This was followed by similar views of buildings and portraits of friends and acquaintances from the Düsseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats. The Portraits depict the individual persons framed as in a passport photo, typically shown with emotionless expressions, sometimes face-on, sometimes in profile, and in front of a plain background.[3] His early portraits were black-and-white and small, but he soon switched to color, using solid backgrounds in different colors. He began to experiment with large-format printing in 1986, ultimately producing photographs up to seven by five feet in size.[4] In a discussion with Philip Pocock (Journal for Contemporary Art, 1993), Ruff mentions a connection between his portraits and the police observation methods in Germany in the 1970s during the German Autumn. Ruff intended that large groups of the approximately eight-by-ten-inch color portraits would be hung together, so to add variety he photographed each person against a colored backdrop. By 1987 Ruff had distilled the project in several ways, settling on an almost exclusive use of the full frontal view, eliminating the colored backdrop in favor of unvarying white, and enlarging the finished work to monumental proportions.[5] Thomas Ruff's building portraits are likewise serial, and have been edited digitally to remove obstructing details - a typifying method, which gives the images an exemplary character. Of these Ruff notes, "This type of building represents more or less the ideology and economy in the West German republic in the past thirty years." These first series were followed in 1989 by images of the night sky, Sterne, which were not based on photographs by Ruff, but rather on archived images ('Catalogue of the Southern Sky', including 600 negatives) he had acquired of the European Southern Observatory in the Andes in Chile. These photographs of the stars, taken with a specially designed telescopic lens, are described and catalogued with the precise time of day and exact geographic position. From these photographs, Thomas Ruff selected specific details which he then enlarged to a uniform size.[6] In the years from 1992 to 1995, during the first Gulf War, Ruff produced his Nacht series (1992-96), night images of exteriors and buildings using the same night vision infrared technology developed for use, both military and in broadcast television, during the Gulf War. In 1994 to 1996 these were followed by Stereoscopy images, and another series in the 1990s, Zeitungsfotos, consisted of newspaper clippings enlarged without their original subtitles. In 1999 the artist made a series of digitally altered photographs of Modernist architecture by Mies van der Rohe. The series l.m.v.d.r. - the initials of the architect - began as a commission offered to Ruff in 1999-2000 in connection with the renovation of Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. Having worked with architectural subject matter since the mid-1980s, Ruff was enlisted to photograph the Krefeld buildings as well as the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat in Brno.[7] In 2003 Thomas Ruff published a photographic collection of "Nudes" with a text by the French author Michel Houellebecq. Ruff's images here are based on Internet pornography, which was digitally processed and obscured without any camera or traditional photographic device. In 2009, the Aperture Foundation in New York published jpegs, a large-scale book dedicated exclusively to his monumental series of pixilated enlargements of internet-culled images, all compressed using the standard JPEG format.[8][9] which intentionally uses JPEG artifacts. His Substrat series (2002-03), based on images from Japanese manga and anime cartoons, continued this exploration of digitally altered Web-based pictures. However, he alters and manipulates the source material such that the work becomes an abstraction of forms and colors with no visual memory of the original source material.[10] On February 7, 2011, one of his Nudes pictures appeared on the cover of New York Magazine.[11] The artist's most recent series, zycles and cassini draw from scientific sources. zycles are based on 3D renderings of mathematical curves that were inspired by Ruff's encounter with copperplate engravings found in antique books on electromagnetism, and the cassini works are based on photographic captures of saturn taken by NASA. Ruff has transformed the raw black-and-white prints with interjections of saturated colour.[12] After a number of collaborations with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, the firm designed a studio building for Ruff and Gursky in Düsseldorf. Ruff is represented by David Zwirner, New York, Johnen Galerie, Berlin, and Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Frankfurt.
Larry Sultan (July 13, 1946 in New York - 13 December 2009 in Greenbrae, California) was an American photographer. His work was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as multiple grants from the NEA. At the time of his death, he was a Distinguished Professor of Photography and Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts.
The New York Times characterized his 1977 book Evidence as "a watershed in the history of art photography."
