Alysha Castonguay Topless Photos Ignite Controversy
June 18th, 2010I taken Pix in the last months – please tell me your thoughts:
Old photos bring back such wonderful memories of days past and recent ones delight each and every member of the family, especially when family members don't see each other on a daily basis. But it is so difficult to find time to get these precious treasures into an album or even stored properly. Why shove them away in an album that may not even be taken out during this rushed season or why store them in a drawer, when you can turn them into beautiful reminders of those you love during the holiday season and bring a sense of cheer to all who visit your home?
A mantle or bookshelf, and even a piano or table can become a showplace for your photos, if you dress them up with holiday sparkle. The first step is to find just the right frame. Make your determination of color and type of frame by considering the rest of you holiday theme. Is your living area adorned with gold or silver as the holidays demand or have you chosen a “Country Christmas” theme with highlights of deep greens and reds? Maybe your colors are new this year with an explosion of pinks and purples or perhaps even limes! Frames for your photos can enhance a rooms décor and bring noticeable exclamations of delight from your family when they find themselves among the decorations. For my mantle, during the rest of the year, I choose black or silver frames for the photos of my precious loved ones. During the holidays, I leave the silver and some of the black frames but chose to introduce gold and burgundy, and occasionally a clear crystal frame to give variety and pizzazz.
Certain lighting can give photos and other objects accentuation during this season. Adding candlelight with the perfect candle-holder give your pictures glow and warmth. Choosing just the right candle and holder is important for the right look. A “Country Christmas” theme could involve old portraits of days-gone-by with the classic choice of large red candles on stained-wooden candlesticks, surrounded by pine boughs and raffia bows. A more elegant theme would be displayed by those same photos with gold and white candles on metallic candlesticks on a fringed draping topped with swags of cedar and gold and white ribbon, displayed on your grand piano. A display of your children or grandchildren's photos in reds or lime-green pokadotted frames flanked by matching candles in white or green-painted holders and surrounded by tinsel draped across small branches of holly would perk up any table.
Put photos everywhere! Everywhere people go in your house during the holidays is a perfect location for photos. A small grouping of photos showing Christmases past is a great way to get conversations going in the family room or any breakfast area. A side- porch is a fun place for a photo display tucked in-between the swing and a rocking chair on a small tray table. Leave room to sit that piping hot cup of cocoa or mug of cinder! Even a bathroom with a small shelf is an ideal spot to place some funny pictures of you getting hit by a giant snowball or grandpa showing the little ones how to make a snowman.
Your guests and family will enjoy the conversation that ensues during this season, started by your great photos and memories will be recalled with even more memories made…oh, and don't forget your camera!
A bleak, black and white world of prisoners is torn apart by periodic bursts of vibrancy. The diptychs of Michel Séméniako reveal a carefully manicured illusion of personality, almost playing with the popular notion of prisons in pop culture. Pierre Jouve's small collection of youth offenders is perhaps the most engaging of the color prints, but the photographer is left horribly underrepresented. The last room of the exhibition becomes an almost carnivalesque whirlwind of saturation, featuring the intense collaboration of
Anne-lise Dees, Jacqueline Salmon and Catherine Rechard.
Tying the exhibition together is not chronology but classification. Rooms are broken down by location, with contributions by a steady cast of photographers spread throughout. Women's prisons La Petite Roquette and Saint-Lazare reveal a jarring juxtaposition of nuns and incarceration, the role of religion in rehabilitation. The men's– Grand Roquette, Sainte-Pelagie, Mazas and Santé– lay clustered together, more barren and austere. Throughout the exhibition essays on each prison, brief summations of photographers, developments in regulations and politics accompany each turn of the corner.
Table displays collect documents ranging from surveys of accommodations to mugshots of the condemned. An entire room is dedicated to Alphonse Bertillon's anthropometric system to correctly and uniquely measure convicts. Although the texts and diversions prove necessary for a contextual understanding the Parisian prisons in their society, it creates an additional level of commitment for the exhibition visitor.
Multimedia rounds off the experience. Excerpts from two films– one shot at La Petite Roquette, one at Santé– are projected. A narrow hallway, submerged in experimental video clips from multiple screens, presents Les Yeux de L'ouïe, based on Kafka's existential parable Before the Law. A collection of Séméniako prints have been digitized into a slideshow, faces obscured as they pass. A table in the rear room has monitors which allow a rotating fish-eye look into cells. Another small room collects various texts, magazines and other periodicals, some of which can be leafed through.
What the exhibition attempts is admirable, but by sheer scope the exhibition almost defeats itself. The closely packed prints, lengthy texts, and tiny descriptions prove an exhausting tour. By effectively segregating the color prints from historical black and white photos the visit becomes more overwhelming as you advance. However this collection does provide fascinating insight into the world of Parisian prisons, politically balanced and straightforward, which could not be found otherwise. If you cannot budget an afternoon with a coffee break in the middle be prepared to find yourself returning.
The Carnavalet is hosting a series of tours, discussions and other events related to the exhibition. A schedule can be found here.
A bleak, black and white world of prisoners is torn apart by periodic bursts of vibrancy. The diptychs of Michel Séméniako reveal a carefully manicured illusion of personality, almost playing with the popular notion of prisons in pop culture. Pierre Jouve's small collection of youth offenders is perhaps the most engaging of the color prints, but the photographer is left horribly underrepresented. The last room of the exhibition becomes an almost carnivalesque whirlwind of saturation, featuring the intense collaboration of
Anne-lise Dees, Jacqueline Salmon and Catherine Rechard.
Tying the exhibition together is not chronology but classification. Rooms are broken down by location, with contributions by a steady cast of photographers spread throughout. Women's prisons La Petite Roquette and Saint-Lazare reveal a jarring juxtaposition of nuns and incarceration, the role of religion in rehabilitation. The men's– Grand Roquette, Sainte-Pelagie, Mazas and Santé– lay clustered together, more barren and austere. Throughout the exhibition essays on each prison, brief summations of photographers, developments in regulations and politics accompany each turn of the corner.
Table displays collect documents ranging from surveys of accommodations to mugshots of the condemned. An entire room is dedicated to Alphonse Bertillon's anthropometric system to correctly and uniquely measure convicts. Although the texts and diversions prove necessary for a contextual understanding the Parisian prisons in their society, it creates an additional level of commitment for the exhibition visitor.
Multimedia rounds off the experience. Excerpts from two films– one shot at La Petite Roquette, one at Santé– are projected. A narrow hallway, submerged in experimental video clips from multiple screens, presents Les Yeux de L'ouïe, based on Kafka's existential parable Before the Law. A collection of Séméniako prints have been digitized into a slideshow, faces obscured as they pass. A table in the rear room has monitors which allow a rotating fish-eye look into cells. Another small room collects various texts, magazines and other periodicals, some of which can be leafed through.
What the exhibition attempts is admirable, but by sheer scope the exhibition almost defeats itself. The closely packed prints, lengthy texts, and tiny descriptions prove an exhausting tour. By effectively segregating the color prints from historical black and white photos the visit becomes more overwhelming as you advance. However this collection does provide fascinating insight into the world of Parisian prisons, politically balanced and straightforward, which could not be found otherwise. If you cannot budget an afternoon with a coffee break in the middle be prepared to find yourself returning.
The Carnavalet is hosting a series of tours, discussions and other events related to the exhibition. A schedule can be found here.
Centre de la photographie Genève
La Revanche de L'archive Photographique
4 June – 31 July 2010
Opening : 3 June 2010, 6 pm
Bâtiment d'art contemporain
28, rue des Bains
1205 Geneva, Switzerland
Opening hours : Tues-Sun 11.00-18.00
www.centrephotogeneve.ch
With the participation of :
Claudia Andujar, Arab Image Foundation, Roy Arden, Ariella Azoulay, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Christian Boltanski, Marcelo Brodsky, Banu Cennetoglu, Martin Dammann, Michele Dantini, Silvie & Chérif Defraoui, Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane, documentation céline duval, Dora Garcia, Jochen Gerz, Catherine Gfeller, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lois Hechenblaikner, Edward Hillel, Jacob Holdt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Armin Linke, Susan Meiselas, Gustav Metzger, Gabriele & Helmut Nothhelfer, Uriel Orlow, Mathieu Pernot, Peter Piller, Walid Raad, Ricardo Rangel, Rosângela Rennó, Guadalupe Ruiz, Marie Sacconi, Joachim Schmid, Sean Snyder, Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel, UMAM Documentation & Research, Meir Wigoder and Akram Zaatari.
There are two main reasons linked to archives that have allowed photography to attain the noble level of the museum of fine art.
On the one hand, the artists of the historical avant-gardes used photography as a medium that could touch a wider public than that of art, via the mass media. A number of their protagonists, such as Hannah Höch, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy or Alexander Rodchenko, among others, secretly kept archives of photographs.
On the other hand, museums of fine art started to highlight works by photographers who were aspiring to constitute archives through their photographic documents. Eugène Atget is the first in this lineage. His work inventorying Old Paris served as a model for Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott. In the post-war era the “inventory” of the German population at the time of the Weimar Republic by August Sander was an example for Bernd & Hilla Becher in particular. All these photographers were involved in what Walker Evans calls the “documentary style”, one of the characteristics of which is in fact the ambition to set up an archive. Today, the nature of the photographic archive interests a growing number of photographers and artists. Confronted with the avalanche of photographs produced daily, more and more producers of images are becoming archivists-iconographers.
LA REVANCHE DE L'ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE takes stock of this infinitely rich field that resonates closely with “Visual Culture”. By considering the period from the 1970s to the present day, it reconnects with the spirit of the avant-gardes and also shows a range of works that are all closely or distantly related to political art or art policy.
This show goes beyond the framework of a conventional exhibition of photographs. It offers not only a broadening outside the field of contemporary art, by including stances reflecting political militancy, anthropology or photo-reportage, and also showing photographic productions from the most varied points of view.
LA REVANCHE DE L'ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE constitutes the central focus of the 50JPG festival (50 Jours pour la photographie à Genève), a triennial devoted to photography initiated by the Centre de la photographie Genève in 2003. Each triennial uses photography to question a contemporary set of problems. After REPRÉSENTATION DU TRAVAIL/TRAVAIL DE REPRÉSENTATION in 2003 and PHOTO-TRAFIC in 2006, the 3rd edition is focusing on the theme of the photographic archive.
Around its keynote exhibition LA REVANCHE DE L'ARCHIVE PHOTOGRAPHIQUE, the Centre de la photographie Genève brings together about thirty institutions, art galleries and alternative spaces in the region that are staging photographic exhibitions. These come within the thematic scope of photographic archives (IN section), or offer photographic exhibitions outside that theme (OFF section).
The festival 50JPG also includes :
• a symposium “From one archive to another”, organized with the Haute école d'art et de design – Genève, on 4 – 5 June
• a portfolioreview FOTOBILD set up for the first time in Geneva on 12 – 14 June (registrations on www.fotobild-berlin.de/registration)
• screenings and lectures
More details on www.50jpg.ch
How much will this listening pleasure cost? A cool $40,000, but you will have 50 times the number of speakers as the Joneses. 
