Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 2nd 2012
 
The pictures could be taken by aliens. When you walk into "Transmission", the current exhibition at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London, it's not immediately clear what you are looking at. The images on the wall, hung without labels or titles, are uncannily familiar: landscapes, often captured from high altitude; networks of crevasses and fissures, mountain ranges and isolated craters. We've seen things like this before in photographs of the lunar surface or pictures sent back by rovers on Mars. But you are in fact looking at some of the most photographed places on the planet: the Yosemite national park, the Grand Canyon and Mount St Helens.
 
Dan Holdsworth is a photographer, but this isn't quite photography, or at least not quite as we know it. He made the pictures out of data, captured by the United States Geological Survey using satellites in space, which make laser scans of the Earth's surface and take coordinates every few metres, which Holdsworth then renders digitally. In the centre of the room is a stack of more than 6,000 sheets of paper, more than a foot tall, printed with nearly 5m coordinate points in neat columns. They represent 0.23 square metres of the print of Yosemite Valley on the wall.  
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~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 29th 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, February 17th 2012

The new edition of Intelligent Life is on the streets now in Britain and across Europe. It’s our 20th issue, and the first to feature something that is commonplace, verging on compulsory, at many magazines: a cover photo shoot with an actress—Cate Blanchett, probably the first leading lady to turn her back on Hollywood to run a theatre company.

When other magazines photograph actresses, they routinely end up running heavily Photoshopped images, with every last wrinkle expunged. Their skin is rendered so improbably smooth that, with the biggest stars, you wonder why the photographer didn’t just do a shoot with their waxwork.

It’s a supreme example of having it both ways. Publishers want a recognisable person on the cover, with a real career; but they also want an empty vessel—for clothes and jewellery and make-up, which often seem to be supplied by the advertisers with the most muscle. (One cover shoot we spotted this week even had a credit for a fragrance. You would hope that the readers smelt a rat.) The actresses end up playing two conflicting roles: both modern women and throwbacks, both something to aspire to and something to negate.

Cate Blanchett, by contrast, appears on our cover in her working clothes, with the odd line on her face and faint bags under her eyes. She looks like what she is—a woman of 42, spending her days in an office, her evenings on stage and the rest of her time looking after three young children. We can’t be too self-righteous about it, because, like anyone else who puts her on a cover, we are benefiting from her beauty and distinction. But the shot is at least trying to reflect real life. It’s a curious sign of the times that this has become something to shout about.  read more »

"It's a pitfall to have a definition of photography," says Jeff Wall, whose latest work is on view at White Cube gallery in London and, from December 9th, at Marian Goodman in New York. Wall is an inveterate experimenter who astonished the art world of the late 1970s with photographic light boxes featuring complex mises-en-scenes that evoked the history of both painting and cinema. Wall's new exhibitions, by contrast, consist primarily of large-scale prints in three modes that he refers to as documentary, near documentary (re-enactments of real events) and cinematographic (scenes constructed from the artist's imagination). "I don't know of any other photographer who has asked more of the medium," says David Campany, an eminent art historian who has just published a book about a single photograph by Wall. "Jeff is utterly committed to photography but not one account of it. This has allowed him to evolve, while keeping his standards high."

Wall is not an easy interviewee. In his early days he wrote extensive, persuasive statements about his work, guiding the viewer through its theoretical and art-historical references. Today, he prefers to stand back and let the photograph do the talking. He doesn't even want to divulge how the works were made. "Too much information about the making distracts the viewer from the direct experience of the work," he says.  read more »

The affluent emirate of Abu Dhabi appears to be revising its cultural policy. The Arab spring has ushered in a shift in consciousness across the region; citizens are re-considering their rights while rulers watch their step. Last month Abu Dhabi's Tourism Development and Investment Co (TDIC) announced that its Guggenheim and Louvre museums, which are part of a $27 billion development, would not be completed by 2014 as projected. No new dates for the openings have been announced, and the museums may proceed with a new agenda. What started as a tourism-driven project may be transformed into a local education initiative.

This political shift can be seen in the difference between the 2010 and 2011 keynote exhibitions of Abu Dhabi Art, a boutique art fair that takes place every November. Last year the main art exhibition was titled "RSTW", and it featured expensive works by Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool from the "private collection"—perhaps more accurately described as the "stellar inventory"—of Larry Gagosian, a New York-based dealer.

By contrast, this month, the same space hosts an exhibition titled "Emirati Expressions", which is the culmination of an education workshop conducted by Stephen Shore, an influential documentary photographer. The show includes work made in Abu Dhabi by Shore as well as the photography of artists who live in the United Arab Emirates. It's an unusual but smart model for a flagship exhibition, particularly for a nation with a fledgling art scene.  read more »

This past February, while on patrol in Afghanistan with the 75th Cavalry of the American army, Giles Duley (pictured), a British photographer, stepped on a bomb and instantly lost three of his limbs. After nearly 20 operations and nine months of intensive rehabilitation, Duley is getting ready to go back to work. A retrospective show, "Becoming the Story" at the KK Outlet Gallery in London, marks his comeback. 

Born in London in 1971, Duley began his career as an editorial photographer in the fashion and music industries in Europe and America. Ten years before his trip to Afghanistan, he had a change of heart. Tired of the flimsy, narcissistic world of celebrity culture, he started to concentrate on humanitarian projects, working with charities such as Médecins sans Frontières, the International Organisation for Migration and UNHCR. He funded trips to war-torn regions himself, documenting the people he met and telling their stories through his images. 

The venue has an odd name and an even odder concept. The KK Outlet is a somewhat vague multi-purpose centre that combines a communications agency, a gallery and a bookshop. It is designed for the development of innovative brands and products alongside displays of art, photography and design. The conceit is both grand and vapid. But the plain exhibition space serves to heighten the power of Duley's photographs. Packed tightly into a small space, his works are unframed and untitled, and casually pinned to the walls with simple silver clips. Other than the short captions beneath each photograph, they appear fully exposed.   read more »

When Robert Rauschenberg died in 2008 at the age of 82, he left behind one of the most diverse and respected bodies of artwork produced in the 20th century. Known largely for his painting and sculpture, he also dabbled in printmaking and performance art. Sometimes he went so far as to combine these media into a single unified work.  

Photography was one of Rauschenberg’s greatest passions and unsung talents. While studying at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in the 1940s he seriously considered becoming a photographer rather than a painter. Although he ultimately favoured the brush—the established tool of serious artists—he never lost his love for photography, and often incorporated photographic images into his artworks. “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world,” he once said.

Many of his early photographs have survived, but have been largely overlooked until recently. To celebrate their discovery, a new book called “Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949-1962” will be released on October 31st. The collection includes rare portraits of contemporaries such as Cy Twombly—who is seen standing among Roman relics in 1952 (pictured top)—and Jasper Johns, as well as streetscapes and some startling images recorded while Rauschenberg was travelling as a young man.   read more »

The patterns and logos of high-fashion brands are almost primitively appealing. Primitive, at least, in the sense that they answer to a human being's most basic requirements for visual allure: the colours are bright, the designs loud, the symmetry apparent. If you placed a Takashi Murakami-designed Vuitton handbag in front of a baby, the baby would doubtless crawl forward to cop a feel. That particular pattern features an LV signature in 33 colours, as well as a shower of rainbow-confetti shapes.

Photographer Luis Gispert was interested in the seamier side of logo mania. So he set out to find vehicles intricately customised with bootleg versions of familiar patterns. By way of message boards and word-of-mouth, Gispert tracked down the owners of decked-out cars and photographed the most theatrical examples. High fashion, he discovered, has little bearing on the choices of car-customisers. Selecting a Fendi over a Gucci theme turns out to be partly a matter of aesthetic—do you prefer the look of an "F" or a "G"?—and partly a matter of status. A small handful of blockbuster labels crop up in car after car.   read more »

The seaside the English like to be beside looks different depending on who’s doing the looking. “King Lear” conjures up the coast of Albion as a place of epic scale and dizzying perspectives. Vera Lynn made the white cliffs of Dover a wartime symbol of home. There’s another coast that is altogether more domesticated and slipshod: bawdy in Donald McGill’s postcards, seedy in Graham Greene’s “Brighton Rock”, gaudy in the Technicolor snaps of Martin Parr.

In this new photo essay from Intelligent Life magazine, Sheila Rock views the English seaside through American eyes, as “a forgotten England”, writes Jasper Rees.

Catherine Opie, an American photographer, has a reputation for toughness. Much of this has to do with a series of self-portraits from the 1990s. In one picture, “Self-Portrait /Pervert” (1994) Opie is topless, her face covered in a leather mask and her arms lined with metal pins. In another picture, "Self Portrait /Cutting" (1993), we see Opie's back, which features a carved child-like rendering of a house with clouds, sky and two women holding hands. Her flesh is a raw canvas, with blood pooling in parts. In these pictures and others, which feature her lesbian and gay friends in Los Angeles, Opie explores the use of photography as social commentary without sacrificing artful composition and form. Her aim is to capture America, in faces and on streets, from the centre to the fringe, in ways that are stylised, shocking and everyday.  read more »