Photo news Self Publish, Be Happy weekend showcases photobooks in London

Photo courtesy The Photographers' Gallery and Self Publish, Be Happy

Look out for the Self Publish, Be Happy Weekend taking place on Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 June in London at The Photographers’ Gallery. The free event showcases contemporary DIY photo books selected by curator and founder of Self Publish, Be Happy, Bruno Ceschel by both emerging and established artists, from obscure zines xeroxed in student bedrooms to traditionally printed photo books, and promises to give “art book lovers the opportunity to discuss, admire and be inspired by publications originating from around the world”.

Ceschel has picked his fifty favourite, recently self-published books featuring work by: Maxwell Anderson; Morten Andersen; Gerry Badger; Tim Barber; Alexander Binder; Lucas Blalock; Ricardo Cases; Luis Castelo; Joshua Deaner; Charlotte Dumas; Jeremie Egry & Nicolas Poillot; Jason Evans; Sam Falls; Gary Fogelson; Stephen Gill; Sebastien Girard; Terence Hannum; Takiura Hideo; Derek Henderson; Asa Johannesson; Erik Kessels; Alexandra Klein; Sjoerd Knibbeler; Marten Lange; Shane Lavalette; Alastair Levy; Jeff Luker; Aubrey Mayer; Heather McDonough; Alex McTigue; Sophie Morner; Lester B. Morrison; Adam Murray & Robert Parkinson; Asher Penn; Karol Radziszewski; Richard Renaldi; Japp Scheeren; Lina Scheynius; Joachim Schmid; David Schoerner; Anne Schwalbe; Victor Sira; Alec Soth; Morten Spaberg; Esther Teichmann; Katrina Umber; Erik Van Der Wejjde; Jan Von Holleben; Patrick Waugh; Grant Willing; and Ofer Wolberger.

A selection of the books will be for sale and visitors will also be able to meet the authors/publishers in the gallery’s first floor café and the bookshop at book signings throughout the weekend.

A limited edition catalogue of only 200 has also been produced for the event with photographs by Nik Adam, Peter Haynes and Åsa Johannesson and will be available, exclusively, at the gallery bookshop on the weekend.

The event is has been organised in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery. Self Publish, Be Happy was founded by Ceschel in 2010 with the aim “to celebrate and promote self published photo books through events, such as fairs, exhibitions and conferences, books and online” and also “organises workshops to help photographers make and publish their own books”.

Winners in Sony World Photography Awards 2010 announced

© Tommaso Ausili, from the series The Hidden Death, photo courtesy the photographer and Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Italian photographer Tommaso Ausili is the overall winner of the L’Iris d’Or/Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year award. Ausili’s series of photographs in the Contemporary Issues category, The Hidden Death, captures an assembly line at an abattoir. Ausili received a $25,000 cash prize plus Sony digital SLR camera equipment and he joins previous L’Iris d’Or winners, David Zimmerman and Vanessa Winship, as a member of the World Photographic Academy.

Tommaso Ausili said at the ceremony held in Cannes last night: “I’m very glad to receive this award. Since I started this series on the death of animals, I have felt an enormous sense of guilt, and this prize goes some way to repay that debt. Thanks to the Sony World Photography Awards for honouring my work with this prize.”

© Tommaso Ausili, from the series The Hidden Death, photo courtesy the photographer and Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Photographer Vitali Seitz was announced as the 2010 Sony World Amateur Photographer of the Year at the ceremony. Based in Munich, but originally from Siberia, Vitali’s image entitled, Hauskonzert: Home concert, was taken at an informal concert as part of a family birthday and also won the amateur Music category. Vitali wins a $5,000 cash prize and Sony digital SLR camera equipment.

The 12 professional winners spanned categories as diverse as fashion, architecture, current affairs and sport and were revealed alongside the Sony World Photography Awards Amateur Photographer of the Year as part of the World Photography Festival.

Chosen by the 2010 Honorary Judging Committee, comprising 12 World Photographic Academy members, the professional category winners are:

Photojournalism and Documentary
Walter Astrada (Argentina) for Current Affairs

Scott Barbour (New Zealand) for Sport

Tommaso Ausili (Italy) for Contemporary Issues

Paolo Pellegrin (Italy) for Arts and Entertainment

© Paolo Pellegrin, photo courtesy the photographer and courtesy of Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Commercial

Martin Brent (United Kingdom) for Advertising

David Handley (United Kingdom) for Fashion

Mohammad Golchin (Iran) for Music

Fine Art
Philipp Lohöefener (Germany) for Architecture

Tommaso Bonaventura (Italy) for Portraiture

Renhui Zhao (Singapore) for Conceptual and Constructed

© Renhui Zhao, photo courtesy of the photographer and Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Pere Pascual (Spain) for Natural History

Peter Franck (Germany) for Landscape

Winning and shortlisted images will be showcased in the Sony World Photography Awards Global Tour exhibition throughout 2010 and 2011. To see the rest of the photos, go to Sony World Photography Awards.

Note: The 2011 Sony World Photography Awards opens for entries on Friday 28 May.

Photo news and competition entry calls – Another Monday, Monday

Bill Henson, UNTITLED, 1998/1999/2000, photo courtesy of the artist and Robert Miller Gallery, New York

After a week over on the NYPH 2010 blog, it’s good to be home. Today’s post brings you news of a photo show in New York featuring works by Australian treasure Bill Henson, two calls for entries for the Host gallery and Foto8 Summer Show in London, plus a deadline extension until midnight Sunday 18 April for the Press Photographer’s Year 2010. There’s also the launch of an online photo mag, Square Magazine.

PHOTO SHOW – IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
In Praise of Shadows is an exhibition of works by Dirk Braeckman and Bill Henson and is on show at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York until June 12. If you’re heading to the Big Apple, or to the New York Photo Festival 2010 running from May 12-16, there’s no excuse to miss the show. For those who are unaware of Henson’s work, I urge you to delve further into the psyche of this intriguing artist.

Henson’s photographs “demonstrate the artist’s interest in the duality of nature and artifice, in adolescence, and in the distinction between male and female. These beautiful and mysterious images are characterized by chiaroscuro, translucent skin tones, and jewel-like colors that add an ethereal quality to ambiguous settings, ” says the press release and I couldn’t agree more.

I reviewed Henson’s bold and rather beautiful book, Mnemosyne, in HotShoe, five years ago and was fortunate enough to attend the opening of a retrospective of his work held at the National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 2005, before it transferred to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

As I wrote at the time: “In Henson’s work there is also the sensation of being on the cusp of something. Whether it’s in the light and the subtle changes observable in the twilight hours and the onset of dusk; the physical places where the fringes of the city give way to barren and deserted landscapes and decaying buildings; or the models who are often adolescent teenagers on the brink of adulthood, Henson’s work straddles opposing forms and concepts with masterful ease.

“He says that music and writing interest him more than photography and his work is littered with references to classical art forms, from images of Baroque and Rococo architectural details and interiors, to subjects recalling Michelangelo’s La Pieta. “Our culture is always inside our nature,” he is quoted as saying and he is not afraid to reference and appropriate from a wide range of sources, mixing subjects and themes from both high and popular culture.”

Braeckman’s lives and works in Ghent in Belgium. His, mostly, black and white photo artworks explore “abstract spaces, domestic interiors and other loci of the built environment… Flatness and depth become difficult to discern, paradoxical,” states the same press release.

Dirk Braeckman, N.P.-M.I.-05, photo courtesy of the artist and Robert Miller Gallery, New York.

Sony World Photography Awards 2010 Amateur category winners announced

WINNER © Fredrik Jalhed, Lennart takes a bath, courtesy of Sony World Photography Awards 2010

A quick news post for today as the winners of the Sony World Photography Awards 2010 Amateur categories have been announced. I will return to the SEX auction tomorrow once I have some better sized images. For today, here are the nine winners selected from 43,745 amateur submissions from 144 countries. I have chosen some of the winning images that I particularly like. In the Conceptual & Constructed category, I have also selected an image by a young Czech photographer, Martin Stranka, from the same category who was shortlisted and whose work I will definitely be keeping an eye on.

The winners are:

Architecture – Marianna Marcantonini, Italy

Conceptual & Constructed – Jake Lowe, Australia

Documentary – Fredrik Jalhed, Sweden

Fashion – Alex Chebotar, Russia

Landscape – Hayri Kodal, Turkey

Music – Vitali Seitz, Germany

Natural History – Alex Goh, Malaysia

Portraiture – Richard Brocken, The Netherlands

Sport – Maksym Gorbatskyi, Ukraine

The winners were chosen by the Honorary Judging Committee, comprising world-renowned photographers, curators and representatives from leading international photo agencies, from a shortlist that was pre-selected by inspectors from iStockphoto. The amateur category winners will be showcased at the Winners’ Exhibition as part of the World Photography Festival in Cannes from 22-27 April. Each photographer will have their work published in the Sony World Photography Awards Winners’ Book and will then be exhibited around the world throughout 2010 and 2011 as part of the Sony World Photography Awards Global Tour.

The overall Sony World Photography Awards, Amateur Photographer of the Year will be chosen from the nine category winners and announced at the Sony World Photography Awards ceremony and gala evening in Cannes on Thursday 22 April. The overall winning amateur photographer will receive a $5,000 cash prize as well as Sony camera equipment. All the winning and shortlisted amateur images can be viewed at Sony World Photography Awards.

WINNER © Alex Chebotar, Extravaganza, courtesy of Sony World Photography Awards 2010

Photo News and competitions – Wednesday Round Up

For today’s mid-week round up of photo news, there’s an exhibition and a photo product award, plus final calls for applicants for the 2010 Hungry Bursary Awards Scheme and the Dutch Masters Series of photographer-led workshops taking place in Italy. Also, a quick heads up on the 12 April date when the annual Association of Photographers Open will be accepting entries.

© Hana Vojáčková, Red Balloon 86, photo courtesy of the artist and gallery

PHOTO SHOW
London-based Czech artist, Hana Vojáčková’s first solo show, Red Balloon 86, a series of large-format photographs and a five-screen video installation taken within the exclusion zone of Chernobyl is on show until Sunday in London. The work is a personal response to the 1986 radioactive explosion. The video is inspired by the boy in the 1956 French film, The Red Balloon, and also follows the journey of a young child. I haven’t seen the show but it looks interesting, especially as she is working with both still and moving imagery.

Hana Vojáčková gained access to the site in late 2009 “to capture the wasteland that is Chernobyl, where in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear disaster, its residents had 40 minutes to pack their worldly belongings and leave”.

ASSOCIATION OF PHOTOGRAPHERS (AOP) OPEN
The AOP Open is calling for entries from around the world for its annual photography competition. The aim of the competition is “to showcase outstanding individual images – there are no categories or themes so the choice of work submitted is entirely up to the photographer”. The AOP Open is now in its 11th year and annually attracts around 1500 international entries.

PRIZE
Awards will be presented to the ‘Best in Show’, the ‘Public Choice’ winner and also a ‘Judge’s Choice’ selected by each of the judges. The chosen images will be exhibited in August at the AOP Gallery and also showcased on the awards website. The gala evening will be held in August at the AOP Gallery in Shoreditch, East London.

DEADLINE
From 12 April until 16 May