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Announcing the winners of The 1000 Words Award

August 20, 2012, 4:04 am
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1000 Words is proud to announce the results of the inaugural 1000 Words Award for European photographers.

Having attracted considerable interest from a diverse spectrum of committed and passionate photographers, the standard of the open submissions was exceptionally high. And while the deliberations were difficult, the judges selected in their opinion, four photographers who could most benefit from the mentoring and workshop experience and go on to produce interesting and innovative bodies of work from having the time to focus on their practice.

In total, 348 submissions were received from 24 EU member countries.

The winners are: Henrik Malmström (b. 1983, Finland), Lucy Levene (b.1978, United Kingdom), Tereza Zelenkova (b. 1985, Czech Republic) and Virgílio Ferreira (b. 1970, Portugal).




At the core of my practice I seek to destabilise different subjects by reassessing their potential as metaphors for broader questions surrounding photography’s capability for representation and its relationship with the real. My latest work is an installation that comprises of a series of black and white photographs and several objects from my personal collection. This work can be understood as a metaphor for the night as a time associated with both inspiration and imagination, but also melancholia, solitude and isolation. The darkness of the night, like the darkness inside a camera, is a space where images are conjured. Here I am not really interested in the images brought to us by dreams but rather by that point of insomniac vigilance when one can no longer recognise what’s a dream and what’s reality; when familiar objects start to take on shapes of something else, undergoing a sort of metamorphoses. Tereza Zelenkova






A series of un-staged images taken in an Edinburgh nightclub. The title is from the poem by Maya Angelou; Come, And Be My Baby.
Lucy Levene








This series deals with ideas of intangibility related to states of being, by capturing candid moments of anonymous people in the streets of London. In these pictures I attempt to evoke those feelings of vulnerability, bewilderment, impermanence and solitude, which are related to the uncertain times that we live in. They are haunted depictions of our world, and maybe they reflect us.

In these photo-chemical experiments the use of light has a double function: it both records and destroys the information in the picture, denying any secure reality. These manipulations are made on the moment of capture, and all the process of image transformations happens inside the apparatus. Virgílio Ferreira


































My work up until now has always been connected to home and identity. I like to challenge myself into finding new perspectives and angles in a search for how things can be represented. Sometimes it can appear as fiction, but still there is always a deeper social aspect to it.
Henrik Malmström  

The 1000 Words Award for European photographers is a major initiative in collaboration with The Other European Travellers, a project co-ordinated by Cobertura Photo and co-organised by Atelier de Visu, 1000 Words and Festival Voci di Foto in partnership with Magnum Photos. It is part-funded by The Education Audiovisual and Culture Exchange Agency (EACEA) under the auspices of the EU Culture Programme.

Photographers were invited through open submission to apply for an opportunity to realise a new body of work with the supervision of several high-profile photographers and industry experts.

The 1000 Words Award includes:

• £1,000 cash prize
• 18 month mentorship programme
• 3 workshops with Jeffrey Silverthorne, Antoine d’Agata and Patrick Zachmann in London, Marseille and Seville respectively, including financial assistance with accommodation and travel
• Travelling group exhibition through the UK, France, Spain and Italy
• Catalogue and DVD
• Feature in 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

The 1000 Words Award selection panel were:

• Simon Baker, Curator of Photography at Tate
• Brett Rogers, Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, London
• Dewi Lewis, Director at Dewi Lewis Publishing
• Tim Clark and Michael Grieve, Editors at 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

The 1000 Words Award and The Other European Travellers have been supported, in part, by The Education Audiovisual and Culture Exchange Agency (EACEA).

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Palais de Tokyo Young Curators Season 2013 Open Call

September 5, 2012, 1:58 am
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Dedicated to the emergence of the newest forms of contemporary art as it is, the Palais de Tokyo sees participating in the renewal of the ecosystem of art as part of its remit. This is why it undertakes to seek out and support new players, and new directions. Thus in the summer of 2013 the Palais de Tokyo is entrusting its entire programme schedule to "young curators". Selected on the basis of the proposals they submit, the winners will bear witness to the perpetual reinvention of the issues involved in curating an exhibition, their scouting talent, and their ability to dream up new ways of relating to art. This event is likewise intended to demonstrate the dynamism of Paris and the surrounding area as part of a joint initiative involving a great many partners and institutions.

APPLICATION FILE:
The proposed project must clearly demonstrate innovative thinking about exhibition formats. Whether it relates to a solo or a group exhibition, it must envisage occupying a surface area that can be as large as 250 sq. m. It must be capable of evolving in accordance with the technical constraints and the diversity of spaces that apply at the Palais de Tokyo. The selection will be made primarily on the basis of the inventiveness of the project, its curatorial boldness, and its relevance in the current field of creative work. Applicants can indicate a preference as regards the typology of space best suited to their proposal. Applicants can be curators and/or artists.

The application file will consist of:

1. a statement of intent
2. an illustrated list of proposed artists (and/or works)
3. an estimated budget in euros comprising the items: production of works, transport, materials and equipment required
4. a CV
5. an artistic documentation giving a short description of the previous curatorial projects carried out by the applicant
6. anything else likely to shed light on the proposed project

File to be forwarded before 30 September, 2012

- In digital format to: youngcurators@palaisdetokyo.com
- As a hard copy to: Palais de Tokyo, Young Curators, 13 av du président Wilson, F-75116 Paris, France

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS:
Applicants must be under 40 years of age.

SELECTION METHODS:
The Palais de Tokyo will bring together a jury consisting of seven curators from its team, its President, Jean de Loisy, and several suitably qualified notabilities. Following an initial selection, the applicants chosen will present their proposal to the jury in person. The traveling expenses of the applicants selected to present their proposals orally will be covered by the Palais de Tokyo. Between ten and fifteen winners will be named following this second phase.

FOLLOW-THROUGH OF THE PROJECT:
Each winner will be assigned a curator as their main contact at the Palais de Tokyo and will be supported by the production service throughout the implementation of the project. The total estimate budget for the season is 500,000, excluding caretaking and security, mediation and communication. Each curator selected will receive a sum of 1500 euros as a fee, not to be included in the estimated budget.

TIMETABLE:
Call for applications: beginning of June 2012

Applications to be submitted before 30 September, 2012

Oral interviews of those selected in the first round: 5 November, 2012

Winners announced during the week of 5 November, 2012

Exhibition: June 2013

APPENDIX:
For information, a plan of the Palais de Tokyo etc click here.
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1000 Words Photography Magazine 14

September 20, 2012, 9:59 am
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We are delighted to announce that issue 14 of our online magazine is now live. To view it, please go to: www.1000wordsmag.com

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Rosina Darch (1924-2012).



For this Autumn edition we have chosen the theme of ‘Murmur’. Silent vibrations and fugitive apparitions, the imagery showcased here derives its brilliance in the shape of its understatement, and the art at its core. Artists who translate lived experience into a pattern of photography that preserves its vitality, drawing out psychological complexities and subtleties. They are storytellers, yet their voices are calm, measured and appropriate.

Exploring that which connects and concerns the photography we have brought together, Louise Clements reports back on Eva Stenram’s ‘gently feminist’ exhibition which formed part of The Discovery Award at this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles; also plucked from the French festival is the ethereal and melancholic work of Belarus photographer Alexandra Catiere whose series Here, Beyond The Mists is accompanied by a text from Natasha Christia; Lucy Davies of The Daily Telegraph describes a path through the work of recent RCA graduate Regine Petersen in particular Find a Falling Star, a project about Meteorites and everything; Brad Feuerhelm meets Esther Teichmann and bring us an insightful interview with the German-American artist, looking at the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation.

Elsewhere, Anouk Kruithof serves up a lively (inte)review with the formidable artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarinon the occasion of their latest photobook, a collection of Polaroids that ‘forms an intimate and imperfect inventory of their fifteen-year collaboration’, produced in collaboration with Self Publish Be Happy; and finally, Gerry Badger discusses Paul Graham’s The Present, his much anticipated volume which explores both photography’s relationship with time, the ‘present’, and the nature of photographic narrative, or in this case, with non-narrative.

In our dedicated Books section, David Moore lays bare the facts about Lise Safarti’s She, Michael Grieve gives his verdict on Soho, the latest in an ongoing series of city studies by Anders Petersenwhile Brad Feuerhelm ponders the authenticity of Nicholas Comment’s Mexico City Waltz.

Once again, 1000 thanks to our photographers and writers, editorial and art departments as well as of course our advertisers and funders for making this magazine possible.
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Rafael Arocha

October 1, 2012, 2:15 am
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All images © Rafael Arocha

“Photography keeps me alert,” writes Rafael Arocha by way of introduction to his project entitled Midnight. “The photographic process allows me to critically and creatively understand, and get closer to different situations, feelings and people, learning more about my own thoughts and inner emotions. I believe this process allows the photographer to discover and connect with his/her obsessions, doubts, intellect and memory.”

With more than a whiff of Anders Petersen, this imagery plumbs the heart of grimness. Alive to the presence of human flesh, it looks at the relationship between instinct and desire, where night time is the stage set on which courtship becomes ritualistic. Filtered through his uncompromising lens are scenes, incidents and gestures that become transformed into things of profound and often awkward beauty.

“Midnight refers to a fleeting moment,” Arocha goes on to explain, “a line that divides one moment in time from another. It is then that a transformation happens, a metamorphosis, and an instinctive drive, from deep within, offers us the opportunity to show ourselves as less ordinary. Things happen, sometimes unnoticed, which reflect our own obsessions or fantasies. Non-verbal codes are used to communicate, and once interpreted, they become intimate longing and desire.”

Rafael Arocha was born in 1978, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Click here to view more work from the series. To learn about his practice visit www.rafaelarocha.com
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Chloe Borkett

October 3, 2012, 2:19 am
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All images © Chloe Borkett

Chloe Borkett’s vision is sensitive to the melancholia of the world. Her project Stories East of the River is a delicate yet direct document on the lives of the younger generation in small republic of Transdniester in the region of Moldova. Portraits, punctuated with lyrical details and brooding landscapes, capture a sense of an uncertain future for a generation whose identity and solid basis for growth is riddled with doubt. Sitters stare into space or look directly back at the viewer as if searching for something positive with bold yet concerned expressions.

Says Borkett: "The young are deeply proud to be Russian but are starting to question the tiny Republic’s success and the implications on their futures. International trade is restricted; jobs and opportunities are limited and on-going difficulties with obtaining expensive visas, limits economic migration."

Borkett’s strength is in her beautiful use of colour to convey a sense of the story without either artistic indulgence or hard, objective, journalistic tactics.

Born in 1978, she graduated with a degree in documentary photography from the University of Wales, Newport and is now based in London. She has been involved in various exhibitions including the Ian Parry exhibition in 2011. She continues to pursue projects concerning social issues with a focus on human rights. To view more work from this series click here.
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Spencer Murphy

October 5, 2012, 5:38 am
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All images © Spencer Murphy

Spencer Murphy’s name should ring a bell thanks to his editorial commissions which has seen his photography published in such places as The Guardian Weekend, Telegraph Magazine, New Statesman, and the FT Weekend. He has also been included in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize no less than five times!

Here though are extracts from a personal project, a delicate and visually understated series entitled The Abyss Gazes Into You. It offers a gentle and thoughtful glimpse of Murphy's use of the landscape as inspiration and as a means to discover something within him.

“These images are a reflection of something inside myself – a feeling of both being trapped and floating endlessly in time and space, a mixture of hope and despair, desolation and beauty,” says Murphy.

“The sense, perhaps, of what it is to live a finite life in an infinite universe. They are pictures that, to me, hint at the unfathomable scale not only of the universe, but of life itself. They are instances in which, by accident or design, I have found myself staring once more into the abyss, and the abyss has momentarily returned my gaze.”

Lofty themes and grand claims, but does the work bear the weight of these words? Check out more from the series here and decide for yourselves. We are giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Born in 1978, Murphy grew up in the Kentish countryside and studied photography at University College Falmouth, graduating in 2002. Murphy now lives and works in London.
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William Klein + Daido Moriyama @Tate Modern, London

October 10, 2012, 5:14 am
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Fresh from the media view of the hugely anticipated Klein + Moriyama: New York Tokyo Photography Film exhibition, which opens today at the Tate Modern, Rachel Ridge reports back on her findings and brings us a quick q&a with Daido Moriyama. Also, after the drop, are two of latest of Art.sy/Tate Shots videos.




Klein + Moriyama: New York Tokyo Film Photography is the latest in a recent rupture of thoughtfully curated photography coming out of the Tate Modern. And, following the likes of Diane Arbus, Boris Mikhailov and the 2010 show Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and The Camera, it appears to have a penchant for the candid wanderers of the world.  
So here we have two connoisseurs of the street in what is essentially two retrospectives back to back. It begins with American painter, filmmaker, and photographer William Klein (b.1928), and ends with Daido Moriyama, (b.1938). The story goes that a twenty year old Moriyama stumbled upon Klein’s seminal photo book, Life is Good and Good For You in New York, published in 1956, a daringly stark portrait of New York, which would go on to change the way he photographed from then on.
These are men who see the city as a mysterious world, that births a strange kind of existence filled with stark realities, performance, isolation, desires and nervous energy. Both shooting predominantly New York and Tokyo in black and white with a point and shoot, they seem to subsume street photography into their own brand of photographic impressionism. Quick to capture what grabbed them, their images had little time for technical expertise and appear more like throbs of instinctive impulse, that often dissolve into abstraction.
The show literally opens with a bang, with Klein’s film Broadway Light 1958, towering over you in pulsating neon flashes which cut to close ups of garish street signs, ‘Don’t walk’ and ‘Taste it’. Klein explores the city as cinema, a phantasmagoria, lulling us into a waking dream state. His work appears to be an intense investigation into these wheels of control and seduction.

Elsa Maxwell's Tory ball, Waldorf Hotel, New York, 1955. © William Klein


An interesting paradox is his heavy involvement in the fashion industry, working as a photographer for Vogue in his early career. We see enlarged pictures of models head to toe in designer clothing parading the gritty streets of New York, and a satire of the fashion industry in the film, Who are you Polly Magoo? which plays in a room looping a retrospective of his films. It’s quite hard to believe how he got away with poking fun at fashion, whilst at the same time, changing the face of it forever. In his most creative fashion endeavour he mixes photographs of models with photograms showing them interacting with moving light.
There is an inherent urgency about Klein’s practice that speaks to some kind of post war hysteria; rooms of abstract paintings, photograms, films then back to photography. A man on a manic quest for his own truth and always trying to break down the façade, he even does this with the photograph itself in huge blown up photo laminates of painted contact sheets unveiling the selection process for all to see. Laying things as bare as he can, the American dream seems to shatter slightly every time Klein clicks. The war may have been over but a new one was being waged.
The mania of Klein’s rooms pave the way for Moriyama to adopt a more sensual approach, where Klein is the rampant explorer, Moriyama, ten years his junior, is the flaneur letting his intuition lead.
Memory of Dog 2, 1982. © Daido Moriyama

Moriyama, born in Osaka but later settling in Tokyo, seems to be trying to make sense of these fragmented places, which the city poses. His democracy of vision renders real-artificial, human-animal, subject-photographer, inanimate object-nature all equal, all up for investigation. His photographs are where pre conceptions go to die. The city is merely a plethora of possibilities and he is open to them all. In the series Platform he captures different groups of people waiting for the train. We see a businessman, a granny and a housewife all coexisting on an equal plane, all having a story we can get lost in.
Moriyama’s influence, Jack Kerouac’s On the road, can be seen in the countless open-ended narratives that pour onto the walls in a stream of consciousness. Like Kerouac did with writing, Moriyama pushes the limits of photography - shooting grainy, disjointed compositions, overlapping images and over exposing. Photographs become his own subconscious imprints. In Farewell photography we see how Moriyama like Klein, uses personal expressions and distortion of light to remind us of the façade of the photograph.
The curator, Simon Baker, explains this is “a show about photographic architecture”. Staying true to Klein and Moriyama’s love affair with the photo book, the exhibition utilises this in a visually exciting way. There are vitrines full of books, issues of Japanese vintage publication Provoke. The photographs adorn the walls in grids resembling something of a free flowing book etched out on the wall. This, coupled with mammoth sized images and large-scale films create a constant flux of shapes and forms. 
Ultimately, this exhibition is an opportunity to witness how pioneering both were in breaking from the confines of the photograph to create a visual language where perception can roam freely, in turn, producing images that seem to spring from the dark recesses of our imaginations and fantasies.
Rachel Ridge 
Rachel Ridge: Do you see the relationship between you and William Klein? 
Daido Moriyama: Rather than feeling there’s any particular connection with the artist, I feel very happy and very fortunate to be able to share the same space with him. When I was in my twenties and saw Klein photographs of New York it really inspired me to become a photographer and change the way I took photographs myself.

RR: I read that sometimes you don’t look into the viewfinder when you’re shooting; you let your body take the photograph. How much do you rely on instinct and intuition?

DM: Yes. Intuition is very important and the instinct there. Sometimes if you’re in the town you might be looking one direction and you’ll just feel that there’s something happening over there and so you’ll just turn the camera and take a photo in the other direction and that is pure instinct. 

RR: Can you elaborate on how Jack Kerouac’s On the road has influenced your work?

DM: It’s not as though in every shot I take there is a bit of Jack Kerouac or a bit of Andy Warhol. When I was young I was very influenced by seeing their work or reading their work and that has somehow sunk into my subconscious and so it probably is present in all that I do but I’m not very conscious of it when I’m taking the pictures. I can emphasise with them in how they see the world, your basis stance to what’s around you.

RR: So like an intuitive remembering...

DM: It’s intuitive sometimes when you’re actually taking the photo. It can be intuitive what kind of photo you take but at the same time this basic stance to the world around you that’s the base on what you’re standing, so not quite the same as intuition. Through the lens it might be an instinctive motion to take a photo but the whole of my life and memories are acting through that one motion at that time.



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Antoine d’Agata

October 15, 2012, 7:26 am
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All images © Antoine d'Agata

Antoine d’Agata’s latest publication ICE continues his ongoing fascination with sex, drugs, death and dissecting taboos, finds Chloe Athanasopoulou.

Perhaps it is too soon to judge whether Antoine D’Agata’s newest incarnation, ICE, is his swan song, but undoubtedly, it is the most contextualised and revealing book he has produced so far. Refreshingly amoral, excessive beyond reason, paradoxical and seductive, his journey through the prism of the drug, metamphetamine hydrochloride or so-called ICE, is unlocked here not just by way of photography but also through extensive writing.

Alongside already familiar photographic work produced since 2005 in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, the injections of text throughout the book, such as his personal diary, emails to and from prostitutes portrayed in ICE, his editor, and his children back in France, offer a new dimension and level of complexity to his work that refrains from repetition. ICE is not an answer, but rather a multi-layered question, a circle of construction and destruction where the chronological distance between the photographs taken becomes spirally bigger together with the intensity of the pure experience. Antoine’s ambivalence between pain and pleasure, and instinctive gravitation towards the fugitive and circumstantial leaves no space for romantic notions of idealised beauty.

The protagonists of ICE are contemporary nymphs; abyssal and suffering, humane but still hard to reach and to keep hold of. Ka, the most beloved and indeed photographed of all the girls, is a contemporary Olympia, a Baudelairean Red Hair Beggar Girl, a queen, a prostitute, a cannibal, an anorexic desire and still, as D’Agata describes her, "taller than a mountain". The complex relationship between the prostitutes and the photographer is exposed through the extraordinary textual part of ICE; the shocking honesty and brutal rawness from both parts in regards to sensitive matters, such as the exploitation of the sitter, intimacy, sex and love, is far from pretentious and counteracts the judgemental and reassuring predisposition of our times.

The oeuvre of Antoine d’Agata has never been easy to digest and ICE is unquestionably his toughest body of work yet. The rigour and sheer determination of his quest reveals much of himself but uniquely, and crucially, opens up to the experience of his subjects.

Chloe Athanasopoulou
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Daido Moriyama printing show @Tate Modern, London

October 17, 2012, 8:02 am
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Our Associate editor, Brad Feuerhelm on the rare opportunity to create his own limited-edition, photo book with legendary Japanese photographer, Daido Moriyama.



I was lucky enough to get to the Tate Modern last week to take part in making a book with Daido Moriyama along with a bevy of other photography aficionados. The idea of the printing show has been successfully resurrected by curator, writer and Goliga Press head Ivan Vartanian for the Tate’s current show Klein + Moriyama, which in itself is a great behemoth of a dual retrospective.

Mr. Vartanian has taken his cue from the original printing show that Moriyama did in New York City in 1974 wherein he notoriously and, in perfect participatory harmony, assembled a small workshop in the commercial gallery and invited interested parties to become part of the performance of book arts selection. Members were allowed to pick an amount of Moriyama’s images to collate into their own book. A highly probable gesture to the unique and collaboration bereft of the pressures of commerce normally associated with a commercial gallery endeavour. This seemed to be a kind of citizen artist project with a nod to the happenings of the 60’s. Collaborative. Inspirational. Effective. 



On the sixth floor of the Tate Modern with its expansive views over a lovely sunny London, participants were asked to repeat the process whereby they are allowed to pick through a pre-selected amount of Moriyama’s works to collate and produce their own book on the spot with other members allotted the same time. It was a hubbub of friendly, weekend activity with museum curators milling about with the public and of the photographic enthusiasts on the same level, the level of artist. The sort of open experience is one of the many reasons the London photographic community has been greatly enabled by the Tate’s push towards photography under the tutelage of Simon Baker, chief in staff of bringing photography howling down on London, the beast tamed and now sharply in the spotlight.

Before entering the sanctity of the Tate, I had already decided to reduce my knowledge of Daido Moriyama into one image and to repeat it over and over, making a repetitive, yet completely unique object barring any other paraphoto nerds had not beat me to it in 1974 at the original staging or at the recent Tokyo happening. At $40,000 for an original copy of the 1974 book, I think I will decline to pursue its possibility. In selecting an image of lips, I felt that I selected an iconic summation of the desire in Moriyama’s work. My ultimate choice would have been the ‘stray dog’ image, which I can still envision as a single image book.

Moriyama, ever the provocateur, was clever to exclude ‘stray dog’ and the famous tights image for his pre-selection of works available in the book making process. I remember chuckling on the way in when I realised it was not there, knowing he had got the best of me under his controlled and fairly so, tyrannical application of what we could choose. The images on display were gorgeous and the second-guessing about making it a more straightforward book still swayed to repetition and the single idea/image.

After selecting your images on a card (all cleverly organised), you give the selection to a printing assistant who then goes through the process of stapling the images to a pre-made screen printed cover of which there are two choices to pick from. I went blue. The title… Menu. 



I waited while my book was assembled to have my number called out to retrieve it from Simon Baker. My Menu served, a deserved light chuckle from him at its insistence to be different and I was sent off to wonder in the big smoke for the rest of my Sunday, feeling that the experience was well worth the obscenely cheap £20 ticket. Whether I felt I collaborated or parasitically stole myself into a vain collaboration with Mr. Moriyama is another matter entirely!
Brad Feuerhelm
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Cindy Sherman

October 22, 2012, 7:00 am
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What is there to say about queen bee Cindy Sherman? For 30 years she has starred in all of her photographs and yet they reveal nothing about her. For they are anything but self-portraits. Rather, her collection of pictures toss a molotov cocktail through the stained-glass window of photographic truth.

We recently happened upon this rare interview with her, produced by Art21. In it she reveals how dressing up in character began as a kind of performance and evolved into her earliest photographic series such as Bus Riders (1976), Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), and the untitled rear screen projections (1980).

Through her myriad of guises, metamorphosing from a busty Marilyn Monroe to a cowgirl to a forlorn clown, she examines issues of gender, identity and power, and explores how photography is complicit in these contructions. Often with the simplest of means - a camera, a wig, makeup, location, an outfit - but always freighted with self-reflexive irony, Sherman chosen heroines pursue this with overt anarchy energy presenting ambiguous but memorable characters that suggest complex social and cultural realities lived out beyond the frame. Having developed an aesthetic and artistic language of their own, they interrogate public images, from kitsch (film stills and centerfolds) to art history (Old Masters and Surrealism) to green-screen technology and the latest advances in digital photography.

But of course that’s not the only advance she has made. Sherman’s Untitled #96 from 1981 - more commonly referred to as 'Orange Sweater' - passed all records for photography, and was sold for $3.89 million in Spring this year. According to Art Info, the buyer was New York dealer Philippe Segalot, and the underbidder was Per Skarstedt, also a New York dealer. Christie's confirmed that this was a record for a photograph at auction, previously held by Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon, which fetched $3.35 million in 2006. Sherman recently had another high profile sale, with her work Untitled #153, from 1985 reaching $2.7 million in late 2010. Needless to say, the price of a photograph should never be the measure of value but nobody can deny her stature and influence on the medium, the esteem with which she is held by critics and curators, and the prestigious collections that contain her work.

Below is another video, this time comprising a panel discussion on the occasion of her retrospective survey at MoMA that finished back in June. It features artists, working in a variety of mediums, as they consider Cindy Sherman's influence on contemporary art practice. Panelists include George Condo, Kalup Linzy, Elizabeth Peyton, and Collier Schorr. It is moderated by exhibition organiser Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.




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Doug DuBois @Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh County Cork

October 24, 2012, 3:10 am
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All images © Doug DuBois

Tomorrow evening the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh County Cork, Ireland, will open the exhibition of works by the brilliant Doug DuBois - My Last Day at Seventeen.

In a text describing the project, DuBois ventures the following:

"Russell Heights is a housing estate of uncertain vintage that sits on Spy Hill overlooking the Cork Harbour on the Great Island in East Cork. The neighbourhood is insular: everyone seems to be someone’s family member, former girlfriend or spouse. Little can happen there that isn’t seen, discussed, often exaggerated and fiercely defended against any disapprobation from the outside.

My introduction to Russell Heights came at the invitation of Kevin and Eirn, two teenagers who took part in a photography workshop I gave at the community centre. The title of the project, My Last Day at Seventeen was uttered by Eirn when I photographed her on the eve of her eighteenth birthday. Certain photographs are made spontaneously, but most are fashioned collaboratively utilising a chosen wardrobe, setting and circumstance. These scenes are carefully crafted and stylised to evoke the narrative rhetoric of literature and film without abrogating entirely the photographic claim to depict lived experience. The portraits, similarly directed, are often tightly framed to concentrate on the anxious countenance and fragile bravado of a future not fully imagined or realised."

The photographs were made over a four year period during a series of artist residencies at the Sirius Arts Centre under the invitation of Artistic director extraordinaire Peggy Sue Amison. Collectively, the images present a somewhat fictional, somewhat documentary account of adolescence in Ireland and a coming of age story about a small group of teenagers from Russell Heights. 

The exhibition runs from Thursday 25 October to Sunday 23 December.
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The future of photography

October 24, 2012, 9:29 am
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It's been at least six months since an institution posed the modest question, what is the future of photography? so here is the latest manifestation of that discourse. During Unseen 2012, the Friday afternoon panel discussion 'Future of Photography' examined 'what's next' in the contemporary photography landscape. Panel discussions members included Marc Feustel (Eyecurious blog), Simon Baker (Curator of Photography and International Art, Tate), James Reid (Director of Photography at Wallpaper), Christine Ollier (Artistic Director of Galerie les Filles du Calvaire), Francois Hébel (Director of Les Rencontres d'Arles Festival). The discussion was moderated by Marcel Feil, Artistic Director of FOAM.

In all seriousness, it's a highly engaging and enjoyable video, particularly the section that flags up work from the new generation of photographic artists who are making waves (think Dru Donovan, Asger Carlsen, Letha Wilson, Akiko Takizawa to name but a few) and serves to highlight the many and various directions in which the medium is headed. If you want to read a summary of the issues that came to the fore before watching click here.
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MacdonaldStrand

November 8, 2012, 2:05 am
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All images © MacdonaldStrand

Brad Feuerhelm considers the participatory aspects and iconic violence in Most Popular of All Time, anew book byMacdonaldStrand.

Having picked up the latest self-published title from husband and wife team MacdonaldStrand (Clare Strand and Gordon Macdonald), I have come away with a greater sense of what photographic practice can bring about when disseminated through the line of the pencil, darkly. As photography becomes more and more synonymous with that of conceptual art practice, the mantra of the iconic within the medium begins to permeate a greater need for understanding for our own associations with images that take on a totemic value. A photograph with 'iconic status' is an instantly recognised yet sometimes little understood visual cadence that explodes across the world in daily consummation of news and media alike. How do we recognise, process, receive, and finally retransmit its symbolic value over time? How do we train our minds to adhere to a group formula for understanding these visual markers of progress and detriment? And finally, how to we reinterpret this material and send it back out into the world to promote its niche capacity for several understandings within the visual language of the time - past, present, and future?

The works contained within the superb Most Popular of All Time invoke such questions. The project results from an online survey conducted by the artist/curator duo, whereby users were asked to name their most iconic images. These photographs have become so ubiquitous that it is hard to see their content and they have become detached from their context.From the information gathered, MacdonaldStrand took the resulting images and reduced them to line drawings with 'connect-the-dot' numbered points. Left half-finished, the image is then to be completed by the further drawing on the part of the viewer.

All colour is drained, all traces of photographic grey scale removed. It is a simple yet effective conceit to reduce photography to that of line, but also embedded within the work is the ability to promote the ‘punctum’ of its iconic status with a participatory function - it brings the viewer into a complicit rendering of line and photographic management of iconic status.

Within the works selected for re-purposing are Eddie Adams famous ‘execution’ image and Richard Drew’s Falling Man. These pictures in and of themselves capture very difficult conditions of humanity and the role of observer within. The majority of the images displayed are of a horrific base and coalesce our need to exult difficult imagery into that of lore and legend, that of description and representation which is often fraught with a tension not found in other mediums. In short, they are epic tales of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and absence.

Yet representation is not the exclusive aim within the book nor the works themselves, but rather they evoke a need to understand how we as a collective society enable these icons caught on film (or file) and how we redistribute their meaning and function as the photograph itself. The structures of violence, the poignantly horrific, and the sometimes misunderstood signifiers of our collective photographic imagination delineated by the direct act of hand on paper.

The works are also available for an incredibly economic rate, which is also clever given the material. I have purchased all images within the show for less than £100. But in doing so I understand what exactly it is I am enabling. MacdonaldStrand have chosen a crafty and intelligent way to examine and exclude some of the icons of photography through something as commonplace as a pencil. Time and the flow of chaos have been reduced to the materially manageable. 
Brad Feuerhelm
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Archive of Modern Conflict @ Paris Photo 2012

November 28, 2012, 6:02 am
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A Cyanotype plant study. The world record parachute jump from 1932. Rooftops in St. Petersberg, Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. A West African king. Cumulus humiliis. An abstract composition. A Kominka dancer. An observatory. Another plant study. These are just a handful of the prints that were showcased in ‘Collected Shadows’ – a stunning exhibition from the Archive of Modern Conflict at this year’s Paris Photo.


Deftly assembled by curator Timothy Prus, the show was a gloriously eclectic jamboree that displayed all manner of photography's styles, periods and ends. Spanning works from 1850 to the present day by both anonymous and name photographers including Gustave Le Gray, Robert Frank, Bertha Jaques, Josef Sudek and Willi Ruge, and arranged in sections according to themes of earth, fire, air, water and ether, 'Collected Shadows' was richly satisfying and undoubtedly the most talked about booth at the fair.

Below is a video interview (produced by The Art Newspaper), the first half of which features Prus discussing how the archive has grown and the ideas behind the installation. It's a revealing, albeit brief, insight into the quirky mind of the collector known for his penchant for photographic oddities of the past. He is clearly as fascinated by the magic of photography as he is by the mysteries of life. After all, the collecting style is freighted with an acute awareness of the tendency for people to crow over the misery of others and the role images play within that.


The jewel in the crown of the exhibition was the new Bruce Gilden portraits, odd-looking sitters shot mostly on Brick Lane in London, that were hung on the outer wall of the booth. Each photograph was ingeniously paired alongside a historical work such as a wax-paper negative from 1858 showing the garden of a private house in Tehran, for example. Both images on their own were extraordinary, but their combination proved an intoxicating mix.

For those wishing to discover more, the Archive of Modern Conflict has an online shop for its books where you can browse titles from the likes of Stephen Gill and Larry Towell as well as their own fabulous journals. The latest, issue 4, comprises photographs from 'Collected Shadows'. Check out the slideshow of sample images here.
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Stefan Bladh

December 3, 2012, 7:14 am
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London Art Fair 2 for 1 ticket offer

December 5, 2012, 8:44 am
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London Art Fair is one of the UK’s premier destinations for modern British and contemporary art, bringing together 129 leading galleries from the UK and overseas.

Alongside the main fair, two curated sections focus on younger galleries, new work and contemporary photography; Art Projects and Photo50. Photo50 is an exhibition of contemporary photography featuring fifty works, curated this year by Nick Hackworth, Director of the excellent Paradise Row gallery. Entitled, A Cyclical Poem, it will bring together the work of a number of British photojournalists and documentary photographers from the 1970s to the present day including Brian Griffin, Paul Hill, Sirrka-Lisa Kontinen, Dorothy Bohm, Marketa Luscakova and Chris Steele-Perkins. The exhibition is an elliptical meditation on the idea of historical change, instances separated by eras, of congruence and difference; it considers what has changed and what has stayed the same.

The fair keeps its doors open late on Thursday 17 January, providing you with the opportunity to look at the work by over 1,000 artists whilst enjoying complimentary drinks, talks and performances.

1000 Words readers can purchase 2 for 1 advanced tickets for this evening; just enter code LAF467 when booking to activate your discount. Offer valid until midnight 31 December 2012. Book here!
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1000 WORDS WORKSHOPS WITH JH ENGSTROM AND TODD HIDO IN ATHENS, GREECE, APRIL 2013

December 17, 2012, 2:17 am
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After ambitious workshops in Fez, Morocco, 1000 Words is very pleased to announce a new series taking place in Greece next year, starting with two in Athens conducted by internationally renowned photographers, Todd Hido (15-19 April 2013) and JH Engström (22-26 April 2013). The theme for these workshops is concerned with ‘Uncertainty’ - of the mind, emotions, the creative process and social issues.

Athens is one of the oldest cities and the ominous presence of the Acropolis serves as a constant reminder that modern Western thinking in the arts, philosophy and politics originated here. Today, Athens is a wonderfully exciting and vibrant metropolis, bursting with culture, nightlife and the optimistic energy of every day Mediterranean verve. An extremely visual city, it is layered with complex meaning and is the perfect setting for creative exploration.

Contemporary Greece is also of course enduring economic and social upheaval on a massive scale. The regularity of demonstrations in Syntagma Square is testimony to its citizens’ discontent in the face of an unstable present and an uncertain future and yet the vibrancy of the cultural and social scene is ripe with adventure and new possibilities.

TODD HIDO:

Todd Hido is an American photographer based in San Francisco. Hido’s photographs are often described as “revealing isolation and anonymity in contemporary suburbia.” Whether shooting houses at night, landscapes, interiors, nudes or portraits, his work exudes a poetic and often eerie aura that is singularly his own.

Hido’s monographs have been published to critical acclaim and include House Hunting, Outskirts and Between the Two. His work has been exhibited widely and is found in collections at the Guggenheim Museum, George Eastman House and San Francisco MoMA amongst numerous others.





JH ENGSTROM:

JH Engström is a leading Swedish photographer who lives between Värmland and Paris. He is best known for his influential photobooks, most notably the highly collectable monograph Trying to Dance, published in 2003, as well as From Back Home, a collaboration with Anders Petersen for which he won the Author Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles 2009. Engström is represented by Galerie VU in Paris and Gun Gallery in Stockholm. He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2005.

His photography is marked by a distinctly subjective approach to documenting his surroundings. Born out of emotional encounters, at the heart of his work lies both an intimate connection with his subjects and expression of his own self. Critic Martin Jaeggi has spoken speaking of Engström’s pictures as having "the impression of looking at memories".




ABOUT THE WORKSHOPS:

1000 Words Workshops will take place in the studio of the New School Athens situated downtown in the district of Metaxourgeio, Athens. The workshops will be an intense and productive experience lasting five days and will consist of 14 participants. Two of the participants will be young Greek photographers who will be awarded a bursary via the New School Athens.

© Yorgis Yerolymbos

PRACTICAL INFORMATION:

The cost of each workshop is £800 for five days. Once participants have been selected they will be expected to pay a non-refundable deposit of £400 within one week. Participants can then pay the remaining amount as per the deadlines listed below. Participants are encouraged to arrive the day before the workshop begins for a welcome dinner. The price includes:

-tuition from Todd Hido/JH Engström (including defining each participant’s project; shooting; editing sessions; creating a coherent body of work; creation of a slide show; projection of the images of the participants.)
-a welcome dinner
-24 hour help from the 1000 Words team and an assistant/translator with local knowledge.

Participants will be expected to make their own travel arrangements and find accommodation, which in Athens can be very cheap for the week. We can advise on finding the accommodation that best suits you. We can also help you find accommodation at a discount. For photographers using colour film we will provide the means for processing and a scanner. Photographers shooting digital will be expected to bring all necessary equipment. Please note that for the purposes and practicalities of a workshop, digital really is advisable. All participants should also bring a laptop if they have one. Every effort will be made to accommodate individual technical needs.

HOW TO SUBMIT:

We require that you send 10 images as low res jpegs and/or a link to your website, as well as a short biography and statement about why you think it will be relevant for you to work with Todd Hido or JH Engström (approx. 200 words total). Submissions are to be sent to workshops@1000wordsmag.com with the following subject header: SUBMISSION FOR 1000 WORDS WORKSHOP WITH TODD HIDO/JH ENGSTROM.

18 February 2013: Deadline for applications
20 February 2013: Successful candidates contacted
27 February 2013: Deposit due (£400)
18 March 2013: Balance due (£400)
14 April 2013: Arrive in Athens for welcome dinner (Todd Hido)
21 April 2013: Arrive in Athens for welcome dinner (JH Engström)
15 or 22 April 2013: Workshop begins
19 or 26 April 2013: Workshop ends

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:



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2012: The year that was.

December 31, 2012, 8:59 am
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It's 31 December and an apt time to mentally wander back though 2012. Reflecting on our programme and its impact, it seems we've finished the year as we begun - working intensively and passionately and with no shortage of inspiring projects on the horizon. To everyone who has contributed to and supported this little adventure in contemporary photography, our sincerest thanks.

What follows (in no specific order) is our list of the best of the past 12 months here at 1000 Words:

-the appointment of an Associate Editor, Brad Feuerhelm, and Editor at Large, Louise Clements, whose roving eyes and busy travel itineries have allowed us to see and report on even more fine photography

-two issues of 1000 Words Photography Magazine, based around themes of Uncertainty and Murmur, released in March and September respectively

-staging an 'in conversation' at Daniel Blau Gallery, London, between Tate's Curator of Photography, Simon Baker, and Chris Shaw to a sell out audience

-1000 Words Deputy Editor, Michael Grieve, conducting portfolio reviews across four days in March at Fotofest in Houston, Texas, USA, and Brad Feuerhelm attending Vienna International Portfolio Review, Austria, as a reviewer during late November

-launching the inaugural 1000 Words Award; a professional development opportunity that allows four photographic artists to realise a new body of work whilst receiving a £1,000 cash prize, 18 months mentorship, three workshops with Jeffrey Silverthorne, Antoine d'Agata and Patrick Zachmann in London, Marseille and Seville respectively, a travelling exhibition through the UK, France, Spain and Italy, a catalogue and DVD plus a feature in 1000 Words Photography Magazine

-one 1000 Words Workshop with Roger Ballen that took place in the wonderfully evocative old town of Fez, Morocco

-attracting positive press coverage in The Telegraph, The Guardian and Source Magazine

-securing funding from EACEA - The Education, Audiovisual and Culture Exchange Agency

-Tim Clark, Editor in Chief at 1000 Words Photography Magazine serving on a panel of judges for the Google Photography Prize in association with the Saatchi Gallery, London.

So roll on 2013! Here's to yet more questioning, listening, collaborating, adding value, aiming higher, innovating and doing more with less.
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Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013

January 7, 2013, 6:10 am
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Brad Feuerhelm takes a close look at the recently announced shortlist for this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and discovers a provocative effort to conceive an ontology of photographic practice.



It’s the time of year when many voices whine in unison over the shortlisted artists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. As an award worth £30,000 and a whole new set of paradigms for representations, further projects, and gallery representation (if not already achieved) up for grabs it is understood as to its contentious nature.

Yet the four contenders on 2013’s shortlist should offer naysayers much less to moan about compared to previous years if one takes into consideration the fact that the award has shifted its parameters to really encompass the diversity of photographic output rather than the mundane and somewhat outdated modes of photography.

As a side note, I had portfolio reviews in Vienna this November and to my own ironic chagrin, found that while encountering reviewees, my first question was “photographer or artist?” as if it mattered. To the affirmative, most stumbled, but declared artist rather than photographer. Indeed the backsliding of photographers levelling themselves into the porous and vacuous suck and pull of the art chasm caused a chuckle every time. Let’s face it, we are ashamed to be photographers anymore, so is it any surprise we are moving forward to break rules, conceptualise, and regurgitate what came before us, all in haste of cogitating over its meaning?


Starting then with what I perceive to be the problematic nomination, Mishka Henner’s No Man’s Land would be a convincingly clever interpretation of lucid geography, technocracy (albeit with lightweight theoretical drive) if I had not seen very similar modes of dissemination before. Not only is it derivative but the project completes a vicious circle of unpleasant attitudes of human currency and a new attempt to denigrate women to that of commerce even further.

No Man’s Land, is an alleged pseudo-documentary project wherein the author has appropriated Google Earth images showing what can only be prostitutes selling their wares. The coordinates of the place of ‘shooting’ are often labelled on the page, so if you want go fornicate with women for money and add to their misery, Henner has given you the guide as to how to do so. Further, even if this was a fake project using Photoshop, for example, would the punch line be any different? No, it would be worse. And let’s not for a minute digress that the idea of prostitution in the work is the viewer’s implementation. Girls alongside the road in Spain or Italy dressed a certain way with a mattress next to them undoubtedly attest to this. It is not as interpretive as Henner may have us believe. Why have we chosen to champion a project and a career heavily nuanced by borrowed material and by material of aggregate and impolite societal discord?

What I propose in my malaise over the first entry discussed here is that perhaps we need to examine exactly what it is we are rewarding, over that of what photography is at present. There seems to be a wide chasm of indifference or intolerance when making accusations or distilling what can and can’t be photography. What we do not need to do is nominate something that rewards us with a surface glance, without the actual removal of photographic skin and tissue. Surely we should be focusing on meaning and less on outwardly dogmatic pursuits over what is and what is not photography? 


The next body of work, I would rather champion, is Cristina De Middel’s Afronauts book nomination. Just as we cannot complain that someone like Killip is too ‘old guard’ to receive the award, we cannot take away from De Middel’s superb self-published entry and first major body of work. It has incredible angles and depth throughout. From the biographic (Abuela Made The Costumes), to the outlandish movements of counter-fiction in post-colonial Africa, the book and work merits inclusion within this list. It is a refreshing and sincere project, and a novel one at that, not borrowed from somebody else’s idea bank. 



Elsewhere, artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are my picks for their outstanding contributions to photographic literature with War Primer II. It is an intelligent meditation on media, war, conflict, modernist behaviour, and the re-examination of text in photography or vice versa. Though out of print and ridiculously expensive (i.e. elite to own one now), I nevertheless find the message undisturbed by their internal highbrow leanings. All bases are covered as per usual. Broomberg and Chanarin have really taken it up a notch with this dystopian commentary on the frailness of human emotion and the cyclical volumes of butchery and brutality that are often shelved when contemplated within the condition of being human. For my money, I feel this is the strongest and most deserving body of work. It is my hopes that between these two great artists and Cristina De Middel, that we will awake, re-evaluate and make the choice for integrity of photographic output over its incipit divisions. 


Finally, there is Chris Killip - an amazing photographer. To this sentiment, there is no doubt. We do not have to water him down with pretentious preening or art world credibility. He is a photographer and his works are exemplary. He is being nominated for his show at Le Bal in Paris entitled What Happened / Great Britain 1970-90, the work of which proposes to show Britain through the lens of the Thatcher years into the early 90’s. The notion of upheaval and difficult social and economic uncertainty make Killip’s work as a native a skillfully mastered set of documents chronicling the ailments of Britain’s post-industrial everything. If I were to challenge myself to stay semantically in line with the ‘photography award’, I would almost have to lean towards Killip or De Middel’s for their more traditional use of normative photography, within that of again also, photographic practice.

There is no profundity here to my own thoughts, simply a discourse that needs to be opened up when we award somebody something that is calculated to be derived that promotes a backsliding in what we nominate. We must also take it upon ourselves to really understand that the discourse of what we call photography now has its legions within ‘photographic practice’ and this understanding once reached will be a service to all. Sharpen the knife before digging into the plate.
Brad Feuerhelm
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Recollections of Gigi Giannuzzi, my publisher

January 14, 2013, 4:02 am
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© Cristina Vatielli

Robin Maddock remembers a dear friend and publisher who is no longer with us, Gigi Giannuzzi.

The feeling with Gigi is that you didn’t so much meet him at a precise moment, as hear his voice across a room, or in the summer air at a festival. He would have probably been shouting at someone with his own kind of overblown Italian mock-exasperation, right in their face. You might have seen him glide by on wheeled-heeled trainers, resplendent in a sarong. You might have known him as the only reveller to dip in the pool at the Forum spaghetti party at Les Rencontres d’Arles, when some punk photographer pulled his wet boxers down in front of the global photo community. But really you should know him principally through his incredible list of books, brought out against all the odds and whims of fashion over the last ten years.

But of course I can remember meeting him, working Metro lab’s front desk in July 2003. Just like his books, you didn’t forget him. I knew Open Wound by Stanley Greene, Zona by Carl de Keyzer, Agent Orange by Philip Jones Griffiths, books that are so strong, clearly born of a special collaborative alchemy. So I knew who he was, when he walked in brimming with champagne, happiness and pride. He had just spent the afternoon with Oscar Niemeyer at the Serpentine Pavilion, the catalogue of which he just published. I tried to show him my pictures on rockabillies, which turned his face sour - those right wing red necks just weren’t his thing. Once you understood that flashy design, beauty and especially marketability were secondary to the importance of the social issues, you had a chance of him listening. Those other characteristics could and would follow in his work when felt it right to give them free reign.

My own evening of full initiation into Trolley’s extended family began with a late night opening at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid during PHotoEspaña. After being very forcibly made to kiss Christian Cajoule in front of Guernica, we promptly got thrown out from the newly opened Frank Cappa’s ‘Mexican Suitcase’ room for prostrating ourselves on the floor in melodramatic fevered adulation. Before long he was behind the bar of the most classic cocktail bar in Madrid, demanding they make up a cocktail called a Gigi. He appeared grinning with a green thing which was held aloft for a cheer and promptly threw himself down a flight of stairs just to make us laugh. What an exit! I missed a very important meeting with a woman from the museum the next morning, but it was worth it.

Gigi took a characteristic punt on my first book Our Kids are Going To Hell as he always ignored the logical economics of putting books out. Whereas other publishers had scratched their heads, gone over it and said things like "I can’t see a European market for this" etc, whereas they were negative and basically lacking any guts or vision, he just said it "looks a lot better, why don’t we do something". In our line of work we only very rarely meet someone who feels similarly about a topic with whom agreement can become a method to address it. Working on ‘Our Kids’ with him was the beginning of my photography life proper.

In August 2009, after being sent away a few times for arriving before noon, we laid out the mini prints to consider on a table at Trolley's former office in Redchurch Street, east London. It seemed we edited and sequenced it in half an hour. It took much longer of course but that is testimony to the intuitive way we worked. It was the first time I had input from someone who could actively make my work better, pictures becoming a book. There were narrative moves that I couldn’t go with knowing the back-stories, but others that he made that were akin to killer chess moves. Those we kept. In the end we hugged, it felt to me as though we had fixed something of which we would proud.

The climate devised by him was often attritional and combative. The artist Paul Fryer who did an early Trolley book with Damien Hirst, recently described the group as a "satanic creche". Gigi often found a form of attack was the only way to deal with the egos of photographers. His idea was that if people couldn’t handle it then they weren’t worth it. He was undoubtedly a difficult, complex man at times. We nearly came to blows in a back street in Venice once, only because he thought I didn’t trust him. "No logo, no logo" he was shouting. There’s footage somewhere of him, after the storm, beating me up with a rose that was my peace offering.

His ‘no bullshit’ stance on things cut to the chase. My second book God Forgotten Facecould have been a mess without him being brutal with me. When I came to London to show the work in early 2010 I thought I was finally done. He told me, "It looks like you’ve just started". I went back quite confused and upset to Plymouth, but after a few days I knew he was right. Hannah Watson, his business partner, had to say to me, "He said it because he thinks you can take it..." That changed the work. He pushed me to do a more original book. Sometimes we can’t see our own pictures for what they are. We get clouded with the knowledge of the event and importantly, our egos. We need editors we can trust, who bring something to the table. He used to say "everyone do their job", he knew what his was.

He was a bit calmer with the gallery artists he worked with. He loved them as people, possibly because he was a form of artist himself. Interestingly, he saw very little grey area between art for the gallery and the photography he worked with. There was no hinterland of photography trying too hard to be art at Trolley. He said to me once, “You’re about as arty as I go", but it was him who always reined me back from being overly self-indulgent.

The first time when we were on press in Italy in 2009, we had discussed paper stock during the morning and found a good match. Over a typically good prosecco-fuelled lunch I noticed him thumbing the stock sample he had brought to the restaurant. I realised this was a publisher still in love with making photo-books after all these years. That’s of course what we all want, what we will continue to need. Gigi was a highly principled man but rarely for the ‘politicised’ he had vision, tons of flair, integrity and great bravery. He used these qualities to work our piles of pictures into books that contained life in an honest way.

So naturally I will miss him enormously as an editor and publisher, but at present many people are feeling the loss of a simply irreplaceable friend. He affected a lot of careers, but it’s the great laughs we’ll miss the most. I think of him at one of Maya Hoffman’s incredible chateau parties in Arles. He had collected all the VIP tickets from the floor and was throwing them over the wall so all of us could get in. He always found a way and it seems like yesterday.
Robin Maddock

The show ‘Trolleyology’, a survey of the ten years of publishing at Trolley opens on 18 January. The private view will be held on the evening of the 17th at the London Newcastle space on 28 Redchurch Street, London. An accompanying book of the same name is due in the Spring. Trolley Publishing and TJ Boulting continue under his business partner Hannah Watson at 59 Riding House Street, London.
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