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| | Arts Calendar / May 18 / Exhibitions |
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 Chris Shaw is a leading light of modern British photography. He was widely acclaimed after publication of the book "Life as a Night Porter" in 2005: influential critics called him the arbiter of a new genre and London’s Tate Gallery acquired several works for its collection. His "Life as a Night Porter" began in 1993. When one day Chris Shaw found himself with no money and no roof over his head, the prospect of employment as a hotel night porter seemed to offer the ideal solution by providing a place of sanctuary for the night. The work was exhausting. Twelve-hour shifts not always in London's most fashionable hotels proved a real test of endurance. Shaw, an art college graduate, started taking photographs to stop himself falling asleep. "I was saved by photography; it has since become my vocation," confesses Shaw. "Life as a Night Porter" is a diary of sorts covering a period of ten years. And, like a real diary, it bears the imprint of the owner's personality. Blurs, marks, uneven edges and ironic captions give a constant, almost physical feeling of the photographer's presence. Chris Shaw notes that chance events, mistakes and diverse factors ranging from fatigue to lack of time or money played an important role in forming his style. This is how Chris Shaw describes his technique: "Many would probably not consider my raw, uncensored work as "traditional," yet in a digital age as the visual norm becomes ever cleaner and more perfect, I keep redefining the tradition of shooting, then developing and printing the negative with my own hand. I strive for permanence; to archive the physical, to fix a place in time on paper with light, an obsession is with the nature and reality of the imperfect photographic print... What's important here is not technical perfection in the spirit of Ansel Adams, but a physical connection with the print and what it depicts." Apart from the photographs Shaw took in his years working as a night porter, the series also includes shots of hotels where he stayed as a guest - in New York, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Arles, Liverpool, etc. The author is often asked: "So where is this hotel?" Chris Shaw points to his own head in reply: in reality such hotels don't exist, but if you always work or live in hotels, then with time they all seem alike - and look that way, too. The second project presented in the exhibition, "Weeds of Wallasey", features Chris Shaw's birthplace, the town he returned to many years later. Wallasey is situated on the Wirral Peninsula in the north west of England. The author writes of this photographic series: "I observed and documented the battle between nature and a post industrial blight, to express my own feelings about a landscape I grew up in, my roots, my weeds... to document a time and a place... the feelings for lost family members, the association of death and departure with my home town. Recently, Peel Holdings signed a multi-million pound property development deal in conjunction with Chinese partners to redevelop this area ("Wirral Waters"). These photographs belong to the "before," and if the after is all brand new mirrored high-rise glass and chrome, there will always be weeds."
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| Jacques Henri Lartigue: Bibi |
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 "And now it is up to you, modest photographs, to do what you can - very little, I know - to tell everything, explain everything, make everything be imagined... everything, even and above all what cannot be photographed," - from Jacques Henri Lartigue's diary (1931). The great Jacques Henri Lartigue revealed his talent for photography as a child yet only achieved fame in 1963, at the age of 69. This was when his early work, a brilliant photographic record of French life in the Belle Epoque, attracted attention in the United States. Lartigue's legacy is often seen in terms of these stunning snapshots of sporting events, the nascent automobile and aviation industries, and elegant ladies promenading the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. But his oeuvre is actually far richer and requires not only our wondrous gaze, but also sensitive appreciation. As if reflecting everyday existence in a mirror, the mature Lartigue documents his life's course in photo albums, sharing his happiness, his troubles and fears. The present exhibition focuses on Jacques Henri Lartigue's works from the 1920s, the period spent with Madeleine Messager, nicknamed Bibi, the photographer's first wife and mother of his only son, Dany. Lartigue's years with Bibi (1918-1930) form an integral whole in his life and work. The robust and joyful Bibi provided an anchor for his anxious sensibility, while Lartigue magnified his wife's serenity with the use of panoramic formats. Bibi was also the subject of his finest autochromes. An elegant and social couple, Jacques and Bibi lived through the heady 1920s, the soirees and the trips to Deauville, the Basque coast and Cote d'Azur. Lartigue sought to make a career as a painter and become financially independent, but this proved fraught with difficulty. Unsure of himself despite his good looks, Lartigue gave way to the temptations of his time. When Bibi left him in 1930 he was dumbfounded and deeply hurt.
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| New Orleans in Photography |
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 The U.S. Embassy in Moscow is the sponsor an exhibition called New Orleans in Photographs, which opens May 16 at the ultra-sleek Multi-Media Museum - Moscow House of Photography. Curated by New Orleans photographer Frank Relle, the show combines 100 large framed images by recognized photographers with another 1,000, smaller images culled from the photo-sharing social media app Instagram. Through New Orleans in Photographs, Russians get a chance to peek into the lives of everyday New Orleanians and people from southeast Louisiana, and to glimpse a more updated and complex view of a region known primarily by stereotypical images: Bourbon Street, Mardi Gras, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "Although we recognize our relationship with the government of Russia is not business as usual at this time, people-to-people engagement programs help build mutual understanding among the peoples of our countries," says Stacy Mactaggert, deputy press attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The idea for the exhibition emerged a couple of years ago during a discussion Tony Micocci had with a friend from the cultural office at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow about sharing American culture with Russia. Micocci, an independent performing-arts consultant who has been working with artists and facilitating cultural exchange with Russia since the 1970s, recently moved from New York City to New Orleans to join the faculty of the University of New Orleans Arts Administration Program. Like many newcomers, he was struck "by the vibrancy and uniqueness of the culture of New Orleans and Louisiana, and its visual power." After meeting Relle through a mutual friend at the city's Arts Council, Micocci was confident Relle could mount a world-class exhibition showing the city's "re-emergent vivacity." New Orleans in Photographs is daring not only in scale (when is the last time you went to a photography exhibition with 1,100 images?) but also in its use of Instagram images. The free photo-sharing app is seen by many serious lovers of photography as a repository for the most banal detritus of visual culture: narcissistic selfies, cute animal photos and unappetizing-looking meals. But for Relle, whose haunting "Nightscapes" of New Orleans architecture put him on the radar (and in museums) as a photographer to watch, Instagram was a phenomenon that could not be ignored. When he started his own Instagram account in July 2012, he was amazed by the sheer number of photographs people shared with one another, as well as the often intimate nature of the images - "like a public family album," he says. "There's a tone among the photographic elite," says Relle, "to look down on Instagram because it's quick, it's easy, it's dirty. So if you participate in that, you're bastardizing photography. Of course, if you look at a bad Instagram feed, you can get bored. But if you look at a good one, there's no denying there's great information there. To those who say Instagram's no good, I want to say, Have you been on?" In curating New Orleans in Photographs, Relle replicated the formula he used for his first New Orleans-themed, mixed professional/social media photography show for the city's Octavia Gallery, Contemporary Antiques, in December 2012. He first chose the established photographers whose work he felt was primary. "Without the large, well-exposed, thoughtfully composed, sharp photos," he says, "the show [New Orleans in Photographs] has no anchor. A lot of the smaller images are camera phone images, and so printing them, even 6 by 6, is challenging. They don’t hold up to being a larger view. The show would be a mess without the large-framed professional works." Next came the daunting part. He and his assistant curator, Catie Sampson, waded through the social media images to find ones that represented a wide swath of Louisiana, organizing the images in such categories as family, food, landscape, music, religion, sport, festivals, Mardi Gras, industry and architecture. The results of their hard work are a cultural and photographic revelation. New Orleans in Photographs reflects as many sides and moods of the region as could be fit into one exhibition space. Images of well-heeled, genteel, uptown ladies-who-lunch mingle with Cajun hunters proudly displaying their squirrel, elk and snapping turtle bounty. Sleepy children are juxtaposed with sad-eyed bartenders. And masked and painted figures abound in images depicting the city's seemingly nonstop parades, balls, festivals and jazz funeral celebrations. New Orleans in Photographs, in its expansiveness, inclusiveness and democratic vision, is what Robert Frank's The Americans would have looked like if he had focused on New Orleans and had an Instagram account.
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