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| | Arts Calendar / May 11 / 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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| Photobiennale 2014: Erwin Blumenfeld |
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 Erwin Blumenfeld's life and work impressively document the socio-political context of artistic development between the two World Wars, while highlighting the individual consequences of emigration. The exhibition devoted to Erwin Blumenfeld's multi-layered œuvre brings together over 300 works and documents from the late 1910s to the 1960s, and encompasses the various media explored by the artist throughout his career: drawings, photographs, montages and collages. This exhibition traces his visual creativity and encompasses the early drawings, the collages and montages, which mostly stem from the early 1920s, the beginnings of his portrait art in Holland, the first black and white fashion photographs of the Paris period, the masterful colour photography created in New York and the urban photos taken toward the end of his life. The retrospective also showcases his drawings, many of which have never been shown before, as well as his early collages and photomontages, shedding fascinating light on the evolution of his photographic oeuvre and revealing the full extent of his creative genius. The now classic motifs of his experimental black-and-white photographs can be seen alongside his numerous selfportraits and portraits of famous and little-known people, as well as his fashion and advertising work. In the first years of his career, he worked only in black and white, but as soon as it became technically possible he enthusiastically used color. He transferred his experiences with black-and-white photography to color; applying them to the field of fashion, he developed a particularly original repertoire of forms. The female body became Erwin Blumenfeld's principal subject. In his initial portrait work, then the nudes he produced while living in Paris and, later on, his fashion photography, he sought to bring out the unknown, hidden nature of his subjects; the object of his quest was not realism, but the mystery of reality. Blumenfeld's work was showcased most recently in France in a 1981 show at the Centre Pompidou, which focused on his fashion photography, in 1998 at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, as well as more recently in the exhibition "Blumenfeld Studio, Colour, New York, 1941-1960" (Chalon-sur-Saone, Essen, London).
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