PDN - September 2012

OUR PICKS OF THE MONTH
SEPTEMBER 2012

“Phoenix Recumbent, 1968” is one of 200 prints on display at the “Imogen Cunningham” exhibition in Madrid.

EXHIBITION

Imogen Cunningham
in Spain

In America, Imogen Cunningham is considered one of the premier modernist photographers, the subject of numerous monographs and academic studies. Along with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and others, Cunningham formed Group f/64, which advocated for photography to be accepted as art. But it seems her work is less-known in Europe. This month, 100 years after her first solo show, Cunningham is finally getting a full-scale exhibition in Europe. Fundación Mapfre in Madrid has gathered 200 prints from every part of her 70-year career into a show that opens September 18.

The images represent all the genres she explored and experimented in, including nudes, double exposures, street photography and her well-known botanical studies, such as the “Agave Design,” a series of images shot during the 1920s, and her examinations of magnolia blossoms, which she carried out between 1923 and 1925. Her portraits of Martha Graham and other artists are featured as well.

The accompanying catalogue, being published by Kehrer Verlag, includes biographical and critical essays by Allen Cunningham, Celina Lunsford and Marisa Sanchez.

“Imogen Cunningham”
Through January 20, 2013
Fundación Mapfre
General Peron 40
Madrid, Spain
www.fundacionmapfre.com

BOOK

Cancer Alley
Revisited

In 1998, Richard Misrach was commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to photograph the American South as part of its “Picturing the South” series. Misrach, who was then best-known for his series “Desert Cantos,” which explored the relationship between man and land, decided to photograph playgrounds, homes and other places between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that had been damaged by pollutants from neighboring refineries and factories. The resulting work, “Cancer Alley,” is a chilling documentation of the impact of industrial pollution along the Mississippi river. Twelve years later, when Misrach was approached by Aperture about republishing the series in its entirety as a book, he decided to return to the same stretch of land in Louisiana with landscape architect Kate Orff to bring a sense of understanding about the rapid and permanent effects of industrialization.

The first section of Petrochemical America contains images Misrach made in both 1998 and 2010, the latter of which document a few of the small changes being made to help create safer communities within Cancer Alley. In the second part of the book, Orff, whose firm focuses on creating sustainable communities based on biodiversity, uses detailed “speculative drawings,” including flowchart-like “Eco-Portraits,” to illustrate the long- and short-term effects pollution has had on the area’s human, animal and plant populations. In this unique book, Orff and Misrach have created, as noted in the introduction, “[a] collaborative examination of Cancer Alley [that] points to the past and into the future, implicating neighborhoods and corporate states … [a] new thinking about how we can best divert ourselves of our addiction to petrochemicals and to sketch the outlines of a more helpful future.”

Richard Misrach’s “Hazardous Waste Containment Site, Dow Chemical Corporation, Mississippi River, Plaquemine, Louisiana,” 1998.

Petrochemical America
Aperture
Hardcover, 216 pages
$80
www.aperture.org

EVENT

Sight Unseen

This month the inaugural Unseen Photo Fair will be held from September 19 to 23 in Amsterdam.
Co-sponsored by the renowned photography publication Foam Magazine, the fair includes stands featuring
work from 50 galleries across the globe and three unique exhibitions. The Foam Talent Exhibition
showcases Foam Magazine’s picks for its upcoming Talent issue, which highlights young photographers;
Unseen Collection shows approximately 60 prints, all available for purchase at affordable prices; and
Unseen Exhibition displays the collection of a “world-famous international collector,” the name of whom
has not yet been released.

Held at Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek, a former gasworks turned cultural center surrounded by a spacious park, restaurants and cinemas, Unseen Photo Fair also includes screenings of films, panel discussions and networking parties. Happening concurrently on site is Offprint, a book fair featuring photo and art books from international book publishers, designers and artists. Attendees can purchase single-day tickets or a pass for all five days on the fair’s Web site.