WORK BY SIX CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS EXPLORED AT MOMA
New Photography 12 : Richard Billingham, Thomas Demand, Osamu
Kanemura,
Sophie Ristelhueber, Georgina Starr, Wolfgang Tillmans
October 24, 1996–February 4, 1997
On October 24, 1996, The Museum of Modern Art opens the twelfth exhibition in
its annual New Photography series, devoted to important contemporary
photographic work. Richard Billingham (British, b. 1970), Thomas Demand
(German, b. 1964), Osamu Kanemura (Japanese, b. 1964), Sophie Ristelhueber
(French, b. 1949), Georgina Starr (British b. 1968), and Wolfgang Tillmans
(German, b. 1968) are the six artists represented in the exhibition, which is
the first in the series to be comprised entirely of work from outside the
United States. Organized by Thomas W. Collins, Jr., Beaumont and Nancy Newhall
Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography, New Photography 12 remains on
view through February 4, 1997.
The exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from Springs Industries,
Inc., and is part of The Springs of Achievement Series on the Art of
Photography. Under the sponsorship of Springs Industries over the past twelve
years, the series has presented recent work by forty-eight artists from nine
countries.
As an undergraduate art student, Richard Billingham made a series of
candid color photographs of his family and their life in a housing project
outside Birmingham, England. Originally created as studies for paintings, these
large color pictures stand alone as a testament to the dramatic impact
Billingham's father's alcoholism and unemployment have had on his family. The
series has been recently published in book form as Ray's a Laugh
(Scalo).
Thomas Demand culls photographs from history books and periodicals that
illustrate significant and often notorious events. Using the photographs as
guides, Demand meticulously constructs scale models of the settings of these
scenes out of paper and cardboard, then makes large-scale color photographs of
the models. Included are depictions of the Harvard dormitory room in which Bill
Gates founded Microsoft Corp. (Corner, 1996); Leni Riefenstahl's photo
archive (Archive, 1995); and the hotel room in which L. Ron Hubbard
wrote Dianetics (Room, 1996). Cool and spare, the pictures are
nonetheless moody and evocative, haunted by tensions arising from their subtly
unsettling artifice.
Osamu Kanemura earns his living delivering newspapers throughout
Tokyo.Traveling his extensive route each day for the last three years, he has
made numerous black-and-white photographs of crowded neighborhood shopping
streets, signs, seasonal decorations, tangled wires, and commercial traffic.
His dark, graphically dense pictures capture the pace and material essence of a
city that is more a product of unchecked growth than design. Some twenty
gelatin-silver prints from the series will be displayed unframed and tacked
side-by-side to the gallery wall.
Sophie Ristelhueber, a Parisian, traveled to Kuwait at the end of the
Gulf War to make a series of aerial and ground-level, color and black-and-white
photographs recording the physical traces of the conflict. Entitled Fait
("Fact"), the series includes stark photographs of trenches, tank tracks, bomb
craters, and military detritus scattered in the desert sand. Ristelhueber
installs these twenty-two large prints in an expansive grid which at first
appears abstract but then gradually reveals itself as a reconstruction of a
battlefield. "By shifting from the air to the ground, I sought to destroy any
notion of scale . . . the constant shift between the infinitely big and the
infinitely small may disorient the spectator. But it's a good illustration of
our relationship with the world: We have at our disposal modern techniques for
seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet in fact we see nothing,"
writes Ristelhueber.
In 1994 Georgina Starr was invited to create a public artwork for The
Hague in a series called "The Seventh Museum." Arriving with no particular
project in mind, she obsessively collected documents of her loneliness and her
anxiety (the toys she made, the games she played, the restaurants in which she
ate alone every evening, projects begun and abandoned). Eventually, she decided
to organize and install this intimate artistic autobiography in the gallery as
her contribution to the series. Starr has elaborated on the original project by
creating from it an intriguing archive of photographs of the individual
components, grouped into nine thematic sub-collections. One of these, "The
Seven Sorrows Collection," is presented in New Photography 12.
Wolfgang Tillmans first made a name for himself in London, photographing
his friends in the demimonde of underground music and fashion for progressive
British magazines. Mixing commercial work with pictures from his artistic
oeuvre, Tillmans creates installations in the form of large arrays of prints,
which narrate stories or evoke aspects of his milieu. "I have tried to embrace
photography as applied art as well as exhibited art, and have been searching
for applications and places that question the institutionalization of the image
within both the gallery and the magazine," says Tillmans.
For further information please contact Uri Perrin, Department of
Communications, 212/708–9757.
