In the video interview above, American photographer Taryn Simon talks about her powerful four-year project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–11), currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art.

Posts by Roxana Marcoci
Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII
Sanja Iveković: Personal Cuts
In 1982 Sanja Iveković presented Personal Cuts on prime-time Yugoslavian national television, on TV Zagreb’s 3, 2, 1 – Action! This video is now on view in MoMA’s retrospective Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence, and I am most grateful to Sanja for giving us the opportunity to present this work on our blog.
Sanja Iveković: Lady Rosa of Luxembourg
Opening on December 18, Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence is the first museum retrospective in the United States of the groundbreaking feminist, activist, video, and performance pioneer Sanja Iveković (b. 1949, Zagreb)
Roe Ethridge in New Photography 2010

Roe Ethridge. Old Fruit. 2010. Chromogenic color print. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. © 2010 Roe Ethridge
One of four artists featured in this year’s New Photography exhibition, Roe Ethridge has contributed photographs to many international magazines, including the New York Time Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Visionaire, I-D, Vice, Artforum, Flash Art, and Art Review.
Amanda Ross-Ho in New Photography 2010
In recent years, with the increasing turn toward the digital, photography has become more complex and varied in its range of possible representational renderings. Photography is at a point of transformation, and in organizing the New Photography 2010 exhibition, I wanted to be responsive to these changes and bring together a group of artists who have expanded the conventional definitions of the medium.
Alex Prager in New Photography 2010
Taking her cues from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Douglas Sirk, as well as from the staged photographs of Cindy Sherman and Guy Bourdin, Alex Prager’s pictures focus on cinematic images and mise-en-scène. Sharing personal anecdotes about her life and work, Prager tells us in the video interview above how she came to take her first photographs and make her debut film Despair (2010), which has its U.S. premiere in the New Photography 2010 exhibition.
Action Pants: Genital Panic

VALIE EXPORT. Action Pants: Genital Panic. 1969. Screenprints. Photographed by Peter Hassmann. The Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Sarah Peter. © 2010 VALIE EXPORT
I met with VALIE EXPORT about three months ago at MoMA when she came to New York to preview her friend Marina Abramović’s exhibition. It was a sunny morning in March, and we sat down outside the staff cafe sipping glasses of grapefruit juice and talking about her signature work, Action Pants: Genital Panic.
New at MoMA: Sanja Iveković’s Double Life
I first made a studio visit with Sanja Iveković about ten years ago, when I was invited to organize a large-scale exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia. She impressed me instantly. I recall thinking, “This is an inspiring artist with whom I will forge a long-lasting relationship.” A feminist, activist, and video pioneer, Iveković came of age in the early 1970s, when artists broke free from mainstream institutional settings, laying the ground for a form of praxis antipodal to official art. Part of the generation known as the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice), she has produced works of cross-cultural resonance that range from conceptual photomontages to video and performance. Last month I visited Iveković again in Zagreb, this time to discuss her first survey exhibition in the U.S., which is scheduled to open at MoMA at the end of 2011.
What’s in a Portrait? Rineke Dijkstra’s Almerisa

Rineke Dijkstra. From left: Almerisa, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. March 24, 2007; Almerisa, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. January 4, 2008; Almerisa, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. June 19, 2008
One of the reasons I like Rineke Dijkstra’s photographic portraits so much is because of how she manages to convey the vulnerable side of her subjects, caught at a decisive moment of transition in their lives, usually from adolescence to incipient adulthood. Dijkstra was trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and since the mid-1990s she has gained international acclaim for her penetrating pictures of teenagers and young adults. Using a 4×5-inch field camera with a standard lens and a tripod, she creates exacting portraits—frontal views, centered in the frame, posed against a minimal background—that offer remarkable observation and emotional force. Her subjects gaze directly at the camera, combining brooding psychological intensity with the formal classicism of seventeenth-century Dutch portraits by painters such as Johannes Vermeer.
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