ROBERT ADAMS – THE PLACE WE LIVE
07.06.2014 - 31.08.2014
With his highly distilled, monolithic vision, Robert Adams (born 1937) is one of the most significant photographers of the changing landscape of the American West. His black and white images of neglected highways, desolate farms and suburban sprawl chart the impact on the environment of unfettered urban development and the thoughtless exploitation of natural resources. Adams first came to public attention in 1975 when he was included in the now famous New Topographics exhibition held at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. The show made the case for a formally radical mode of landscape photography in which the Romantic and Symbolist predilections of the American modernists were displaced by a more impersonal, disinterested vision. Composed in an 8x10 inch view camera, Adams’ prints are almost featureless, a minimalist rendition of the sheer ordinariness of the American landscape. Taken against the background of a growing environmental movement, but rarely overtly political, Adams’ photography has consistently pointed to the aesthetic dissonance generated by a degraded modern environment.
An exhibition of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
http://www.fotomuseum.ch/PREVIEW-REVIEW.preview-review.0.html?&no_cache=1&L=1
◇ Fotostiftung: Annual programme 2014
1914/18 – Pictures from the Border
7 June to 12 October 2014
The years of the border occupation in Switzerland from 1914 to 1918 also left their mark in a particular genre of image and text document: the photo postcard. Sent in their thousands by soldiers to their loved ones at home, these postcards were not simply industrially-produced printed items, they were original photographs, often taken on site by amateurs and enlarged on photographic paper in very small editions: single and group portraits, kitchen or field-hospital scenes, men mixing socially or amusing themselves. The superficial harmlessness of these images makes them seem more like a collective sedative. Yet they also betray how the Great War was actually perceived, what preoccupied people at the everyday level and how they struggled in the face of their powerlessness. In recent years the Fotostiftung Schweiz has compiled more than 1,000 of these touching witnesses of that era, which are now being exhibited for the first time.
http://www.fotostiftung.ch/en/exhibitions/annual-programme-2014/
◇ Fotomuseum Winterthur - COLLECTION ONLINE
http://www.fotomuseum.ch/index.php?id=302&L=1
