Open Book – Photobook Exhibition

 

 

Open Book – Photobook Exhibition

‘Open Book’ – exhibition coordinated by Shelley Jacobson

RM Gallery, 307 K’Road (first floor), Newton, Auckland
5 – 21 November
Opening Wednesday 4 November

Physics Room (library), Christchurch 5 December – 30 January
Opening Friday 4 December

Harvey Benge
David Cook
Shelley Jacobson
Andrew Kennedy
Solomon Mortimer
Mark Purdom
Haruhiko Sameshima
Ann Shelton
Fiona Short
Anita Totha
Tim J Veling
Shaun Waugh

‘Open Book’ consists of twelve new photobook works, created specifically for exhibition. Its premise is to provoke artists’ experimentation with the book form and to position the book as a gallery experience. Each artist has been given autonomy to pursue and realise a project of their individual interest, as relevant to their current practice. The collective result of these endeavours is a compact exhibition: each artist’s work is folded in on itself or cut and stacked, the content largely hidden from view. To experience it, you are invited to open a book.

Exhibition coordinator: Shelley Jacobson
Display furniture: Andrew Kennedy

 

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Photobook New Zealand & Momento Pro announce Photobook Of The Year Awards

We are delighted to announce that Photobook New Zealand and Momento Pro are presenting the first New Zealand Photo Book Of  The Year Awards. The Awards have been established to celebrate excellence in self-published and trade published photo books, and to showcase New Zealand photo books to a growing international audience.

There are three categories for the Awards:

Self published photobook
Trade published photobook
People’s choice

Momento Pro are offering cash and credit prizes valued at $10,500. The awards will be presented at the launch of  Photobook New Zealand on 11 March 2016 at Massey University and will be on display during the Photobook NZ fair.

For more information about the awards visit:
http://www.photobookoftheyear.co.nz/

Momento Pro are also the major sponsor of Photobook New Zealand.

Mary Macpherson
photoforum-nz.org/photobooknz

Photobook New Zealand – ‘Boosted’ crowdfunding campaign

Photobook New Zealand has just kicked off their Boosted crowdfunding campaign. Their Photobook Fair will be held from 11-13 March 2016 in Wellington, and will feature displays of photographer’s books and a programme of exciting speakers from New Zealand and Australia. Please help share this news and support this upcoming event.

Photobook New Zealand team. From left: Gabrielle McKone, John Pennington, Mary Macpherson, and David Cook. (Absent: Mark Strange)

Photobook New Zealand is a brand new event to give New Zealand’s wonderful photographers and independent presses the opportuntiy to showcase their books.

It will be held from 11-13 March 2016 in Wellington and feature displays of photographers’ books and a programme of exciting speakers from New Zealand and Australia.

Internationally photographers’ book festivals are major annual art events, with rewards for excellent and innovative work. We want to celebrate New Zealand’s photographic talent with you. We will hold New Zealand’s first festival of photographers’ books to help attract a wide audience for our talented bookmakers and focus international attention on their work. This year, for the first time ever, you will be able to enter your photobook in the New Zealand Photobook of the Year awards sponsored by Momento Pro.

To find out more and to help make Photobook New Zealand happen, make a Boosted donation  [ http://www.boosted.org.nz/projects/photobook-new-zealand ] and share this information.

Photobook New Zealand is organised in association with PhotoForum Inc.
Website: photoforum-nz.org/photobooknz

 

Photobook New Zealand 2016: Venue announcement

Photobook New Zealand is delighted to announce that Massey University’s College of the Creative Arts has become a supporter and will provide the venue and technical support for our event.

Photobook New Zealand is New Zealand’s first photobook fair. The event will run in Wellington from 11 – 13 March, 2016, during the New Zealand Festival Writers’ Week when the city is buzzing with cultural activity.

Massey’s beautiful, well-equipped Te Ara Hihiko complex, in Tasman St, will host the bookfair and the exciting programme of talks and events. The Massey building offers the advantages of an auditorium and flexible spaces for bookfair exhibitors and informal talks and discussions.

Combining the different elements in one spacious building will allow book fair exhibitors to attract the audience attending the talks programme and make an easy flow between both parts of the programme. Tasman St is also close to Wellington’s CBD and the complex also offers plentiful parking.

Photobook New Zealand is currently signing some exciting Australian and New Zealand presenters for our programme. We’ll also shortly be announcing our Boosted funding initiative which will give people the opportunity to help us fly.

Photobook New Zealand is organised under the auspices of PhotoForum NZ. Website:photoforum-nz.org/photobooknz

If you’d like to receive updates about Photobook New Zealand, please email us at photobooknz@gmail.com

Links to New Zealand photography publications

Listed below are details and links to New Zealand photography publications previously listed on the PhotoForum homepage:

Pictures They Want to Make – Recent Auckland Photography by Chris Corson-Scott and Edward Hanfling
Wellington Streets by Julian Ward
Bent by Mary Macpherson
some things you should have told me by Harvey Benge
Our Future Nga Tau ki Muri by Ans Westra
Steamer by Alan Knowles
Aceh Revives + Scars: Life after the Tsunami by Noel Trustrum
the grass is awfully green – Limited edition book by Peter Black
Catch My Eye by Gabrielle McKone
Thinking it through by Tony Watkins, photographs by Haruhiko Sameshima
Old New World by Mary Macpherson

Enjoy Gallery’s online journal: The Dendromaniac

An excerpt from Mary Macpherson’s series ‘Bent’ is featured in the Enjoy Gallery’s online journal ‘The Dendromaniac’. (Dendromania means an obsession with trees and forests).  http://journal.enjoy.org.nz/the-dendromaniac/bent

Mary’s work is featured along with an interesting range of artists and writers who all address the subject of trees. http://journal.enjoy.org.nz/the-dendromaniac

Mary Macpherson, Pine desk with veneer, Wellington.

 

The Dendromaniac

– Edited by Jessica Hubbard, Ann Shelton and Alice Tappenden

On the subject of trees and related musings comes Enjoy’s Third Occasional Journal, a cache of eclectic, intriguing and informed material from both local and international writers and artists.

Trees are the subjects of our wonder and awe. They create the air that we breathe, provided our earliest form of fuel and on many occasions outlive us spectacularly. Their broad meanings, both sinister and virtuous, have been passed down over hundreds of years, during which they have been silent witnesses to history and unwittingly co-opted in the darkest of human spectacles.

Personal and theoretical, historic and contemporary, visual and written, the responses to these (and other) concerns from our journal contributors consider trees in expanded, original, critical and challenging ways, allowing the diversity of their responses to ignite contrasts and comparisons, discussions and further questioning from readers around the world.

Enjoy Public Art Gallery
Level 1 / 147 Cuba Street
Wellington 6011
New Zealand

Gallery opening hours
Wednesday to Friday 11am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm

Haruhiko Sameshima’s ‘Bold Centuries’ celebrated as a NZ Classic book

 

Shortlisted along with books by Allen Curnow, Dennis McEldowney, Margaret Mahy (with Jill McDonald), and Gordon H Brown, Gregory O’Brien give the thumbs up to Haru Sameshima’s Bold Centuries in his list of five New Zealand classic books worthy of more attention.

‘Bold Centuries (2009) by photographer Haruhiko Sameshima, O’Brien wrote on ‘Unbound’, the New Zealand Book Council’s web page, ‘ is a thought-provoking, fascinating, exemplary publication. Fizzing with visual and intellectual energy, the book asks all sorts of questions while offering all sorts of pleasures to the committed viewer/reader. It is a notable highpoint in Sameshima’s audacious, uncompromising project as both a photographer and the publisher of Rim Books.’
http://booknotes-unbound.org.nz/great-kiwi-authors-share-great-kiwi-classics/

Bold Centuries: A Photographic History Album, was published by the photographer himself, with assistance from Creative New Zealand and also PhotoForum.

As Andy Palmer wrote, ‘Bold Centuries is not merely an artist survey book, nor just a collection of loosely related images; it is a curated exhibition placing the artist in context with his forebears and his contemporaries.’

This remarkable book, packed with a huge variety of images relating to ecotourism, the subject of Sameshima’s university study, also included essays by Kyra Macfarlane, Ingrid Horrocks, John Wilson, Tim Corbalis, Aaron Lister, Damian Skinner, Fiona Amundsen and Claudia Bell.

A pdf showing a few pages from the 196 page book can be seen here.

Copies are still available from Rim Books, www.rimbooks.com at $60 plus post and packaging in NZ.

 

Shelley Jacobson: Surface Expressions

26 February – 14 March 2015

Opening and book launch: 6–8pm, 26 February

Artist Shelley Jacobson will be launching a new series of photographs and an accompanying book, both entitled Surface Expressions, at K’Road project space The Keep on Thursday 26 February.

Surface Expressions is a study of the Wairakei geothermal area in the central North Island. It draws attention to the region’s unique natural features and to the human forces that have formed its current state.

Victorian-era Wairakei was a world renowned and exotic geothermal tourist destination. In the mid-twentieth century it was radically transformed by its conversion to a site for generating electricity. Through this intervention, the underlying geothermal system was irrevocably altered: the spectacular Geyser Valley was extinguished; the steaming craters of Karapiti were revealed. More recently, a man-made geyser has come to accompany the power station in this disrupted landscape.

The photographs in Surface Expressions offer glimpses of the land forms of Wairakei today. The publication takes a wider view, incorporating found text dating from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. These newspaper clippings, advertising materials and Trip Advisor ratings speak in the vernacular of their respective times and frame social ideas and expectations of tourist attractions.

The Keep is the open studio and concept store of fashion designer Lela Jacobs. This setting allows customers to be involved with the design and construction process and offers them the opportunity to take home the finished product. The Keep works closely with the local artistic community and hosts a schedule of art, design and craft exhibitions. www.thekeep.co.nz

Shelley Jacobson is an Auckland-based artist. She graduated with an MFA from Massey University Wellington in 2009 and a Diploma of Publishing from Whitireia New Zealand in 2012. In her work Shelley is interested primarily in cultural geography. She maintains a research-based practice focused on this area. Shelley is involved with PhotoForum New Zealand’s publishing programme, most recently guest editing a double issue of its members’ magazine. www.shelleyjacobson.co.nz

The Keep
504 Karangahape Road, Auckland
09 555 7098
info@thekeep.co.nz
Hours: Thursday, Friday 10am–6pm
& Saturday 11am–4pm or by appointment

EyeContact: Peter Ireland reviews ‘Wellington Streets’ by Julian Ward

 

Espial publications
Photographs by Julian Ward

Wellington Streets
24 pages
47 images
Wellington, 2014

Review by Peter Ireland – 24 December 2014
EyeContact – www.eyecontactsite.com

Richard Hamilton’s justly famous 1956 work Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? still has the power to surprise and delight, despite countless reproductions and its elevation to the status of “pop icon”, to say nothing of the artist’s own 1992 “remake” and 2004 “upgrade” – perhaps his way of preventing the image from being taken too seriously by the art history industry. Replace the word “homes” of the title with the word “art” and it’s a good question to keep asking, especially today when art production is so diverse and voluminous. But it’s a question asked and answered by artists rather than art historians.

The very recent publication of Julian Ward’s fourth book suggests there may be some merit in rejigging Hamilton’s title a little further: take out that “homes” and “art” and shove in “photography” and suddenly Ward’s images take on a new potency. They might be “about” life on the Capital’s streets, but they’re just as much about photography: just what is it that makes the medium so different, so appealing?

Read the full review HERE

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Related article: http://photoforum-nz.org/blog/?p=4867

 

‘Meet Me in the Square’ – David Cook’s new publication & forthcoming exhibition

Photographer David Cook has just released a book of  his Christchurch images from the 1980s. An accompanying exhibition is due to open at Christchurch Art Gallery (offsite at 209 Tuam St),  in late January 2015. See more details below.

 

Take a trip down Retro Avenue with this beautifully designed book of photographs of 1980s Christchurch.

After the earthquake of 22 February 2011, photographer David Cook returned to his former hometown and found the central city irreparably damaged. He was inspired to unearth his archive of 6000 photographs of the city he’d shot as a young man in his twenties, rebuilding through images the city as he remembered it.

Cathedral Square, Centennial Pool, Lancaster Park, schoolboys, punks, nuns – this is a moving, nostalgic journey through the city we’ll never see again.

View a selection of images from the publication and purchasing details here

Meet Me in the Square: Christchurch 1983-1987
Published by Christchurch Art Gallery
Designed by Jonty Valentine
ISBN: 978-1-877375-37-8
Pages: 180
Dimensions: 275mm x 210mm
Format: Hardcover $NZ49.95 and flexicover book $NZ39.95
Publication date: December 2014 – Available now.

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David Cook: Meet Me in the Square forthcoming exhibition

31 Jan 2015 – 24 May 2015
Curated by Ken Hall

Christchurch Art Gallery offsite at 209 Tuam Street
open 10am – 5pm, Monday to Friday
10am – 4pm, Saturday and Sunday

As a young photography student, David Cook’s camera was his licence to explore 1980s Christchurch. Bell-ringers and boot boys, beery crowds, nuns, mums with prams – his photographs continue to resonate. More exhibition info here