Two-in-One Shampoo Sculptures

By in Sculpture

Two-in-One Shampoo Sculptures
Chalotte 2in1 – To promote the launch of Procter & Gamble’s new Head & Shoulders 2in1, CJ WORX Bangkok teamed up with renowned Thai artist Mackcha to…

Tender Portraits of Brooklyn’s Latin American Football Clubs

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Tender Portraits of Brooklyn’s Latin American Football Clubs

In his own words, Mateo Arciniegas Huertas talks about shooting Latin American amateur soccer leagues in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and fostering a sense of home away from home through sport

June 14, 2024

Men splayed on green turf in their soccer cleats, T-shirts wrapped around their foreheads collecting sweat, a cardboard box full of cold Modelos, footballs resting in a wide net; Mateo Arciniegas Huertas creates art that makes you emotional, conveying the beauty of what sport can do for the human spirit. Through stunning projects shot on 120-millimetre film, like Madison, Domingo Alas 4 and Public Displays of Love: 01 Affirmations, Arciniegas Huertas captures the community fostered by Latin American amateur soccer leagues in Bushwick, Brooklyn. An amalgamation of the collections will be featured in New York with Adidas to celebrate the forthcoming Copa America Championship, which begins on June 20.

16Mateo Arciniegas Huertas

In 2010, at 16 years old, Arciniegas Huertas and his mother sought asylum, immigrating to the United States from Bogotá, Colombia. As a teenager, he often felt heartbroken, missing Bogotá and feeling lost while adjusting to life in a foreign country. Over time, photography became both his trade and an artistic medium through which he could document his attempt to find home in the US.

Below, in his own words, Mateo Arciniegas Huertas talks about Madison and Domingo Alas 4, named after the parks at which his league plays each week. He also discusses a continuation of his photographic series, Public Displays of Love: 01 Affirmations, inspired by South American Barra Bravas football culture.

“My friend Memo invited me to play in a Latin American league at Reinaldo Salgado Playground. It’s organised by an Ecuadorian person who everyone knows as ‘El Profe’. I began photographing us before, during, and after the games, not knowing what I wanted but knowing that I needed to photograph what I was part of. Now, I’ve been photographing them since 2021, but they’re also my friends who I see more than most. We play football, play cards, we drink, we get food, then we go to a bar on Myrtle Avenue.

“It’s transitioned from a project into my life. It’s autobiographical. It’s part of me because I’m equally as obsessed with football as they are, or we love the same music, like vallenato, cumbia, or merengue. It’s sharing things that I don’t share with many people outside of that environment, a sense of home. They’re not performing for me. I have this big camera in their face, and they don’t care. It’s a level of comfort that only comes with time.

“For one day only, we’re there to enjoy ourselves and each other’s company, to dream, to eat, to share. Nothing else matters. For six hours, all of our worries are gone and we are there to exercise. It’s an act of freedom. While playing football, you have to be present. Most of my friends work in construction. It’s such a physical job. By the time you are 40 or 50, your body is destroyed. This is the one day they’re not doing hard labour. They’re thinking with their bodies, and we’re communicating in a language that’s nonverbal.

“I started hand-painting banners called trapos with acrylic or spray paint, evoking South American Barras Bravas. All the hardcore fans have banners representing love for their team or city. I’m merging football culture with romantic love, another obsession of mine. Bayanato is Colombian folklore music played with an accordion, and all the words are about heartbreak or love. After a very big breakup filled with tragic heartbreak, I was trying to understand it through the lyrics. When creating these monumental banners, I thought that, seeing these larger-than-life letters, it would register that it’s over, or that I have to change, like an affirmation.

“As immigrants, it takes a long time to settle. Our migration was nonvoluntary. We decided to leave, but we didn’t want to. If you had a choice, who wants to come to a strange place, where you don’t speak the language, and you have to work 50 hours a week? There’s a level of understanding in our impermanence that makes our community so tied to each other. We’re finding a permanence within impermanence. You might feel at home and at ease, but you are always thinking of what you left behind, your family, your culture. When I go to Bogotá now, I realise that I forget the feeling of the altitude, I forget about the smell, the way the sun hits.

“I want people to understand that this group exists. It’s unique to me, but there are hundreds of groups like this in New York City that show up, play football, bring a speaker and some Modelos. This is cross-cultural, too, and can be done with many different sports. To engage your community, you don’t need much. You don’t need this big apparatus to dictate how you interact with one another. You don’t need money or no one telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. You can just exist as a self-sustaining ecosystem. You just have to commune.”

Works from Mateo Arciniegas Huertas’ MADISON, Domingo Alas 4 and Public Displays of Love: 01 Affirmations are currently on display across Adidas activations in New York.

‘Artists used to be forgotten, their work was thrown away’: how a Berlin gallery changed photography

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‘Artists used to be forgotten, their work was thrown away’: how a Berlin gallery changed photography

When Annette Kicken’s late husband, Rudolf, founded a photo gallery in Aachen, Germany, in 1974, appreciation of photography as an art form was rare. Major German photographic museums, such as Museum Ludwig in Cologne or C/O Berlin, were years away from opening. In the UK, the National Portrait Gallery had only just appointed its first curator of photography. In the US, the Metropolitan Museum of Art would not establish a department of photographs until 1992. The number of galleries and collectors devoted to the medium was so small that they referred to themselves as an international “photo family”.

“It was a very, very small scene,” says Kicken, who joined the gallery in 1999. “There were very few institutional exhibitions. There was no market. Artists were forgotten, and their work was often just thrown away.”

Kicken Gallery, which moved from Aachen to Cologne in 1979, and later to Berlin in 1999, set out to promote and preserve photography, from the invention of the medium through to contemporary practice. Quick to participate in international fairs such as Art Basel and proactive in its cooperation with museums, the gallery helped to re-establish pioneers of the genre and build recognition for the photography of surrealism, Czech modernism and the Bauhaus, as well as American new colour photography and artistic documentary movements in both East and West Germany.

The 50 Years | 50 Photographs at Kicken Berlin reflects on the legacy of the gallery, as well as the gradual acceptance of photography as a means of artistic expression. The exhibition is curated by Wilhelm Schürmann, himself a photographer, collector and co-founder of the gallery with Rudolf Kicken.

You feel Schürmann’s photographic eye throughout the exhibition. Motifs, themes and forms repeat and recall each other across the gallery. There are flashes of fireworks against a black sky in Arno Fischer’s East Berlin, New Year’s Eve, 1989/90, and then the syncopation of windows against a white facade in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Madrid, Spain (1933). There’s the curved umbrella handle of Lisette Model’s reader in Bois de Boulogne (1938) and then, two frames later, the curved walking stick of Helmut Newton’s Jenny Kapitän (1977).

Industrial development and women’s independence are recurring subjects. So, too, are the lines, blocks and barricades of the city and the fragile bodies that move, or yearn to move, around them. Above all, there is the cross-field of gazes – from a suspicious glower in Schürmann’s own Dublin (1973) to a sideways glance in William Klein’s New York (1954) or the downcast eyes in Ed van der Elsken’s Self-Portrait With Ata Kandó (1952). In an exhibition about how photography is shown, and how it has been seen, here are subjects confronting with a stare, shielding eyes from view, and inviting us to look closer.

“Our hope is that other galleries take on the photographic position more and more,” Kicken says. “Maybe then the need for specialist galleries like ours recedes, but then our mission will be accomplished.”
50 Years | 50 Photographs is at Kicken Gallery, Berlin, to 20 December.

The camera never lies: six highlights from 50 Years | 50 Photographs

Sibylle Bergemann – Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 1967 (main picture)
Today, Kicken is housed in a surviving Wilhelminian building on the Kaiserdamm boulevard in West Berlin. In that unusually intact historic Berlin venue, 50 Years | 50 Photographs also traces the destruction, reconstruction and division of the city, including this striking shot by Sibylle Bergemann, born in Berlin in 1941 and a leading documenter of everyday life in East Germany.

Helga Paris – Selbstportraits, 1981-1989
50 Years | 50 Photographs opens with three works from Helga Paris’s 80s self-portraiture series. A fitting start for an exhibition reflecting on the passage of time, Paris’s shifting outfits, hairstyles and expressions evoke not only the vicissitudes of personal biography, but also the final years of the German Democratic Republic – the subject of much of her work.

Jaromír Funke – Z Cyklu Cas Trvá, from Time Lasts, 1937
Kicken Gallery introduced several protagonists of Czech avant garde photography to the international art market, including František Drtikol, Jaroslav Rössler and Jaromír Funke. Sourcing impulses from cubism, new objectivity, abstraction and surrealism, Funke was pioneering in his experimentation with mirroring, flattening and reflections. Many of his works are now held in major museum collections.

Lisette Model – Bois de Boulogne, 1938
When Kicken first opened, many early photographers were still alive, providing an opportunity to foster relationships with pioneers of the genre. Austrian-American Lisette Model turned to photography in the mid-1930s and built a captivating portfolio of candid, unedited street shots. From 1951, she taught photography at the New School in New York, where her roster of students included Diane Arbus.

Wilhelm Schürmann – Ireland (Dublin), 1973
As a photographer, collector and co-founder of Kicken, Schürmann offered an “inside and outside” view on the gallery’s history, says Annette Kicken. “It’s very personal, very selective, very special.” Schürmann’s own work is represented in two photographs, including this portrait from Dublin.

Ed van der Elsken – Amsterdam, Nieuwmarkt, 1956
Over its 50-year history, Kicken Gallery has gained the rights to some major estates, including those of Umbo, Erwin Blumenfeld and the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken. This picture by Van der Elksen of twin sisters in Amsterdam is one of several in the exhibition that capture pairs of women, whether co-workers, friends, siblings or a mother and daughter.

Experience Life of Nature Photographer in This Tranquil Simulator

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Experience Life of Nature Photographer in This Tranquil Simulator
image

“The camera simulates settings such as Auto/Manual Focus, Flash, Exposure, Contrast, White Balance, Aperture, Burst Shot and other effects for full creative control over your photography. The game further provides tools that allow for manipulation of the environmental conditions for your photos, such as manual adjustment of light angles, fog, snow, wind, and rain.”

Equine photographer Alfie Bowen reflects on his early years with horses

By in Photography

Equine photographer Alfie Bowen reflects on his early years with horses

This project, which I shot over the past two years, is all about connection: my connection to animals and the art form of photography; the horses’ connection to each other and the land; and our collective connection to the land and our planet.

My connection to animals, which has developed continuously throughout my life as an escape from the challenges of living with Autism Spectrum Disorder, has often focused on exotic species – zebras, lions, giraffes and others – but I have a very genuine love for the UK’s floral and fauna, and for horses.

Precious, the New Forest, Hampshire, UK. (Image credit: Alfie Bowen)

I first spent time in the presence of horses during childhood days out at Fritton Lake in Suffolk, where I would spend 10 minutes on the back of a friendly pony. We would ride along the same route every time I visited, but the thrill of being back in the saddle each summer holiday would leave me beaming from ear to ear.

Those summer holidays and those experiences with animals and the natural world were a welcome – but all too short – escape from the difficult days I faced in mainstream education, where instead of being surrounded by beauty, I was surrounded by darkness.

Sanctuary, the New Forest, Hampshire, UK. (Image credit: Alfie Bowen)

The bullies, who capitalized on my emotional fragility and social difficulties, would bully with a relentless determination. I would be exposed to this torrent of darkness day after day, for month after month, until I couldn’t take it any more and refused to leave the safety of my bedroom for well over seven days.

The school’s response was to activate a part-time timetable – I would spend half of the week in the darkness of school, and one day in the sunshine. The sunshine shone in the form of a placement with horses, where I would spend my day feeding, grooming and smiling with horses and ponies, and then a placement at the amazing Clinks Care Farm. 

The Stallions of Massingham Heath, Norfolk, UK. (Image credit: Alfie Bowen)

The other days were spent in the safety of my home. One day, my mum suggested I take her small compact camera into the garden and attempt to photograph the bees and butterflies – and I became bitten by the photography bug.

I guess I have come full circle with this project, photographing the animals that offered me the escape I so desperately needed during those dark days in 2012. It has been so special to explore their lives, in the fields of Suffolk, the mountains of North Wales and amongst the trees of the New Forest over the past 24 months. In many ways, it has been as much a journey of self-healing and self-exploration as it has been about photographing the horses.

At One With Earth, Buxton Heath, Norfolk, UK. (Image credit: Alfie Bowen)

There is nothing more special than witnessing these ponies thriving in the wild, therefore it is worth noting that I kept a safe and respectful distance at all times. I photographed them exclusively on Nikon’s Z 9, combined with Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 S, Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 VR S and Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S lenses.

Wild Horses

(Image credit: Alfie Bowen)

Alfie Bowen’s second book, Wild Horses, is published by ACC Art Books. Orders of the exclusive edition also come with a signed print. 

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