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A new centre for photography in Venice

By in Photography

A new centre for photography in Venice

At times culture in Venice can feel tidal. The art and architecture biennales bring with them a rush of openings before the crowds inevitably recede. Yet in recent years there have been a number of more permanent cultural institutions setting up in the city. In 2022, the Anish Kapoor Foundation acquired the Palazzo Manfrin in Cannaregio for its headquarters. In March this year, Le Stanze della Fotografia, an exhibition space dedicated to photography, opened on the island of San Giorgio.

‘Venice was missing a fixed place with the capacity to develop a continual activity in relation to photography,’ observes Denis Curti, Le Stanze’s artistic director. ‘There was an institutional void that we wanted to remedy.’ The project began back in 2012, with a series of temporary photography exhibitions organised by Marsilio Arte that brought artists including Helmut Newton, Letizia Battaglia and Sabine Weiss to the Casa dei Tre Oci, a neogothic building famed for its beautiful windows that overlook the city from the island of Giudecca.

Installation view of Ugo Mulas at Le Stanze della Fotografia. Photo: © Luca Zanon

When Casa dei Tre Oci was bought by the Berggruen Institute in 2021, the project found a new, larger home on the neighbouring island of San Giorgio where the Fondazione Giorgio Cini already holds one of the most important photographic collections in Europe. Once the warehouse of the Cini foundation, and then a boarding school, the building provides two floors and 1,850 square meters of exhibition space. Each room contains a network of moveable walls, suspended from high ceilings, ready to be adapted for whatever kind of installation is required. The inaugural exhibition is a survey of the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas; on the second floor, an exhibition of works by the contemporary photographer Alessandra Chemollo captures a ghostly Venice in all its splendour, with architectural shots soaked in golden light.

The works of Rauschenberg transported to the Venice International Art Biennale (1964), Ugo Mulas. Photo: © Eredi Ugo Mulas; courtesy Archivio Ugo

Variety is key for Le Stanze, which seeks to attract as wide an audience as possible and puts on an accompanying events programme with educational courses, talks and book presentations to complement each show. The next exhibition, opening this autumn, will look at the work of contemporary photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin, showing his images in the context of his reportage right up to the present day with his coverage of the war in Ukraine. ‘For us photography is of interest in all its complexity, as a language all of its own,’ says Curti.

The history of photography in Venice is rich. Most famously, in 1979, the city hosted the large-scale event Venice ’79 La Fotografia, with 26 exhibitions, 46 workshops and a large program of seminars and conferences taking place across the island from June through to September. Curti hopes that La Stanze will revive this tradition, but also move it forward. ‘Our objective’, he says, ‘is to share the culture of photography, to make Venice become a point of note, a kind of capital of photography in Italy. We don’t merely want to present exhibitions, we want to develop engagement, a continual movement.’

Le Stanze della Fotografia is now open.

Photos From Turkey’s Convulsive Decade

By in Photography

Photos From Turkey’s Convulsive Decade

The Magnum photographer Emin Özmen remembers the day in 1993 when radical Islamists set fire to the Madımak Hotel in his hometown of Sivas, Turkey, killing 37 people. Intellectuals and artists had gathered there for a festival honoring a 16th-century Alevi poet.

Many of those who died were themselves Alevis, members of a Muslim sect that is a minority in Turkey. During the 1970s, right-wing Sunni groups often fought Alevi leftist groups in the streets. The violence eventually subsided, but tensions remained—the horror at Madımak, when Özmen was 8 years old, was the result. It made Özmen want to become a witness.

Picture of a mourning crowd at the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara; a day after a failed coup attempt by the Turkish military.
A mourning crowd at the Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, the day after a failed coup attempt by the Turkish military in which at least 265 people died, including soldiers, police, and civilians, July 2016
Picture of Syrian children playing in Istasyon neighbourhood of Mardin.
Syrian children play in the Istasyon neighborhood of Mardin, October 2, 2020.
Picture of protests to support Bogaziçi students who were arrested for displaying a rainbow flag.
Protesters support Bogaziçi students who were arrested for displaying a rainbow flag at another protest, in Istanbul, March 2021.

On Sunday, May 14, Turkey’s first Alevi candidate for president, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, faced off against Turkey’s longtime autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a Sunni Muslim who rose to power in 2003, five years before Özmen became a working photojournalist. Over the course of Özmen’s career, he has watched and documented as Erdoğan has transformed Turkey from an aspiring democracy into a polarized autocracy with a failing economy.

Those Turks who have suffered from repression, violence, and hunger these past 20 years believed Kılıçdaroğlu might have a chance at winning this week, despite the vociferous opposition to him from Turkey’s right-wing populace, which disdains him because he is an Alevi liberal and because he is not Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But neither candidate gained the required 50 percent of the vote. The election will go to a runoff on May 28, and Erdoğan still has a chance—many Turks see it as a foregone conclusion—to prevail as president for another five years.

“A whole generation and I were only going to know this shadow,” Özmen writes in his beautiful new book, Olay. “To grow up despite this shadow, to try to build ourselves despite this shadow. This shadow is still there, twenty years later.”

Left photograph showing a fire seen near a gas station. Right photograph showing the covered bodies of 12 people kept in a slaughterhouse in Sirnak.
Left: A fire seen near a gas station in Hasankeyf, 2020. Right: The bodies of 12 people are kept in a slaughterhouse in Sirnak.
Picture of Turkish riot police using tear gas while Syrian Kurds cross the Turkish - Syrian border.
Turkish riot police use tear gas as Syrian Kurds illegally cross the Turkish-Syrian border in Suruc, September 2014.
Picture of a boat full of migrants illuminated by the flashlights of Turkish coast guards in Bodrum, Turkey
A boat full of migrants is illuminated by the flashlights of Turkish coast guards, who have come to rescue them near the Greek-Turkish border. This small boat’s engine failed, and seven refugees from Syria, ‎Pakistan, and Afghanistan were stranded in the middle of the sea near Bodrum, 2015.

Özmen sought to capture in his photographs the sense of constant terror his generation and his people have endured, particularly in the past 10 years. As he writes, many Turks have been silenced under Erdoğan, and his photos, even those of active violence, have an eerie quietness to them, as if the volume has been turned off on a TV. (His work recalls Gilles Peress’s influential Telex Iran.) Özmen uses this quality to evoke what he describes as a sense of “powerlessness in the face of so much injustice and violence.”

The events (olay can mean “event” or “incident” in Turkish) he depicts are famous ones: the 2013 Gezi Park protests, in which thousands of people revolted over the construction of a mall on one of Istanbul’s last stretches of green space; the war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the southeast in 2015; the attempted military coup against Erdoğan in 2016; the continuing Syrian-refugee crisis.

Most of the photos are black-and-white and without captions, choices that foster the strange effect of universality—documenting the tragedies as ones the Turkish people experienced collectively, even if they themselves never marched in the streets, or ran from bombs, or attempted to sneak illegally across the Greek border. The events are what Turks carry inside them; they are what their country has become. Özmen calls his own mind “the victim of a violent wind.”

Left picture showing smoke and tear gas fill the sky as Turkish police and protesters clash near Taksim Square on the first day of the Gezi Park protests. Right: The minaret of a sunken mosque emerges from the reservoir of the Birecik dam.
Left: Smoke and tear gas fill the sky as Turkish police and protesters clash near Taksim Square, in Istanbul, on the first day of the Gezi Park protests, June 2013. Right: The minaret of a sunken mosque emerges from the reservoir of the Birecik dam, in Gaziantep, 2019.
Picture of people watching the confrontation from a building as protesters clash with Turkish police during the Gezi Park protests.
People watch from a building as protesters clash with Turkish police during the Gezi Park protests, in Istanbul, June 2013. The civil unrest began in May 2013, when a sit-in protesting an urban-development plan was violently evicted from the park.
Picture of a women laying down on the ground as police used tear gas to disperse crowd at Taksim square on the first day of Gezi Park protests in 2013.
A women lies down on the ground in shock as police use tear gas to disperse the crowd at Taksim Square on the first day of Gezi Park protests, in Istanbul, May 2013.
Picture of people gathering to show solidarity with Palestinians after Israel's assault on Palestinian civilians at the Gaza border.
People gather in Istanbul to show solidarity with Palestinians after Israel’s assault on Palestinian civilians at the Gaza border, May 2018.

Over the course of the decade that Özmen recorded, Turkey endured several natural catastrophes: earthquakes in Van, Elazığ, and Düzce, as well as raging wildfires in the Aegean region. The government’s responses to these events struck many Turks as a surprising failure. They were a harbinger of the country’s future.

In February, two devastating earthquakes struck southern Turkey in 24 hours, killing at least 50,000 and as many as hundreds of thousands, while making millions homeless. By now much has been written about why the earthquake was so deadly. Erdogan had built his authoritarian system on a corrupt construction economy and centralized the state so much around himself that many of its institutions failed to respond to the disaster. In many ways, the weeks after the earthquake felt like the culmination of the Turkish people’s psychological experience of the past 20 years.

Turks were not only grieving or terrorized in February. Many knew that the 21st-century dystopian future that haunts our collective dreams, whether because of climate change or war or authoritarianism, had come for them. Thousands of people, rich and poor, lay crushed under their own possessions, and as day turned to night, in rain and snow, dead bodies lay in the street with no one to bury them; men, women, and children cried out from the rubble with no one to save them.

Those left alive were forced to witness this new world: Their families were gone, their houses were gone, food and water were gone, the roads were gone, the airports and ports were gone, the police were gone, the fire department was gone. They now lived in a wasteland, the kind we often say only nature is powerful enough to create. But only man could have created such a magnificently rigged apocalypse, and in 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Turkish republic, this act of creation was the work of one.

Turks always remind me that their country has been around for a long time. The Erdoğan era has lasted only 20 years, and even this strongman couldn’t crush the Turkish people’s history—that enduring, democratic desire to live and love that Özmen portrays so heartbreakingly in his photos.

Left photograph showing a religious frame with the inscription “God” on the wall of a house in Hasankeyf. Right photograph showing civilians hang a white flag on their house to show they are unarmed in Nusaybin, Turkey. Right photograph
Left: A religious frame with the inscription “God” remains on the broken wall of a house in Hasankeyf, an abandoned historical town in Batman that was engulfed a few months later by the Ilisu Dam project, in 2020. Right: In January 2016, civilians in Nusaybin hang a white flag on their house to show that they are unarmed. Since October 2, 2015, Turkish authorities have imposed seven very strict curfews in this Kurdish town in southeastern Turkey.
Picture of people removing the bodies of their loved ones and relatives from the village cemetary as water levels rise at Ilisu Dam reservoir lake in Sirnak, Turkey.
People remove the bodies of their loved ones and relatives from the village cemetery after a government hydroelectric project causes water levels to rise in the Ilisu Dam reservoir lake, in Sirnak, September 2019.
Picture of people fleeing in shock, flee from homes as mortars continue landing in several locations in Akcakale, Turkey.
People in shock flee their homes Akcakale during fighting between the Turkish military and Kurdish PYD rebels the day after Turkey launched its military operation in northern Syria, 2019.
Picture of a a fire raging on in Dalaman, Turkey over a village near the airport.
A fire rages in Dalaman over a village near the airport, August 2021. In July and August 2021, 299 forest fires ravaged the Mediterranean region of Turkey in the worst-ever wildfire season in the country’s history.

One month after the earthquake, I was eating dinner on the terrace of my hotel in İskenderun, where a group of men and women sat at a nearby table drinking and smoking. A car pulled up and a woman got out, screaming, and a blond woman from the table ran to help her sit down.

“How could I not have known they were dead!” she cried. “I just saw on Facebook … How could I not have known!”

They consoled her. She kept crying. They tried sterner words.

“Sister, calm down,” one man said. “We have to be strong. Look, I have buried 40 friends.”

They were stealing sips from a bottle of spirits under the table, ordering more wine. The woman was still weeping. The blond woman spoke to her again with a clear voice.

“Sister, God is testing us,” she said. “Look at her.” She nodded at another woman across the table, who bowed her head. “Her friend is in the hospital. When they found her children in the rubble, they were hugging.”

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona

By in Photography

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona

‘Visual Spaces of Today’ by Andreas Gursky

Starting May 25th, 2023, German photographer Andreas Gursky exhibits 40 of his images that document  globalization and mass consumption at Fondazione MAST in Bologna. Titled ‘Visual Spaces of Today,’ the exhibition, co-curated by Urs Stahel, spotlights the photographer’s thematic images that suggest perspectives on work, the economy, and globalization.

Each photograph reveals the concrete spaces of production plants, goods-handling centers, temples of consumption, transport hubs, energy and food industries, and financial centers across the world. Gursky selected the images as he kept the acronym MAST in mind, which stands for Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione, Tecnologia (Factory of Arts, Experience and Technology).

Included in the exhibition, which overlaps with Fondazione Mast’s 10-year celebration, are 40 images by the artist, dating from his early works (Krefeld, Hühner, 1989) to his more recent production (V&R II and V&R III, 2022), travelling great lengths, from Salerno (1990) to Hong Kong (2020), and combining the modern tourism industry (Rimini, 2003) with age-old production processes (Salinas, 2021).

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
Andreas Gursky, Lehmbruck I, 2013, image © designboom | | header image: Andreas Gursky, Salinas, 202 © ANDREAS GURSKY by SIAE 2023, photo by Sprüth Magers | images courtesy of Fondazione MAST

Salerno marks Andreas Gursky’s landscape photography

Andreas Gursky sits inside Fondazione MAST, a solemn expression crossing his face, and ponders the selection of images that are dear to him. One of them is Salerno (1990), the first image in the exhibition, greeting the viewers into his documentary den of photographs. He was cruising along the Italian coast by the seaside one holiday, and all of a sudden, the uniformed rows of vehicles and stacked port containers came into view. Gursky had learned the ropes of black-and-white photography in art and even crossed the path early on in his career. This time, in Salerno, he took out his camera and captured the industrial landscape in full color.

‘I wanted to photograph that landscape, and I told myself, it is time for me to do what I want. I used a tripod for this one and quickly snapped the images because the sun was already setting. Then, I was not sure if it would become an image of mine, but when I got back to my workshop and looked at the result, it also seemed like a postcard. I must say this image is important to me because it inaugurated my landscape photography. When I look back at this image, I recognize the moment I shifted my approach to large-scale photography. This image was a turning point for me,’ says Gursky during the press conference at Fondazione MAST.

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
Andreas Gursky, F1 Boxenstopp I, 2007, image © designboom

Globalization in the world of work

Large-scale photographs of Andreas Gursky grace the exhibition space of Fondazione MAST. The intentional size encourages viewers to step beyond the designated line view to scrutinize the images and find details that plain sight may miss at first glance. Globalization in the world of work brews gradually in mind until the viewers come to terms with the world they live in running on mass consumption and the ever-transmuting economy influencing the way people work. Yet beyond the social and political themes Gursky has captured, a poetic and nostalgic tone shadows the photos through the details viewers might look past when they glimpse at the shots for the first time.

For Kamiokande (2007), Gursky flew to Japan and photographed the neutrino detector research facility and observatory. ‘It was around 1,000 meters below the sea level to prevent catching radiation,’ says Gursky. He adds that normally, the facility would be full of water, but during his visit, the cavernous observatory seemed to lack it. Tiers of golden spheres lure in the viewers and retain their attention as they gaze at the image, floating yet attached to the wall of the facility. In Gursky’s image, the globes seemingly glow in sequence, almost tricking the viewers of the detail that makes the image odic. Glancing on the lower right, two oars with rowers paddle through the still water. ‘Without these boats, the image would have been scientific. I was moved by this detail. It gives the image a romantic and musical perspective,’ says Gursky.

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
installation view | image © designboom

Compositions and uniformity in art photography

Composition matters to Andreas Gursky. While post-editing can help, being in the moment and snapping the shot at the right time and angle are deemed essential to the photographer. At times, Gursky looks for fragments that can piece the whole picture together, an attempt viewers can see in Bahrain I (2005). Here, he hopped on a helicopter and armed with his camera, he circled around the Bahrain International Circuit raceway like a vulture waiting for its prey. Past the photos and into the editing, Gursky created a snaking racetrack that slopes down from a sandy mountain, every car and person disappearing from the pictorial canvass. 

Uniformity follows balance, and such a style is seen in many of Gursky’s images. In RHEIN II (1999), a chance encounter occurred. ‘It is not how I imagined the final result would be, but after that, I started to reflect on how I took photographs and was working along the theme of abstract expressionism,’ he says. The image oozes tranquility in nature. Gursky was on a hike and jog when he found himself running along the bank of the Rhine River. At some point during his run, he paused and saw an image of a large abstract horizon in nature with the green grass and water flow stretching endlessly like a seamless tape. There, he knew it would be an image showcasing the stillness on the horizon that is free from disruption.

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
installation view | left: Andreas Gursky, Toys’R’Us, 1999, image © designboom; right: Andreas Gursky, Tokyo Stock Exchange, 1990, image © designboom

Salinas in Ibiza as an image of respite

Serenity within rapid globalization and pocketed quiet moments in times of city frenzy come into play inside Fondazione MAST. Andreas Gursky masters pulling the viewers into the painterly compositions of his images for visual purposes while pushing them into the sphere of social and political nuances pervasive in his industrial and landscape photographs. One moment, the viewers bask in silence, reveling in the transient stillness, then seconds later, gradually rather than abruptly, they see the world they live in, back to the ground from the temporary high.

The last image that Gursky discussed at Fondazione Mast was Salinas (2021). The photographer went to Ibiza and captured the landscape of salt pools at the feet of rugged, rocky hills. No unmistakable details spring into view; just silhouettes of the grided pools and mountains. The obscure lines and slopes underline the picturesque landscape, snapped at the right time and at the right angle. The sun has sunk but painted the sky with orange hues, and the halcyon of the water reflects the surroundings. Gursky, his camera ready, captured the respite, breathing in the wondrous silence and breathing out globalization in the world of work for a while.

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
installation view | photo by Luca Capuano

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
installation view | photo by Luca Capuano

in MAST, andreas gursky captures globalization in the world of work from bahrain to arizona
installation view of Andreas Gursky, Kamiokande, 2007 | photo by Luca Capuano

‘An incredible experience’: Forty years of Cannes film festivals through one man’s camera lens

By in Photography

‘An incredible experience’: Forty years of Cannes film festivals through one man’s camera lens

When Eric Gaillard first went to photograph the Cannes Film Festival in 1981, it was a smaller, more intimate affair.

It was the kind of place where you could see the greats from Hollywood’s Golden Age like Lauren Bacall or Ava Gardner wandering alone on the esplanade or having fun on the beach without bodyguards.

Aishwarya Rai poses on the red carpet at the 70th Cannes Film Festival, 2017. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Morgan Freeman poses at the 58th Cannes Film Festival, 2005. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)

Returning for his 40th time,  Mr Gaillard found a different beast — larger, more multicultural, with more restrictions on where photographers could stand to try and get that viral snap or capture the moment when a movie star gets caught off-guard sharing an intimate smile, striking a goofy pose, or having a bad hair day.

Elizabeth Taylor and George Hamilton arrive at the 40th Cannes Film Festival, 1987. (Reuters:  Eric Gaillard)
Diego Maradona plays with a ball while promoting the film Maradona by Kusturica at the 61st Cannes Film Festival, 2008.(Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Actor Penelope Cruz waves as she leaves the screening of Pedro Almodovar’s film Volver at the 59th Cannes Film Festival, 2006. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
The 2021 edition of the festival looked a little different. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)

The 76th edition of the festival, taking place from May 16 to May 27, has seen Cannes’ usual population triple to 230,000 people to watch films, rub shoulders with celebrities and — in some cases — compete for the coveted Palme D’Or.

Actor Kristen Stewart removes her heels on the red carpet at 2018 festival.(Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Director Michael Moore holds the Palme d’Or for his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Actor Nicole Kidman signs autographs while promoting the film The Killing of a Sacred Deer in 2017.(Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Late director Agnes Varda is seen on a screen during her tribute ceremony at the 72nd Festival,  2019.(Reuters:  Eric Gaillard )

Gaillard, who is retiring after this festival, was there for Reuters, snapping Michael Douglas pointing at the camera with a cheeky grin and a besuited Harrison Ford receiving an Honorary Palme D’Or.

Harrison Ford poses with his Honorary Palme d’Or Award at the The 76th Cannes Film Festival, this year. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Director Emmanuelle Bercot poses during a photocall for the film La tete haute out of competition before the opening of the 68th Cannes Film Festival.(Reuters: /Eric Gaillard)
Actor Sharon Stone arrives for the screening of British director Peter Chelsom’s film The Mighty in 1998. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Actor Pierce Brosnan poses as he promotes the James Bond film Die another day in 2002.

He was there in 1997 when Michael Jackson was in attendance, in 2008 when Diego Maradona showed off soccer tricks, and in 2018 when Kristen Stewart kicked off her heels on the red carpet.

Quentin Tarantino laughs with actor Uma Thurman  as they promote their film Kill Bill Vol. 2 in 2004.(Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Actor Woody Harrelson is held by director Michael Cimino and actors Alexandra Tydings, Jon Seda  as they arrive for the screening of their film Sunchaser at the 49th Festival in 1996.(Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Photographers surround Michael Jackson as he arrives for the midnight screening of his movie short Ghosts in 1997. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Elizabeth Taylor pins a red ribbon on Sylvester Stallone’s tuxedo during the Cinema for AIDS evening in 1993. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)

A shot from the 48th edition of the festival in 1995 shows a disarmingly young Johnny Depp, while a black-and-white photo from 1987 depicts a tanned, bejewelled Liz Taylor with one-time flame George Hamilton.

Actor Christophe Lambert looks surprised as Emmanuelle Seigner and Stefania Rocca kiss him on the cheek in 1997. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Actor Jean Pierre Leaud promoting the film La Mort De Louis XIV (The Death of Louis XIV) at the 69th Cannes Film Festival, 2016. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)

More recent photos show cinemagoers wearing masks (the festival was cancelled in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic but came back the following year with restrictions), increasing numbers of women among the phalanxes of photographers, and attendees using phones to create their own social media posts.

Actors Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt arrive for the screening of Wolfang Petersen’s Troy in 2004.(Reuters: Eric Gaillard)
Actor Angelina Jolie arrives for the screening of the animated film Kung Fu Panda at the 61st Cannes Film Festival, 2008. (Reuters: Eric Gaillard)

But the essential glamour and fascination of the occasion has not changed — for the stars, or for the journalists. Mr Gaillard said Cannes is “an incredible experience.”

Reuters

Fashion Photography with a Pistol and a Pulse

By in Photography

Fashion Photography with a Pistol and a Pulse

A barechested Brad Pitt lying on his back.

“Fight Club, Brad Pitt No. 24,” Los Angeles, 1998.Photographs by Steven Klein
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Fashion Photography with a Pistol and a Pulse

“This book I offer you is the book of desire, my dream of leaving my mark on you, in you,” Steven Klein writes in a note at the beginning of his self-titled massive career survey from Phaidon. His words can be read as a warning of sorts: brace yourself. The book—first published late last year and just released in a case-bound, gilt-edged, limited “Luxury” edition—includes several hundred pictures taken over the past three decades; most are printed in a super-saturated color that looks sticky on the page. This selection can only skim Klein’s hyper-prolific œuvre in and outside the editorial pages of Vogue, W, i-D, and Dutch, among other publications. Still, the volume is very deliberately too much; for many viewers, it would feel indigestible at half the size. That’s mostly because Klein’s way of leaving his mark teeters between the seductive and the sadistic: the spectacles he engineers often involve stage blood, gaping wounds, contorted limbs, and gratuitous nudity. Usually, something’s burning; at times, it’s the model.

Madonna reclining on a bed.
“Madonna,” St. Regis Hotel, New York City, 2021.

Klein, who is fifty-eight, is the photographer who gave Justin Timberlake a bloody nose, pulled Brad Pitt’s pants down, smothered Kanye West in a plastic bag, and put Madonna in an electric chair, on a stripper pole, and in bed with a group of anonymous studs. (Next to Steven Meisel, her collaborator on the book “Sex,” Madonna has teamed up most regularly with Klein, turning out photographs and films—commercial, promotional, and private—that now constitute a substantial body of work.) His fashion sittings, many on manicured suburban lawns, tend to veer into the absurd and include bizarre masks and prosthetics and incongruous props (a horse, a baby, a pistol, a wheelchair). There’s a comic undertow to much of this: Edward Gorey meets David Lynch. But Klein’s most obvious predecessors on the fashion front, Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, were having a lot more fun. Klein’s humor is pitch-black and effortful. The moods he creates are typically dark and ominous; he often seems to be shooting a slasher film rather than a Vogue spread. In Klein’s ritzy version of the horror-movie cul-de-sac, fashion victims are damaged, wounded, left for dead.

A woman and a horse swimming in a pool.
“Horse Pool, Guinevere Van Seenus,” Windsor, Connecticut, 2005.
A fashion photograph of a woman breastfeeding a toddler.
“Suburban Woman No. 10,” 2008.
A fashion photograph of a woman in a gown holding up a car on a freeway.
“Mechanic,” New Jersey, 2006.

In his introduction to Klein’s book, the photographer Mark Holborn writes that “to open this book is to enter criminal territory. Here, the police are busy. Transgression, too, has its allure.” If Klein’s transgression doesn’t seem as thrilling as it once did, you can’t fault the work. It remains tough, subversive, and “difficult” at a time when few magazines—and even fewer advertisers—value anything remotely challenging. Sadly, that makes “Steven Klein” feel like a period piece, a memorial slab to an era when fashion photographers—including Klein, Meisel, Nick Knight, David Sims, Bruce Weber, Collier Schorr, Matthias Vriens, Juergen Teller, and Wolfgang Tillmans—were leading an adventurous, sophisticated, queer-centric avant-garde. They broke old-guard magazines wide open, spearheaded new ones, and changed the way we thought about the medium and the message. Because Klein was one of that group’s most radical members, especially in retrospect, his work looks more outrageous now than it did when it first appeared. How dare he photograph a nude woman with surgical scars on her stomach and breasts as if she were a body dumped on the grass? Or conjure a pregnant male nude, a Los Angeles porn set, a model submerged in a tank like one of Damien Hirst’s sharks, or Tom Ford buffing a man’s bare ass like it was a car hood? Odd to think that this is now history too rude to be repeated.

A bloodied man wearing a suit holding a dog on his shoulders.
“Riccardo Tisci,” New York City, 2011.
Kim Kardashian bending over with no pants on.
“Kim Wears Prada, Image No. 15,” Motel 6, Los Angeles, 2014. 

Holborn’s introduction describes a short film Klein made for Alexander McQueen that reworked the opening scene from Michael Powell’s 1960 movie “Peeping Tom,” with Kate Moss as the doomed focus of an “obsessive predatory stalker” played by Klein himself. A still from that short, of a small camera clutched in Klein’s tattooed hands like a weapon, is one of the book’s most charged and contained images. Klein is hardly a lone stalker. He has a huge support staff—editors, stylists, hair-and-makeup people—to help realize his obsessions. But his most lurid visions rarely make the editorial pages these days. His transformation of the singer-songwriter Ethel Cain into a vampiric Victorian queen, for the cover of the Spring issue of V, is merely alarming. Subversiveness—the transgressive vision—might be old-school, but Klein hasn’t given it up. His monograph suggests that it’s still a force that can thrill and disturb.

A staged photograph of a person being arrested.
“Underwear Campaign,” Brooklyn, 2004. 
A hand holding an apple.
“Still Life with Apple and Helmet,” New York, 1996.

They Sell Seashells (With Gems) From the Seashore

By in Native

They Sell Seashells (With Gems) From the Seashore
image

Designers from Glenn Spiro to Silvia Furmanovich are turning shells into fine jewelry.

On a recent vacation in Careyes, Mexico, Sara Beltrán scoured the beach looking for beautiful seashells for her Dezso jewelry line. And finding an unusual one, she thinks, is like discovering a great diamond.

“Amazing shells are hard to find,” Ms. Beltrán, a New York-based designer, said. “You can’t buy them or create them; it’s a gift from Mother Nature.”

Ms. Beltrán is among a group of designers who are mixing humble mollusk shells with gemstones, along with gold and other precious metals, in upscale contemporary jewelry.

Another such designer is Glenn Spiro, who buys Victorian-era objects decorated with shells from antiques dealers, then removes those shells for use in new designs. For example, one of his earring designs featured large snail shells, each shell enhanced with a central 4.5-carat diamond surrounded by more than 150 tiny diamonds, while another design starred greenish scaphopod shells, also called tusk shells, each scaphopod encrusted with eight pear-shape diamonds totaling almost four carats and small white diamonds totaling almost a half-carat. Prices start at $20,000.

Even the French house Boucheron embellished a brown and white marbled seashell, conus marmoreus, with 286 diamonds totaling 6.54 carats for a brooch in its Carte Blanche high jewelry collection, a 26-piece set called Ailleurs, unveiled in Paris in July 2022.

“It is the goal of high jewelry to arouse emotion and poetry, and it is our duty to question what is considered precious,” the house’s creative director, Claire Choisne, wrote in an email. “If someone understands the message, and the creativity, she or he will fall in love with this kind of piece, just like clients of contemporary art would.”

She said that while most people associate “precious” with large, shiny diamonds and other gems, for her, it’s the opposite. Her high jewelry collections have featured bamboo, marble and sand: “I wanted to show that precious materials are also found in nature, as I think it is the best designer in the world.”

While many might consider such approaches modern or novel, this method of working with shells is not new. These designers are actually bringing shells back to their roots: For most of history, shells were highly valued, and even used as currency. Cowrie shells, for instance, were used as currency in West Africa as early as the 14th century, and later, they were used for trading among African, Asian and European nations. For centuries, Native Americans shaped clam and conch shells into beads, some of which were added to ceremonial garments and accessories, while others were used as a currency known as wampum.

To create the Jack Coquillage Brooch, Boucheron’s designers embellished a conus marmoreus shell with diamonds and white gold.

In the early 1940s, shell jewelry evolved, when Fulco di Verdura, the Italian aristocrat turned New York jewelry designer, fashioned lion’s paw and scallop shells into glamorous statement pieces worn by customers like the Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers and the actress Paulette Goddard. The designer purchased some of those shells from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and had them set with gold, diamonds and sapphires.

The New York jeweler Seaman Schepps also created his signature turbo shell earrings in the 1940s. The style originated when a client asked him to turn a pair of turbo shells from the Indian Ocean into earrings. The earrings, adorned with diamonds and other gems, continue to be a best seller for the brand, which is now owned by Anthony Hopenhajm.

“There is a lot of great historical jewelry,” he said. “But there are very few designs like our turbo shell earrings that are still worn today by both women in their 20s and their grandmothers.”

A shell’s organic beauty seems to attract everyone from the beachcombers who pluck them from the shore to jewelers, who see in them myriad ways to bring texture, pattern and volume to their designs.

As sea creatures secrete layers of calcium carbonate to form hard shells to protect their soft bodies, the uniform patterns and varying hues that make shells so captivating are created in the process, said Jessica Goodheart, assistant curator of mollusca at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“The coiled patterns are shaped when the snail’s body rotates during torsion,” Dr. Goodheart said, “and the varying colors come from chemicals generated either internally or as the result of something absorbed in the diet.” When the shells are discarded, they eventually wash up on the shore.

Many people associate shells with casual jewelry styles, like the puka shell necklaces of the 1970s and the cowrie shells of the 1990s. But today, as designers look for more unusual and organic elements, shells have come to the forefront again.

The organic origins of shells are what attracted Claudia Ortega, an interior designer based in Mexico City, to Ms. Beltrán’s jewelry.

Sara Beltrán, the designer behind the Dezso jewelry line. “The shells remind me of the sea, of the smells, the sounds and peacefulness,” she said.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Two pairs of earrings Ms. Beltrán designed: left, shells topped with polki diamonds set in 18-karat rose gold; right, shells that the designer handpicked in Sag Harbor, N.Y., set with marquise diamonds.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

“Sara is one of the jewelers who is breaking new ground and showing us that jewelry doesn’t have to be so rigid and made in just gold and gemstones,” said Ms. Ortega, who has been collecting Ms. Beltrán’s work for more than a decade. “Her pieces are fun and contemplative, and they aren’t a show of money or value, but they say so much more about the person who wears them.”

For Ms. Beltrán, the value of her designs isn’t in the worth of their gold or gems. “The shells remind me of the sea, of the smells, the sounds and peacefulness,” she said.

She brings the shells she’s gathered — on the beach, or through visits to a shell dealer in Paris — to Jaipur, India, where she designs pieces, inspired by the symmetry of Art Deco style, and then has them made by craftspeople with whom she has worked for years.

“I lay out all the shells and pair them with the gemstones that will enhance their colors and patterns,” Ms. Beltrán said. For example, she topped each of her white conical shell earrings with a one-carat polki diamond set in 18-karat rose gold; paired a large orange clam shell with a three-carat Madeira citrine for a necklace; and adorned an orange spotted mitra stictica shell with a three-carat emerald-cut citrine that had been set in 18-karat rose gold. Prices for her shell designs range from $1,700 to $20,000, depending on the gems.

A pair of earrings by the Brazilian designer Silvia Furmanovich. Over the past two decades, Ms. Furmanovich has looked to shells and other unusual materials for inspiration.

For the past 20 years, the Brazilian designer Silvia Furmanovich has also used natural elements in her colorful jewelry. Those elements include bamboo, wood and shells, and, she said, she continues to look for other unusual materials and artisan-made crafts to incorporate into her designs.

On a 2019 trip to Kyoto, Japan, for instance, she purchased some antique clam shells that had been painted in gold leaf with scenes from Japanese literature for use in a matching game called Kai-awase that was popular during the Edo period (1603-1868). She turned those shells into earrings set with gold and diamonds, some accented with emeralds, others with fire opals.

And during a trip, to Sedona, Ariz., she met some American Indian artists who specialized in inlaying gemstones in shells, and enlisted their skills in creating a new capsule collection of jewelry, inspired by their traditional motifs. Among the new pieces is a set of lavender shell earrings with amethysts and diamonds, accented with mosaics made of abalone, mother-of-pearl and turquoise, crafted by those artisans whom she met in Arizona.

Ms. Furmanovich said she is touched by the beauty of shells: “They remind me of the spirit of the sea, summer, nature and joy.”

Paris Exhibition to Focus on Art Nouveau and Beyond

By in Art World News

Paris Exhibition to Focus on Art Nouveau and Beyond
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Creations by pre-eminent craftsmen — Lalique, Fouquet, Vever — will be part of a show at L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

On June 2, Van Cleef & Arpels is to unveil “A New Art: Metamorphoses of Jewelry, 1880-1914,” an exhibition in Paris focusing on almost 100 items from a period that included the Art Nouveau era, many designed by the foremost artisans of the age, like René Lalique, Georges Fouquet and Henri Vever.

“Art Nouveau is a topic that we had not covered in the past in our exhibitions, and we do, when we program our shows, always try to look at different angles, different time periods, as well as different cultures,” said Lise Macdonald, the president of the brand’s L’École, School of Jewelry Arts. Its most recent show featured gold ornaments from China over several centuries.

Reservations can be made on the school’s website for the free exhibition, to be held in L’École’s 18th-century building near Place Vendôme through Sept. 30 (with a hiatus from Aug. 5-21). Most of the exhibits, on loan from brands and institutions like the Musée d’Orsay, have distinctively Art Nouveau details: curving lines, a combination of precious materials and commonplace ones like glass and pewter, and imagery inspired by nature or fantasy.

But the movement, which had its heyday from about 1890 to 1910, was not limited to jewelry. “The vision of Art Nouveau was that all of the arts are touched by it,” said Paul Paradis, a teacher at L’École who worked on the exhibition. “It was a total design concept, from the ceiling to the floor to the door handles.”

None of the jewelry — including a Lalique necklace in gold, enamel, glass and platinum with dangling pendants that resemble women with vivid green and cobalt butterfly wings around their legs — was made by Van Cleef, which opened its first store in 1906 on Place Vendôme.

“The mandate of the school is not to focus on Van Cleef & Arpels,” Ms. Macdonald said; it is meant “to speak to the larger audience on the history of jewelry, on its know-how and on gemology.” During the period represented in the exhibition, Van Cleef was focusing more “on abstractions and symmetry and the trend of Art Deco.”

Joanna Hardy, a fine jewelry specialist based in London who is not affiliated with the school, said L’École is more concerned with education than it is with marketing. “Just because they didn’t make it, doesn’t mean to say they wouldn’t show it,” she said.

Nonetheless, the show’s theme seems to reinforce the brand’s positioning.

Van Cleef is “trying to use Nouveau to say, ‘We are about craftsmanship — it’s not just about the gold you buy or the diamonds you buy,’” said Akshay Madane, a partner at the management consulting firm Kearney.

Other luxury brands have used museum sponsorships and exhibitions to sell similar stories, he said. “They’re trying to educate and inspire, and they’re doing it slowly in a subtle way so as not to come across as sales-y, because that’s not what these brands are about.”

Margate gallery PR post catches Tracey Emin’s eye

By in Art World News

Margate gallery PR post catches Tracey Emin’s eye

Turner Contemporary in Margate recently posted a job advertisement which caught the attention of the Kent seaside town’s most famous artist resident. We are referring to Tracey Emin (of course) who cheekily asked on Instagram if she could apply for the post of Marketing and Communications chief, a weighty occupation that involves “overseeing PR, marketing, social media and digital communications” at the popular gallery. Emin asks on the gallery Insta post: “Can I do it” (the deadline is 12 June by the way). The artist opened TKE studios earlier this year in the town, comprising an art school, exhibition space and studio complex which currently accommodates ten resident artists including Ghazaleh Avarzamani of Tehran and Jon Key of Alabama.

Earlier this year, Emin told The Guardian: “It’s a beautiful way to live and I want to have a beautiful life. And this is so lovely: come here, talk to artists, look at art. Go home, see my cats, paint my pictures. Go to the sea, go for a swim in the ice cold water, come back, dry myself, walk here, look at somebody’s pictures, talk to them about what they’re doing.” The next iteration of the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (TEAR) will be announced in 2024.

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