KAUNAS PHOTO is the longest-running annual photo art festival in the Baltic States.
We English will be on show at Kaunas Photo Festival as part of the Generation ’74 exhibition series.
11th KAUNAS PHOTO edition pleased release of prominent European photographers, who celebrate the 40 year achievements and presents the exhibition series “Generation 1974” and a photo book of the same name, which both photographers and compilers are from the same generation. In the exhibition participating 11 authors: Borut Peterlin (Slovenia), Nick Hannes (Belgium), Simon Roberts (UK), Gintaras Česonis (Lithuania), Mindaugas Kavaliauskas (Lithuania), Kirill Golovchenko (Ukraine/Germany), Vitus Saloshanka (Belarus-Germany), Tomas Pospech (Czech Republic), Przemyslaw Pokrycki (Poland), Pekka Niittyvirta (Finland), Davide Monteleone (Italy/France)
An interview and photographs from We English appear in a recent issue of CityZine Magazine in China.
You can download a pdf here.
This survey exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow presents the work of British photographer Simon Roberts (b. 1974, UK) since 2005. After completing a substantial project in Russia, entitled Motherland, Roberts brought his attention closer to home.
With renewed interest in the relationship of individuals and groups to the landscape, Roberts focused on social practices, customs, cultural landmarks, economic and political scenarios that define his ‘small island’ as uniquely British. With echoes of ‘history painting’, these photographs point to contemporary issues specific to Britain, but equally engage with universal ideas of the human relationship to landscape, of identity and belonging.
Landscape Studies of a Small Island is presented as part of the UK Russia Year of Culture in 2014.
The exhibition is curated by Karen McQuaid from The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
More information here: http://www.mamm-mdf.ru/en/exhibitions/landscape-studies-of-a-small-island/
More installation shots from the show can be viewed here.
An essay written by Martin Caiger-Smith for the exhibition catalogue can be downloaded here.
We English (Chris Boot, 2009) is featured in the third and final volume of Phaidon’s acclaimed Photobook series, described as ‘the most important contribution to the field since modern histories of photography began to appear in the early 20th century’ (photo-eye) by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger.
See more here.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Following the success of volumes I and II of The Photobook: A History, this third volume brings the history of the photobook up to date, with specific exploration of postwar and contemporary examples. It covers key themes including the globalization of photographic culture, the personalization of photobooks, the self-publishing boom and the new ‘layered’ photobook approach.
While the history of photographs is a well-established canon, less critical attention has been directed at the phenomenon of the photobook, which for many photographers is perhaps the most significant vehicle for the display of their work and the communication of their vision to a mass audience. Volume III, co-edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, expands this study and history of the photobook further. It explores the symbiotic relationship between the contemporary propaganda book vs. the protest photobook, sex and youth culture, photographers examining their own environments and the impact of the Internet and social media on the nature of the photobook, among much else.
The book is divided into 9 thematic chapters, each featuring general introductory text providing background information and highlighting the dominant political and artistic influences on the photobook in the period, followed by more detailed discussion of the individual photobooks. The introductory chapter texts are followed by spreads and images from over 200 books, which provide the central means of telling the history of the photobook. Chosen by Parr and Badger, these illustrations show the most artistically and culturally important photobooks in three dimensions, with the cover or jacket and a selection of spreads from the book shown.
Phaidon, 2014
Hardcover
11 3/8 x 9 7/8 inches (290 x 250 mm)
320 pages
900 color illustrations
We English is being exhibited at the 2013 Festival Fotografico Europeo in Busto Arsizio, near Milan, Italy.
The exhibition is courtesy of mc2 gallery.
For more information visit: http://www.europhotofestival.it/simon%20roberts.php
Some new work I’ve made in Sunderland is featured in this group show, staged jointly between Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.
Exhibition dates: NGCA: 28 Sept – 23 Nov 2013
Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens: 19 Oct 2013 – 23 Feb 2014.
The exhibition is part of ‘The Social: Encountering Photography’ – a month of photography in Sunderland and North-East England.
Tunstall Hills, Sunderland, July 2013 © Simon Roberts
Artists are: Craig Ames, Ulf Aminde, Haley Austin, Natasha Caruana, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Melanie Friend, Gilbert & George, Julian Germain, Paul Graham, Chris Harrison, Nigel Henderson, Jeremy Hutchison, Yee I-Lann, Bob Jardine, James O Jenkins, Linder, Melanie Manchot, Daniel Meadows, Gustav Metzger, Tim Mitchell, Martin Parr, Reynold Reynolds, Reynold Reynolds with Patrick Jolley, Simon Roberts, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Daniele Sambo, Jo Spence, John Stezaker, Homer Sykes, Stuart Whipps
‘YOU ARE THE COMPANY IN WHICH YOU KEEP’ reveals the diverse ways in which photographers and artists using lens-based media have created images that map out our new social networks – observing the patterns of which structure our social existence, or forecasting what the twenty-first century has yet to bring. Many of the artists might be described as working in anthropological or ethnographic ways, observing how our experience of the world is mediated through camera lens, and asking how far photographic images structure our imagination. They ask: in the twenty-first century, are images the means by which we are socialised, and the means by which we can know ourselves? Do the images that we consume and internalise become the imaginative materials that we are made of?
The exhibition spans the two neighbouring venues of Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, with each examining separate aspects of how photographic images now suffuse every aspect of our lives. At NGCA, more than 20 artists investigate how the neoliberal economics and continuing military muscle of so-called post-industrial countries determine how far the modern world is being shaped.
Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr
21 September 2013 – 16 March 2014
The first major exhibition at the new Media Space in London will be Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr, drawing from the Tony Ray-Jones archive at the National Media Museum. The exhibition is curated by Greg Hobson, curator of Photographs at the National Media Museum, and Martin Parr has been invited to select works from the Tony Ray-Jones archives.
Find out more about the exhibition here: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/plan_your_visit/exhibitions/only_in_england.aspx
About Media Space-
Opening in September 2013, Media Space will showcase the National Photography Collection held by the National Media Museum through a series of major exhibitions. A collaboration between the Science Museum and the National Media Museum, Media Space will also invite photographers, artists and the creative industries to respond to the wider collections of the Science Museum Group to explore visual media, technology and science.
Media Space will be based on the second floor of the Science Museum. It is a £4 million capital project and will include a 500 m² gallery for major exhibitions, a Virgin Media Studio for installations, events and creative workshops, and a café/bar. Hannah Redler was announced as Head of Media Space and Science Museum Arts Programme in 2012.
A catalogue has just been published for the recent British Council exhibition ‘Observers: Photographers of the British Scene from the 1930s to Now’ which was on show at Galeria de Arte do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brasil.
The exhibition and catalogue spans almost a century – from the new photographic directions of the 1920s and 30s that developed alongside the emergence of mass media, to the diverse practice of today’s image-laden world – and features the work of many of Britain’s most significant, celebrated and influential photographers.
Curator Martin Caiger-Smith references We English in his accompanying essay ‘A view from the roof’, where he writes:
“Ideas of proximity and distance – in both a physical and a psychological sense – of detachment and engagement, consideration of the individual and the community, particularity and generality, are never far from mind here. Simon Roberts, in the tracks of Ray-Jones or Meadows in his project ‘We English. returns to the task of presenting a synoptic view of the nation and its people. His work involves a coming together of people and place – landscape and society. History is ingrained in each image – not least the history of those who have shared his endeavour.
There is something old-fashioned in his project, beneath its very contemporary surface, something of the photographic social archives of the nineteenth century. And his viewpoint is a distant one: his landscapes are broad, and the teeming people he observes are small, distant, unaware of his presence and intent.”
Prints from We English and XXX Olympiad on show at Somerset House as part of the Landmark exhibition. More information about the show here and additional installation shots on Flowers Gallery website here.
Image: We English and XXX Olympiad prints exhibited at Landmark, Somerset House, March 2013
The online magazine Distorted Arts has reviewed my We English work, which is currently featured in the Landmark Exhibition at Somerset House in London.
“Roberts’s photographs reside somewhere between documentary and pure landscape. Many of his images contain poignant vignettes set against dynamic panoramas. Camel Estuary is populated with staffage straining against one another. Their interaction enlivens the scene, while the tamed sea, blue sky and sweeping shore evoke the English tradition of land, leisure and pleasure.
A contemporary archive of Englishness; Roberts’s work captures people, places and events beautifully. Figures in the landscape are small, but significant – the Arcadian shepherds and smiling rural folk of a Victorian landscape are replaced by windswept trekkers, crowded stadiums and post-modern reverie.”
You can read the whole review here.
And view an online gallery of images from the exhibition on the Guardian’s website here.
Landmark: The Fields of Photography at Somerset House from 14 March – 28 April 2013.
