Photography about activism and black and white

Result #1

are a paean to the techniques of the subject, and about the painters hand in its formal skills and its balance of technical virtuosity and emotional resonance. This show concludes the performance series of photographs, which began as a more general call for an artists work to participate in public space. It represents an incisive expression of a much more diverse vision of the potential for inclusion and identification with the nonwhite in contemporary art. Jim Shafrazi is an artist who consistently addresses the intersections between identity and knowledge, and is consciously engaged with questions of representation, power, and memory. He also works to dismantle the social and political categories that coexist at the core of culture.

Result #2

film, 1955–2005), shows black-and-white photographs that approximate reproduction, while Big Vision, 1978–2004, a multichannel video installation, shows performers in front of a white screen. The presence of these works as evidence of a history of resistance (exemplified by their placement alongside the Walter Huxtable home films that came out of the now-notorious BAM Bam Of the 1970s) recalls the work of John Lipscombe and the photographers that he made alongside his wife.These exhibitions have prompted several conjectures, not least of which is the idea that Darcis was an anti-man. That Darcis was less interested in publishing than in documenting the movements of women such as Nina Simone and Juliana Huxtable gives some kind of validity to the notion that this is his best work. The Zapruder photographs that the artist has been constructing since the 60s, which show him photographing his wife photographing herself, hold a distance from the sense of apprehension that accompanies the advent of black and white film; in their searing clarity, they blur the line between representation and reproduction. They also show that a man with an established reputation can make works that are provocative without falling into the trap of a mania, that demonstrate that a focus on cultural difference is as vital as that of any other.

Result #3

Photography about activism and black and white photography? Acknowledging that there is a part of the art that resists all labels—that is, its political or ideological—theres no way to tell the difference between a parody or a provocation, but the photographs are still inoffensive.In two recent exhibitions, Gerhard Richter and Daniel Ruder showed photographs that cover almost one decade. Richters four mostly nondescript pictures, taken at the gallery doors, are all dating, but they are more often of rather nonobjective subjects, and it would be wrong to see them as a catalog of serious photography. The images that appear in the show arent as good as Richters earlier work, but they arent as bad as, say, John Baldessaris dioramas or, say, Jay DeFeo, who takes more seriously the critical aspect of his own practice. Most of Richters pictures are black-and-white, but they have been manipulated, most famously, with the aid of a camera whose flash causes the black-and-white planes to become almost invisible. That is, Richters images seem much more like photographic photographs, where they become what they seem, what is really there.Only the first half of the show is good. We see a selection of kinds of black-and-white, from the dreamy to the gritty, from the gritty to the dreamy, and from the dreamlike to the realistic. The same happens in Richters landscapes, but they have been worked over and interpolated into what is essentially a photographic photograph, with the addition of what the camera does. Richter takes pictures that are generic, but he leaves the placement of each individual picture ambiguous, so that the location of the subjects seems to be important. This effect is enhanced by the way the camera appears to move along a hillside, like a bulldozer. Theres no question that Richter is involved with photographs, as any artist is.

Result #4

Photography about activism and black and white photography, such as the black series titled Action Expressions, 1985, which was exhibited in the gallery office space and consists of twenty photographs taken on the streets of New York. In this series, past and present, people, caught by the spotlight and photographed, enter the frame as the shadows of someone in the crowd form a barrier between them and the photographers. They become objects of attention. They appear as mere individuals in contact with the camera. A couple of pictures focus on words: a short video of a woman, who is asked if she has met anyone from the Black Panthers, about her experience. Here we see the person in the midst of a surveillance operation, but she is not standing out in the middle of the action. She is a protester. In another photograph, the public enters a car and passes through the doors of an armored vehicle. Inside, another person, the limousine driver, speaks to the camera. This could be a commentary on the anti-black violence that swept the US last year, but it is probably an over-interpretation of the situation, a partisan comment on racism and sexism. The difference between someone like Martin who holds the power to make changes in society and someone like Martin who is never changed by those changes—the image of the activist as the protagonist of a film of a political protest, the person who can change the world, and the one who is ever standing still and waiting to be silenced.It is only through the medium of photography that the photographer can create a different kind of relationship between the subject and the world. In this sense, the photographic portrait becomes the protagonist of an ongoing action, not only on the streets of New York, where the portraits were taken, but in the wider world. This was a sense of intimacy found in the actions themselves, in the moment in which the photograph was taken, in the visual contact between the subjects. It is through this intimate relationship that the photograph becomes a tool of human rights activism.

Result #5

Photography about activism and black and white photography, and particularly black photographers faces, often duplicates the effects of oppression: a subject in an enlarged form, a duplicitous attention, and a significant absence of an artistic truth. Black Photographs: A Mixed Selection from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Milwaukee, was a timely celebration of this institution. The show, curated by Kenneth Thompson, is organized around a set of paradoxes: an essential part of the modern black figure has emerged in the nineteenth century as an underrecognized, unasserted, non-artistic product of the black elite. While a great many art historians find black-formal art a sign of social inequality, this is also the norm for many who make money by presenting those subjects as commodities.A few photographs and other visual materials form a damning critique of such traditional cultural critique and a hint of desperation, not to mention privilege. In The Glass Pieces, 1963–65, a series of black-formed, glass-shattering works, we find what may be the apotheosis of the commercial photograph. Dozens of photos, some of them meticulously collaged (with such cuts as beveled shots) from commercial-quality media, reveal the gradual spread of a black body from low-culture independent to an even more visible, and more powerful, part of the black elite. The photographic material begins to resemble the avant-garde porn camera the black body—both the reality of the body and the black photoplay—and to have taken on a new significance as a mass-media spectacle. These pictures of heavy black silhouettes—of dogs and hamburgers, faces and hair, heads and hats—are compelling because they constitute a particularly oppressed group, who are forced to present themselves as both grotesque and fragile.