N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
Everything’s wrong with this sort of competitions, yet they’re necessary to keep the art market alive. There are very few art prizes in Portugal and they tend to promote the most conceptual approach to contemporary art practices, one of the reasons the results are always controversial. This week (or the week before, it’s fuzzy) Fnac…
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Note: I chose to give the warning I missed to find when I came across the image that I’ll be referring to later on this post: a poor resolution image of the inside of the Bataclan after the tragedy that came to be known as the Paris attacks. The tragedy took place on a Friday…
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Chinese artivist Ai Weiwei has been stationed in Lesbos documenting the daily arrival of refugees, which is (was) to say that he was playing the role of a photojournalist. His photographs are published via social networks and his main goal seems to be to draw attention to the crisis and our active role on it,…
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Documentation of Casey Jenkins‘ performance Casting Off My Womb. Image via http://hyperallergic.com Casting Off My Womb was a 28-day performance by artist Casey Jenkins, that took place at the Darwin Visual Arts Association. A local television network documented the performance and later made it available on youtube, gathering over 6 million views and triggering hundreds of…
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For the past 4 years, in collaboration with two colleagues – Luis Pavão & Paula Lourenço -, I’ve been teaching Alternative Processes in Photography. One of the courses we used to teach was dedicated to Color Printing Processes, which I particularly enjoyed. About two years ago I decided to tattoo the color scheme on my…
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Inspired by the echos of the migrant crisis in his home country, hungarian photographer Norbert Baska has made a fashion shoot called “Der Migrant” with models in luxurious clothes posing as refugees in fake camp set-ups with barbed wire. ‘Lovely‘, some say. ‘What’s the problem‘, others ask. But the majority of us will immediately recognize…
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It’s been approximately 90 days since I last made a post on this blog, an habit I used to enjoy. These last months, being concentrated on my PhD thesis, have turned me into an individual with a crippled personality and I’ve become quite deficient in my ability to bond, empathize or take some pleasure out…
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sketch for a cocoon This is it for a while. I’ll be absent for the next 4 months. At least, I imagine so. As much as I would want to keep up the posts, it’s becoming too difficult. In November I’ll be handing in my PhD thesis, so my Summer will be spent in total…
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printscreen from iGNANT’s FB There are several photographers traveling to “remote places” with the aim to capture “human nature”, at its wildest form. One of these so-called explorers is British photographer Jimmy Nelson (b. 1967). Having spent his childhood in Africa and his teen years in England, Nelson started working as a photojournalist at the…
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© Sam Taylor-Johnson, Steve Buscemi, from the series Crying Men. Excerpts from the article Masculinity Is Killing Men: The Roots of Men and Trauma, by Kali Holloway, fully available @ alternet.org: If we are honest with ourselves, we have long known that masculinity kills men, in ways both myriad and measurable. While social constructions of…
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A loved one, who knows how I feel about America, decided to gift me with this pearl: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco. Having learned a lot from Sacco, I’ve become a fan, but this is my first encounter with Hedges and I have to say it’s gut-wrenching. I…
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Exhibition catalog, 110 × 165 mm, 272 pages, October 2013. A post about a group exhibition themed The Weak Sex – How Art Pictures the New Male, held @ Kunstmuseum Bern from 18.10.2013 to 09.02.2014. © Alexis Hunter, Approach to Fear: XVII: Masculinisation of Society – exorcise 1977. Excerpt from Preface and Acknowledgments Matthias Frehner, Director…
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I Lensmen‘s post about documentary photographer Mitch Epstein. © Mitch Epstein, Topanga Canyon, California 1974 (Recreation America). © Mitch Epstein, Playing Cards in a Chicken Market, Hanoi, Vietnam 1993 (Vietnam: A Book of Changes). II doc! photo magazine doc! photo magazine and contra doc! are online publications devoted to documentary and fine art photography, respectively. III…
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© Brendan George Ko, Nine eleven (Detection), from the series We Soon Be Night, 2011-13. © Brendan George Ko, Hoodlumz (New Tribe), from the series We Soon Be Night, 2011-13. © Brendan George Ko, United, from the series We Soon Be Night, 2011-13. © Brendan George Ko, Product Placement (Malthusian Catastrophe), from the series We…
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page from the K-Hole report. The end of authenticity is near. Apparently, the post-authenticity movement is coming and it seems to have found its motto: embrace the fake. To quit the rhetoric of authenticity, a discourse that argues for the importance of being different and unique, and to embrace this new attitude would presuppose the…
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James Frey photographed in 1994, shortly after coming out of rehab. In an article by Anna Iatsenko published in Paradoxes of Authenticity (2012), the author speaks about what came to be known as The James Frey Controversy, a situation involving the writer and the TV tycoon Oprah Winfrey. The story concerns Frey’s book A Million…
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Author Busisiwe Deyi writes about Cultural Appropriation in Africa is a Country, in the context of the SPUR restaurant chain. Although the text is about this specific brand, the arguments go for other situations. What the fuck is happening in the fashion world these days that everyone wants to be Native American? Or do they? Of…
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Dear Siri, I read What I Loved while riding the train to work and listening to Bowerbirds, 16 Horsepower and Eddie Vedder. Needless to say, the experience had a great impact and I still dream about Matt’s and Bill’s artworks, wanting to see them come to life. I don’t think it had ever happened to…
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Excerpts of Brendan Cormiers’s essay No Interest in Reality, written for The New Institute’s exhibition, 1:1 Sets for Erwin Olaf and Bekleidung, Nov 11th 2013 – March 30th 2014. Full text here. “In the documentary, On Beauty and Fall, celebrated Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf states that he has no interest in reality. He laments the…
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I © Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12. © Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12. © Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12. © Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Elephant, 2010-12. II © Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Mutants, 2014. © Marina Rosso, Untitled, from the series Mutants,…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 