Tips & Technique Books / Z

Gallery FIFTY ONE is excited to announce its new show 'Irish Summers' by the renowned Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert (1941). This exhibition brings together a selection of images the artist made on trips to Ireland over the period 1983-84. While some of these photographs are included in a number of Gruyaert's previous projects and books (e.g. 'Rivages'/'Edges'), this is the first time that they are presented as a series. An eponymous new FIFTY ONE Publication will be launched for the occasion of this exhibition.

With artists around the world enduring difficult times, Open Doors Gallery and Setanta Books are proud to announce a new collaborative project looking to highlight the work of emerging and unpublished photographic artists from all over the world. This exciting new zine series will feature a new artist bi-monthly.

Beginning as a designer, Peter Fink (1907, Grand Rapids 1984, New York City) traveled the globe from the 1950s to 1970s, moving in hidden streets and industrial towns of postwar Japan, France, Portugal, northern Africa, and the Middle East, photographing workers and street scenes. Arts and culture are recurring themes, as well as the life of workers, families or children in each new place he observed, but also expressive portraits and fashion, surreal still-lives, or his radical Refractions - reflections on architecture.

Margaret was born in rural Wisconsin, 1989 and began exploring her photographic style from a young age. Therefore, she has developed a unique ability to capture the magic in the landscapes she grew up in. By exploring the transient nature of memory, Durow uses photography as a tool to preserve a feeling. Hence, giving her work an intimate and insightful quality as she documents the world around her.

Fred Stein (1909 Dresden - 1967 New York) was a master of the art of street photography. As an early pioneer of the handheld camera, he captured poignant moments in the street life of two of the world's great cities: Paris and New York where he lived after fleeing from Nazi Germany.

Melanie Friend's photographs reveal the military presence as a disquieting feature on the horizon: a rusty tank positioned as a target, a red box used for field telephones in a copse, smoke from an exploding shell. In the inaccessible ‘Impact Area', a cluster of distant soldiers undertake firing exercises. Red flags warn the visitor to keep out; signage to the military remind them not to drive tanks over Neolithic barrows. Occasionally, Friend has closer encounters with an artillery gun or an armoured vehicle, but often the landscape holds sway; manoeuvres are heard, but not always seen.

Award-winning photographer Dotan Saguy first met the Reis family, Mormons from Brazil, the day they arrived in Los Angeles in a converted yellow school bus they call home with their three children ages 10, 5 and 2. They had come to the United States two years prior to chase the American Dream. While they quickly found financial footing in the US and acquired all the material things they wanted, they were still not happy. Inspired by a YouTube video by a Brazilian artist who quit everything to travel and sell his art, they decided to explore an alternative lifestyle that would allow them to spend more time as a family and discover the world together through travel.

Over thirty years ago between 1983 and 1987 along the California/ Mexico border, Ken Light took his Hasselblad camera and flash and rode along with Border Patrol agents in the middle of the night as they combed the Otay Mesa looking for “illegal aliens.” He was there when the immigrants were apprehended - literally captured by authorities as well as the photographer's flash, evoking an unvarnished Weegee. The black and white images he made are stark, impromptu mug shots in the desert, taken at a moment of extreme vulnerability, when hope gave way to despair.

American photographer Jamie Johnson has devoted her over 20-year career to photographing children around the world. In 2014 she was invited to Ireland to document the Irish Travellers, a nomadic, ethnic minority that have lived on the margins of mainstream Irish society for centuries. She was introduced to a group of Travellers at the Ballinasloe Horse Fair and Festival, an annual event in County Galway where Travellers from Ireland and Europe come to set up camps, reunite with family and friends, and sell puppies and ponies. The children are left to run footloose and fancy free with dolls, animals, and candy cigarettes. While the Travellers don't usually like outsiders, Johnson's warmth, kindness and show of respect won them over and she was granted full access to photograph their lives and culture.