Black Square (2006–) is an ongoing project in which Simon collects objects, documents, and individuals within a black field that has precisely the same measurements as Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 suprematist work of the same name.
Taryn Simon was born in 1975 in New York, where she currently lives and works. Collections include Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Institutional exhibitions include A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011, traveled to Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, through 2013); Contraband, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2011); A Polite Fiction, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2014); Rear Views, A Star-forming Nebula, and the Office of Foreign Propaganda, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015); 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); Action Research / The Stagecraft of Power, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); A Soldier Is Taught to Bayonet the Enemy and Not Some Undefined Abstraction, Albertinum, Dresden, Germany (2016); An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2016–17); An Occupation of Loss, Park Avenue Armory, New York (2016); The Innocents, Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (2017); Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017); Shouting Is Under Calling, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2018); A Cold Hole + Assembled Audience, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2018); and An Occupation of Loss, presented by Artangel, London (2018).
Black Square (also known as The Black Square or Malevich's Black Square) is an iconic painting by Kazimir Malevich. The first version was done in 1915. Malevich made four variants of which the last is thought to have been painted during the late 1920s or early 1930s. Black Square was first shown in The Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in 1915. The work is frequently invoked by critics, historians, curators, and artists as the "zero point of painting", referring to the painting's historical significance and paraphrasing Malevich.
Born in New Delhi, India, relocated to Montreal, Canada, before studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Gupta has been using photography as a critical practice since the 1970s. Subversive, impulsive, personal and political, Sunil Gupta's socially engaged projects have focused on such issues as family, race, migration and the complexities and taboos of sexuality and homosexual life. His work has been instrumental in raising awareness around the political realities concerning the fight for international gay rights and of making visible the tensions between tradition and modernity, public and private, the body and body politics.
Over the last seven years, Melissa O’Shaughnessy has photographed daily on the streets of New York.
As one of a growing number of women street photographers contributing to this dynamic genre, O’Shaughnessy enters the territory with clarity and a distinctly humanist eye, offering a refreshing addition to the tradition of street photography. Through her curious and quirky vision, we witness the play of human activity on the glittering sidewalks of the city. Woven into her cast of characters are the lonely, the soulful, and the proud. She has fallen for them all—perfect strangers.
Melissa O’Shaughnessy was born in 1960 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and studied at Georgetown University and the University of St. Thomas, graduating with a degree in journalism. She is now a New York City based photographer. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and publications, and her work is included in the book Bystander: A History of Street Photography.
Ben Zank: It always starts with a lot of frustration. Then I panic because I haven’t been creative lately and I’m wasting my life. I’ll play video games for several hours or maybe take a walk. Then I’ll see something kind of interesting and return to it with my gear, and that usually involves one or two ruined articles of clothing. I’ll edit for up to 3 days to make sure I don’t miss any problems. Then I’ll be really happy with my new work for a few days. Rinse and repeat.
Once you see a single picture by Alessio Bolzoni, you will recognise the elements that make them his: bodies contorted and interlinked, leaning into each other. Sometimes, his subjects look like they’re stretching to crack bones, or are fruitlessly trying to find comfortable sleeping positions. They are malleable, and skies often expand endlessly out of the frame.
If you’ve spent any amount of time gazing at billboards in Europe, or within the worlds of Luca Guadagnino, you will have seen these pictures. Having shot for Kris Van Assche’s Dior, Off-White, Fendi and Berluti, Alessio -- who was born in Italy, but is now based in London -- and his expressive images have become staples of fashion campaigns and editorials. But the codes of his work bleed through into his collaborations with that aforementioned arthouse movie director too. For Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria and, most recently, We Are Who We Are, Luca has enlisted Alessio to shoot stills on set. Far from the screengrab-esque imagery we are used to, they seep beyond the frames Luca creates and act as insights into the characters within the film. Alessio’s artistic stance is inspired, but always pays homage to the project at heart.
In the photos: Jordan Kristine Seamón, Jack Dylan Grazer, Vittoria Bottin, Tom Mercier, Spencer Moore II, Sebastiano Pigazzi, Kid Cudi, Francesca Scorsese, Faith Alabi, Corey Knight, Chloë Sevigny, Ben Taylor and Alice Braga
Brian Oldham was born in Orange, CA in 1993. He grew up as the only child, who was looking for creative and artistic ways to express himself. He was playing fictional and fairy tales games, that helped him to develop imagination. At the age of 16, Brian’s love for art and fantasy finally got an actual form when he discovered a potential that gives conceptual photography. As a self-taught photographer, Brian used different resources to develop photography skills. Today, Brian is recognized as a queer interdisciplinary artist, currently based in Los Angeles. He specialized in portrait photography and conceptual photography and found a distinctive way to express his imagination and talent.
In October of 2017, the photographer Jeff Mermelstein, who has been taking pictures of New York City street life since the early nineteen-eighties, was walking in midtown, on one of his near-daily shooting expeditions, when he encountered something he had never thought to capture before. “It was somewhere around Eighth Avenue and the mid-Forties,” Mermelstein told me from his home in Brooklyn, when I called him the other day. “I noticed that a woman was sitting there, tapping something out on her phone.” Operating on half-conscious instinct, as he often does when photographing, Mermelstein raised his own phone, went up to the woman, and took a picture, focussing not on her, as he might usually have done, but on the screen of her device. “She was doing a Google search, and it was something about wills, and a line came up about finding six thousand dollars in an attic. It was just a couple of lines there, but I suddenly felt, This could be the germ of a short story. It was a galvanizing moment.”
Jacobus Snyman is a South African born Photographer, Videographer and Creative Director.
Inspired by the ability to create art through photography, Jacobus' passion for story telling through visual imagery, remains core to his creative process.
It is this passion for narrative building that has seen him collaborate with clients such as Vanity Fair, Dr Martens, Primark, Woolworths and Country Road amongst others.
Hervé Lassïnce est un photographe et comédien français vivant à Paris.
Sa photographie est constituée pour beaucoup de portraits intimes. Familles, ami.e.s, amants et amoureux constituent l'essentiel de ses modèles, photographiés le plus souvent sur le vif, dans le flux du quotidien, en France ou à l’étranger (Russie, Mexique, Inde, Tunisie, États-Unis, Canada…).
Il est l'auteur du livre Mes frères (éditions Granon), et a fait l'objet de plusieurs expositions : à Paris (galeries P38 et galerie Agathe Gaillard, Philharmonie de Paris), à Marseille ainsi qu'à la Villa Noailles de Hyères (Festival international de la Mode et de la Photographie), à Los Angeles (galerie Paris-Berlin) et à Milan (galerie Offarch).
Il est régulièrement sollicité par la presse pour réaliser des portraits : Les Inrocks, Le Monde, AD magazine, Butt, Trax, Boycott, I-D magazine, Psychologies magazine, Athletica, La Parisienne, Têtu, Milk magazine, Egg… Il a ainsi réalisé les portraits de Jean-Michel Jarre, Benjamin Biolay, Christophe Honoré, Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, Perez, Yannick Haenel, Mathieu Lindon, Nabil Ayouch, Nils Schneider, Stéphane Giusti, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Sara Martins, etc.
