French engineer Georges Poulet’s (1848 – 1936) photographs of railway construction in Argentina convey a sense of the pioneering spirit characteristic of the nineteenth century. These cyanotypes depart from customary notions of documentary photography, taking the viewer on an intensely atmospheric journey through the largely unspoiled Argentina of the late nineteenth century. They also reveal a desire to record technological progress in an artistic way. The mysterious blues produced by the cyanotype process create a special ambience, while the captions written elegantly in red ink at the bottom of each photo provide an element of narrative and of contrast.

Scientist Sir John Frederick Herschel invented the cyanotype (more commonly known as the blueprint) in the early days of photography. Engineers and architects used it to reproduce technical drawings, maps and so forth; but artists also employed the technique and its influence is evident in their work.

Poulet employs the advantages of the cyanotype medium: its ability to reproduce reality, and the blue that is an integral part of it. Blue, of course, has a metaphorical dimension, symbolising longing for far-off places. In one of those distant regions we encounter the subject of Poulet’s series of cyanotypes: full of yearning, he shows us the railway in Argentina as in a dream, flooded in a melancholy blue.

Please join us for the opening of this exhibition on Thursday 31^st May, 2012 from          6 – 9 pm at 51 Hoxton Square.

Abridged text from “Aurora Argentina”, an illustrated publication accompanying the exhibition and containing a complete catalogue of Poulet’s Argentinian cyanotypes.

WassinkLundgren is a partnership between Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren, which began in 2005 after they both graduated from the Utrecht School of Arts, The Netherlands. Through collaboration, they make work often described as conceptual documentary photography.

In 2007 they published Empty Bottles, which won the prestigious Prix du Livre for Best Contemporary Photobook at the Rencontres d’Arles Photofestival, was nominated by Thomas Weski as ‘Best Photography Book of 2007-8’ at the Kasseler Fotoforum, and was included by Martin Parr as one of the thirty ‘best books of the decade’ exhibition and catalogue presented at Photo Ireland 2011. Other publications include WassinkLundgren is Still Searching (2006), Lu Xiaoben (2010) and Tokyo Tokyo (2010) which is currently on show as part of Hijacked III at QUAD, Derby. The same body of work can also be seen at State of the Art at the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf and as part of The Dutch Photobook since 1945 at the Dutch Photo Museum in Rotterdam.

Wassink lives in London, where he finished an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Lundgren lives in Beijing, where he recently finished an MA at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. On 16th May they will both be in the same city to talk about their work and collaboration at Daniel Blau Gallery.

http://wassinklundgren.com/

Anthony Luvera is an Australian artist, writer and educator based in London. Since 2001 Luvera has collated photographs made by people living in London who have experienced being homeless. Between 2006 and 2008 he spent time in Belfast researching the archive of Belfast Exposed Photography and creating the body of work Residency with homeless people living in Belfast. Through these and other projects, and the social relationships upon which they are based, Luvera explores the tension between authorship (and artistic control), and the ethics involved in making photographs about other people’s lives.

Luvera’s photographic work has been exhibited widely in galleries, public spaces and festivals including the British Museum, London Underground’s Art on the Underground, National Portrait Gallery London, Belfast Exposed Photography, Australian Centre for Photography, Fotofreo and Les Rencontres D’Arles Photographie.  His writing appears regularly in a wide range of periodicals and peer-reviewed journals including Source, photographies, Hot Shoe International and Photomonitor. He lectures on under-graduate and post-graduate degree courses in the photography, visual art and social sciences faculties for a number of institutions, facilitates workshops and gives lectures for public education programmes and various community photography projects across the UK.

http://www.luvera.com/

This event runs from 7 pm at 51 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB.

Our talks are open to everyone. We recommend booking early to avoid disappointment. Numbers are limited to 60 people. Tickets to this event are available for sale above by clicking “BUY TICKETS”.

Photomonitor is proud to partner with Daniel Blau Ltd to promote engaging thought on photography and lens-based media in the UK and Ireland.  www.photomonitor.co.uk

Moving along into the 20th century, photographic technology advanced to such a degree that the operator of the camera no longer even needed to be present – imagine the first view of Earth from Space encrypted in video and produced in a Californian Lab. We can think back to the origins of photography and to Daguerre with his famous dioramas – large-scale theatrical backdrops that intended to represent more closely the feeling of being pulled into a vision of the mountains and streams of ancient Greece. So what happens when we reduce the idea of optics to a singular two-dimensional object? Can we identify our place within the frame or must we also compress, reduce, and rend the photograph to fit our own scale within the universe?

We live in a new era of rapid technological advancements built upon major achievements such as the infamous atomic bomb testings in the Pacific atolls. Why should our understanding of our place within the frame not also advance?

Please join us for our opening on Thursday 19th April from 6 – 9 pm at 51 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB.

German-American artist Esther Teichmann (b. 1980) received a Masters of Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2005 and a PhD by project also from the RCA in 2011. Her practice moves across still and moving image, collage and painting, creating alternate worlds, which blur autobiography and fiction. She continues to live and work in London where she is senior lecturer at the London College of Communication/UAL on the BA and MA program in photography. Teichmann’s work has been exhibited and published internationally, with group shows in London, Los Angeles, Berlin and Modena and solo exhibitions in the UK, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.

Her work can be viewed at www.estherteichmann.com

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, England. Mavor is the author of four books: Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Duke UP, 2007), Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden (Duke UP, 1999) Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Duke UP, 1995) and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour (Duke UP, 2012). She has lectured broadly in the US and the UK. For 2010-2011, Mavor was named the Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at University of Toronto.

Currently, Mavor is completing Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Hue of Blue (forthcoming from Reaktion in 2013).

This event will run from 6 – 9 pm at 51 Hoxton Square, London N15 4JU.

Tickets cost £5.00 and are available to purchase above by clicking “BUY TICKETS”.

http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2012/03/photographers-own-paper-negatives-from-the-1850s-2/

During Tokyo Photo Fair 2011, Simon Baker, Curator of Photography and International Art at Tate, presented the work of British photographer, Chris Shaw, together with Japanese post-war, avant-garde photographers of the Provoke movement, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, Kirkuji Kirwada, Takuma Nakahira, Masahisa Fukase and Ikko Narrahara, who, from a distance, served as a major inspiration to Shaw’s attitude and approach beginning with his celebrated book, Life as a Night Porter. The evening’s discussion will examine Baker and Shaw’s passion for Japanese photography and its influence on Shaw’s practice.

Chris Shaw began working in London hotels in 1993 and over a ten year period he created what would become Life as a Night Porter which was published in 2006 by Twin Palms. Born in 1967, Shaw studied photography at the West Surrey College of Art and Design at Farnham, graduating in 1989, and has had solo exhibitions at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, GUP Gallery in Amsterdam and 779 Gallery in Paris. Shaw has also been shown as part of Paris Photo and Arles Photography Festival in 2005.  He lives in Paris. His work was featured in issue 12 of 1000 Words.

Simon Baker is Curator of Photography and International Art at Tate. He is Tate’s first curator of photography and joined in 2009 from the University of Nottingham, where he was Associate-Professor of Art History. He has researched and written widely on surrealism, photography, and contemporary art; and co-curated the exhibitions Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (Hayward Gallery, London, 2006) and Close-Up: Proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film, and photography (The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2008).

This event runs from 7 pm at 51 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB.

Our talks are open to everyone. We recommend booking early to avoid disappointment. Numbers are limited to 60 people.

Tickets to this event are no longer for sale online. There will be a limited number of tickets available for £5 on the door on a first-come first-served basis.

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As Picasso was the central star for painting and Man Ray for modern photography, Gustave Le Gray was the prominent figure early 19th Century photographers had to conquer before they could make a name for themselves.

Like many of his colleagues, Le Gray was a painter before he enthusiastically embraced the new medium of photography. By 1849 he had entered the Paris photo scene with his calotype landscapes taken in Fontainebleau and from there found further influence teaching photography to a group of students including Du Camp, Le Secq, Mestral and Tournachon, who in turn would also go on to achieve great fame in photography.

His ground breaking inventions rapidly set new standards for size and quality. In 1857, his Vague Brisée, a “snap-shot” of a small boat with wind-filled sails and a breaking wave in the foreground, was shown to an approving and fascinated audience.

As a technical perfectionist, Le Gray was above all a great painter with the camera.

In addition to the excellent Vague Brisée three new discoveries will be shown, calotypes taken at Fontainebleau castle. Rare treasures from the estate of his colleague Le Secq, they appear to be the only surviving examples of these images.

We are thrilled to present these works to our American audience and consider our gallery very fortunate to reintroduce these pictures to the œuvre of Le Gray.

Information about our New York exhibition:

http://www.danielblau.com/fairs-events/2012/thoroughly-le-gray/

Warhol’s sensual early drawings coalesce brilliantly with the images from the first decades of photography – both selections have the capacity to teach us direct lessons on what it means to create, rather than to produce, as well as portraying the genesis of artist and medium.

It’s interesting to see what has happened in the 100 years between the generation of these photographs and of Warhol’s drawings. The photograph was a revolutionary development, which caused many frustrated artists to swap their paint brushes for cameras and to utilize photography as their main artistic media.

As a new discovery we’re showing a series of photographs of a tapestry taken by the Bisson brothers for the Duke of Luynes in 1855 – 6 successive photographs arranged side by side to form a large picture of about 70 x 100 cm!

Quote from the catalogue essay by  Sydney Picasso.

The name “Andy Warhol” brings to mind colourful silkscreens and cans of soup: glossy, finished products arranged neatly on gallery and museum walls. However, his early drawings exhibit a profound technical ability, a draftsman’s skill that reveals a lesser-known Warhol.

We will be showing a collection of extremely rare works from the 1950′s. These are Warhol’s manual experiments with mechanical reproduction and have not seen the light of day for over 50 years. His process of tracing photographs from projected images and blotting the ink onto other pieces of paper is a rudimentary form of printmaking involving multiple stages. We are excited to exhibit these moments of metamorphosis, testaments to a period of revolution in Warhol’s life and artistic career.

Whilst the drawings produced during his first years in New York were often commercial ventures, they embody the embryonic talent so apparent in his later art. These are preliminary drawings, stills from the film of artistic progress, intentional artworks in themselves. They are playfully filled with dotted lines and occasional patches of colour which contrast with the neutral dead surfaces of his subsequent work. This treasure trove from Warhol’s personal collection gives us invaluable new insight into his first ten years as an artist in New York and represents his budding genius. From kids in Central Park to gun-wielding men and a boy shooting up, these drawings are Warhol’s artistic take on the darker side of society.

TEFAF (The European Fine Art Fair)

STAND 443

MECC, 6229 GV Maastricht

The Netherlands

The relation between cinema and photography is beautifully explored in this book of photographs. Bate takes his cue from the celebrated filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to bring the issue of ‘seeing the other’ forward to a post-Soviet context. Located in the Baltic state of Estonia, the photographs associate the experience of everyday life with questions of memory, image and narrative.

If you would like to attend this event, please RSVP to:

london@danielblau.com

This event is free and runs from 6 – 8:30 pm at

51 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB.

We have selected the pictures not only for their artistic merit but also for the condition and quality of each print. Furthermore the focus of this small selection is on the transitional years 1850-60.

This is a particularly interesting time of rapid developments in photography. The invention of the glass negative and albumen paper gave the artists important choices of “soft” or “sharp focus”,  depending on the selected materials.

This difference is nicely illustrated in the two prints from the same negative by Baldus of Michaelangelo’s Slave. One is printed on salt paper and the other on albumen paper and both prints are beautiful in their own rights.

Some artists preferred the traditional paper negatives like for example de Beaucorps who in 1859/60 still used them on his extended travels in Europe and North Africa. Others like the Brothers Alinari or Bisson produced photographs of unsurpassed sharpness and clarity from glass negatives on albumen paper.

The Brothers Bisson made some of their greatest prints at this time. The large and mysterious photo of the Roman architectural detail is an outstanding example of their artistic excellence and technical achievements.

AIPAD

Park Avenue Armory

67th Street and Park Avenue

New York City

Opening: March 28 2012, 5 – 9 pm

Exhibition: March 29 – 31, 11 – 6 pm / April 1, 11 – 5 pm

Gustave Le Gray will not be included here, as his works are being shown in our special exhibition “Thoroughly Le Gray” at the rooms of C.G. Boerner.

http://www.danielblau.com/fairs-events/2012/thoroughly-le-gray/

As Picasso was the central star for painting and Man Ray for modern photography, Gustave Le Gray was the prominent figure early 19th Century photographers had to conquer before they could make a name for themselves.

Like many of his colleagues, Le Gray was a painter before he enthusiastically embraced the new medium of photography. By 1849 he had entered the Paris photo scene with his calotype landscapes taken in Fontainebleau and from there found further influence teaching photography to a group of students including Du Camp, Le Secq, Mestral and Tournachon, who in turn would also go on to achieve great fame in photography.

His ground breaking inventions rapidly set new standards for size and quality. In 1857, his Vague Brisée, a “snap-shot” of a small boat with wind-filled sails and a breaking wave in the foreground, was shown to an approving and fascinated audience.

As a technical perfectionist, Le Gray was above all a great painter with the camera.

In addition to the excellent Vague Brisée three new discoveries will be shown, calotypes taken at Fontainebleau castle. Rare treasures from the estate of his colleague Le Secq, they appear to be the only surviving examples of these images.

We are thrilled to present these works to our American audience and consider our gallery very fortunate to reintroduce these pictures to the œuvre of Le Gray.

Opening: March 27, 6 – 9 pm

Exhibition: March 28 – 30, 10 – 6 pm / March 31 & April 1, 11 – 5 pm

C.G. Boerner,

23 East 73 Street (3rd floor)

New York, NY 10021

+1 / 212 / 772 7330

contact@danielblau.com