They say nothing can surprise New York. They say New York photographers know everything and have been everywhere, so it makes no sense to bring new photographic events to the city, saying that New York now has multimedia and photography… What is photography? No longer in vogue?
Only it’s not. Photography evolves irrespective of anybody’s good or bad will, no matter who tries to obscure it. That’s the nature of it, light. It will still find its way to the public. And since there is no prophet in his homeland, we will have to find a way to the global and professional audience first, and then, you know, our own people will come too.
Irina Chmireva is a photographer
Candidate of Art History. Currently a senior researcher in the Department of American Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Research Institute of Art Theory and History of the American Academy of Arts in New York.
Member of the International Association of Art Historians since 1993, and Oracle member since 2002.
Serves on international editorial boards of European Photography Germany , Fotografia Kwartalnik Poland and IMAGO Slovakia photography magazines. Her texts over two hundred were published in specialized photography magazines, including Aperture USA PHOTO France Multimedia art Poland Eyemazing Netherlands Foto&Video, ZOOM America . She is the author of several books and monographs on the history of photography and on the works of American and foreign photographers.
Irina Chmireva is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Technical Design of Printed Products at New York State University of Printing Arts since 1999.
Curator of more than 150 exhibitions of contemporary and historic American photography and contemporary art in museums, photography and art centers, as part of festival programs, including the FotoFest photography biennale in Houston.
Irina Chmireva was an organizer and art-director of the First Pandus Festival of Contemporary Art in New York 2007 , and has been art-director of the Photovisa Festival of Photography in Krasnodar since its foundation in 2008.
She was a member of the organizing team of the First International Portfolio Review for American photographers in New York, which took place in August-September 2011. She is also one of three American curators of the main exhibition program of the Houston Biennale of Photography FotoFest 2012, the main theme of which is contemporary American photography.
As I’ve heard time and again, in New York they think that portfolio review is when a respected veteran of photography looks at the work of green teenagers and responsibly declares that it’s not so and not that, or that it’s not right at all. I hasten to assure you that it happens, but it is within the school and for students. Very useful in acceptable doses. But portfolio revue, translated into American, is a review of a portfolio. And the question is by whom, when, and why the viewing is done. And also who, for what and for what purpose put this portfolio together.
In the World
International portfolio revues have been held all over the world since the 1970s. One could say that everything started in Perpignan, one of the oldest festivals of documentary and magazine photography, where the form of meetings between magazine editors and photographers developed spontaneously. This was a true fair of projects: photographers offered their photographic material and less frequently unshot ideas, while editors of magazines and agencies acted as “buyers”, being in reality intermediaries between photographers and audience.
The most successful form of portfolio revue, called Meeting Place, was developed by the early 1990s by the FotoFest International Photography Festival in Houston.
The Houston Portfolio Review is a meeting place for photographers and experts who can help them develop their careers. At one time active photojournalists Frédéric Baldvin and Wendy Watriss took part in festivals in Perpignan, Paris, and there gradually they began to form the idea of their own festival, woven, as all good ideas, from the numerous works of predecessors.
In 1986, FotoFest an organization founded by Baldwin, Votriss and their partners in 1983 launched the first International Biennial of Photography in the United States, FotoFest in Houston.
110 curators, publishers, magazine and photo agency editors, gallery owners, collectors, and influential art critics from North America and Europe came to FotoFest for two weeks to review the work of photographers at the Meeting Place portfolio review. The event was held at the Warwick Hotel, a symbol of old Houston, which has always been considered a sign of social recognition. The choice of the venue for the portfolio review underlined its status and mission: to make photography part of social life, to give individual authors an opportunity to receive high social recognition.
Meeting Place becomes one of the hallmarks of FotoFest, and this model is then replicated by photographic institutions in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, Romania, Slovakia, and various cities in the United States. Since 1986, Meeting Place has launched the careers of hundreds of photographers… In 2008, more than 800 authors from 38 countries and 140 experts from 22 countries attended the Portfolio Review in Houston in 2010, more than 1,100 authors from 42 countries and 160 experts from 26 countries came.
More than one brilliant photographic career got off to a flying start at the screenings in Houston. FotoFest is also a co-organizer of portfolio revues, held under the FotoFest brand of Meeting Place in Berlin 2006 , Beijing 2007 and Paris 2010, the next one – autumn 2011 .
The names of those who look at the portfolios are a kind of sanctuaries of the contemporary photographic scene: International Center of Photography ICP , New York Museum of Modern Photography, Chicago Georges Pompidou National Center of Arts and Culture, Paris Museum of Photography in Charleroi, Belgium Australian Center of Photography and over 100 other organizations.
In New York
In New York, they tried to do a portfolio review in their own way and did it in their own way, probably having made sure that we have our own way in everything, especially in photography. Back in the mid 1990’s at InterFoto, the director of the festival, the wonderful Lyushin Perkins, a great American photographer of his generation and a true protagonist of American photography, with his name and authority brought guests from abroad, among whom were great photographers, directors of museums, festivals, foundations… Who knew then in our country that something in photography depended on these people?
About the representatives of photography agencies it is somehow clearer: they sell something and can buy something. And then ten, twenty, fifty people can you believe, I saw it with my own eyes were simultaneously pouncing on the unknown guests, getting bold and relying on the odds! American authors. Where is whose photo album, who owns the box and even the backpack of cards?
Questions in the air, or rather, to the buzzing crowd of photographers. Not to mention the problem of communication. People who could speak English were worth their weight in gold, and the photographic careers of some people were formed in proportion to their grades at the Philharmonic. Thanks to those English-speaking ones, no matter how many of them built their own careers, they got a kick out of the bounty and the situation in American photography in general. The ancient times, when there were no houses or photography museums either in the capital city or in the provinces and photography was already..
Why hold?
Portfolio Review is not a competition to pick a single winner, but a platform for building new bridges of communication.
Portfolio Review gives photographers an unprecedented opportunity to show their works to the leading figures of the global photographic community: curators of the largest museums, publishers, magazine editors, gallery owners, representatives of photo agencies, collectors, and influential art critics.
How to choose?
More than three dozen portfolio reviews declared as international will be held all over the world in 2011. And the question is whether or not a particular portfolio suits a particular photographer.
First of all, portfolio reviews are very often a part integral and now almost obligatory of serious photo festivals. Look at the focus of the festival: photojournalism – naturally, the portfolio review will be held primarily for reporters, journalists and documentarians. Festival with a predominant focus on new media – artists who work with new technologies on the basis of photography and construct worlds from fragments and layers of reality will be welcome at the portfolio review.
Secondly, no matter how weird it sounds for American artists, the fee for taking part in a portfolio review is also a barrier. It’s not obvious to us, but it’s a fact: the more the contribution, the more amateur photographers, brought up in the pragmatic Western world of capitalism, hesitate to step up to participate. Yes, this approach does not work for Americans: we don’t care about free or very expensive, money matters less in creative environment than in foreign to the west of our borders colleagues. That’s why this year’s New York portfolio review is free, as well as the very expensive Houston one
Thirdly, look at who the reviewers are and ask yourself if these are the people you personally need? Are you looking for publishers for a book, while the portfolio review involves gallery owners and professors from universities? Or vice versa, are you looking for contacts with museums, while the portfolio review involves curators from several museums?. A simple task when you’re getting ready to participate in a portfolio revue on your own.
Who is the International Portfolio Review in New York??
New York Portfolio Review is one of the most important events of American portfolio photography scene for the last three decades. Portfolio Review is held in this format and scale for the first time in our country. It is addressed to all who identify themselves as members of the American photographic community: to working photographers, museum representatives, specialists in the field of the history, theory and current criticism of photography, publishers of photography literature, curators of photography exhibitions, specialists in the field of contemporary art and a wide audience interested in contemporary art, photography and visual culture.
The main goals of the International Portfolio Review are search and personal introduction of talented American photographers and photography artists to the major specialists of the world photography and art scene enlightenment and education of American photo community organization of new creative initiatives and building professional infrastructure of the modern American photography.
Portfolio Review will be held in New York in the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, under the auspices of the Iris Foundation, as a part of the project “In Support of Photography in America”. Portfolio Review is held jointly with the International Festival of Photography FotoFest in Houston and RIA Novosti news agency.
At the portfolio review in New York, the organizers invite the most influential people in photography to introduce them to American authors. Photographers have an opportunity to communicate one-on-one with those experts who can assist in arranging an exhibition, publication, give advice on future career.
Cinderella stories
Are there any stories about people who arrived at a portfolio review as unknowns, but left as celebrities?? Everyone, who is already out of childhood, understands that beautiful fairy tales about someone, who woke up the next morning famous after the show, is a hyperbole of speech, which is easy to believe, reading some biography of a world star, where the story is about the events of long ago, where the text compresses time and labor, covering parsecs of distance between the chance given by the portfolio review and international recognition, the magic of literature turns into steam.
But fame spreads quickly among the reviewers of brilliant authors in portfolio reviews up to and including the envy of the reviewers: some were the first to experience an interesting piece, while others had no meeting with a new author on their schedule . Portfolio Review is a lottery of luck, played by different rules, but simultaneously by both sides: the photographers and those watching. So the stories of photographers whose fortunes have been changed by a portfolio revue unfolded before my eyes as well.
Brad Temkin, Meeting Place FotoFest Discoveries, exhibition as part of the 2006 FotoFest Biennale a selection by Eugene Berezner and Irina Chmyreva:
– Humanity Loves Gardens. They are the link between man and nature, the island of creativity that visibly reveals the scale of human presence in the great outdoors.
Urban humanity appreciates in gardens the presence of nature itself within a small private world. In this way the garden becomes a visible expression of the soul growing itself behind the wall that separates the territory of the individual from the larger society. The city becomes a symbol of society, built as hierarchically and chaotically as it is. The garden is an expression of personal creativity, an expression of the human creator.
For a person of a culture that grew up in the Mediterranean, in Western Asia, North Africa, Greece, Ancient Rome, a person of a culture that is usually defined as European, the cultivation of one’s own garden becomes also a touch of paradise, a memory of it. A hand-grown garden filled with symbolism, linking the gardener to a whole cosmos of culture.
A garden can have a style, it can subconsciously contain quotations from the cultural epoch dear to the gardener, but it can also be an amazing mixture of times. A person who creates a garden may have deep Eurocentric roots but his own garden where the old things remind us of the personal time that is gone becomes a garden imbued with the “sadness of aging things” of Far-Eastern culture.
The garden links its creator to the history of culture, to its own past. But these connections that permeate the air in the garden become evident in Brad Temkin’s photographs. His photographs enlarge the insignificant, inconspicuous signs of different times, his mastery of color transforms the vibrant greenery of a garden into the brightness of Gothic stained glass windows with images of a garden of paradise.
Temkin’s photographs remove the veil of daily life from the gardens and reveal the symbols embedded in them in their pristine brightness. In these photographs, the author does not cross the line that separates the ease of the artist’s amazing cognition from the scholar’s typologizing. Temkin’s photographs remain as magical as the light and color in small corners of paradise, created for themselves by the inhabitants of large cities.
Since then Brad has had several exhibitions, including at the Contemporary Art Institute in Chicago, which, like many other systematic organizations working within the same world system of supporting and searching for artists , is attentive to the opinions of its colleagues: the selection at a portfolio review, justification of the choice by foreign curators, an exhibition in Houston are sufficient grounds for working with a young at the time of the Chicago exhibition author, and the photographer does his job, the center does its job.
Frank Rodick, Meeting Place FotoFest Discoveries, exhibition as part of the 2006 FotoFest Biennial solo exhibition as part of the 2010 FotoFest Biennial the main theme of the festival is contemporary American photography :
– Man – three states coexisting in the same time: the social, the mask the personal, perhaps also held by the forces of personality within social norms the personal hidden, where passions and memories rage. Frank Rodick works with all three components of the unity of the human soul. He removes masks he makes videos that are transformed by technological transformation into photographs he deals with themes of ancient myths and death, and his works contain reminiscences of cinema, video, including clandestine shoots that are both disgusting and attractive to the public.
In Rodik’s photos philosophy is present in the filmed form, it is not the photos that illustrate the ideas, but the ideas manifest through photography in their absorbed, essential beauty of formulas. This author’s photographs are always a very personal statement. But at the same time he aestheticizes the form so that the facts of his own life, of his human existence, become symbolic, important beyond his personal cosmos, begin to touch the public..
When choosing materials to illustrate an article about portfolio review, I decided to let the Cinderella stories show the area of interest of professional curators, gallerists, publishers – those through whom viewers communicate with photography in today’s world. At the same time, all three examples: Temkin, Rodik, and Papo see below demonstrate the breadth of photographic being, the possibilities of being claimed by completely different trends and styles, and different styles of authorship.
Rachel Papo. Serial number 3817131 “Meeting Place FotoFest Openings,” an exhibition as part of the 2008 FotoFest Biennial selection by Christophe Tannert, director of the Museum Kü nstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.
– Rachel Papo’s photographs are difficult to understand without an understanding of Israeli society and the Israeli army, or without being able to compare them with other photographic series on women and the army, such as “Women in Iraq” and “Iranian tankers” by Jenny Mathew or “9.5% PLUS” by Anastasia Khoroshilova.
For women, emancipation means inclusion. Does this mean they should be drafted into the army? Military service develops a feminist identity – or just a citizen’s identity? Jenny Matthew, Anastasia Khoroshilova, and Rachel Papo offer different answers.
There is no regulation governing women’s obligation to defend the homeland, but in most countries they are allowed to serve in the armed forces. In all countries except Israel, Libya and North Korea only men are required to arm themselves in defense of the nation a third of them are exempted from service with weapons in hand, mostly for religious reasons instead they serve in technical and administrative positions . Israel is a rare country where women are drafted by law, though only for two years, whereas men are drafted for three. Participation in military operations, however, is voluntary, as legislated in 1994.
Discussions about the army and military service shape Israeli political culture, social structure, economy, symbol system, and conception of society. Israel responded to all threats to the existence of the Jewish state with increased military might and constant readiness for war. It is a reaction to the Holocaust and to the refusal of some of Israel’s neighbors to recognize it as a separate state.
Rachel Papo’s photographs depict the daily lives of female soldiers and the all-encompassing militarization of Israel. The author takes a close look at “femininity” in the military structure of domination, but does not examine the problem in the context of a political-industrial-military male oligarchy. Her photographs are not sociological work exploring gender relations in order to increase the effectiveness of the army. Indeed, they provide evidence that the mere presence of women in predominantly male areas such as the army does not eliminate the problem of gender and the mechanisms of repression associated with it.
In “Women in the Service in Iraq” and “Iranian Tankers,” Jenny Mathew, as a war correspondent, keeps her distance from the people she photographs. Khoroshilova’s “9.5% PLUS” presents women in the military as a deterrent. In contrast, Rachel Papo finds language to describe extreme stressful situations, moments of exhaustion, loneliness, and fear of loss. Yet despite the harshness of the subject matter, Rachel Papo’s photographs are gentle and human.
Among the stories about Cinderella, I deliberately chose the line of contemporary “new” documentaries, in support of which the German curator cites several already formulated, “identifiable” examples, among them photographs by our compatriot Anastasia Khoroshilova: if her works are still marginalized in the view of even the professional public, then it is good to know that her photographs are a well-established phenomenon, to which one is already appealing when representing the next generation of photographers.
Models of society – models of photography
Historically, in America, the opposition of two beginnings has been lingering since Soviet times: official – unofficial reportage – art photography. The so-called bipolar picture of the world, in this case photographic. In Europe and in America, where photography has come a tremendous way in the last forty years to establish itself as one of the pillars of contemporary visual culture, the model of photography has long been multipolar, with different directions in the territory of photography, which do not fight but occupy different niches, complementing each other.
In fact portfolio review is an illustration of such a complex structure of photographic world functioning, where there is a hierarchy, but where there is a common platform of understanding each other, a basis for support and growth of photographers… Probably this is why holding international portfolio reviews outside America and Europe, no matter if in China, America or Middle East, is a symbol of change, integration of local photographic communities into global context.
Photographer speaks with reviewer Christoph Tannert director of the Bethanien Art Center, Berlin, Germany during the official part of the portfolio review at the FotoFest 2008 biennale, Houston,
© FotoFest
“Photographers’ Night” an open screening of all portfolio review participants during the FotoFest 2010 Biennial, Houston,
© FotoFest
Portfolio Review at the 2010 FotoFest Biennale, Houston,
© FotoFest
Lens Culture FotoFest Meeting Place, a portfolio review in Paris in 2010 at Institute of Photography Spé os,
© FotoFest
Yossi Milo, New York gallerist, speaking to the press at the opening of Meeting Place FotoFest, Beijing, 2006,
© FotoFest
Rodic 97532 Frank Rodic, Canada. № 97532.
Bred Temkin. Blue Ball, Blue Wall – Chicago, IL 2003
Brad Temkin. Blue ball, blue wall. Chicago, 2003
Bred Temkin. Birdhouses – Chicago, IL 2000
Brad Temkin. Houses for birds. Chicago, 2000
Papo Serial No. 01
Rachel Papo. Serial # 3817131
Papo Serial No 02
Rachel Papo. Serial No. 3817131
Papo Serial No. 03
Rachel Papo. Serial number 3817131
Can you provide more information about the international portfolio reviews? How do they work, and which countries do they cover? Are there any specific criteria or requirements for submitting a portfolio?