Aras Karimi, a Los Angeles based artist, looks at photography as a relationship between light and film: light as a playful actor and film as a serious recorder. He sees it as his job as a photographer to write the best scenario for this one-time instant play. Light itself, is the main subject of his works. He is interested in light as the story teller. In fact the scenes in his works are the medium to picture light, its mood on different surfaces and its personality in different spaces.

Photos Aras Karimi | Untitled works about light

The below video shows highlights from the ‘Stillness at the Speed of Light’ exhibition which was on show in May 2010 at The Vinyl Factory in Soho, London. The Exhibition showcased the extraordinary alchemy between light artist Chris Levine and pop/fashion icon Grace Jones. Chris Levine is the latest in a line of artists who worked with Grace Jones. He managed to make a step forward in the line of all the extraordinary iconic images of her which where created by other artists, like for example Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, by creating a stunning 3D portrait series using the lenticular printing technology.

Photos Chris Levine | Grace Jones | video: Delmar Mavignier

Currently the Foam Fotografiemuseum ( Photography museum) is presenting an exhibition of the stunning work by the photographic duo of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. The exhibition is titled: Pretty Much Everything. It shows approximately 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo’s career. Art, fashion and portrait works all exist next to each other. By disregarding any chronological order the combinations of images are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years.

Inez van Lamsweerde en Vinoodh Matadin launched their international career with the publication of ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image by use of a computer. The series typified van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s hyper-realistic style and was made to celebrate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.

Dubiousness is at the base of practically every image they make. Their work is ambiguous in every sense of the word and balances deliberately on the thin rope between fashion and art, perverting both worlds, mirroring the strangeness of everyday life through an extreme enlargement of a singular part.

Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images – forming one flowing, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This showing will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh’s world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, and the spiritual and the banal.

Pretty Much Everything is on view from the 25th of June untill September 2010 in Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam.

Photos Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | M/M (Paris) | source: Foam Fotografiemuseum

Currently the museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany is showing an interesting exhibition from work of American artist Wade Guyton. The monochrome planes, stripes and bars, which Guyton has recently begun using very often, are computer-generated. The colour black and the letter X have become signature motifs in his work. These newer paintings by Wade herald the modernist motif par excellence: the monochrome. The classical monochromes by Alexander Rodchenko or Robert Ryman had already served to reduce painting to its essence: color, canvas, and frame. It can be assumed that Guyton’s monochrome bars, even when they appear in larger complexes, have a similar objective to that of Rodchenko and Ryman, namely self-reflective painting. However where other artists have used brushes, light, sounds or even metaphors to paint, Wade started (ab) using an inkjet printer. As medium he started out with paper but moved to canvas. He prints the elementary geometric forms he uses over and over again by feeding the canvas into the printer again and again. This sometimes causes the print head to lose grip. These errors in the printing process produce elisions and streaks.

Guyton follows a strict plan; it is for instance important that the dimensions of each canvas be adapted to the technical details and the space in question. And although the width of all the artist’s works produced on the printer is the same, the length is oriented to the architecture of the exhibition room.

The exhibition in the museum Ludwig is curated by Dr. Julia Friedrich and will run until  22-08-2010

Photos Wade Guyton Maurice Cox | museum Ludwig

Sepp Magazine is an exercise by FIFA in combining fashion and lifestyle with football. It Takes its name from outgoing FIFA President Sepp Blatter. The Magazine explores the issues surrounding football, fashion, life and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. This is done in a surprisingly insightful  way by some of the best photographers and art directors. Sepp Magazine is edited by Markus Ebner and fashion journalist Godfrey Deeny. It is art directed by the talented Mirko Borsche.

For the current installment of Sepp, which hit newsstands this week, Ebner marshaled several fashion luminaries. Ellen von Unwerth contributes photographs of Germany’s rising soccer stars. Karl Lagerfeld dreams—and draws—himself into the game in a series of idiosyncratic watercolors where he drew some of his favorite stars, like Ribery, Kaka and Wayne Rooney, Argentine icon Maradona is rendered by Anna Sui and Clinique collaborator Hiroshi Tanabe. Henrique Gendre portraits models from Brazil posing in the country’s playing colors, as well as architectural photographs of host nation South Africa’s new stadiums and some of the world’s greatest fashion designers created their very own football uniforms. It seems that among them there is also a mini dress football outfit for the national football team of The Netherlands (Oranje). These designer football outfits where shot by Rene Habermacher for this issue.

On paper, high fashion and football are unlikely companions but the team behind Sepp Magazine have turned this project into a fascinating and engaging ultra-glossy biennial.

Photos: Sepp Magazine and Nowness  | Verlag Neunundsechzig | FIFA World Cup in South Africa