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

“How You Look At It” is a short fashion film directed and created by Poppy de Villeneuve. The movie is an intriguing cross over and melting between cinema and online viral fashion advertising.
De Villeneuve is a British photographer based in New York. Her father is Justin de Villeneuve, the Sixties fashion photographer who discovered Twiggy, and her mother is the model Jan de Villeneuve. Poppy herself began modelling at the age of 17 but found it “boring” so took up photography instead. She studied at the London College of Printing, and since graduating has worked for publications including Vogue and Dazed & Confused. She also exhibits her work regularly.

Nowness on the film and its director:
“Summer in the city: a bustling, stifling and less-than-calming experience. But even in the midst of blaring car-horns, sweltering commuters and dizzying throngs of irritable pedestrians, there’s a pocket of peace to be found in every metropolis. Such moments of sweet escape provide the inspiration for the How You Look At It film.”

“Poppy de Villeneuve (who has shot for Vogue, Jalouse and Nylon, among others) and starring rising Chinese fashion model Liu Wen, who was recently signed as the first Asian face of Estee Lauder. To create her moment of blissful cool, De Villeneuve took to the serene spaces of New York’s Asser Levy Recreation Center—a turn-of-the-century bath house, replete with Art Deco pool—where, in a heat-induced reverie, a Norma Kamali clad Wen is joined by former Sopranos regular and actor in the Martin Scorcese-produced HBO series Boardwalk Empire Edoardo Ballerini, for a sensual, teasingly ambiguous swimming lesson.”

Video: Poppy de Villeneuve  | backstage photos by fashion blogger Hanneli | source: Nowness/luxury group LVMH

Christopher Coppers is a Belgian artist who is based in Brussels. His current work consists, for a large part, of interventions, either with, within or on magazines. Construction and deconstruction are important key elements in his art. He has by now used many different magazines as his medium, for the most fashion related ones. Some examples are: Elle, Vogue, BEople, Playboy,View magazine, Vanity Fair and ID fashion magazine.
He Combines his love for printed matter with an obvious urge for creative distortion or destruction. Christopher extremely careful and diligent revisits these magazines, he dramatically reinterprets the original covers by intricately carving them and so transforming them into sculptures. By doing this he gives them a second purpose, a second life.

Photos: Christopher Coppers | magazines

The National Portrait Gallery in London has dedicated a retrospective exhibition to the work of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated photographers, Irving Penn (1917-2009).

The exhibition is brought together from major international collections and includes over 120 silver and platinum prints, many vintage, ranging from his portraits for Vogue magazine in the 1940s to some of his last work. The exhibition is a survey of Penn’s portraits of major cultural figures from the worlds of literature, Fashion, music and the visual and performing arts brought together from many international collections. Portraits include Truman Capote, Salvador Dalì, Marlene Dietrich, Christian Dior, T.S. Eliot, Duke Ellington, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicole Kidman, Willem de Kooning, Kate Moss, Jessye Norman, Rudolph Nureyev, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso, Harold Pinter, Igor Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams.

Penn’s photographs stand out for their elegance, the clean look of their images, a strong contrast between subject and background and a “less is more” aesthetic. These are the distinctive features of an oeuvre that marked and captured an epoch. The power of Irving Penn’s visual language is often found in the details and shades of his portraits. Through his sublime techniques of composition, light and printing, the character of his subjects is stripped naked before the camera lens.

Irving Penn said in 1975:
“Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world… very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe.”

The exhibition in the The National Portrait Gallery in London will run until the 6Th of June 2010 and will travel afterwards to Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni where it will be on display from the 1st of July to 19Th of September 2010.

Photos: Irving Penn | Photo top and 6Th photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters | Photo bottom: Cate Gillon/Getty Images | The National Portrait Gallery

Nick Knight is among the worlds most influential and visionary photographers. As a fashion photographer, he has consistently challenged conventional notions of beauty and is fêted for his groundbreaking creative collaborations with leading designers as well as editorial for W, British Vogue, Paris Vogue, Dazed & Confused, Another, Another Man and i-D magazines have consistently kept Knight at the vanguard of progressive image-making for the past three decades. His first book of photographs, Skinheads, was published in 1982. He has since produced Nicknight, a twelve year retrospective, and Flora, a series of flower pictures, both published by Schirmer Mosel. Knight’s work has been exhibited at international institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Saatchi Gallery, The Photographers Gallery and Hayward Gallery. He has also produced a permanent installation, Plant Power, for the Natural History Museum in London and was the first of Channel 4’s ‘Big 4′ 50-foot installations outside its London HQ in 2007.

The below Flower video by Nick Knight is featuring a remix of Special Cases by Massive Attack.

Photo and video: Nick Knight featuring Massive Attack | Youtube