At the heart of Gina Soden’s photography is a preoccupation with abandoned structures and locations. Travelling widely to undisclosed sites throughout Europe, she explores the boundaries of beauty, decay, nostalgia and neglect. The genesis of each piece is often the unique architectural character of each location, heightened by their painfully slow transformation after years of abandonment.
The compositions feature derelict asylums, long since closed schools, ex-military compounds and famous city power stations in various stages of decay. The results are striking and poignant, at once both edgy in their contemporary aesthetic and nostalgic in their ruinous beauty. The work is underscored by the potential controversy of gaining unlicensed access to the out of bounds areas.
Natural Selection, The Fine Art Society 27th July to 29th August 2013,
Blumenfeld Studio: New York, 1941 – 1960 looks at one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, Erwin Blumenfeld and his latter works from his career in New York. Having produced an extensive body of work throughout his thirty-five year career, it was in the USA, after the war in the context of economic growth and a buoyant and expanding press, that Blumenfeld’s humorous, inventive and personal work flourished.
After fleeing occupied France in 1941 to settle in New York, the German-born photographer was immediately signed up by Harper’s Bazaar, collaborating with Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland on the magazine’s fashion shoots. After only three years of working in the USA, he had become one of the most famous and highly paid photographers in the business, with the New York Times heralding him as an “outstanding leader in imaginative photography”. A highlight of his career in America was his 15 year collaboration with Vogue and Alexander Liberman, shooting over fifty US Vogue covers including portraits of famous models and high society women from the time; Babe Paley, Dovima, Jean Patchett and Carmen Dell’Orefice. He also regularly worked with other American fashion magazines such as Cosmopolitan (for which he shot Grace Kelly in 1955) and Life Magazine, as well as producing major advertising campaigns for fashion and beauty clients including Dior, Elizabeth Arden, Max Factor, L’Oréal and Helena Rubenstein.
Highly inventive and often opposing conventional codes, Blumenfeld developed his own idiosyncratic style, using photomontage, solarisation, colour slides and a host of hybrid techniques. From the start of his career, he was very much influenced by the idea of photography as art, wishing to be respected as an avant-garde artist rather than a fashion photographer. Embracing his creativity by “smuggling art” into his commercial projects, Blumenfeld frequently drew inspiration from art history and his interest in graphics, for example he took a modern twist on Vermeer’s Girl with a pearl earring for US Vogue and was inspired by Manet’s Bar des Folies Bergères for a Harper’s Bazaar shoot in 1941.
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