Several exhibitions are on display through May 9, 2012, at the Central Exhibition Hall - Manege. There will be a total of 13 exhibitions bringing together national and international photographers, including four series of photographs presented in association with various international events, like the Rome Film Festival with Alec Soth and Tim Davis, the Rencontres d’Arles with Jon Rafman, and the Lianzhou International Photo Festival with Ouyang Xingkai. Also on display will be the work of Doug Menuez, Sergey Shestakov, Alinka Echeverria, Andrew Bush, Gonzalo Lebrija, Jane Stravs, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, as well as Stephen Shore and Harry Gruyaert.

• 30.03–09.05 : Doug Menuez “Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000” presented by the Artist

• 30.03–09.05 : Alec Soth « La Belle Dame sans Merci » presented by the Artist, FOTOGRAFIA International Festival of Rome and Zètema Progetto Cultura (curator: Marco Delogu)
In 1930 Società Editrice La Cultura, based in Milan and Rome, published the first edition of La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, a fundamental text in modern comparative studies by the critic Mario Praz, which introduced new reading itineraries for texts by English, French and Italian writers. Chapter IV is entitled La belle dame sans merci, after the ballad by John Keats. Following several lines from the poem and a passage from Giuseppe Parini’s ode A Silvia, it continues “with an extremely obvious and bald statement. There have always existed Fatal Women both in mythology and in literature, since mythology and literature are imaginative reflections of the various aspects of real life, and real life has always provided more or less complete examples of arrogant and cruel female characters.” The English poet’s verses constitute one of the best-known artistic formulations of this theme and the work of Alec Soth in turn picks up the threads. It is a complicated intertwining of four subjects: beauty, eroticism, love and death, of which the last two can never be treated separately. Francesco Zanot

• 30.03–09.05 : Tim Davis “The Upstate New York Olympics” in association with FOTOGRAFIA International Festival of Rome and Zètema Progetto Cultura and presented by the Artist and Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York
The Upstate New York Olympics is Tim Davis’ attempt to make art while playing sports. Exploring his local Hudson Valley landscape, Davis invents new sporting events, like the ‘Lawn Jockey Leap Frog’, the ‘Trash Day Knife Toss’, or the ‘Compost Freestyle’ and then performs them for the video camera. Shot in HD video with the exactness of his still photographs, the actual events are sincere attempts to interact with and underseen landscape and comic commentary on the arbitrariness of the actual Olympics. Davis acts like an athlete but doesn’t look like one and these games often involve a healthy amount of trespassing instead of overblown pomp and circumstance. In ‘Other Peoples’ Balls’, Davis jumps fences into strangers’ backyards and uses their sporting equipment. The videos, made over four seasons (unlike the actual Olympics which seem not to care about Spring and Autumn) are shown on multiple screens, and are accompanied by a display case of editioned cast bronze trophies for specified events.

• 30.03–09.05 : Sergey Shestakov “Journey into the future. Stop n°2” (curator: Olga Sviblova)

• 30.03–09.05 : Alinka Echeverria “Road to Tepeyac” presented by the Artist
C’est dans un texte en nahuatl intitulé Nican Mopohua que sont consignés les récits de l’apparition de la Vierge dite de Guadalupe sur la colline de Tepeyac, à Mexico.
Ce site correspond à un ancien lieu de pèlerinage du nom de Tepeapac où avaient lieu des sacrifices humais du temps des anciennes civilisations précolombiennes. Les indigènes adoraient là différents dieux dont la mère portait le nom de Tonantzin, qui signifie “Notre Mère”. C’est donc selon un processus classique de remplacement d’une divinité ancienne par une figure catholique sur un site déjà dévolu à la croyance que se construit la vénération de la Vierge de Guadalupe. Selon la tradition, elle apparut à Juan Diego et cela est attesté à la fois par le fait qu’elle lui remit des fleurs qui ne poussent pas en ce lieu et que son image s’inscrivit de façon durable sur le tissus dans lequel elle les enveloppa.
La première apparition eut lieu le 9 décembre 1531 au matin. Irradiant de sa propre lumière elle indiqua à Juan Diego que l’on devait construire un temple sur le lieu de l’apparition et qu’il devait en informer l’évêque de Mexico.
Le même jour, dans l’après-midi, Juan Diego vient rendre compte de l’échec de sa mission. La Vierge lui demande d’insister et de revenir le lendemain.
Le 10 décembre Juan Diego demande à la Vierge de donner un signe afin de confirmer qu’il s’agit bien d’elle afin de convaincre l’évêque.
Le 12 décembre la Vierge demande à Juan Diego de retourner sur le lieu où elle lui était apparue la première fois et qu’il ramasse là toutes les fleurs qu’il pourrait trouver. Ce qu’il fit avant de les apporter à la Vierge qui les lui remit enveloppée dans un linge. Lorsque Juan Diego apporta les fleurs à l’évêque, ce dernier ouvrit le linge sur lequel, après que les fleurs furent tombées au sol, s’inscrivit miraculeusement l’image de la Vierge.
Le 12 décembre au matin, la Vierge apparut dans la maison de Juan Diego et guérit de la peste Juan Bernardino.
Chaque année, pour célébrer l’anniversaire de l’apparition de cette Vierge qui est devenue la Sainte patronne du Mexique, plus de six millions de pèlerins, venus à pied de tout le pays se rendent au sanctuaire de Tepeyac. Christian Caujolle

• 30.03–09.05 : Andrew Bush “Vector portraits” presented by Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and Julie Saul Gallery, New York
Begun in 1989, Andrew Bush’s series Vector Portraits was taken while the artist drove the city streets and freeways of Los Angeles. Either stopped in traffic or traveling at speeds of 20 to 70 miles per hour, the artist took portraits of other drivers using a medium-format roll-film camera and flash attached to the passenger side door of his car. Extended titles note particulars of speed, location or time with scientific precision while leaving other details unclear, such as “Man traveling southbound at 67 mph on U.S. Route 101 near Montecito, California, at 6:31 p.m. on or around Sunday, August 28, 1994”.
The photographs capture subjects in the ambiguous combination of private and public space created by a “private room on wheels.” The drivers are either alone in their vehicles lost in thought, or with passengers, revealing the dynamic between families, couples or friends. An examination of people and their cars in a city famous for its car culture, the series addresses personal privacy and challenges our definition of public space.

• 30.03–09.05 : Ouyang Xingkai “Hongjiang” in association with LIANZHOU FOTO and Catherine Philippot
My childhood was spent in the alleys of old towns like Xing Sha Chi and Dao Gu Cang in Changsha. When I was 7, my kind and conventional father was suddenly labeled a “Rightist.” The main income for a family of eight was cut off. So, every day before dawn I would follow my older brothers to the old warehouse by Xiang River to unload goods and pull a wooden trailer, to bring in extra income for the family. After laboring for a whole day we would only make 20 – 30 cents. When the night approached and we went home, occasionally, we would spend 2 cents for a fried green onion pancake from Granny Wang’s food stand in the old alley. We brothers shared the one green onion pancake and ran happily on the bumpy rocky roads, cheerful laughter spreading all over the old alley…
The wheel of time has rolled on, carrying my childhood away into the remote distance. Though the old streets and alleys of Changsha are now deeply buried under steel and concrete, my mind often wanders among the fragmented memories of my bumpy childhood: the slippery quartzite pavement after the rain, our shabby house filled with heavy oil smoke, and the image of our elders walking swiftly in old alleys filled with pear blossoms…
In October 2003, by chance I came to visit an old town in Xiangxi – Hong Jiang. I became friends with Shen Xianghua, a resident of the old town who was in his eighties but still maintained clear memories and sharp vision and hearing. He told me many folk stories about this old trading town, led me down the old alleys to visit the locals. As I was walking on the smooth quartzite pavement, entered a moss occupied old house, laid my eyes on the black shining furniture, or ate a piping hot green onion pancake, I felt as if I had stepped back in time to my childhood.
In the following 8 years, I traveled between City of Changsha and Hong Jiang dozens of times. I began my photography project with the architecture, and I took a series of photographs on the theme of the architecture and inhabitant environment in this old trading town; by finding and visiting craftsmen in different folk arts, I was able to record the living status of this special group of people. For 4 consecutive years, I celebrated the Spring Festival in Hong Jiang, observing and recording the local traditional festival customs. As I pushed open door after door to the old houses, I was able to photograph the quiet daily lives of over 50 long-time residents of this special place. It was through photographing Hong Jiang that I began rethinking humanity, life, and love, while simultaneously reliving many childhood memories. This is how this photo book “Hong Jiang” came into being.

• 30.03–09.05 : Jon Rafman “9-Eyes of Google Street View”
In Association with Les Rencontres d’Arles and presented by the Artist
In 2007, Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, this fleet of cars began an endless quest to photograph every highway and byway in the free world. Consistent with the company’s mission ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,’ this enormous project, titled Google Street View, was created for the sole purpose of adding a new feature to Google Maps. Every ten to twenty meters, the nine cameras automatically capture whatever moves through their frame. Computer software stitches the photos together to create panoramic images. To prevent identification of individuals and vehicles, faces and license plates are blurred.
In 2008, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.
Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality – as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.
Within the panoramas, I can locate images of gritty urban life reminiscent of hard-boiled American street photography. Or, if I prefer, I can find images of rural Americana that recall photography commissioned by the Farm Securities Administration during the depression. I can seek out postcard-perfect shots that capture what Cartier-Bresson titled ‘the decisive moment,’ as if I were a photojournalist responding instantaneously to an emerging event. Or I can search for passing scenes that remind me of one of Jeff Wall’s staged tableaux. At other times, I have been mesmerized by the sense of nostalgia, yearning, and loss in these images – qualities that evoke old family snapshots. A future historian may wish to study the architecture of this soon-to-be-demolished Northern Parisian banlieu. If Google chooses, their systematic storing of panoramic views serves photography’s historic role of cultural preservation.
The collections of Street Views both celebrate and critique the current world. To deny Google’s power over framing our perceptions would be delusional, but the curator, in seeking out frames within these frames, reminds us of our humanity. The artist/curator, in reasserting the significance of the human gaze within Street View, recognizes the pain and disempowerment in being declared insignificant. The artist/curator challenges Google’s imperial claims and questions the company’s right to be the only one framing our cognitions and perceptions.

• 30.03–09.05 : Gonzalo Lebrija “R75/5 Toaster” presented by Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris
Riding on a BMW motorcycle, Gonzalo Lebrija undertook a journey along the Peninsula Baja California. The choice of the vehicle for this action art is not free: the model in the series R75/5 has an accessory that Lebrija used as a working tool. Indeed, the two chrome plates on the sides of its gas tank – which has given to the vehicle the nickname of toaster – is used by Lebrija as a mirror reflecting the landscapes that he re-treats with a camera along his journey. The result is a collection of 66 photographs that translate, as a chronicle of travel, the vicissitudes of Lebrija through the Bajacaliforniano territory. The works of Gonzalo Lebrija always have a strong nature of stage performance. His photographs record actions where there are doses of courage and sense of epic. The solitary journey in the desert, camping opencast, evokes the screenplay of a film in which the protagonist is undertaking an adventure, male and tragic, following an impetus and imprecise boost, which is confronted to nature and quest for oneself.
However, the sober and elegantly formal handling of Lebrija conceals the strong emotional charge of his work. The synthetic and severely balanced compositions give to these photographs some sort of unpleasant distance, as if the artist were a dandy who doesn’t allow any kind of sentimentality. However, under the cold surface, remains the assertion that it is still possible to undertake actions of defiant individuality like those that once, in a mythical past, humans have done, leaving their footprints over time. In this way, the motorcycle (a kind of parody of the ‘motorcycle courier’) doesn’t become just a means of transport, but also the fetish incarnated by a symbolization that brings us back to the immediate identification to real and fictional characters, like Ulysses, Captain Ajab, Ernest Hemingway, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Peter Fonda, etc.
By capturing images through the metallic and curved surface of the gas tank, Lebrija uses the motorcycle as a medium. The action fits the role that the artist assigned to himself in this story. Indeed, heroes are not accustomed to talk about themselves. At the best, they would do it obliquely, as in this case, through the slight deformation of the landscape made by the board, and the added brightness by the chrome plate, that the alert viewer would interpret as the keys to decrypt out the author’s codes and enter the beautiful refractory surface of his pictures.
One the other hand, this project is the culmination of a visual investigation that Lebrija has developed over the past years. In 2000, he directed a wide range of photographs entitled Autopaisajes, which, as its name suggests, is the reflection of evanescent urban scenes captured on the surface of multicolored automobiles. Then in 2005, invited by the protected UNESCO patrimonial sites program, Lebrija introduced a Ferrari in the chapel of the Instituto Cultural Cabañas, in Guadalajara, to make a snapshot of the mural Hombre de fuego, José Clemente Orozco, projected on the Italian red car’s bodywork, providing an original metaphor of energy and power. Carlos Ashida

• 30.03–09.05 : Jane Stravs “American express” presented by Galerija Fotografija, Ljubljana
The series of black and white photographs on New York is today an anachronism of its own kind. Or else? Immanuel Wallerstein, the American theorist on world systems, states that the USA is renewing its economic–financial capitalist system by having pushed the system into crisis. What does New York look like in black and white? What did it look like before Obama and the crisis? Already in crisis! Jane Štravs points to the state of photography at a time when the new digital media allow everyone to be their own photographer, cameraman, and archivist. Can photography renovate itself as well? Most of Štravs’ photographs are but shots of shots, as the content within his photographs seems to be already framed on the street. Packed for memory instead of presenting Reality. These photographs are already “off the field,” functioning similarly as new wave films. The repetitive alteration of black and white surfaces is reminiscent of the time on the eve of the crisis. In Štravs’ photography various objects are presented in simple way, sometimes with repetitive motions over monochrome backdrops, creating enigmatic moving-picture icons. We see images that recall fascination with 1950s movies and the aesthetics of snapshots. Štravs presents shots of USA’s mythologies, racial segregation and its militaristic turn. Who is on the street? Where is the Public? What is the Public? These questions are again important to be posed in relation to the present series. Štravs’ photography never gives up, trying to challenge our perception and questioning where is our place in this world.
 Marina Gržinić (Dr. Marina Gržinić is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana and Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.)

• 30.03–09.05 : Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs “The Great Unreal” presented by Silverstein Gallery, New York
What to do as a young photographer, trained in, enamored of, yet burdened by the weight of certain American photographic icons: Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Robert Adams, Joel Sternfeld?
Team up, go on a road trip across America, and take the piss. Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (both Swiss and born in 1979) made a series of trips between 2005 and 2008, during which they photographed the clichés: desert landscapes, tract houses, funny signs, motel rooms, and the road itself. Yet instead of generating a subjective vision of America through documentary photographs, honoring that sacrosanct tension in art photography, the Salingerian duo has desecrated their own work, manipulating, splicing, puncturing, montaging, spattering, and rephotographing the original prints, as if in an effort to make the photographs emote more, to insert (or doubt?) the romantic loneliness of that other Swiss roadster Robert Frank; to enhance (or make fun of?) the deadpan humor of Stephen Shore; to augment (because maybe one just couldn’t quite feel it at the time?) the sense of revelation of William Eggleston.
The Great Unreal asks how true photography is and goes further: are we – were we ever –capable of authentic experience? Kevin Moore, Independent Curator, NYC

• 30.03–09.05 : Stephen Shore “Uncommon Places” presented by 303 Gallery, New York and Aperture Foundation, New York
Between 1973 and 1979 I made a series of trips across North America, photographing with a view camera. These were essentially journeys of exploration: exploring the changing culture of America and exploring how a photograph renders the segment of time and space in its scope. I chose a view camera because it describes the world with unparalleled precision; because the necessarily slow, deliberate working method it requires leads to conscious decision making; and because it’s the photographic means of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness.
Stephen Shore

Originally published in 1982, Stephen Shore’s legendary ‘Uncommon Places’ has influenced a generation of photographers. Shore was among the first artists to take color beyond the domain of advertising and fashion photography, and his large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition over the past thirty years. 
Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated vision of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore, in these images retains precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which a parking lot emptied of people, a hotel bedroom, or a building on a side street assumes both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. 
From 1965 to 1969, Shore spent much of his time documenting the scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York, later described by him as a substitute for college. Warhol roused in the young artist – then in his late teens – an ambivalent interest in commercial everyday culture, in its forms of production and its stereotypes. The method of working in series was crucial for Warhol, as reflected in his choice of techniques such as silk-screening. Ultimately, the many stars produced by the Factory, and photographed by Shore, led the young photographer to believe that identity is something that can be constructed.
In Shore’s early works there are elements of role-play. But it is primarily his journeys, and the ways in which he translates them into photographic sequences, that we may view as constructions of identity. Immersed in documenting the American landscape he ironically began to see himself as an ethnologist, and in keeping, began to wear a safari jacket while photographing. From ‘American Surfaces’ to the various stages of work that comprise the series ‘Uncommon Places’, Shore’s oeuvre repeatedly repositions him anew in his world. Each new photographic strategy Shore employs refers to the identities he assumes in the process. The viewer too is included in this game of repositioning, and thus is made a part of Shore’s constructions of identity.
The series of road trips Shore began taking in the summer of 1972 place him in a role typical of a member of the Beat generation. Born too late to have been a Beat himself, Shore was nonetheless familiar with the writings of Jack Kerouac and road movies like ‘Easy Rider’: the homeless man, in search of himself, adrift in the big, wide world.
‘Uncommon Places’ fits very neatly with developments in pop and conceptual art. This becomes clear if one concentrates more on how Shore constructs and presents time throughout the series than on the precious singular photograph. Taken as a whole, the images provide a throughout map of what amounts to a lifetime of movements in space and time. And through ‘Uncommon Places’ he constructs various identities – publishing pictures in books and showing them in exhibitions allows viewers to step into a specific place defined by Shore. In this way, the audience becomes involved in ‘Uncommon Places,’ which can also be seen as a biographical experiment.

• 30.03–09.05 : Harry Gruyaert “Moscow 1989-2009” presented by the Artist and Magnum Photos
During my first stay in the USSR in 1969, I expected to discover communism, and I found Dostoïevski and Gogol.
In 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I saw a society that was frozen and ossified, which no longer knew which god to turn to.
Suddenly a palette of unknown, washed-out, muted colors were offered to me, the image of this universe which existed between two worlds.
In 2009, the choice of an aggressive capitalism and frenzied consumerism imposed itself: flashy advertising invaded the public space. But the ‘Russian soul’ still dominates; there is not much greater feeling of freedom.

Central Exhibition Hall “Manege”
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