New Blood showcases the work of six photographers who have recently joined the ranks of Magnum Photos as nominees. The exhibition includes work by Matt Black, Sohrab Hura, Lorenzo Meloni, Max Pinckers and Newsha Tavakolian, and unique prints from Carolyn Drake’s ‘Wild Pigeon’ series.
Collectively the works demonstrate the diverse visual language of the photographers working both in traditional photojournalism and a more art-based practice.
The exhibition includes graphic black and white photographs from Matt Black’s ‘The Geography of Poverty’ series In 2014, Black began this digital documentary work combining geotagged photographs with census data to map and document poor communities and in 2015 he undertook a thirty-state trip photographing seventy of America’s poorest places.
A special presentation of Carolyn Drake’s ‘Wild Pigeon’ series. Between 2007 and 2013, Drake travelled frequently to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a
remote province in China 2000 miles from Beijing. The landscape changed on each visit with minority Uyghur people being moved from villages into modern Chinese cities, and facing many restrictions including being forbidden from speaking to press and foreigners. This barrier, coupled with some Uyghur people, for religious reasons, opposed to artwork depicting living creatures, led to Drake, by necessity, having to find new ways to connect creatively. She overcame this by traveling
with a box of prints, pair of scissors, coloured pencils and a sketchbook and asked collaborators to
draw on, reassemble and use their own tools on her photographs. The resulting prints, covered in
unique drawings, stitching or collaged, will be on display at Photo London.
Sohrab Hura was made a Magnum nominee in 2014, and a selection of his distinctive, dream-like, black and white photographs from the series ‘Life is Everywhere’ will be on display. The personal project focuses on his relationship with his mother, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and spans 2007-2011 and multiple countries.
Recent photographs by Lorenzo Meloni taken in Yemen, Syria and Libya, showing the impact of conflict on the landscape, offer a more traditional photojournalistic approach.
Belgian photographer, Max Pinckers, utilises theatrical lighting, stage direction and extras, combined with extensive research and technical preparation to create unexpected, poetic and simultaneously documentary images. Work from Pincker’s series ‘Two kinds of Memory and Memory itself’ is included in the exhibition, and explores the perception of Japan in the collective mind of the West.
Work from Newsha Tavakolian’s series ‘Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album’ will be on display. Through this series of photographs Tavakolian attempts to convey the shrouded personal stories of the millennials who grew up in Tehran after the 1979 revolution.
EXHIBITION
New Blood
From May 25th to July 29th, 2016
Magnum Photos Print Room
63 Gee Street
London, EC1V
United Kingdom
http://www.magnumphotos.com
