mapjd@lcc

Overview The Exhibitions Program at the Center for Documentary Studies presents images, documents, sound, and written experiences in four galleries, bringing to light telling details and resonant moments in everyday life that might otherwise go unnoticed. CDS exhibitions connect people to those moments, and to a larger story. Serving as a community forum for documentary work, the galleries make the documentary arts accessible to a general audience and present experiences that inform, heighten our historical and cultural awareness, create discourse, foster understanding, and confront traditional views of "others."

The iconic South African photographer, in conversation with Max du Preez, discusses the literary influences on his work, including Athol Fugard and Herman Charles Bosman.

Then & Now - Eight South African Photographers Then and Now 160 Images View photos from the exhibit An exhibition of 160 photographs mounted in 5 venues at Duke University. South African photographer Paul Weinberg conceived and curated Then & Now which is comprised of black and white and color photographs from 8 South African documentary photographers. Twenty photographs were selected from each photographer, 10 made under apartheid and 10 photographs made after the historic democratic elections of 1994.

n asbestos fibre the diameter of a human hair is actually a cluster of two million individual fibres which could fit onto the head of a pin. If inhaled, minute fibrils can work their way deep into the lungs, where they cause asbestosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma, an otherwise unknown cancer of the lining of the lung or the abdominal cavity'. All of the three principal types of asbestos, white, brown and blue are carcinogenic, blue being the most deadly. Mesothelioma is invariably fatal and associated with the inhalation of asbestos fibre, usually blue asbestos. Even the most trivial exposure might result in mesothelioma, which can be latent in the body for forty or more years. Once the cancer becomes active, death follows inexorably within about twelve months. After witnessing the excruciatingly painful death of a friend who contracted mesothelioma I did some exploring of the aftermath of the mining of blue asbestos in Australia and South Africa. These are some of the photographs that resulted. In this introduction I briefly review a few of the factors at work in that aftermath.

David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein in 1930. After a spell in his family's clothing business, he became a full-time photographer in 1963. In addition to pursuing his own work, he has photographed for magazines, corporations, advertising agencies, and other institutions in South Africa and abroad. His work has been exhibited in South Africa, Europe, Britain, the United States, and Australia. In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, which has provided young South Africans with an entry into photography. He has won numerous award including the Hasselblad International Foundation Award in Photography in 2006.

Source Photographic Review presents: An audio interview with South African photographer David Goldblatt. Interview is accompanied by a slide show of the photographer's work. Original interview conducted by Mark Durden.

Academics and artists at London Metropolitan University worked with photographer Paul Trevor to make a selection of his images of East London digitally available to artists, students and researchers. The Collection includes 500 images (chosen from a total of 120,000) of the Spitalfields area from the 1970s to the 1990s, a period of rapid social and physical change. The Paul Trevor Collection is part of a larger archive project at London Metropolitan University, which will eventually include oral as well as visual narratives, that aims to represent aspects of the lives of local East End communities in their distinctive social, economic and political contexts. The process of producing this photographic dimension of the archive was lengthy and gave rise to challenging questions. What are the aesthetic, historical, and social dimensions of creating a photographic archive and how might these be related? Which factors contribute to the construction of a photographic archive as a relevant resource for public history and/or academic inquiry? How can aesthetic and social/political discourses work together to achieve this end?

David Goldblatt has photographed his native South Africa since the early 1970's, carefully observing the social, cultural and economic divides that characterise the country. His first publication, On the Mines, examined gold-mining in the East Rand area of the country. In Boksburg documented a small town which he sees as "shaped by white dreams and white properties" but which is ultimately "nondescript and elusive". Goldblatt often creates webs of likenesses and contrasts across an image, such as seen and seeing; young and old.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal first exploded into public light in April 2004 when reports and photographs of torture were revealed in a daring New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh. At a conference recently held at Stanford, entitled Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib, Hersh and a panel of experts came together to think through the legal, political, psychological, and ethical implications of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and also to weigh the consequences of the US government's evolving approach to handling enemy combatants and suspects taken during the war on terror. You can now find all of the presentations on iTunes (which you can download for free). Here is the lineup:

Networking promotes archival interest, says satisfied National Media Museum The National Media Museum has praised its collaboration with Flickr, which saw the UK institution make some of its photographic collections freely available online. Initially launched by the US Library of Congress and Flickr in January 2008, the project, dubbed The Commons, aims to give the public easier access to thousands of archived photographs while helping the library categorise them through Flickr's photo- tagging system, in effect harnessing the power of social networks.

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer. You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.*

THEORY: "Lee Friedlander: Museum of Modern Art, New York" Lee Friedlander: Museum of Modern Art, New York ArtForum, Sept, 2005 by Carol Armstrong Walking with a friend through the Lee Friedlander retrospective at MOMA, I noticed that the two of us each had a different way of looking at almost every early street photograph on view: One of us saw the photograph a certain way right off the bat and couldn't easily see it otherwise, while the other noticed everything else in the photo and could only see the "hook" after having it pointed out. What in one viewing looked like Americanized pieces of Cartier-Bresson poetic doubling in another couldn't be disentangled from a set of densely stratified spatial and perceptual conundrums that at once posit the transparency of photography and question it at every level.

THEORY - "Andreas Gursky and The Contemporary Sublime" Andreas Gursky and The Contemporary Sublime Art Journal, Winter, 2002 by Alix Ohlin The German photographer Andreas Gursky takes pictures of enormous spaces--stock exchanges, skyscrapers, mountain peaks--in which crowds of people look tiny and relentless, making their presence felt in the world, like a minute, leisurely colony of ants. Also like ants, these people appear to spend little time examining their own encroachment--architectural, technological, and personal--on the natural world. In their determined, oblivious way, the people in his photographs make clear that there is no longer any nature uncharted by man. In place of nature we find the invasive landmarks of a global economy Taken as a whole, Gursky's work constitutes a map of the postmodern civilized world.

Over the past 20 years, photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank has been something of a recluse, a sort of art-world J.D. Salinger, avoiding the public and generally declining requests for interviews. Dividing his time between his old loft on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and a former fisherman's shack on the coast of Nova Scotia, Frank has deliberately eschewed the trappings of celebrity in recent years despite growing acclaim for his work as a photographer--or perhaps because of it. In 1989 he became so fed up with the commercialization of the photography market that he nailed a stack of his rare vintage photographs to a board, tied it up with baling wire, and called that his art work. Such acts of defiance have only added to the legend of Frank's irascibility and desire to be left alone.

THEORY - "Boris Mikhailov: A Terrible Beauty" A Terrible Beauty by Sue Hubbard Boris Mikhailov: Case History The Saatchi Gallery 13th September- 25th November Boris Mikhailov is sixty-three, has dyed black hair, a white moustache and a young wife. Born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, he has recently exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, just been awarded the Citibank Photography Prize and is now showing his work, Case History, which consists of over 400 photographs taken in the Ukraine, at The Saatchi Gallery. For anyone with a taste in postmodern irony, there is plenty to be found here. For Mikhailov takes pictures of the bomzhes, the homeless down and outs, victims of the economic and social collapse in the former USSR. But Boris Mikhailov is no Bill Brandt or Don McCullen capturing life's gritty realities with a clear humanist agenda, nor is he an objective eye simply documenting what he sees from behind his lens. Rather he is a director, a creator of mise en scènes, who seeks out the alcoholic, the drug addict, the ill and the dispossessed and then pays them not only to pose for him, but to expose themselves - genitals, scars, menstrual blood and hernias - to his scrutinizing gaze. This is the ultimate market exchange, the sale, for a few kopeks, of these peoples' only resource, their bodies. Like all capitalists and entrepreneurs they sell what they have for the best offer, in this case to a photographer who takes their pictures, which will then be consumed by the international art world. The irony is brought full circle, in a game of signifiers and signs, by the fact that it is Saatchi, the advertising guru who gave us 18 years of Thatcherism, who is playing host to these photos of some of the world's most abject. What, I kept wondering, would these subjects make of the private view, where the likes of Tracy Emin quaff champagne in her latest Agnès B, surrounded by their exposed and blistered penises, black eyes and filthy bodies; and what does it

THEORY - "Boris Mikhailov: A New Metaphysician" Boris Mikhailov: A New Metaphysician By Helen Petrovsky (Ithaca, New York) If we were to define photography today, we would have to posit its essential anonymity. To be more precise, we would have to rethink the very conditions of its theorizing: it is no longer "my" photograph that has to be redeemed by being set against the flow of time or the grand narratives of history. (And such, we remember, was Roland Barthes's project.) It is "nobody's" or, better still, "whatever" photograph that is likely to take its place in theorizing.