Monday 4 October 2010

Georgia spread in Italian Marie Claire.
















Marie Claire in Italy have run a number of my photos from the Georgia: In the Shadow of the Bear project in this months issue.































Sunday 3 October 2010

Exhibition and workshop at Spazio Labo in Bologna

I have a workshop and an exhibition of Fault lines at Spazio Labo in Bologna at the end of October.

Exhibition opens on the 28th October, all are welcome and the workshop is 29th to 31st October, Vanessa will help out, details below.

Documentary Practice and Narrative: The Long Term Project
Workshop with George Georgiou (London, UK)
With the participation of Vanessa Winship

The workshop “Documentary Practice and Narrative: The Long Term Project” will address the issues of contemporary documentary photographic practice and approaches, taking a deeper look at the long-term project in photography. The aim is to build up an understanding of different forms of narratives and different ways of structuring work according to the final mode of presentation, be it a book, an exhibition, multimedia or magazine feature. We will discuss how ideas and concepts are crucial to the development of the documentary project, how to identify themes, motifs and issues that address and question the societies we live in, on both the local and the global level. Participants will bring completed and in progress projects so we can look and deconstruct the images and the working methodology, including taking a detailed look at the editing process. The teacher’s own and other photographers’ projects, working methods and project evolution will be used as illustrations.
Each participant should bring selected project/s from their own work and be prepared to discuss their aims in the context of a group.

Dates of the workshop:
Friday 29th October 2010: 6.30pm to 9.30pm
Saturday 30th October 2010: 10 am to 6 pm
Sunday 31st October 2010: 10am to 6pm

For more information: info@spaziolabo.it - +39 3283383634

Workshop fee:
300 €
280 € - student price

Place of the workshop:
Spazio Labo’ - Centro di Fotografia
via Frassinago 43/2c, Bologna

Saturday 2 October 2010

New Yorker Photo booth book review


OFF THE SHELF: GEORGE GEORGIOU’S TURKEY

From the founding of the Ottoman Empire, in 1299, to the
current negotiations to accede to the European Union, the
country we know as Turkey has had a complicated history.
“There are different interests in play in Turkey, from
secularism and Islamism to the traditional and the modern,
as well as between democracy and repression—often in
unlikely and contradictory combinations,” the photographer
George Georgiou explains. 
“It is these contradictions my work addresses and the
complexities of a large country that was a former imperial
empire searching for a modern identity.” Georgiou’s work
on Turkey, where he moved in 2003, first came to my
attention at the Open Society Institute, when it was selected
for Moving Walls
Now, nearly three years later, it has evolved into his début
book: “Fault Lines: Turkey East/West.”
It began with an idea of divided communities, something
Georgiou had explored in previous work on Serbia and Kosovo.
“I wanted to move the project away from the idea of conflict to
that of a nation caught between ideologies,” Georgiou writes.
“Turkey is caught between East and West in terms of Europe
and the Middle East, and I was interested in Turkey’s role in this
dynamic. Often the approach photographers take to Turkey is
exotic and ‘orientalist,’ fairly narrow and reinforcing a sense of
the ‘other.’ I really wanted to make a contemporary story
about Turkey.”
Though the book opens with a map of Turkey and a timeline
of the country’s history, the next hundred and thirty pages are
devoted to photographs alone (captions are relegated to the final
pages of the book, and there is no text by Georgiou or others).
It seems that Georgiou wants us to just spend time looking, to
see the contemporary Turkey that he discovered.
 Here’s a selection to get you started.
Slide 1 of 9
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  • In the cover image for the book, a woman cycles past a Turkish 
    fighter jet mounted by the seafront in Mersin, commemorating
    the invasion of Cyprus. 
    “Turkey is undergoing huge change and a lot of the work is
    aboutthat change. The changes are many: economic, social,
    political—and the landscape,” Georgiou writes in an e-mail
    from Ukraine,where he’s finishing another book,
     In the shadow of the Bear,about that country and Georgia.