Jelena Jureša

MIRA, STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT

Like a family album with its linen-embossed cover and single inset snapshot, the book Mira, Study for a Portrait is a meticulous artistic re-creation of one woman, one family, one country. Jelena Jureša traces Mira’s life and the story of the Perera family, a family of Sephardi Jews, during their life in prewar Bijeljina, Bosnia. The intimate journey is re-created by Juresa using found photographs beginning with Mira’s birth and childhood, her life first in Belgrade, later in Sarajevo, the birth of her children, her marriage, divorce, and work in an old people’s home, ending with her tragic death in 1990 when the riots broke out heralding the beginning of war in Croatia and the fragmentation of former Yugoslavia. This project not only tells the story of a woman’s journey through life but the parallel story of a nation that would fall into a brutal civil war, in many ways mimicking the tragedy of Mira’s life.

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THE KADDU WASSWA ARCHIVE

A Visual Biography

With Africa at the world’s latest front line in political, cultural and ecological issues, this extraordinary exhibition catalog presents an unforgettable story of a quiet soul in a rural village in Uganda who had a huge impact on his nation. Dutch photographer Andrea Stultiens met Ugandan teacher Kaddu Wasswa in 2008 through his grandson, photographer Arthur C. Kisitu, and discovered the meticulous archive in which Wasswa documented his years of community activism including youth development, international exchange and organic farming techniques. Stultiens and Kisitu added their own photographs, and the result is an absorbing visual biography that stretches from Uganda’s colonial days through its first 50 years of independence, which will be commemorated in 2012.

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LEO KANDL

Free Portraits

For decades, Austrian fine art photographer Leo Kandl has looked at a broader concept of portraiture, using newspaper ads to find his models in cities as diverse as New York, Moscow, London, Kiev and Vienna. He hooks-up with an eclectic and engaging group of young, self-assured subjects who like the idea of self-expression. Kandl gave his models complete freedom to stage their photographs, allowing a delicate interplay between artist and model. Kandl’s method of photography allows plenty of scope for emotional interaction, with the potentially risky process of two people unfamiliar with each other coming together in the roles of model and photographer. The very personal color images produced are characterized by curiosity and an occasional erotically charged atmosphere.

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Helmut and Johanna Kandl

Business or Pleasure: Photos & Stories

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BARBARA KASTEN

Works from 1986–1990

When Barbara Kasten photographs architecture, she colors it, breaks it into fragments and bends it to her will. With custom made geometric mirrors, electrical generators, lights fitted with colored gels and a crew of assistants, she creates a new reality —hard-edged, disorienting, vivid, surreal —and then she takes the picture.

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KAUCYILA BROOKE

Vitrinen in Arbeit

American photographer Kaucyila Brooke finds sly ways to explore of the values of contemporary culture. In this beautiful collection, Brooke looks at the renovation of the display cases at Vienna’s Natural History Museum as an opportunity to record the layering of time and history, and to comment on what information our cultural arbiters – in this case, museum curators – see as important. As the museum transitions from the static 19th-century exhibition model to an interactive 21st-century style, Brooke makes knowing use of the reflections and transparency of the glass cases, and the disorder of their contents. The oversized collection of 140 color images is cleverly packaged in a hardcover binding and clear dustcover made to represent a vitrine.

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Peter Kayafas

The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta

This entrancing full-color book (the first by American photographer Peter Kayafas) documents the astounding folk art of Ion Stan Patras (1908-1977), a Romanian woodcarver whose life’s work was the storytelling grave markers of his northern Romanian village, Sapanta. Kayafas fell under the spell of these vividly colored, painted masterpieces in 2003, and returned to Romania in 2004 determined to capture both the artwork and poetic epitaphs on the grave markers. Whether someone died young or old, quietly in his bed or far from home, Patras’ markers remain unique memorials, and Kayafas’ photos do them justice. Includes meticulously translated epitaphs by Adrian Sahlean.

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PETER KAYAFAS

Totems

Socio-documentary photographer Peter Kayafas explores the abandoned buildings of the West in this elegant monograph and exhibition catalog. His timeless images are often considered contemporary extensions of the visions of luminaries such as Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander. The crumbling churches, barns and houses—once maintained as part of vital communities of farmers and migrants—now stand in various states of decay. The images are “simple and spare, yet quietly overpowering with their evocations of history on a scale beyond that of individual lives,” wrote critic Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe. Kayafas approaches buildings as he might photograph people: he creates formal portraits to capture the dignity and resilience of the simple but extraordinary structures that seem to call out for recognition.

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KAREN KILIMNIK

Photographs

American artist Karen Kilimnik gained fame in the 1980s with her “scatter art” installations such as The Hellfire Club Episode of the Avengers, which embodied the glamour, risk and mod kitsch of the 1960s television show. Exhibiting the same shrewd and informed eye found in her paintings, Kilimnik’s oversaturated color photographs of scenes and objects from daily life suggest shades of monstrous things lurking beneath the shiny surface of beauty.

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MATTHIAS KLOS

panoramarand

For panoramarand, Matthias Klos (b. 1969) walked around the entire city of Salzburg in Austria. The route description for his itinerary was the Umschreibung der Stadtgrenze, i.e., the city limits as set out in the city ordinance. Very much in the tradition of the flâneur, Klos—a Vienna-based photographer—followed this written yet imaginary line around Salzburg, keeping to public rights of way the whole time. The idea for the project came from the well-known 19th-century panoramic painting of the city by Johann Michael Sattler. Projected with an idealized 360° perspective, the painting opens up views of the city and its outskirts from a central location on the Festungsberg that was not publicly accessible at the time of painting. In his wanderings along the city limits the artist combines the legislative order of the abstract boundary with the image that the city of Salzburg likes to project of itself.

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