Download PDF - John Rule Art Book Distribution

Photography
Available: January 2013
ISBN: 9783936165586
Price: £22.50
Format: Paperback
Pages: 68
Illustrations: 50 b/w photos
Size: 250x 200 mm
Category: Photography
Rights: Worldwide, except
Germany, Austria and
Switzerland
Available: January 2013
ISBN: 9783936165746
Price: £42.50
Format: Paperback
Pages: 76
Illustrations: 50 col
Size: 260 x 320 mm
Category: Photography
Rights: Worldwide, except
Germany, Austria and
Switzerland
8 JOHN RULE Spring 2013
Deborah Parkin
William Ropp
"The world of children in these portraits is not the sweet, impossible,
and perfect idyll that Heinrich Kühn always photographed his
children basking in nor is it that tragic world of the children Dr.
Bernardo commissioned to be photographed in order to shock the
Victorian consciousness into compassion, just as his contemporary
humanitarians Charles Dickens, Frederick Engels, and the 7th Earl
of Shaftesbury did in their work. Parkin has written that, though not
challenging the actual "innocence" of children, she "is challenging
the notion of childhood being innocent. We shouldn't sentimentalize
childhood, to do this would be a grave disservice to our children. It
would be a lie. It would suggest that a child lives in a blissful bubble
and doesn't feel things that we do as adults…Childhood is what shapes
us into the adults we become." And, as we all know, it can shape us for
good or ill…” Prof. John Wood
Vis-à-Vis : Portraits of New Woman
Chin-Chin Wu
In 2006, Chin-Chin Wu began photographing a systematic series
of intimate portraits in Paris that would later be entitled Vis-à-vis:
Portraits of New Women. Originally small-scaled and experimental in
nature, by 2008, Wu had evolved the project into its present form of
large-format, spectacularly subtle images of female empowerment.
Shooting in Paris and Beijing, Wu engaged 50 women from 18 countries
as subjects. The women voluntarily posed for their portraits and spoke
for the record about their intentions. Dialoguing intimately with the
history of photography and its representation of the female genitalia,
Vis-à-vis intentionally flirts with ideas of fragility and power, eroticism
and raw objectivity, medical precision and sexual primacy, generating
an emotional tension that is both uneasy and arresting. The portraits
included in this book are presented anonymously, with the place of the
shooting, the date of the session and original words from each model.