Gazette Drouot - C apencheres

Archive of Modern Conflict, London
Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) contains collections
not only of photographs, but also of manuscripts,
posters, police documents, scientific documents and
cameras. AMC is financed by David Thomson, the
richest man in Canada (no. 35 in the Forbes world
ranking), owner of the Thomson Reuters empire
(specialising in information about the media, financial
services, health, law, sciences, research technology,
taxes and accounting), and also a painting collector.
The fund, which has three branches in Toronto,
London and Beijing, and currently possesses over
three million documents, recently spent $15M on the
Matthew R. Isenburg collection, consisting of daguerreotypes
and old cameras. While chiefly interested in
vernacular photography, the AMC also possesses
prints by photographers themselves, including
Gustave Le Gray and Robert Frank. The AMC's singularity
lies not only in its ability to bring together ideas,
projects and approaches, but to do so with the critical
and sometimes amused eye it casts on history through
minor documents and the way it associates them.
As witness the exhibition at Paris Photo.
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Archive of Modern Conflict,
www.amcbooks.com
Fotomuseum, Winthertur
Lying some twenty kilometres from Zürich, the Fotomuseum
is set up in a residential quarter on an entirely
rehabilitated former industrial site. This space is
shared with another institution devoted to photography:
the Fotostiftung Schweiz. This Swiss foundation
owns around fifty thousand exhibition prints,
two hundred and fifty thousand archive prints and
over a million negatives, transparencies, reviews and
documents of all kinds, together with works by great
masters like Atget, Brandt, Brassaï, Burri, Capa,
Kertész, Koudelka, Moholy-Nagy, Renger-Patzsch,
Rodtschenko, Steinert and Stieglitz. Founded in
1993, the Fotomuseum is devoted to international
photography, particularly after 1960. Its collection, a
large part of which is digitised and accessible on the
EVENT THE MAGAZINE
Arno Rafael Minkkinen, “Foster Pond”, 2000, b/w gelatine silver
print, 50 x 60 cm.
website, consists of four thousand works that have
been purchased, donated or loaned. The Fotomuseum
stages thematic exhibitions mainly based on
its collection, and a number of exhibitions dedicated
to specific photographers, such as Paul Graham,
August Sander, Lisette Model, Gursky and Rineke
Dijkstra. "Cut & Paste", the exhibition presented by
the Fotomuseum at Paris Photo, explores the theme
of photographic appropriation. Currently, the Centre
Culturel Suisse de Paris is also presenting an exhibition
called "Body Language", based on the museum's
collection. Zaha Redman
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Fotomuseum, Winthertur,
www.fotomuseum.ch
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