THE SONIC BLOG Fotografie ist Kunst | Photography is Art

Like every year there are some nice workshops offered by German Summer Academies. Here are some highlights:

BerlinSummerWorkshops, in the heart of a vivid capital, offers a wide range of workshops from urban landscape to portrait.
Amongst others with Eva Bertram about “augenfällig unscheinbar”, about the obvious, which is so easily overlooked.

The Summer Academy Dresden, Florence of the Elbe, offers strategies for portrait and self portrait with Valentina Seidel.

The Summer Academy Essen, culture capital 2010, researches among many other courses with Karin Geiger the question “What cane be made visible with photography?”.

The Summer Academy of the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt provides the course “Choreografie des Urbanen” with Wolfgang Zurborn, which moves the human body in the center of urban environment an many more.

The Italian photographer Massimo Sordi explores in “Dreaming Bollywood” the phenomenon bollywood in a photographic approach to Indian movie theaters.

I don’t know why, but somehow I have a weakness for projects showing the life of elderly people. So here is another one: “Roig 26” a wonderful series from the Spanish photographer Salva López.

In photography the province is often neglected compared to the supposedly more attractive city. Michael Slogsnat’s long-term project “Heimatphotographie” focuses on the little-known region Bordesholm between the cities of Kiel and Neumünster.

The long-term project wants to tell of the political, social, cultural and economic contexts in the region Bordesholm. What is currently visible in the project blog “Heimatphotographie” oscillates between postcard idyll, document and provincial curiosity and whets appetite for more.

“The object turns into art by the possibility of its interpretation. Does it not allow interpretation or does not need interpretation, it can not be the subject of art.”

Arthur C. Danto

Lay Flat, founded in January 2009 by Shane Lavalette, brings together emerging and established artists together and is specialized in publications that are just as much art objects as the work featured in their pages.

The current issue “Lay Flat 02: Meta” was edited by Shane Lavalette and Michael Bühler-Rose. It brings together a selection of contemporary artists whose photographs are conceptually engaged with the history, conventions and materiality of the medium itself.

With photographs by Natalie Czech, Stephen Gill, Torbjørn Rødland, Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, Joachim Schmid and many others.

The Ostkreuzschule Berlin offers in May 2010 the workshop “Approach and People” with Anders Petersen. The 5 days workshop takes place in two blocks in English on 08th – 09th and 14th to 16th May 2010. Registration until 31st March 2010.

“Less brain work, more adventurous and searching, which does not exclude heart and tenderness. The desire to get closer to the people is crucial. The encounter is important for me. Pictures are secondary.”

On the occasion of the ongoing exhibition “The Sexual Identity of Gay Men” in the gallery Loris in Berlin with work by Matthias Hamann and Christian Kuhn, an artist talk takes place on 26th March at 7 pm.

Stray Cats is not only a U.S. band with a mix of rockabilly, punk and new wave, but also one of the few German blogs on Photography: StrayCats, the weblog of the photographers collective BerlinPhotoWorkshops.

For a year now StrayCats presents its own inspiring sound, mixed with photographers, projects, events and exhibitions. Congratulations!

“Rockabilly went deeper than the blues. He had his own face, his own outfit, his own hair style and a sound that crashed into the feet. Rockabilly was striking, hard and complex. Rockabilly had all the things we liked.” – Brian Setzer