Thomas Ruff "photograms and ma.r.s." /// David Zwirner gallery

The photograms and ma.r.s. works presented in this exhibition continue his interest in visual verisimilitude, with each series exploring the mutability and material presence of the photographic image. The photograms depict abstract shapes, lines, and spirals in
seemingly random formations with varying degrees of transparency and illumination. Their compositions are reminiscent of artistic experimentation with camera-less photography in
the 1920s, where objects were placed directly on photo-sensitive paper and exposed to light, creating white or gray silhouettes wherever they made contact. Cherished in particular by Surrealists, such photograms were governed by unanticipated light effects, allowing for the element of chance in the final result. Yet both the objects and the light in Ruff’s “photograms” derive from a virtual darkroom built by a custom-made software program, giving the artist more control over the outcome.
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illustrations: 1_ "ma.r.s. séries" (extract), 2013, Thomas Ruff ///  2_phg02, 2012, Thomas Ruff

No Longer Indifferent: The Photography of Milton Rogovin, Social Documentary Photographer

Milton Rogovin, né à New York le 30 décembre 1909 et mort à Buffalo le 18 janvier 2011, est un photographe américain et militant syndical. Sympathisant du Parti communiste, il est connu pour ses sujets sociaux, et fut également photojournaliste.

article de Mark Curran:
He is dangerous to the internal security because of his strong adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles (internal FBI memo dated April 8, 1968)

In 1909, five years after Lewis Hine had made his first journey to Ellis Island to document mass migration, another American photographer, Milton Rogovin, was born in New York City. The son of Jewish migrants, he would, like Hine, have another career before making photographs, experiencing a significant upheaval in his life when everything would change. Having graduated from Columbia University and subsequently practicing as an optometrist, Rogovin moved to Buffalo, upstate New York in the 1930s. This was at the height of the Great Depression, and coupled with living in an area defined as socially deprived, Rogovin became politically active. As he comments; ‘this catastrophe had a profound effect on my thinking, on my relationship to other people. No longer could I be indifferent to the problems of people’ (1974: 12).
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illustrations: 1 et 2_ from Lower East Side (extraits)