INsight Artists 2009
Sylvia Plachy
“In a Photograph, you cannot peel back the shades of gray; below the emulsion is whiteness: the alchemy is in the coating.” – Sylvia Plachy
“She makes me laugh and she breaks my heart. She is moral. She is everything a photographer should be.” – Richard Avedon, photographer
SYLVIA PLACHY immigrated to the United States from Hungary with her parents in 1958, and started photographing in 1964. Her evocative photography is acclaimed as diverse, surprising, and humorous, transforming the elusive into the poetic.
Although perhaps best known for pictures in the Village Voice, her work has appeared in over 50 major publications. In the forward to her book Signs and Relics (The Monacelli Press, 1999), filmmaker Wim Wenders writes “It showed me that photographs can do all sorts of things that I never thought of.”
Other books include Unguided Tour (Aperture, 1990), for which she won an ICP Infinity Award, Self Portrait with Cows Going Home (Aperture, 2004), which won a Golden Light Award, and Red Light (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996), a groundbreaking work on the sex industry. Andre Kertesz, her mentor and compatriot said of her work, “I have never seen the moment sensed and caught on film with more intimacy and humanity.”
Sylvia Plachy has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a CAPS Grant. She has exhibited internationally and her work is in multiple collections including MOMA NY and SF, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.
Martin Parr
“With photography, I like to create fiction out of reality. I try and do this by taking society’s natural prejudice and giving this a twist.”- Martin Parr
“He is a cunning photographer, sidling his way into situations where he shouldn’t always be, looking as ordinary as the people he photographs.” – Val Williams
MARTIN PARR is arguably Britain’s most important contemporary photographer, with a unique perspective and unmistakable style, and a critical and popular following in the worlds of art, fashion and journalism.
Inspired by his grandfather, Parr studied photography from 1970 to 1973, taking on various teaching assignments through the early 1990s. Switching to color in the early 1980s, he documented the English working class during the era of Thatcher, earning an international reputation for his innovative imagery. “I suppose I started to make a critique of society as it is, rather than a celebration of what it used to be.”
For Parr, the moral atrophy and preposterousness of our daily lives means we can only find salvation through adopting a certain sense of humor. As an insightful commentator on commercial culture and social life, he has revitalized and repositioned contemporary documentary photography.
A member of Magnum since 1994, Parr has published over twenty books and been widely exhibited around the globe, including MOMA NY and Tokyo, the Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Gilles Peress
“Is a picture worth a thousand words? It depends on the picture.
These photographs are so overwhelming that words, any words, seem trite.” – Raul Nino, poet
GILLES PERESS is an internationally renowned photographer. Having studied political science and philosophy in Paris, he began working with photography in 1970. He has documented events in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Bosnia, Rwanda, 9-11, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Peress often represents the complexity of conflict in his acclaimed books by using minimal text, juxtaposing mundane detail with unfolding catastrophe. For him, there is never a clear distinction between war and peace… “War is never total war; in the same way, peace is never total peace.”
Currently Professor of Human Rights and Photography at Bard College, NY, and Senior Research Fellow at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley, Peress continues to develop his ongoing project titled “Hate Thy Brother,” a cycle of documentary narratives that looks at intolerance and its consequences.
A member of Magnum since 1972, his work is exhibited and collected internationally by the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and PS1; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Corcoran Gallery; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; The Centre Georges Pompidou Musee D’Art Moderne; and the Folkwang and Sprengel Museum. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple NEA grants, the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography, multiple ICP Infinity Awards and the Pollock-Krasner grant.
His books include Haines (2004); A Village Destroyed (2002); The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar (1998); The Silence: Rwanda (1995); Farewell to Bosnia (1994); and Telex Iran (1984, 1997 reprint).
