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Other I at Hotshoe Gallery 12 October – 27 November 2011
November 2011

Metro produced 31 medium sized and 6 very large C-Type prints for WASSINKLUNDGREN as part of the new ‘Other I’ exhibition at Hotshoe Gallery. Opening this week, the show includes the work of Alec Soth, WassinkLundgren and Viviane Sassen.

Curated by Aaron Schuman, the show explores the shift in photography in the latter half of the twentieth century from a medium often used to explore, explain and express the foreign and unfamiliar, to one used to examine, reveal and define oneself.

In 1984, Andy Grundberg noted such a shift starting to occur specifically within documentary practice, ‘…towards recording the “I” instead of the “Other”, centering itself on what the photographer’s life is rather than on what it is not…’. This exhibition features several prominent contemporary practitioners who are cleverly redressing this balance by merging direct encounters with the ‘Other’ into forms of self-exploration, self-revelation and subtle autobiography, equally emphasising what is in front of the camera – the ‘Other’ – and what is behind it – the ‘I’.

ALEC SOTH is a Magnum Photographer, who recently had his first major museum retrospective – ‘From Here to There’ – at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2010-11. Soth is also a publisher, and has utilized his imprint, Little Brown Mushroom and his own new book, Broken Manual, published by Steidl in 2011, was voted ‘Best Book’ at the Kassel Photobook Festival 2011 and also resulted in a documentary film about him, aptly entitled Somewhere to Disappear.

WASSINKLUNDGREN is a partnership between Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren, which began in 2005 after they both graduated from the Utrecht School of Arts. Through collaboration, they make work often described as conceptual documentary photography. Wassink lives in London, where he recently finished an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Lundgren lives in Beijing, where he recently finished an MA at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

VIVIANE SASSEN was born in Amsterdam in 1972, and spent her early childhood in Kenya. In 1997, she received her MA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy in Arnhem. Since then she has found great success as a fashion photographer, publishing work in avant-garde fashion magazines, and has established a unique visual vocabulary all her own. Her aesthetic combines a sense of childhood memory, where scenes are crystallized and highly saturated with color and shadow, with a photographer’s sensitivity to the body and surface.

AARON SCHUMAN is an American photographer, editor, writer and curator based in the United Kingdom. His photographic work is exhibited internationally, and he is a regular contributor of photography, articles, essays and interviews to a wide variety of publications including Aperture, HotShoe International and The British Journal of Photography and is also a Senior Lecturer at the Arts University College Bournemouth and the University of Brighton.

For more information, please visit: www.hotshoegallery.com
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