C photo Posed | Unposed Ivorypress edited by Tobia Bezzola Kunsthaus Zurich.
Ivorypress is a publishing house founded by Elena Foster in 1996 in London. It is specialised in photography and contemporary art and has offices in Spain, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
C Photo is an editorial project by Ivorypress that aims to stimulate debate around different trends in contemporary photography, whilst exploring the developments that have shaped the medium over the course of its history. The editorial mission is to focus on the most engaging photographic work being created today across all cultures and subjects. Featuring work by emerging talent as well as more established artists, C Photo is a benchmark for the in-depth, independent analysis of photography as a universal language.
C International Photo Magazine was launched in 2006 at London’s Serpentine Gallery and The Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, with subsequent launches in Barcelona, Moscow and Beijing. In 2006, C Photo curated the exhibition C on Cities at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and in 2007 the NY C Photo exhibition in New York, with other exhibitions in Prague, Madrid and Berlin. In 2011, C Photo curated the exhibition Real Venice in collaboration with Venice in Peril, showcased as part of the 54th Venice Biennale.
HESTER SCHEURWATER- FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE MIRROR
The photography, short films and video performances of Dutch artist Hester Scheurwater in which she explores her desires, obsessions and fears shocked many and fuelled debate about the sexualisation of society. In her pictures, she is model and artist, the one posing and the one directing the pose. Scheurwater’s work is sexually explicit, but even more it is a curious and smart investigation of herself, where the artist looks at herself from both sides of the mirror. Scheurwater presents herself in a soft porn style, in which she appears keenly to adapt to her role as a lust object. She pleases the (male) viewer with high heels, bright red lipstick, and bare breasts and by posing as a willing woman, often recumbent, reduced to legs, thighs, breasts and mouth. But to this end she also assumes a certain distancefrom her body. The rooms she is in are empty and cold, the lipstick and make-up on her face become a mask and her thick head of hair conceals her face. The language of the erotic or pornographic pose, so thoroughly developed in pin-ups, and girly pornographic magazines suddenly gets distorted. Attraction and repulsion become indistinguishable.The volume C Photo: Posed/Unposed outlines the field of tension between the entirely spontaneous and unposed on one hand, and the striving for a
perfect pose on the other, depicting a variety of approaches from photojournalism or amateur snapshots to advertising, portraiture and fashion photography.
Photographers published are Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Thomas Struth, Pawel Juszczuk, Federico Patellani, Edward Quinn, Hester Scheurwater, Garry Winogrand, Guy Bourdin, Jules Spinatsch, Ghislain Dussart, Slim Aarons.
