Miracle Village is a provocative exploration into the secluded lives of the socially excluded in a purpose-built community located on the outskirts of a rural town in an impoverished area of Palm Beach County,Florida.
Miracle Village houses sex offenders, who, due to the stringent legislation, are unable to find housing, since the laws ensure them to reside at least 1,000 feet from any place where children congregate.

Thanks to Valiente, these outcasts, whose lives are forcibly connected by their offences and shared stigma, have for the first time been given a voice and identity. The undeniable artistic merits of the Miracle Village project lie not only in the exquisite photographic compositions, but in their candid portrayal of the feared and ostracised.

“Muck City Road. A six-mile stretch of neglected pavement. There’s a certain smell to the air.
Like cotton candy and smoke. Sugarcane fields cover the landscape in every direction as far as the
eye can see. Three miles down the road and right beside a private village, there are train tracks.
Locomotives ride the rails at the midnight hours. Their turbines sound echoes through this village.
The people who live there don’t mind the early morning call of the sugarcane express.
To them it sounds like progress. And they love that sound. Its name is Miracle Village.
Over 100 sex offenders live here.”
– Joseph Steinberg
(from the introduction to Miracle Village)

Sofia Valiente – Miracle Village

Exhibition: February 21 – April 9, 2020
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

Andy Warhol – Photography Inspired

Exhibition:
January 9 – February 19, 2020

11am – 6pm | mon – fri
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
illustration: © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Wellenreiter ▪ Le Gray ▪ Andy Warhol

Wellenreiter
A photograph is the result of an interplay between physical and chemical processes and the subject in front of the camera. The technical challenges posed by space photography are
particularly obvious in these early astronomical pictures.
Some of the most magical and esoteric photographs have been created as by-products of 20th Century scientific space missions. At Paris Photo 2019 we are pleased to present a selection of these pictures, many of which are the visual manifestation of historic events.
Rapid technological advances in the 1920s paved the way for electronic transmission of images by cable and radio. In 1946 an adapted German V2 rocket took off from White Sands, New Mexico, taking photographs of Earth at a record-breaking altitude of 65 miles above the ground. These were the first images of our planet to be taken from space. A 48 page catalogue with 35 images is published on this occasion.

Gustave Le Gray
We will also show works by Gustave Le Gray (August 30, 1820 – July 30, 1884) – the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century. Le Gray promoted and helped to establish photography as a means of artistic expression, thus differentiating it from the scientific approach and placing it next to painting.
Le Gray is also known for his role as the teacher of other noted photographers such as Maxie Du Camp and Olympe Aguado, and for the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making.
Our show includes a newly discovered panorama taken in Egypt and some of Le Gray’s early photographs dating from 1849 to 1952 with scenes of nature at Fontainebleau Forest. The exhibition will also present a selection of his most renowned photographs taken while he was hired for the Missions Héliographiques to document French monuments and buildings. Le Gray’s photographs are not just technical masterpieces but also visionary works of art.

Andy Warhol
In addition to our displays of space pictures and works by Le Gray, we present an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s evocative line drawings, focusing on works inspired by photographs he found in LIFE magazine.
These distinctive drawings, many of which are studies of the human form, are executed in ink and pencil on paper. They reference the evolving magazine industry that fascinated Warhol and are situated firmly within the cultural era of the moment. Daniel Blau’s discovery of the original source materials used by Warhol gives insight into the early career of one of the 20th century’s most influential artists.

Download Press Kit

Marconi 1850-1870

Exhibition:
November 4 – December 17, 2019
11am – 6pm | mon – fri
 
Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München
 
Download Press Release

Wellenreiter

The First Early Years of Radio Transmitted Pictures

Rapid technological advances in the 1920s paved the way for electronic transmission of images by cable and radio.
 
In 1946 an adapted German V2 rocket equipped with scientific instruments and an automatic 35mm motion picture camera (instead of the usual explosives) took off from White Sands, New Mexico, taking photographs of Earth at a record‑breaking altitude of 65 miles above the ground. These were the first images of our planet to be taken from space. This venture was a significant step towards bringing humans into space and back again.
 
In April 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth. Later that year, automatic cameras travelling on-board the Mercury‑Atlas 5 along with chimpanzee Enos captured the Earth in color.
 
In March 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov conducted the first spacewalk in history, filmed by a camera he attached to the outside of the ship. Back on Earth, black and white film stills were printed and broadcast around the globe. These technically raw pictures continue to have a visual impact. They are comparable to Capa’s D-Day photos printed from injured negatives in that the materiality of these historic pictures link them indelibly to the time and place of their making. In comparison, the technically brilliant color pictures of Ed White’s spacewalk the same year are almost too picturesque to be truly exciting. All of the above photographs were printed from negative film brought back to Earth.
 
On October 7, 1955 the Russian probe Luna 3 had already radioed back to Earth the first ever glimpse of the Moon’s far side in the form of mysterious black and white grainy images. Luna 9 (1966) transmitted not only the first ever photo taken on the surface of the Moon but also the first panoramic picture and, incidentally, the first self-portrait in space.
Some of these photographs are impossible to decipher without additional information. The few photos Luna 3 managed to take of the Moon‘s far side and send back to Earth are of very high contrast and low quality. They look more like 1950’s Abstract Expressionist paintings than photos of the Moon. These graphic images were our first glimpse of the other side of our friend in space, whom until this moment we had only seen from one perspective.
 
Mission Ranger gave us photographic evidence of the first artificial intelligence suicide in space, when one after the other the spacecrafts crashed on the moon, while radioing back picture after picture until impact. Maybe NASA scientists had the famous Méliès image of a rocket sticking in the Moon’s squinting eye in mind when they conceived the Ranger missions.
 
On July 14, 1965, four years before man set foot on the moon, Mariner IV radioed the first close-up images of Mars back to Earth. The area shown is fittingly named Elysium.
 
In August 1966 Lunar Orbiter I started to systematically photograph the Moon‘s surface. All four Lunar Orbiter missions were to cover almost the entire surface in incredible detail. The onboard camera system functioned almost like a passport photo machine. The exposed negative film was developed in a heated chamber, scanned and radioed back to earth.
 
Some of the most magical and esoteric photographic pictures have been created as by-products of 20th Century scientific space missions. Many of these pictures are the visual manifestation of historic events. Airbrush, crop marks or writing on front and back sometimes add to the Zeitgeist of these objects. Early on, these particular pictures had already been recognised as significant fragments of our post-WWII history.
 
This booklet is published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of man’s first step on another heavenly body.
 
Link to preview of this publication
 
Printed and bound by Pelo-Druck Lohner oHG
Paper content: Dünndruck 50g/m2
Paper cover: Olin, Rough, cream, 200g/m2
 
60 pages, 35 images
15×21 cm, softcover
 
Editor: Daniel Blau
 

ÉMILE ZOLA  –  L’ EXIL
Weybridge 1898

An exclusive exhibition of previously unseen vintage prints from 1898

Daniel Blau is pleased to present an exhibition of 19 photographs taken by Émile Zola during his period of exile in England, coming from his family and all inscribed by the master himself on verso.

Rather than thinking of Zola as a novelist who took pictures, we may instead come to view him as an artist who both wrote and made photographs. As a result of Zola’s courageous intervention in the Dreyfus Affair he spent almost a year in hiding in England. During these months in 1898‑1899 he took copious photographs in the Surrey countryside that was to be his home for much of this time. His friend (and bodyguard throughout the affair) Fernand Desmoulin having brought him one of his cameras. The photographs from Surrey depict country lanes, ladies on bicycles and the Crystal Palace, in some cases in panorama format. In Zola’s photography we see an abiding interest in architecture, machinery, the modern. In the portraits of friends and family, photographs of street scenes and still lives we see the work of a skilled technician with a profoundly visual sense of the world. It was no easy feat to capture photographs of moving bicycles, with the long exposures of the time, without blurring.

Zola was an accomplished photographer whose pictures of family members, collaborators, landscapes and street scenes evidence the same attention to detail as his naturalistic writings. Amateur photographers proliferated at the turn of the century and there is no shortage of snapshots from this era. However, Zola’s pictures of the rural England are made significant by their context. These pictures coming from the great-grandson archive are on view to the public for the first time.

Galerie Meyer
17, rue des Beaux Arts
75006 Paris

Vernissage Photo Saint Germain:
November 5, 2019
4 pm – 9 pm
Public Exhibition:
November 6 – 23, 2019

Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Friday
2.30 pm – 6 pm

Saturday
11 am – 1 pm,
2.30 pm – 7 pm

Landschaft

An exhibition with drawings and paintings by:
Baselitz
Hill
Höckelmann
Kiefer
Kirkeby
Lüpertz

Exhibition:
September 11 – October 28, 2019
11am – 6pm | mon – fri

Maximilianstraße 26, 80539 München

Half a century since Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the Moon, the NASA photographs from the Apollo XI mission remain as awe-inspiring as when they were first seen.

Apollo XI was the first manned lunar landing. The photographs of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon are some of the defining images of the 20th century post-WWII, a time of rapid technology innovation and social change.

 

See here our recent publication “Apollo”