News from Mirages

Here are some new works from my series "The Mirages"





©Michael Werner

Zoe Strauss

©Zoe Strauss



The fantastic Zoe Strauss received a United States Artists Fellowship.

CONGRATULATIONS Zoe, you really deserved it! You and your work are incredible!

The Grants Program:

United States Artists (USA) exists to nurture, support, and strengthen the work of America’s finest living artists. Through our grants program, we support a diverse array of visual, literary, performing, design, media, and crafts and traditional artists.

The first three years of the USA Fellows program will be considered a pilot phase. During that time, USA will distribute 150 unrestricted fellowship grants of $50,000 each to artists across the United States.

The program supports artists in all career stages, including emerging and mid-career artists, as well as individuals who have achieved master artist status. The fellowships will be awarded across a broad array of disciplines:

Architecture and Design
Crafts and Traditional Arts
Dance
Literature (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry)
Media (film, media, and radio)
Music
Theater Arts
Visual Arts

About Zoe's work:

Zoe Strauss uses photography to create an epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life in invisible communities. In her series she addresses themes such as gender and identity; addiction and desire; what it means to be American; just getting by; and hope, pride, and joy. Over the past seven years she has produced an annual installation in South Philadelphia entitled Under I-95. As the Under Under I-95 project has evolved, Strauss has also addressed issues such as mortality, intimacy, and memory to weave archetypal myths that mirror daily life. T.G.

Another recipient of the grant is the wonderful Uta Barth. Congratulations also to you Uta


©Uta Barth

The Old Man

Hasselblad Award 2007: Nan Goldin

Nan and Brian in bed, NYC, 1983 ©Nan Goldin


Nan Goldin is the Hasselblad Award Winner 2007!

The Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography
The Hasselblad award is an international photography award, made for the first time in 1980. It has been presented annually since then, with the exception with the year of Erna Hasselblad’s death, 1983.

The Hasselblad award is the most important prize in photography in the world today, and the award ceremony has become a international event of unique prestige, with award winners of great international renown.

The Foundation's citation:

Nan Goldin is one of the most significant photographers of our time. She has been documenting her own life and that of her friends – her extended family – for more than 30 years, focusing on the urban scene in New York and Europe in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, marked so dramatically by HIV and AIDS. Her work, while based on the direct esthetics of snapshot photography, presents her personal life as work of arts; intimate, formally beautiful, and with intense use of color. The presentation of her work in the form of slide shows resonates in the work of photographers of more than one generation. Her use of photography as a memoir, as a means of protection against loss and as an act of preservation responds to the needs of our times.

Although I doubt that Nan will ever read or find my blog. I want to tell her that I absolutely love her work and her many photo books are my all time favorites.

Nan I love you, you are my hero!

G'Day Sydney

My partner Bruce is at the moment in Sydney, visiting his parents. Unfortunately it's not a holiday. His father is suffering on Parkinson and he had to go to a nursing home because his disease got worse and worse and Bruce's mother was not able to do the care any longer since he really needs care and help 24/7. On the 8th of December he turns also 80, so this makes the trip even more important. I wish I could have gone to my second home Australia too, but it simply was not possible this time, because of the cost of the flight. I love to be in Australia, we spent in 2005 4 months in Sydney and further north in Forster where Bruce's parents live. It is a beautiful little town at the coast, with dream beaches and the lifestyle of a surfers paradise. The images are from Australia, mostly from Sydney, and here from a neighborhood called Newtown, a beautiful place with lots of young people and many, many restaurants, bars and trendy shops.

Night of 1000 Drawings

Here is another big event you can be part of. It's "The Night of 1000 Drawings" at Artists Space New York. Every December they have a big benefit auction in their space and it is always a big success and very popular.

The deadline this year is December 7th, 5 p.m.

The event is on December 13th at Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013

The direct link is here