There is never enough time in the school year to watch all the inspirational DVDs and movies about photography. The Visual Arts department has a great collection of movies, and each year only one or two are watched during an actual class period. With the "In the Frame" movie nights, Mr. Long and Mrs. Nelson want to invite all photography students and all interested faculty and students to join us for Monday Night at the Movies. For the 2015-2016 series we have selected three films so far. Refreshments will be served!
Exquisite Corpse
Earlier this year TASIS Headmaster Lyle Rigg approached the TASIS photography faculty about a project he thought students might like to try. It was called the Exquisite Corpse. Needless to say TASIS photography teachers Frank Long and Kim Nelson were intrigued. Lyle shared a book by the Maine Media Workshop + College where his daughter Karin Leuthy is the Development Coordinator, and where he serves as a board member. Karin introduced the project to her organization as an interesting way to get many artists to work on a collaborative project. The Maine Media Workshops + College invited its own community of world-renowned artists to collaborate with other artists to create "exquisite corpses". View a video of their finished product here: Exquisite Corpse MMW.
The parlor game Exquisite Corpse developed from a Surrealist working of a game called “Consequences” in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper and fold the paper to conceal part of the writing before passing it on to the next contributor. In our Exquisite Corpse, the first player was given a phrase from which they were asked to produce an image. In turn that image was delivered to the next person and so on until each photographer had a chance to respond. Like a visual game of “Telephone,” participants add an image to the chain while only knowing the image that came before their own.
The images in each of these chains are not a collection, but rather a kind of story, told one image at a time, from multiple points of view. The beauty of the stories lie directly in the surprises, mystery, and disconnects that mark the trajectory of each narrative. The serendipity and strange, illogical juxtapositions are what attracted the Surrealists to the form. The excitement of creation and collaboration is what drives us to seek what the unknown will bring us at the end of our chain.
Please enjoy our initial Exquisite Corpse stories created by the students of our Advanced Photography courses (IB first and second year/Photography 2/Advanced Placement). Click on the title of each story and use the arrow on the right to follow the story sequentially.
Simona Bellini takes part in local exhibition
TASIS Visual Art Faculty member, Simona Bellini, is part of a two-person exhibition opening November 6 and running through December 8. The exhibition is entitled 'A partir dal seme' or 'To start from the seed'. For more information, please view the information below or download the flyer here.
A Visit to Riva San Vitale
On October 23rd, as he does almost every year, Mark Aeschliman made the short trip from TASIS to Riva San Vitale with his students to visit the Baptistry of San Giovanni, a 5th Century stone building, the oldest in Switzerland.
In his Architecture class and in his IB Visual Arts course, the students have studied the octagonal structure and have constructed models from card stock. Working from images and drawings of the baptistry, they create and reproduce in color and texture the stone exterior of the building. The visit to Riva San Vitale affords the opportunity to see the actual site and to study first hand the details of the stone exterior as well as the important features of the interior, from the stone baptismal font to the wall painting remnants that date to the12th Century.
Later in November, Mr. Aeschliman will take his students to Basel and to the Vitra Design Campus where they can see firsthand the architecture and design work of many of the 20th and some of the 21st century’s leading creative minds, from Charles and Ray Eames to Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid among many others, whose work is shown in the form of buildings on site and furniture in the design museum.
Visit this link read more about Riva San Vitale and to view a 360º panorama of the Riva San Vitale Baptistery.
Photographer Barry Iverson Shares his Experiences
TASIS photography students are working on street photography this semester as part of their classwork, trying their instincts out on capturing moments of life on campus and on the streets of cities they visit on academic travel. Some are working on street portraits, while others try to place people in a scene that utilizes a certain composition. But this year, they all started with a little extra inspiration from TASIS alumnus, Barry Iverson ’74.
In September, photography classes hosted Iverson, a photographer, photojournalist and curator, during a visit in which he delivered a Senior Humanities address. Iverson, as a photojournalist and chronicler of life in Egypt and much of the Middle East, enjoyed a long tenure with Time/Life magazines. During that time he covered conflicts, politics, culture and personalities, and he continues to be active professionally in a number of areas of photography, creating original works in digital and traditional methods.
“He’s a very creative man, a real innovator’” said Filipe Malcwezski ’16. “He showed us a wide variety of work from his whole career. He shared with us his thought and his view of the world.”
Mr. Iverson visited with TASIS students in 2013 during the inauguration of the Sahenk Fine Arts Center, and on this trip he spoke about several of his personal photographic projects and about his work organising and curating exhibitions of the prolific Armenian Photographer Van Leo who spent his career working in Cairo.
In his Senior Humanities address, Iverson discussed the arc of his photographic life through a series of images. From Lugano and his years at the University of Colorado in Boulder to his work with Time magazine, Iverson’s images reveal a great sensitivity to light and a great feel for the handling of human subjects, from street people to royalty.
“I enjoyed especially his portfolio called “Aged” with the pictures of old people in black and white. He used only one lens for more than a year, and he was able to capture the expressions and emotions of these people in their faces,” said Can Basaran ’18.
In TASIS photo classes, Mr. Iverson talked about how he developed and pursued many personal projects in the midst of intense periods of work an assignment for the magazine. Students were able to get a glimpse of the kind of dedication and passion for the work that it takes to create a body of work over 45 years.
Almost all of the students were fascinated with Mr. Iverson’s hand-colored photographic prints. He learned the technique from Van Leo in Cairo, and continues to produce the luminous images today. The technique is in keeping with Iverson’s fascination with antique photographic images, and his previous work in re-photographing famous vistas of Egyptian monuments based on originals from the 1800s.
Dasha Avonina ’17, a student in Photo 1 said, "I liked his photos from the "Still" series. The feeling of isolation and abandonment, the dark quality comes through with a very peaceful sense about it. I have tried to capture some of that in Venice on Academic Travel.
A quiet gallery of photographs...
During the second week of the fall term the Photography 2 students gathered their cameras and tripods for a photo shoot in the library. Soft light fills the building from its many windows, and hidden corners provide students with a wonderful opportunity for long exposures. Below are a few of the photographs taken for the assignment. A small selection has also been printed and is hanging in the Horst Durrschmidt Gallery in the Sahenk Fine Arts Center.
AP Tests Results and More!
The AP scores are in, and TASIS students did very well. TASIS Visual Arts students received 7 (5s), 6 (4s), and 3 (3s). This year over 28,000 students took the Studio Art 2D Design test with 17.1% receiving a 5, 28.8% (4), 32.4% (3), 17.4% (2), and 4.3% (1). Some of the work of the TASIS AP Photography class can be viewed here. More work from the 2014-2015 school year will be added in the coming weeks.
Alumni artists in the news include Luca Marziale '08, photographer who exhibited work at Art Basel in June and Fiona Struengmann '05 who had a late May photography exhibition at Photo London.
Gianna Dispenza '08 also had an exhibition this June in Beirut. Gianna was also been featured in Majestic Disorder, a London-based is an arts and culture print and online magazine and design agency whose focus is globally driven focusing on cultural topics, fashion, public affairs, and stories about artists across all mediums. Read the Majestic Disorder article here.
