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Gavin Watson

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Gavin Watson grew up in a typical working class overspill town that surround London. Stumbling into photography aged 14, becoming a skinhead at 15, he inadvertently documented the real, social, interracial and musical scene behind the media’s right-wing portrayal of this demonised youth culture of the late 1970s and 1980s… Read More >

PICTURE OF THE WEEK

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In the early 1970s New York City was in the midst of a recession leaving many vacant lots occupied by homeless people. Witnessing these conditions daily, artist/activist Liz Christy and friends formed the Green Guerrillas. They dropped “SEED BOMBS” into these… Read More >

China Red:

Peoples

Revolution

National Day, 1st October 1966. Solange Brand, 1966.

Beijing in 1966: Streets full of young people bustling around, the demonstrations of Mao’s activists, a sea of red flags. The 19-year-old Solange Brand, then a secretary at the French Embassy, captured the early years of China’s Cultural Revolution with a camera that she had bought in Hong Kong. Color photography was practically nonexistent in China at that time; a handful of government publications … Read More >

Seeds of Color

C.A.T. Maximilian Kirmse, 2013. Oil on canvas, 180 x 210 cm.

UPON PAPER is pleased to present the group exhibition Seeds of Color during the Gallery Weekend Berlin. The exhibition once more takes up the theme of color, which the UPON PAPER project – magazine, space, and website – has been exploring for the last six months. The works shown are by young artists whose formal and thematic reflections integrate themselves into an organic whole within the… Read More >

Quantum Light:

David Benjamin Sherry

Self Portrait as the Born Feeling Begins. David Benjamin Sherry, 2010.

David Benjamin Sherry was born in Woodstock, New York – yes, the Woodstock – in 1981 and graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. His work includes photography, photograms, and prints, and is exhibited internationally. Quantum Light, his second book, appeared… Read More >

In a Not

so Tender

Light…

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The South of France, or as it is commonly called today, the Côte d’Azur, is little more than a cultural invention of the twentieth century. In fact to be ‘common’, in its far less eloquent Dantean volgare or vernacular, might well become its future epithet given the trashy and often glitzy lifestyle-led environment it has created over the last fifty years. Increasingly, Saint-Tropez has become a brassy Benidorm for the rich; less glamour than clamor. In effect it owes part of its… Read More >

The Colour

of Spring:

Talk Talk

Talk Talk 'The Colour of Spring' Illustration by James Marsh

It was, in retrospect, what people call a “pivotal album.” The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk’s third full-length release, appeared initially to be a straightforward development from the band’s previous recordings – artfully crafted pop delivering global hits – and yet pointed bravely towards something unexpected, something decidedly un-pop. One could see the footprints the band had left along the… Read More >

Kodak:

We Chose to Color the Moon

Kodak's best selling line of camera, the Instamatic.

“You press the button. We do the rest” was Kodak’s slogan when Kodak No. 1 came on the market in 1889. Black is the artists’ garb. The 21th Century is a purgatory for specialists, skills, and the innocent object on the photographic paper. From all sides, the death of the medium is proclaimed, and images in galleries document first and foremost the disappearance of their own genre. Photographers no longer embark on expeditions through the streets, but wander for hours through Google Street View, like the Canadian artist Jon Rafman, taking screenshots of wondrous places that the Google camera has captured inadvertently. The avant-garde of photography doesn’t need to leave the house. And meanwhile, since everyone has a digital camera or smartphone, there has never been so much photographed by so many people and uploaded to the Internet. Photos are the new text. … Read More >

Shades of Meaning: Kubrick’s Color

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Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was not only a revolutionary film director, he was a truly visionary artist. His movies are uniquely intense, always intelligently and aesthetically shot. Kubrick movies push boundaries, Kubrick movies think. His final work Eyes Wide Shut (1999), is movie of exceptional direction and represents one of his strongest… Read More >

Colors

of a

Lost

Empire

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Around 1905 the chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky devised a plan to systematically document the Russian Empire using color photography. He received the necessary materials, a railway car refitted especially for the enterprise and a permit to enter prohibited areas from Czar Nicholas II himself. The photographs, created between 1909 and 1915, aimed to give Russian school children a better understanding of the history and culture of their… Read More > 

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upon-paper-in-a-not-so-tender-light-mark-gisbourne-paul-signac Talk Talk 'The Colour of Spring' Illustration by James Marsh Kodak's best selling line of camera, the Instamatic. Der Morgen (detail), 1808. Philipp Otto Runge. upon-paper-michelle-abeles-body-paint-too ___ to ___-2012 upon-paper-shades-of-meaning-kubrick-eyes-wide-shut-masked-ball