Jon Nordstrøm Celebrates Danish Tattoos

With an impressive number of tattoo parlors within easy walking distance of the Avenue Hotel in Copenhagen, we just had to share this video we recently came across on the tradition of Danish Tattooing. If you’ve seen a copy of the cult book Russian Criminal Tattoo lying around a friend’s coffee table, consider any future gift giving dilemmas solved; Jon Nordstrøm’s photography books Danish Tattooing and Nordic Tattooing are sure to reach a similar cult status among tattoo lovers, as well as photography book lovers.

You can read more about it on Cool Hunting.

Whether you’re planning on coming home with a new tattoo, or having just thought about it, we think there’s no better place to call your home away from home in Copenhagen than White Line Hotels edit Avenue Hotel.

photo courtesy of Cool Hunting

Ruins Revisited in Barcelona

Before photography really took off, before we were all carrying around digital cameras in our pockets, and long before the creation of live streaming everything from weather to puppies, an intrepid French archaeologist and explorer set out to capture the Mayan ruins on film. For four years, between 1857 and 1861 Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay collected relics and photographed ruins throughout South America resulting in a mostly forgotten report in Eugene Viollet-le-Ducs’ Cités et ruines américaines.

The beauty of mostly forgotten reports such as Désiré Charnay’s, is when someone, somewhere, finds them and sees how magical they are. Mexican artist José Luis Bravo’s current exhibition, Paysages avec Ruines, at Barcelona’s H20 Gallery has taken the original works by Désiré Charnay and recreated the original journey through Mexico as well as turning his eye towards Roman ruins in France, effectively reversing the original exploration. The 1857 photographs were taken with a camera obscura. In Bravo’s Désiré Charnay-inspired expedition, he used a camera that takes digital images in the same style as the originals.

The exploration is one of memory and the reconstruction of a world that no longer exists. Fundamental to an understanding of the photographs is the path that is used to travel back and forth between the two countries, the same path that was likely used during the last century of colonialism. You can expect an exhibition that triggers memories of the types ruins that lay in every country and the early journeys that were taken to document them, as well as the Western worlds never ending fascination with cultures and practices that lay outside our comfort zone.

The exhibition runs through the 28^th of May.

In your explorations of Barcelona, you’re going to need a base. Somewhere you can escape the excitement for a siesta, or perhaps an afternoon dip in the rooftop terrace pool. Sound tempting? Then White Line Hotels edit Hotel Omm is what you’re looking for. Take the day off with a tan and a swim, and get a jump on the evening by starting it at the Roca Brother’s guided Moo Restaurant.

Barcelona through the Artist’s Eye

When we travel our impressions are generally formed based on a city’s great monuments, fashion, design, or museums. One could argue that to truly know a city intimately, the art created by the artists who live and love the city is an insightful reflection of the day to day.

Photographs of a city can tell a story we can’t experience through monuments, stories of moments we often wouldn’t be able to see unless someone captured and presented them to us as photographs. In Barcelona’s Kowasa Gallery the  current exhibition of Marino Zuzunaga’s photography, moments captured over the last four decades have been culled and curated into one provocative exhibition.

“A Select Offering” from the Peruvian artist, musician, professor, theoretician and author will show Zuzunaga’s vintage prints from the early 1970’s in Peru to more recent works shot in Barcelona, which he now calls home. The exhibition reveals the deep thought the artist invests into his work. In “The Photographer and Photography” from 2008 the artist mused:

“As a kind of a primal philosopher, the photographer dedicates himself to something he is probably bound to ignore absolutely and forever. His photographs show a life of fragments, which he intents to bring together without knowing exactly how. His ignorance, as all ignorance, does not delimit him. The knowledge he obtains through photography is often limited in reminding him just that.”

The exhibition at Kowasa takes place parallel to a group show curated by Zuzunaga at the Galería Esther Montoriol. The “Circular” exhibition places recent work by Zuzunaga in a dialogue with other works from a selection of artists. Many major art institutions have bought works by Zuzunaga, this is your chance to see them in a more intimate setting.

“A Select Offering” takes place in the Kowasa Gallery, run by the photography bookstore of the same name. The gallery is located on the second floor of a beautiful old building Barcelona’s main photography books store and well worth a visit of it’s own. The exhibition runs through June 4^th.

The location of the gallery is sublime – in thick of it all. Just like White Line Hotels edit Hotel Omm. Now that spring seems to have arrived, wouldn’t you like to be spending it on their rooftop terrace overlooking Barcelona?

Kowasa Gallery: www.kowasa.com

Galería Esther Montoriol: www.montoriol.com

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Categories: Barcelona, Art, Culture, Exhibitions, Photography

Contributing writer: Alicia Reuter

The IPS: the future blows up, part 2

Continuing with the theme of inflatable objects, we’ll travel down and over, to NYC, where information about photographer Brian Hedenberg’s Inflatable Photo Studio (IPS) hasn’t even been officially released yet. Hedenberg has lived with the problems photographers face, namely, the lack of a studio, and found an interesting inflatable solution.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and thus the IPS was created.  In just three minutes, any photographer can have a studio, pretty much anywhere. Although the studio looks more like a massive blown-up garbage bag than anything else, it has all of the components one needs: it’s portable, it can block out natural light, it’s weather proof, and it’s affordable. The studio boasts two entrances, and the fan is adjustable so that it can blow on the model to achieve that tousled, breezy look that fashion magazines adore.

You can pre-order the Inflatable Photo Studio at www.ips-studio.com.

As any photographer can tell you, New York is one of the inspiring cities in the world.  And the most inspired hotel in NY? Our vote goes for the Greenwich, where you can escape from the city streets into an atmosphere that is, most definitely, New York.

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Categories: New York, Photography

Contributing writer: Alicia Reuter

Iñaki Bonillas: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Projecte SD, Barcelona

Photography just hasn’t been the same since Roland Barthes’ mother died, has it? For those who didn’t study art, photography, or otherwise come across his book Camera Lucida, her death prompted the French theorist/ philosopher/ critic/ semiotician to write his sometimes touching and grief-stricken musings on, very briefly summarized, the essence of photography, the photograph as an object that is both cultural and personal in meaning, and to quote Barthes directly, “that rather terrible thing which there is in every photograph: the return of the dead.” With the book having basically reached the status of required reading at art schools, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s influence is marking the work a generation of artists whose work even comes close to the issue of the meaning of a photograph. Read the rest of this entry »