Sirius Arts Presents

Sirius Arts Centre

Cobh, County Cork

In Partnership with

ADMIRA, Feroz Gallery, Cork County Council and the Arts Council

Present

ABSENCE OF SUBJECT

Photographs by
August Sander and Michael Somoroff

WEDNESDAY 16 APRIL 7:00PM
Artist Michael Somoroff will be present

An Artist talk with American Photographer
Michael Somoroff
will take place at the Crawford Art Gallery
on Thursday 17 April from 1 – 2pm
Admission Free!

American Photographer, Michael Somoroff created this series as a visual conversation with the legendary German photographer, August Sander (1876 – 1964) and presents a unique conceptual homage from one artist to another.  Somoroff selected images from Sander’s portrait series, Menschen des 20^th Jahrhunderts ( People of the 20^th Century) and, using digital technology, has removed the sitter.  The pictures retain the subtle suggestions of human habitation, leaving mysteries, intensified by the display of empty environments the exhibition has been curated by Diane Edkins and Julian Sander

“The originality in this body of work is based on Somoroff’s keen sense of observation and interpretation. In this collection of photographs by Somoroff and Sander accompanied with three animated pieces, Absence of Subject lets you revisit August Sander’s work, allowing the audience to understand the richness of Sander’s intent.  In each of August Sander’s pictures Michael Somoroff has erased the subject retaining only the background. The unprecedented digital revolution has brought the potential for manipulation into focus. Through the use of software Somoroff has taken out what we have always believed to be the “essential element” – the subject, the portrait. The backgrounds once a secondary fragment now become the primary motivator. They have now been translated into new fully conceived images that rightfully belong to the “post-modern” idiom.” — Diane Edkins

August Sander

August Sander has been described as the most important German portrait photographer of the early 20th. Century. August Sander’s first book, the controversial publication, the collective portrait of German society, Face of Our Time (German title: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. This was expanded into Sander’s life work the People of the 20th Century (Menschen des 20 Jahrhunderts). The Face of Our Time contained a selection of 60 portraits and aimed to show a cross-section of society during the Weimar republic. Sander, taking a rigorously nonpolitical stance, attempted to create an inclusive photographic survey of all the various occupations, professions and classes that together formed the national social structure in the years directly after World War I. The series is divided into seven sections: the farmer, the skilled tradesman, woman, classes and professions, the artists, the city and the last people (homeless persons, veterans, etc.). Sander photographed subjects from all walks of life and created a typological catalogue of more than 600 photographs of German people. Each person was formally posed and identified only by captions specifying their social situation.

August Sander’s ambition was to create a universal portrait of mankind, a monumental documentary. With Sander’s portraits, we see an artist’s attempting to document, systemize and organize modern types of people, in order to better understand the changing notions of class, race, profession, ethnicity and other constructs of identity.. The images are thus representation of types, as he intended them to be, rather than portraits of individuals.

Michael Somoroff

Michael Somoroff, the son of the eminent commercial photographer Ben Somoroff, was born in New York City in 1957. Michael studied art and photography at the New School for Social research as well as assisting his father in his studio on the set, on location and in the darkroom. In October 1979 the first exhibition of Somoroffʼs photography was held at The International Center for Photography in New York City under the personal supervision of Cornell Capa launching young Somoroff’s career. In 1978, at the age of twenty-one, he opened his own photography studio and shortly thereafter began working for virtually every major magazine in New York and Europe.

In 1980, Somoroff moved to Europe where he worked in London, Paris, Milan and Hamburg, Shortly after his arrival in Europe, he became a noted photographer in his own right, where he was a regular contributor to such influential magazines on both sides of the Atlantic as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Stern and life. He continued to develop his personal work, traveling throughout Europe and North Africa, forming many friendships that served as the foundation for his artistic efforts. Among his most important mentors was the photographer Gyula Halász, better known as Brassaï, Andreas Feininger, Louis Faurer, and Andre Kertész.

Since returning to New York at the end of the 1980’s, Michael Somoroff has thoroughly devoted himself to the research of his ideas and his artistic production. His dedication to social reform through the promotion of art is the cornerstone of his activities. He regularly lectures and collaborates with corporations as well as cultural institutions of all sizes to create programs that use art as a way of improving communication between people and the communities they live in. He is generally known for his serious interest in religion and the spiritual condition not only of his immediate company but society at large.

Michael Somoroff is represented in many important collections worldwide, a sampling of which include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.