JAMES MOLLISON
"Where Children Sleep"
Photographs, 2010
In cooperation with Nordic Light
24.08 - 28.09.12
Where Children Sleep- stories of diverse children around the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedrooms. When Fabrica asked him to come up with an idea for engaging with children's rights, he found himself thinking about his bedroom: how significant it was during his childhood, and how it reflected what he had and who he was. It occurred to him that a way to address some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children would be to look at the bedrooms of children in all kinds of different circumstances.
From the start, he didn't want it just to be about 'needy children' in the developing world, but rather something more inclusive, about children from all types of situations. It seemed to make sense to photograph the children themselves, too, but separately from their bedrooms, using a neutral background. Mollison´s thinking was that the bedroom pictures would be inscribed with the children's material and cultural circumstances 'the details that inevitably mark people apart from each other' while the children themselves would appear in the set of portraits as individuals, as equals 'just as children'.
James Mollison was born in Kenya in 1973 and grew up in England. After studying Art and Design at Oxford Brookes University, and later film and photography at Newport School of Art and Design, he moved to Italy to work at Benetton’s creative lab, Fabrica. Since August 2011 Mollison has been working as a creative editor on Colors Magazine with Patrick Waterhouse. In 2009 he won the Royal Photographic Society’s Vic Odden Award, for notable achievement in the art of photography by a British photographer aged 35 or under.
His work has been widely published throughout the world including by Colors, The New York Times Magazine, the Guardian magazine, The Paris Review, GQ, New York Magazine and Le Monde. His latest book Playground was published in April 2015 by Aperture Foundation- a series of composites of moments that happened during a single break time, a kind of time-lapse photography. His fourth book Where Children Sleep was published in November 2010- stories of diverse children around the world, told through portraits and pictures of their bedroom. His third book, The Disciples was published in 2008 – panoramic format portraits of music fans photographed before and after concerts. In 2007 he published The Memory of Pablo Escobar– the extraordinary story of ‘the richest and most violent gangster in history’ told by hundreds of photographs gathered by Mollison. It was the follow-up to his work on the great apes – widely seen as an exhibition including at the Natural History Museum, London, and in the book James and Other Apes (Chris Boot, 2004).
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25. september
Debattkveld rundt utstillingen Where Children Sleep (in Norwegian)
Alle barn har rett til:
ALLE BARN har rett til omsorg og beskyttelse, en trygg oppvekst og et godt helse tilbud sier barnekonvensjonen. Både lokalt og globalt er det barn som vokser opp under omsorgssvikt. Hva er det essensielle et barn trenger for å føle trygghet og hvor kan det gå galt?
I James Mollisons utstilling Where children sleep møter vi barn fra hele verden med forskjellig sosial, økonomisk og kulturell bakgrunn. Gjennom portretter og avbildninger av de enkeltes soverom forteller bildene oss om de ulike materielle og sosiale situasjoner barn i verden vokser opp med. Miljøet rundt oss er en viktig del av oppvekst og utvikling,men hva definerer et godt miljø?
Øystein Helgesen fra SOS-barnebyer kommer for å snakke om hvordan barnebyer i Bergen hver dag tilstreber å gi barna omsorg og trygghet. Haldis Haukanes førsteamanuensis ved institutt for sosialantropologi vil snakke om barn og foreldreskap i et krysskulturelt perspektiv, mens Harald Kryvi professor i zoologi vil drøfte hva slags konsekvenser over befolkning har på Jorda og dens befolkning.
Innledere:
> Øystein Helgesen dagligleder SOS-barnebyer i Bergen
> Haldis Haukanes Førsteamanuensis og leder for master programmet gender and development ved Institutt for utdanning og helse
> Harald Kryvi professor i zoologi
> 3.14s debattredaktør Caroline Jensen