United Photo Press 2nd open call | #uppartforall Free Art Festival Online 2021

UNITED PHOTO PRESS want to set again an example in times of the Covid-19 crisis and general curfew and promote the creativity of those UPP members & guests who sit at home and do not know what to do with new photos and paintings... themselves.

We call on artists to send us works dealing with the new phenomenon of social distancing. We are currently facing involuntary quarantine and isolation. From one day to the next, you can no longer live as you have always been used to.

What do I see from my window?
What do I see when I go out for basic needs? (pharmacy,supermaket,etc.)
What am I painting in my quarantine?
What artist activities am I developing in the quarantine?
What does it do to humans?
What happens to the public space without the usual dynamic?
How does this dynamic shift into private, at home?
How does it change interpersonal relationships when social distancing becomes everyday life?
Do we all currently live in long distance relationships?
Is the journey currently going inwards?
And what comes after this general isolation phase?
Etc...Etc...Etc...

We call all UPP artists members and guests to send us *artworks that deals with these questions. All positive contributions will be presented for free on our facebook  made accessible to everyone all over the world  complying with regulations of  Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in EU.

Artists participating in the #uppartforall free art festival online can benefit from a large existing network and publishing.

We are aware that the movement of social distancing art is still in its infancy. At the same time we see your social distancing artworks as documentation, of the present „unimagined' time. Without a doubt, the website alongside its contributions will last for weeks, months and years and gain relevance as a historical statement. 

Vernissage 1st february 2021 (12:00/gmt) on our special page on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/uppartforall/

*all artworks (max. 4 photos per artist, max resolution 1280x720 / 1MB)  must be sent till 15 of february 2021 with name of the author, link of website or social network, email and contact to UPP email: info@unitedphotopress.net
When you send the photos by email to the  #uppartforall free online art festival, you automatically authorize the digital publication of them by the United Photo Press.

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Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87

Bill Cunningham, who turned fashion photography into his own branch of cultural anthropology on the streets of New York, chronicling an era’s ever-changing social scene for The New York Times by training his busily observant lens on what people wore — stylishly, flamboyantly or just plain sensibly — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by The Times. He had been hospitalized recently after having a stroke.

Mr. Cunningham was such a singular presence in the city that, in 2009, he was designated a living landmark. And he was an easy one to spot, riding his bicycle through Midtown, where he did most of his field work: his bony-thin frame draped in his utilitarian blue French worker’s jacket, khaki pants and black sneakers (he himself was no one’s idea of a fashion plate), with his 35-millimeter camera slung around his neck, ever at the ready for the next fashion statement to come around the corner.

Nothing escaped his notice: not the fanny packs, not the Birkin bags, not the gingham shirts, not the fluorescent biker shorts.

In his nearly 40 years working for The Times, Mr. Cunningham snapped away at changing dress habits to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.

At the Pierre hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, he pointed his camera at tweed-wearing blue-blood New Yorkers with names like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. Downtown, by the piers, he clicked away at crop-top-wearing Voguers. Up in Harlem, he jumped off his bicycle — he rode more than 30 over the years, replacing one after another as they were wrecked or stolen — for B-boys in low-slung jeans.

In the process, he turned into something of a celebrity himself.

In 2008, Mr. Cunningham went to Paris, where the French government bestowed him with the Legion of Honor. In New York, he was celebrated at Bergdorf Goodman, where a life-size mannequin of him was installed in the window.

It was the New York Landmarks Conservancy that made him a living landmark in 2009, the same year The New Yorker, in a profile, described his On the Street and Evening Hours columns as the city’s unofficial yearbook: “an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked.”

In 2010, a documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York,” premiered at the Museum of Modern Art to glowing reviews.

Yet Mr. Cunningham told nearly anyone who asked about it that the attendant publicity was a total hassle, a reason for strangers to approach and bother him.

He wanted to find subjects, not be the subject. He wanted to observe, rather than be observed. Asceticism was a hallmark of his brand.

He didn’t go to the movies. He didn’t own a television. He ate breakfast nearly every day at the Stage Star Deli on West 55th Street, where a cup of coffee and a sausage, egg and cheese could be had, until very recently, for under $3. He lived until 2010 in a studio above Carnegie Hall amid rows and rows of file cabinets, where he kept all of his negatives. He slept on a single-size cot, showered in a shared bathroom and, when he was asked why he spent years ripping up checks from magazines like Details (which he helped Annie Flanders launch in 1982), he said: “Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive.”

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