On Saturday November 27th in Barcelona, Spain, FTC released the decks and shirts designed by Alex Trochut.  Only 50 boards have been manufactured, hand numbered, out of which only 10 have reached FTC Barcelona.  The rest are scattered in other stores FTC (SF, Tokyo, Sacramento). http://vimeo.com/17408827 Alex took the opportunity to show his other works at the opening, including ceramic works made by Apparatu. You can see more images from the opening on the FTC site and on their Facebook page.

This World AIDS Day – December 1st - Product(RED) are launching a new campaign that brings light to the important fact that by 2015 we can have a world where virtually no child is born with HIV. With continued funding to organizations like the Global Fund, we have a chance to work towards a world where the number of babies born with HIV could be zero in 2015 – creating the first AIDS Free Generation in 30 years. As a way to raise awareness and educate about this goal, Product(RED) have enlisted a whole host of talented street artists, painters, illustrators, photographers and sculptors to provide their creative interpretation of the fact that ’The AIDS Free Generation is Due in 2015’.  Among those artists were Alex Trochut, Brosmind and James Day (in order below).  Each artist chose a headline and incorporated a unique take on “2015”. Stay tuned for more, including artists Steve Wilson, Dimitri Daniloff, Laziz Hamani, Sean Freeman and Danny Clinch! Read more about the campaign on the Product(RED) blog.

Colette in Paris is now showing Peter Funch's Babel Tales series for the month of November, with an opening reception and book signing on November 18th. A few images from the gallery at Colette: Babel Tales is a series of works that focus on human relations (or lack thereof) in big cities.  Peter's project is a junction between documentary photography and manipulated photography.  Through repetition and juxtaposition he zooms in on human similarities and collective behavior and ends up creating a strange poetic and detailed picture of our presence as both individuals and community in the public sphere.  His uncanny work raises questions of reality contra fiction and challenges our notion of photography as being a depiction of a certain moment in time. Peter Funch's work are documents of moments that never existed as they are composed of several hundred moments taken over the duration of several weeks for each piece.  By shooting in the exact same position over a period of time, he is able to superimpose images on top of each other and create a fictional work base on documentary photography. Babel Tales was published this year with a limited run of 500 copies and has 41 color photos printed on 250 G silk tint paper. Babel Tales is available for sale from the following: V1 GALLERY COPENHAGEN DASHWOOD BOOKS NEW YORK Clic Bookstore & Gallery NYC COLETTE PARIS POLITIKENS BOGHANDEL COPENHAGEN SPOONBILL & SUGARTOWN, BOOKSELLERS, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK You can see more of Peter Funch's work on the Levine/Leavitt site.

Photographer Peter Funch is part of a book by Sophie Howarth and Stephen McLaren titled Street Photography Now. Published by Thames and Hudson, the book presents 52 contemporary image-makers noted for their candid depictions of everyday life in our streets, subways, beaches and parks. Opening reception will be Saturday, September 18th, 6-8 PM, at The Photographers Gallery in London, England.  16-18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F 7LW. See more of Peter Funch's work on the Levine/Leavitt site.

The June 2010 issue of Juxtapoz magazine features an article about the work of Peter Funch.  Copies are currently on newsstands around the country. To see more of Peter's work, visit the Levine/Leavitt site.

Peter Funch's Babel Tales project culminates this month in a solo exhibition with all 41 pieces from the completed series, as well as work from his project, Addendum, at the V1 Gallery in Copenhagen. The entire collection of Babel Tales (many of which have never been displayed in the 4 years since Peter began the project), has been published in a limited edition book in conjunction with the opening, and a small sum of the 500 published will be available at Dashwood Books in Soho, NY. We spoke with Peter, and asked him to tell us more about Adendum, a project in conjunction with Babel Tales involving abstract photographs displayed as light boxes: "Addendum is a word to describe an addition or supplement to a main work.  For these pieces I wanted to show what is behind the image, so I created these studies wherein all the contact sheets from my shooting are laid on top of one another.  There are over 10,000 frames in each of these pieces, and when you look closely you can racognize a corner of a frame or a face, but from afar they simply represent the chaos or randomness you find in the streets." Wrapping up the exhibition is an installation, wherein Peter collected objects he found on the streets over the years of shooting Babel Tales, ground them into dust, and placed them in bags displayed on a table alongside the photographic work. "The piece consisting of 72 bags is a similar concept as Babel Tales being about how we categorize our behavior or our interests. The objects I found all represented a personal story--from a lottery ticket symbolizing lost dreams to a broken plastic nail--they are a physical representation of life's stories.  I would find the object and grind it down until it simply became a color or a texture, like a raw material.  I then categorized and named them in bags. The piece is named after all 72 objects, from bottles to brooms to dolls." You can see more of Peter's work at llreps.com

Peter Funch's "Babel Tales" project has been met with critical acclaim from the international art community, and is now the center of two pieces for both Wired UK as well as Art World Magazine. Peter's technique is to capture thousands of frames from the same position on street corners in major cities. His objective is to discover the human patterns that emerge from the passage of time in one place. Each person in every image is from a different frame. Included in these articles are interviews with Peter explaining more about his intention of this work, and the way it was conceived.