Articles

Contemporary Photographers

Paolo Woods

May 8, 2013 – This is an image from Paolo Woods’ Chinafrica, a photographic portrait of the roughly half a million Chinese people working in Africa.

Contemporary European Photography

Marcus Haydock

May 7, 2013 – I had a hard time deciding to pick an image from Marcus Haydock’s large and impressive portfolio. This one is from Inside Out.

Contemporary Photographers

Diane Meyer

May 6, 2013 – According to the artist, Diane Meyer’s Time Spent That Might Otherwise Be Forgotten “is based on photographs taken at various points in my life and arranged by location. Sections of the images have been obscured through a layer of embroidered pixels sewn directly into the photograph. The embroidery deteriorates sections of the original photograph forming a new pixelated layer of the original scene. The project refers to the failures of photography in preserving experience and personal history as well as the means by which photographs become nostalgic objects that obscure objective understandings of the past.”

Book Reviews, Photobooks

Review: Naked by Rimaldas Viksraitis

May 3, 2013 – A few years ago, Rimaldas Viksraitis won the Discovery Award at the Arles photography festival for his work in the Lithuanian countryside, depictions of scenes that for many critics and viewers brought to mind photographers like Boris Mikhailov or Richard Billingham. With work like Viksraitis’ the topic of photography and exploitation is never that far. It’s not clear to me how useful such discussions really are, especially since they usually omit the topic whether the photographer himself is not being exploited by the larger photography art world that discovered him and then parades him and his images around. I should also add that the photo art world might want to re-visit the topic of exploitation in light of the kinds of images people - willingly - put up online. (more)

Contemporary European Photography

Enrico Boccioletti

May 1, 2013 – “content aware is a collection of edited pictures downloaded from fashion blogs, where the subject is assimilated to the background using content-aware fill in photoshop.” - Enrico Boccioletti

Contemporary Photographers

Curran Hatleberg

Apr 30, 2013 – Curran Hatleberg appears to have an instinct to make the right picture, at the right time, often in places where you wouldn’t expect to find one. See my piece on another one of his photographs.

Contemporary Photographers

Mustafah Abdulaziz

Apr 29, 2013 – Mustafah Abdulaziz’s Memory Loss is filled with images that are almost too good to be true, a laconic portrait of the US and the people living there.

Book Reviews, Photobooks

Review: Kiev by The Sochi Project

Apr 26, 2013 – The release of smaller, purely photo-centric books, has been a part of The Sochi Project for the past years now. The beauty of these smaller books is that they allow for a bit more playfulness in an otherwise often very heavy series of publications. The latest addition, Kiev, is no exception. Rob Hornstra was given a Kiev 6C medium-format SLR camera, a veritable beast of a camera, which, as it happens, I owned once myself. When they work, which often means if they work, these cameras are pretty amazing. You’ll grow a muscle or two (they’re huge and heavy), and you’ll smell Soviet industrial smells you had no idea they even existed. (more)

Contemporary European Photography

Inge Schoutsen

Apr 24, 2013 – Inge Schoutsen’s A Bit of Paradise, but Mostly Utopia is literally that: Photographs from places named Paradise and Utopia.

Contemporary Photographers

Bertrand Carriere

Apr 23, 2013 – In Apres Strand, Bertrand Carriere follows the trails of Paul Strand who in 1929 and 1936 visited the Gaspé Peninsula, which resulted in Strand understanding what he called “the essential character of a place.” (more information [in English] here)

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Conscientious Extended

Longer articles and interviews about fine-art photography and extended interviews with its leading practitioners.

The Ethics of Street Photography

“[Garry] Winogrand was famous for never asking people permission before taking their photographs;” writes Caille Millner in a review of the photographer’s current retrospective at SFMoMA, “a whole generation of male photographers idolized him for shooting however he wanted, whenever he wanted.” It’s not hard to imagine what the legions of Winogrand fans will have made of Millner’s review, which continues “No one seems to recognize that Winogrand’s beliefs are shared most seriously by the kinds of men who haunt Reddit subforums like ‘Creepshots.’ On those forums, the chorus is ‘Rape her.’ Thanks to his superior sense of aesthetics, Winogrand’s moments of lechery show up at SFMOMA, where the chorus is that he’s a visionary.” (more)

By Joerg Colberg  |  Apr 3, 2013

Conscientious Extended »