For some reason that’s not clear to me I prefer Gerald Slota’s b/w work over the colour one. It’s maybe a somewhat different approach to walking into that dark alley that Roger Ballen has been investigating, coming from another end. Also see this page (for some more colour work).
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Gayle Chong Kwan is another artist to have re-done Caspar David Friedrich’ The Sea of Ice (also see Hiroyuki Masuyama). Yes, this is cheese. (thanks, Sara!)
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Just like Thomas Ruff’s well-known portraits, Hein-kuhn Oh’s Cosmetic Girls asks the viewer to try to look beyond make-up, poses, and photographic conventions. Also, don’t miss the older, b/w, work!
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No, this is not a painting, or actually the painting. It’s a digital recreation, using 700 individual photos, assembled by Hiroyuki Masuyama. For more on the artist and his process check out this page and this one.
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In Without A Face, Isabella Demavlys portrays the victims of acid attacks in Pakistan. In places like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and now also Afghanistan, acid attacks have become a common form of violence against women.
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This image is from Gregory Halpern’s Thin on the Ground, but also make sure to have a look at Living Wage Campaign.
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Heather McClintock has been taking photographs in Uganda for a few years now, covering the civil war in the northern part of the country. If you’ve never even heard of that war, you’re not alone. One of Foreign Policy magazine’s The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009, at number 9, is America Joins Uganda’s Civil War. Find more about the civil war here.
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David Pollock’s Sign, Symbol and Nature shows just that: Our modern (Western) world, with its displays of often fake or heavily trimmed nature (where it’s not just cheaply reproduced on wall paintings), generic buildings, and more.
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I saw Gian Paolo Minelli’s work over at The Black Snapper the other day, but I didn’t manage to dig up much more about his work other than this page.
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I’ll admit that Alaska is probably the US state I know the least about, so I enjoyed seeing Ben Huff’s (work in progress) The Last Road North.
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I was going to write something about Matthew Robert Hughes’s portraiture (via), but then I figured I might as well have people look and make up their own minds.
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Here’s a recommendation Matt Wright-Steel of Eleanor Magazine sent me: Blake Gordon’s work, especially Reality TV, which is a commentary on the sheer amount of TV in people’s lives. Writes Gordon “Open your eyes. Step outside. Indulge in life.”
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In Invasive Species, Anna Collette uses plants as metaphors for the state of the world we live in (see her bio for some details on her work).
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I found Shigeru Takato’s work over at Mrs Deane. What really struck me were not the TV studios (which I had seen in similar form somewhere else - I’m pretty sure I linked to it at some stage), but the Our Elusive Cosmos project - images of landscapes that have a connection with actual or imagines space exploration. You might be able to guess what the above landscape was used for (click on the image to see a slightly larger version).
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For those interested in a photographer portraying family, there is Chris Verene’s work. I especially like how The Galesburg Series combines portraiture with other types of photography.
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Hugo Fernandes’ photography has a bit of a cinematic feel to it.
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I don’t link to photographers from South America much simply because their work is so hard to find online (the same, of course, is true for photographers from Africa). I came across Pablo Cabado’s work on Mrs Deane - the project entitled 37°57’35.35”S 57°34’49.34”W shows a derelict amusement park in Argentina.
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At the end of “collage week”, Aislinn Leggett’s Lost Faces seems like a good way to get back to “real” photography, or maybe more accurately in this case to contemporary (digital) photomontage (which, I realized, would be another very good topic for a week).
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Recreating historical images using models is nothing new, but in the case of Bradley Wollman’s The Little War, images of the Iraq war, there is an added dimension: Most of the original images, recreated by the artist, were either carefully staged - or at least controlled - themselves (such as the infamous tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s statue - here is CNN’s original report, and this is what the crowd really looked like, see this story), or they were leaked. Wollman’s images can thus be seen as questioning what the original images are really telling us in the first place.
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Detroit photographer James D. Griffioen’s The Disappearing City is a series of projects depicting just that: Wilderness where there used to be a city.
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As Sarina Finkelstein’s Prospectors shows, there’s a new gold rush in California (or maybe the old one never really ended).
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When I first saw Oswaldo Ruiz’s illuminated houses at The Black Snapper, I was reminded of how Myoung Ho Lee isolated trees from their environments, the differences being, of course, the objects and the ways they are made to appear against the background. Ruiz’s approach adds more visual drama, even though, at the end, I’m not sure it succeeds to move beyond the gimmicky (which is my main objection about Lee’s work, too).
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Barry Underwood’s photographs of altered landscapes remind me of Tokihiro Sato’s. I like this way of changing a landscape - or maybe of creating an installation that is really only made to exist inside the camera.
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Josh Quigley still doesn’t seem to have his own website to feature his carefully staged images - which is too bad, since I know there are a lot more images than these 16 here.
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Marino Balbuena is an Argentinian artist who studied architecture before becoming a photographer. Not all his work is centered on architecture, though (thanks, Thomas!)
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Mike Sinclair’s personal work contains some nice shots, such as this one from Fairgrounds (a nice picture for the season, isn’t it?).
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Herman Nicholson’s Stand guard over the solitude of the other is a study of portraiture via the use of just one subject. There are quite a few very nice portraits in the project, even though the large edit dilutes their power a bit.
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Today, I came across Rodrigo Abd’s photo essay about undertakers in Guatemala. A lot of great images, but not for the squeamish.
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You might know Blake Andrews from his blog (B), but he’s also a photographer.
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It’s the day before Thanksgiving, which is a good opportunity to reflect a bit on American and how (and as what) its people see it. Enters Bryan Schutmaat’s Western Frieze: “these photos are not meant to be pure documentation of America and its identity, but rather a portrait of what American identity means to me, and by photographing the West - where enigma, nostalgia, and history can be found in everyday scenes - I hope to help viewers find out what it means to them, whether or not they ever visit these sleepy towns and loneliest of landscapes for themselves.” (found here)
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There is a ton of very good photography on Laura Swanson’s site. About Anti-Self-Portraits, she writes “Part biography, these images represent my discomfort with being looked at and wishing I could hide. […] By removing identity and having the shape of my body stand in for the idea of difference, there is more room for thoughts about how one looks at another. The exchange is not just about me and the viewer anymore - it has the opportunity to open up into a broader conversation about how difference is looked at.” (thanks, Jonathan!)
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Alex Fradkin’s Bunkers (under Projects) in the San Francisco Bay area. As Fradkin notes “in most cases the bunkers were obsolete before they were finished being constructed.”
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Patrick Madigan’s The Monumental doesn’t need much of an explanation. Those who don’t like this kind of photography should check out the other projects, as they’re very different.
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“The subjects of these photographs are wives, mothers, siblings, cousins and friends of soldiers. They stand in as witnesses for the traces, the dust, the ash, the scent of what’s been lost and what’s been endured and what is still happening. Making images of the family members of soldiers that have served in Iraq or Afghanistan is a way to have a dialogue with a surreal experience. Ideally, the photograph can serve as a vehicle to illuminate the myriad and shared stories of loss, separation and hope.” - Teri Fullerton (statement found here)
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There’s a lot of good work in Matt Eich’s portfolio. Highlights: “Carry Me Ohio” and “Love In The First Person”.
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In a photography world obsessed with age I have been trying to avoid looking at age. That said, when I first saw Kyle Ferino’s I was very impressed: He is 23 years old, something you would never guess from the depth and quality of his work. As is often - but not always - the case, my choice of image is not necessarily representative of all of his work - make sure to look through all the various projects (oh, and this is how a website can be done in a functional and elegant way, with elegant statements that avoid all pretension and art speak).
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Michael Fuchs’ project about Lake Ontario would be a wonderful book - I hope there’ll be a publisher willing to make it.
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I have the feeling photo editors will like this one: Chris Valites’ Water is one of those simple ideas that work very well.
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About his project Pre-Marital Bliss, Tim Veling writes that it is “a series documenting my relationship with my partner, our domestic surroundings and family, as well as the wider social and cultural environment in which we live.”
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(Something season appropriate - for those for whom November weather means gray, rainy, chilly days): Don Denton’s Salt Water & Rain.
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Marten Elder’s Delmarva Beaches contains some beautiful imagery.
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“Vladivostok amateur photographers often go to the countryside for photo sessions. Anyone can be a model but in general they are young girls and photographers are men of different ages. […] I was photographing what they have created. Postures, looks, everything was as it would be on amateur photographs […] And photographers are eager to touch young girls with their hands […] There is even a certain competition between the photographers - who managed to take pictures of more beautiful girls, and whose pictures are sexier.” - Igor Starkov explaining his series Girls at the Park (via)
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Western photographers have flocked to China to take photographs of either the boom towns or their accompanying ecological disasters (or both), but, it seems, little else. Stephen JB Kelly’s “Qi Lihe” presents a completely different topic.
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Elizabeth Heppenstall’s Boys made me laugh - to find out why click on the image above to see the actual version (the above image is just a snapshot, and yes it does get even better than that). As Ian Aleksander Adams noted “taking the things that upset you about the world and turning them into lowbrow kitsch” often helps you keep “sane in a way.” Excellent!
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More typologies: Julia Baum’s Houses. She writes “As I take a second look at these neighborhoods, I’ve found vast differences in what was once a uniform typology. Over the past 50 years these Houses have transformed from modest white cubes into a vibrant display of personality and present a rebellion against conformity. My work asserts that human individuality cannot be contained.”
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Gabriel Benaim’s Tel Aviv at 100 contains a lot of interesting photography.
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“I felt a strong need to create a body of work that goes against what the media has depicted as beautiful. […] The work deals with reality and no photoshop has been used to remove blemishes, scars, cellulite and any other form of ‘imperfection’, but also touches on fantasy.” - Jodi Bieber about Real Beauty
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“For Japanese photographer Yuki Tawada, the artwork is not considered finished even when the printing process has been completed, as the paper and the image itself can still be manipulated for new visual and emotional effects.” (source)
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Keisuke Shirota expands photographs by painting around them.
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Ross Mantle’s In The Wake of an American Dream perfectly portrays the de-industrialized areas around Pittsburgh.
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