Recently in Contemporary Photographers Category

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.

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.

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."

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).

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).

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.

Hugo Fernandes' photography has a bit of a cinematic feel to it.

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.

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).

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.

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.

As Sarina Finkelstein's Prospectors shows, there's a new gold rush in California (or maybe the old one never really ended).

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).

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.

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.