When Wright Morris (1910-1998) went into photography, he was already a scholarly writer, and soon became a respected author in the United States. Therefore, he considered the photographic medium primarily as an additional tool for “capturing the essence of the visible” just as he did with words.
The genre of family continues to be explored as photographers mine their lives, looking at those under the same roof as a way to understand and document those near and dear. Dominik Dunsch’s project Suburbia documents the every day, using family and place
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2019/06/dominik-dunsch-suburbia/
The genre of family continues to be explored as photographers mine their lives, looking at those under the same roof as a way to understand and document those near and dear. Dominik Dunsch’s project Suburbia documents the every day, using family and place to understand his own life as he exists between generations in the middle ground of what is and what was. It’s a series of details and metaphors, the intangible bumping up against the real, snippets of humor and absurdity and beauty all combining into this thing called life.
Tseng’s photographs stage imaginary scenes of cultural friction, craving, and interpretation.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/tseng-kwong-chi-an-ambiguous-ambassador-to-life-in-america
On an evening in December, 1980, the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi gate-crashed the party of the year: the gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the opening night of “The Manchu Dragon,” an exhibition (organized by Diana Vreeland) of Chinese costume from the Qing dynasty. Tseng used a medium-format camera to photograph the arriving guests. An era’s tony milieu pauses, flash-lit: an amused Yves Saint-Laurent, Halston in high spirits, a quizzical William F. Buckley. Nancy Kissinger turns up in the same Adolfo dress as two other women—but nobody looks embarrassed. Tseng himself is also in the pictures, grinning away beside his subjects, with a cable release in his hand. And he is dressed, as he frequently is in his dandy-conceptualist art, in a plain gray “Mao suit,” which reads here as a laconic visual rejoinder to the exhibit’s lavish Orientalism.
At first glance John Sanderson’s series of images, entitled Carbon County, has the familiar cadence of American Western documentary photography. Broad sweeping landscapes with horizons that seem worlds away, lonely snaking roads and rugged men on horsebac
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2019/06/john-sanderson-carbon-country/
At first glance John Sanderson’s series of images, entitled Carbon County, has the familiar cadence of American Western documentary photography. Broad sweeping landscapes with horizons that seem worlds away, lonely snaking roads and rugged men on horseback. But very quickly these perceived pillars of American Western identity, the keystones in the story we tell ourselves about Western life, take a different shape. There is a tone of mythology in the gaze Sanderson casts upon his subjects as he attempts to merge the fantastic nature of American Western lore with the reality of the place. So many of his photographs are made through the window or dashboard of a car, a framing which begins to feel like it contains a still from an old Western movie. And isn’t that how we most often experience this landscape? Either in film or traversing the country across wide open highway, snapping photos of some road signs or an old windmill and then carrying on our way? I ask myself these questions and then begin to wonder whether I’m allowing the version of the West that exists in my own mind to be projected onto the imagery. And perhaps this is the point. Sanderson presents us with the truth and the fantasy all at once as he explores the narratives ingrained in us – American Frontierism, Cowboys and Indians, and the promise that as you continue West surely wealth and personal discovery would be bestowed.
Roy DeCarava, Boy in park, reading, 1950 Roy DeCarava, Swimmers, 1950 “We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good…
via Feature Shoot: https://www.featureshoot.com/2019/06/celebrating-the-sweet-flypaper-of-life-in-roy-decaravas-centennial-year/
“We’ve had so many books about how bad life is, maybe it’s time to have one showing how good it is,” Langston Hughes said of The Sweet Flypaper of Life, his landmark art book collaboration with Roy DeCarava recently republished by David Zwirner Books.
In Good Morning, America, Mark Power offers a wake-up call to a country that has grown more divided
via Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/06/17/good-morning-america-state-union-through-eyes-magnum-photographer-mark-power/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.36adfa277640
In “Good Morning, America,” published by GOST Books, Power offers a view, somewhat pessimistic, of a country he has found deeply divided as far back as the 1980s, when he made his first visit. “Its problems seemed then (and still do, only worse) to be so vast, so deep-rooted, like an enormous ball of twine that is slowly unraveling and impossible to stop,” he told In Sight. His photos, taken during various trips in America since 2012, highlight the incongruity of a country that stands at the top of the economic chain while also being home to increasingly larger pockets of inequalities.
It’s interesting to note that although it’s called “Life” in the Midwest, there is an obvious absence of humankind in these images. That’s because the “life” I am referring to is not humanity, but rather, my observations made as I absorb my surroundings.
Visit the post for more.
via INTERNET K-HOLE: https://internetkhole.com/2019/06/12/11/
It’s one more crack in the fabric of reality as we know it: Researchers at the University of Washington and Facebook have described their work on software that can take any image containing a human body—whether in a painting or a photograph—and automatically create an animated character that walks through the still image.
Appropriately, they call it Photo Wake-Up.
On April 15, 2019, the Italian photojournalist Lorenzo Tugnoli was honoured with the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography
When German photographer Michael Wolf died in Cheung Chau, Hong Kong, on April 24 at the age of 64, he left behind a prodigious body of work that spans 25…
via Feature Shoot: https://www.featureshoot.com/2019/06/michael-wolfs-homegoing-comes-after-sunrise/
When German photographer Michael Wolf died in Cheung Chau, Hong Kong, on April 24 at the age of 64, he left behind a prodigious body of work that spans 25 years as a photojournalist. Wolf spent the majority of his career in Asia creating work that defies easy categorization. Rather, Wolf moved as an outsider would, discovering value in the overlooked, mundane details of life and uncovering a deeper symbolic connection to the larger world.
I remember the first few weeks I started teaching at the University of Kentucky, I was walking around the art building which was my new home and I kept running into Guy Mendes. One has never encountered at more inviting and supportive fellow photographer.
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2019/06/guy-mendes-the-states-project-kentucky/
I remember the first few weeks I started teaching at the University of Kentucky, I was walking around the art building which was my new home and I kept running into Guy Mendes. One has never encountered at more inviting and supportive fellow photographer. Ever since we met, he has been the first to congratulate me on a new fellowship or project. This is made even more meaningful considering Guy’s amazing career. Born in New Orleans in 1948, Guy migrated to the Bluegrass to attend UK in 1966 where he studied under the writer Wendell Berry who introduced him to Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who in turn introduced him to photography the likes of which he had never before encountered. It set him on a lifelong search for a different way of seeing through the camera, looking long and hard at the world at hand.
The Taiwanese photographer Annie Wang’s ongoing series “Mother as Creator” portrays how a parent imagines and reimagines her place in the world she builds with and for her child.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-photographers-vision-of-being-a-mother-and-an-artist-year-after-year
In a 2001 series called “I Sign; I Exist,” the Taiwanese photographer Annie Wang took pictures of her pregnant belly as she signed and dated it, the way an artist autographs a canvas. The experience of pregnancy, she wrote, in a statement about the series, presented a paradox: her body was performing a great feat of creation, but, in doing so, it was beginning to overshadow the creative identity she’d earned through her work as an artist. In the eyes of the world, pregnancy and motherhood can turn a woman into a mere vessel, subsumed by the sacrifices she makes for her children. In these photos, Wang asserts her active role in the making of another life, reframing motherhood as a grand creative endeavor.
I was recently introduced to Sarah Hoskins’ work as a fellow Lexington photographer who imbeds themselves into communities for their practice. I was immediately intrigued by her ability to get access to these small communities and show their intimate mome
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2019/06/sarah-hoskins-the-states-project-kentucky/
I was recently introduced to Sarah Hoskins’ work as a fellow Lexington photographer who imbeds themselves into communities for their practice. I was immediately intrigued by her ability to get access to these small communities and show their intimate moments. The photographs depict families and friends living their lives working, relaxing and worshiping together. Sarah’s work with the towns of eastern and central Kentucky seem to be an investigation of not the general culture and economy of the region, but of relationships and a way of life. I am constantly reminded of the work of Arthur Rothstein’s work in Alabama in the late 1930s. Both are not looking to exhibit labor and abuse of these communities, but their way of life and a portrait of a region and its angelic citizenry.
Thirty-three years ago, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, starting a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world—and that was just the beginning of the disaster.
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/06/chernobyl-disaster-photos-1986/590878/
As the HBO miniseries Chernobyl comes to a conclusion tonight, viewers will have been taken on a dramatic trip back to 1986, experiencing the horror and dread unleashed by the world’s worst-ever civil nuclear disaster. Thirty-three years ago, on April 26, 1986, a series of explosions destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, and several hundred staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers were killed in the immediate aftermath. The workers and emergency responders were not the only ones to risk their lives—a handful of photographers went to the scene as well, managing to capture images of some of the chaos and acts of heroism that took place in the weeks and months that followed. (For current images of Chernobyl and the surrounding exclusion zone, be sure to also see Visiting Chernobyl 32 Years After the Disaster, from 2018.)
The photographer Johis Alarcón documented not just the indelible influence of African culture in Ecuador, but also how the descendants of enslaved women maintained their culture.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/lens/afro-ecuadoreans-identity-spiritual-practices.html
The photographer Johis Alarcón documented not just the indelible influence of African culture in Ecuador, but also how the descendants of enslaved women maintained their culture.
In the course of her half-century-long career, Iturbide has dedicated herself to documenting the daily lives, the mores, and the remarkable diversity of Mexican people, always with an eye for the dignity of her subjects.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/graciela-iturbides-art-of-seeing-mexico
Four years ago, at the age of seventy-three, the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide travelled across her country with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Their journey began in the southern state of Tabasco, near the border with Guatemala, where migrants make their way north atop a notorious freight train known as La Bestia. In the town of Tenosique, Iturbide stopped by La 72, a shelter built in memory of seventy-two migrants who were slain by a drug cartel, their bodies found, blindfolded and bound, in a derelict farm across the border from Brownsville. The backdrop for many of her photographs were shelters run by friars and nuns, where she captured migrants in rare moments of respite. We see a pair of lovers, who had met on the road, locked in an embrace, and a mother unwinding with her infant son, their forms casting a shadow on a hand-painted mural of Mexico dotted with safety and danger zones. On the last stop of her trip, at a shelter in Oaxaca, Iturbide met a Salvadoran teen-ager who was fleeing MS-13 because he had refused to kill. She found the boy in front of a desktop computer, listening to MS-13 raps and composing his own verses. “Even if he didn’t want to belong anymore, he still did,” Iturbide told me recently by phone, from her studio, in Mexico City.
Back in 2006, skateboarder Jerry Hsu got a Blackberry. He began taking notes, snapping visual one-liners, jotting down locations and references that he’d send by BBM to friends. “By today’s standards, those photos are really bad but back then it was like,
via Huck Magazine: https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/photography-2/a-scroll-through-jerry-hsus-bizarre-camera-roll/
In a new project, the skateboarder and photographer shares a collection of surreal shots from his old Blackberry.
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984). Untitled (Cape Cod), 1966. 35mm color slide. Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. During the 1950s and ‘60s, Garry Winogrand made…
via Feature Shoot: https://www.featureshoot.com/2019/05/rediscovering-garry-winogrands-long-forgotten-color-work/
Known best for his black and white photographs that pioneered a snapshot aesthetic in fine art, Winogrand’s color work is now receiving its due in Garry Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, now through December 8, 2019.
I remember a day long ago, when I was cleaning out my purse, removing such items as a rotten banana, a half eaten protein bar, wads of kleenex and a few other sticky and seen-better-days items, plus numerous happy meal toys, all co-mingled with my adult p
via LENSCRATCH: http://lenscratch.com/2019/05/karen-navarro/
Making photographs about being a parent was once considered mundane and not wall worthy. Personally, I have have found the tableau of every day life, the small operatic performances and travails of co-existing and growing up to be immensely fascinating. Photographer and Peanut Press Books founder, Ashly Stohl, had been focusing her lens on her family for years, with an eye towards the poignant humor of living under the roof with three children in various stages of becoming. Her wonderful photographs are now a book, The Days are Long and the Years are Short, published by Peanut Press Books and the work is currently on exhibition at the Leica Gallery in New York until the end of June, with a book signing on June 20th from 6 -8pm.
Filmmaker and photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue spent almost eight years in Afghanistan. There he worked on his award-winning film The Land of the Enlightened. As well as researching, preparing and making his film, PJ also continued to take photographs. His photos are portraits of people and landscapes, as are his diary entries. A recurring theme is his huge admiration for the country, its spectacular landscape, and the resourceful children for whom survival became the art of living. His images – both film and photos – come about as a result of a slow process. The landscapes with its timeless caravans of people and animals show the resilience of a country for more than 40 years in war.