Elizabeth Fleming's Life Is A Series Of Small Moments

Elizabeth Fleming recently got in touch to share some images from her new series of photographs Life Is A Series Of Small Moments. After looking through the all the images from this series on Fleming's website, the project seems aptly titled. The images are wonderfully quiet and truly reinforce how much can be beauty can be found in familiarity. Her statement for this project is quite eloquent, so I'll let her take it from here:

“Life is a series of small moments” is an ongoing body of work about intimacy and disclosure, vulnerability and awe, and the bittersweet knowledge that everything is impermanent. I’m trying to suspend time, to document and truly notice on a deeply involved level both my everyday existence and the activities of my family, and the life that we lead in the here and now. There is heartbreak in lost time, and an ache in me as I watch my girls growing bigger so quickly. It’s fleeting, but even though we all know this, it’s still so continually hard to be genuinely attentive. My images are an attempt to become aware, to see the small details, to not let it all get away from me, and to confront through my camera my adoration and my sadness, the tenderness and exasperation I feel about balancing motherhood with my individual desires. My work is also related to the process of allowing myself to experience and accept a mixture of contradictory emotions, be they wonder and anxiety or boredom and gratitude. Overall my photographs embody being in the thick of parenthood in all of its messy splendor, and I feel honored to be able to bear witness."









All photographs from the series Life Is A Series Of Small Moments

All Images © Elizabeth Fleming

Graphic Intersections: Call For Entries

In the spirit of artistic collaboration, The Exposure Project is pleased to announce the unveiling of a new, somewhat experimental photographic endeavor. Graphic Intersections, loosely inspired by the old Surrealist and Dadaist game Exquisite Corpse, is a project that will attempt to unite disparate artists in an interconnected, photographic relay of images inspired by one another. For those unfamiliar with Exquisite Corpse, it is succinctly described here:

"Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution."

Essentially, this is how Graphic Intersections will work. We will collect submissions from interested photographers until September 30, at which point we will select the participating artists and designate one of these photographers to start the whole thing off. The first photographer will be given a prompting word or concept to work from and will subsequently make photographs inspired by this idea. They will send us their favorite and most representative image from this session which we will then send along to the next artist. The succeeding artist, based solely on their visual, emotional, intellectual, or philosophical response, will in turn make photographs in artistic reaction to the one they were given. The artists involved will not be given any written material to accompany the photograph, nor will they know whose image they're responding to. This is designed to propagate randomness and avoid preconceived biases. This process will continue until the chain has been completed.

There are a few stipulations with the Graphic Intersections project. Firstly, participating photographers will be required to shoot, develop/import and submit their chosen image in no more than 2 weeks. I realize that this does not leave a tremendous amount of time to carry out this process. However, in the interest of completing this venture in under a year it seems necessary to instate a specific time frame. Secondly, chosen photographers will have to exercise a certain amount of patience and trust in the process, as there will be 15-20 artists each with a two week time slot. Lastly, images submitted for this project must be taken specifically for Graphic Intersections. Each photographer must submit a new image which does exist in a previously constructed body of work.

As visual artists, our creative decisions are largely affected by a myriad of personal, social, political and aesthetic issues, all of which impact the photographs we make. With a such a diverse array of artistic identities included in one project, we hope that Graphic Intersections will facilitate greater communication and solidarity, not only between the photographers involved, but between the images produced.

So, if anyone wants to partake in this unpredictable photographic relay race, send an e-mail to ben@theexposureproject.com with Graphic Intersections in the subject header. You do not need to send any images, bios or statements, just your website link (if you have one) and confirmation that you want to participate.

Flak Photo

Andy Adams over at Flak Photo has been kind enough to post one of my photographs as Today's Flak Photo. He has cultivated a wonderful resource for photographers with Flak Photo. If you don't already, you should regularly visit the website for exposure to new artists and projects. Additionally, Andy is a photographer himself. Below is one of his images.



Photograph from the series Great Water: Landscape Views Along Lake Michigan

Image © Andy Adams

An Image A Week: John Baldessari

Unfortunately, conceptual artist John Baldesarri's recent contributions to this year's Whitney Biennial exhibition are done little justice online. With that being said, however, I felt compelled to share one of them for anyone who didn't get a chance to see them in person. As Todd Alden writes:

"Baldessari’s recent wall-bound works continue in this manner, furthering a dialogue with Surrealist invention by juxtaposing fragmented body parts and creating more unexpected pairings...Eliding body fragments into colorful, gap-filled, elliptical tableaux, “these works,” the artist notes, “can be seen not as painting, photography, or sculpture, but as a melding of all three.”

Elbow (Blue) with Desk, 2007

Work © John Baldesarri

Adam Jeppesen

It must be Danish day here at the Exposure Project because I also stumbled upon the work of photographer Adam Jeppesen today. His cinematic, often surreal images are both beautiful and at times unsettling. There is something completely captivating about Jeppesen's work, something that I can't quite put my finger on, but that I find absolutely enchanting. I couldn't find much in the way of a description of his work, except for this brief write up from the Steidl website:

"Adam Jeppesen’s Wake was assembled over a period of several months in the secluded backwoods of Finland. Taken while traveling on assignment, the photographs document the constantly shifting geography of the artist over the course of seven years. Rather than minister to any notion of Nordic melancholy, the artist reconstructs history into an intuitive, dream-like sequence that reflects the emotional and aesthetic clarity afforded by solitude."

You can buy Jeppesen's monograph here.











All Images © Adam Jeppesen

Trine Søndergaard's Now That You Are Mine

Although it's been almost 10 years since its completion, I just recently discovered Danish photographer Trine Søndergaard's project Now That You Are Mine. This series follows and chronicles the lives of female prostitutes on the streets of the red light district in Copenhagen. Simultaneously visceral yet compassionate, the images from Now That You Are Mine expose and undermine the subjection of women at the hand of male chauvinism. Finn Thrane of the Museet for Fotokunst in Denmark writes:

"Søndergaard goes beyond the walls of the private sphere, following the women and the 'fly on the wall'. Released from these conventions, Søndergaard's work embodies and explores the dualities of her own role as an artist, but also as a woman. The artist was personally and daily subjected to harassment by male customers on the street where she lived. Her own subjection to this male gaze marked the beginning of the project. She realised that she was not "seen". That she existed only as a projected fantasy of a woman for the male customer. It is this fantasy her work ruthlessly exposes, a sexual fantasy in harsh contrast to the reality of infected needle sores and bruised skin."

Steidl released a monograph back in 2002 for Now That You Are Mine, which you can find more information about here.











All photographs from the series Now That You Are Mine

All Images © Trine Søndergaard

Michael Marcelle's Wilderness

I rediscovered the work of Michael Marcelle via Humble Arts' latest Group Show exhibition. A graduate of the Bard photo program, and subsequent student of Stephen Shore and Tim Davis, Marcelle's imagery is not derivative of the work of his mentors, but certainly pays homage to it. Marcelle's best photographs possess a strangely alluring, deadpan quality in which everyday nuances are infused with a beautiful mystery. When asked in an interview to describe his method of working, Marcelle responded:

"I shoot almost entirely documentary, but it's not with an interest of accurately portraying the world in mind. It's complicated, because a lot of my work is about abstracting the world into a totally alien landscape, but in order to do that it's necessary to have some signifiers that the work is being made in the world. It's basically using the format and methodology of documentary photography to make something that looks nothing like it."

You can find the whole interview here.











All photographs from the series Wilderness

All Images © Michael Marcelle

Photographic Typologies: Claudia Angelmaier

Claudia Angelmaier's reproduction photographs of old book illustrations and postcards can be seen as a sort of meta-typology. Self referential in their nod to Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Angelmaier's images seem (at least from a typological standpoint) less dependent on a rigidity of process and more concerned with the fact that she is photographing objects that are already typological in nature. In the new issue of Aperture, Brian Dillon writes:

"Angelmaier's studies of book illustrations, slides, and postcards seem to recompose in their quiet and mysterious way a central discovery of Benjamin's essay: the historical refraction of the aura of the work of art in innumerable reproductions. And yet the German artist's work actually frames a phenomenon that Benjamin (otherwise a connoisseur of the artifacts of the recent past) apparently could not foresee: the way that the most technologically advanced reproductions of works of art are themselves subject to aging, decay, and oddly anachronous intersections with the flux of art history that they affect to fix."









From Top To Bottom:

Akelei

Fichte

Kopf Eines Rehbocks

Hirschkäfer

All Images © Claudia Angelmaier

Thomas Macker's With God, All Things Are Possible

California-based artist Thomas Macker got in touch with me the other day to share some images from his series With God, All Things Are Possible. Macker was recently included in Tim Barber's Various Photographs exhibition at the New York Photo Festival in DUMBO.

Additionally, he is the director of photography and field producer for Why Tuesday?, a non-profit, non-partisan organization founded to raise awareness about the problems of America's voting system. You can see more of Macker's work here.









All photographs from the series With God, All Things Are Possible

All Images © Thomas Macker

The Ecology of Photography

Over at Lens Culture, they posted this text written by conceptual artist Joachim Schmid regarding the ecological ramifications of photographic practice. This initially struck me as an issue that is somewhat over-looked, or perhaps more accurately, one that I never fully thought about to the fullest extent. In any regard, the text below presents a solution of sorts to our worldwide photographic addiction.

"Year in and year out an unimaginable number of photographs are produced worldwide. Virtually every day each of us enlarges this gigantic mountain of photographs, without giving the consequences a second thought. But while photography seems a harmless leisure pursuit, the chemicals contained in all photographs pose enormous dangers to our health. What‘s more, photographs in such quantities increase visual pollution and undermine our thinking power—to say nothing of the moral dangers they pose for our children.

In these conditions it would be best if we stopped making photographs altogether—but in many cases this is hardly possible. Therefore, it is essential to professionally dispose of all photographs once they are no longer needed. Experts from East and West have warned us for decades about the impending, catastrophic consequences of the photo boom, but their pleas have fallen on deaf ears among those responsible in industry and politics. Today billions of used photographs are stored improperly in homes and businesses, waiting for desparately needed recycling facilities.

The Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs, privately founded in 1990, offers a clear path out of this seemingly inescapable situation. The Institute maintains all facilities necessary to professionally reprocess photos of all kinds—or, in hopeless cases, dispose of them ecologically. We collect used, abandoned and unfashionable photographs in black and white or color, including instant photographs, photobooth strips, entire photo albums, contact sheets, test strips, negatives and slides, as well as damaged and shredded items, in both small and large quantities.

Remember, used photographs do not belong in the household garbage—they need special disposal. Many photographs can serve a new and useful purpose after reprocessing. For the sake of our environment, send your used photographs to the Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs.

Participation in this recycling program is guaranteed free of charge!"

Terrence Kent

Our friend Terrence Kent got in touch today with a link to some of his newer work. Although not part of a specific body of work, the images below are consistently beautiful and melancholic.

You can see more of Terrence's work here. Hope you enjoy.











All Images © Terrence Kent

Rona Chang's The Hold Over Water

Rona Chang recently e-mailed me with a link to her series The Hold Over Water. In the environmental tradition of photographers like Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel or Chris Jordan, Chang's documentation of parched river beds and dams across three continents underscores the ever-increasing discordance between man and nature. In her statement, Chang affirms:

"I am impressed by the sheer volume of water that a dam can hold, the seeming void downstream, and the long geometric curve that can make up a dam's form. The idea of humans engineering their landscapes to alter river courses and the flow of nature has always held me in awe. The images that comprise this body of work speak of my fascination with the temporary power man can hold over water."

From Top To Bottom:

Water Falling, Jokuldalur, Iceland

Reservoir Drain, Miaoli, Taiwan

Hoover Dam, Nevada, USA

Opening, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Three Gorges Dam, Yichang, China

All Images © Rona Chang

From The Secret World

Exposure Project member Anastasia Cazabon's new self-published monograph From The Secret World is now available for purchase online through Blurb. A joint collaboration with writer Max Rivinus, the book contains 8 short fictional and biographical writings which were inspired by certain photographs. The book includes 35 color photographs in a traditional landscape format and is available in both hardcover and softcover editions.

For a preview of the book click here.

An Image A Week: Bradley Peters

The work of Bradley Peters, a recent MFA graduate of the photography program at Yale, embodies two seemingly antithetical photographic styles at once. His images possess both the theatricality of staged photography, as well as the spontaneity of the snapshot. These polarities are reconciled in different ways. Often Peters' polished, perfectly lit narratives are juxtaposed with a self-consciousness that radiates from the subjects or their environments. He hasn't striven for the perfectly controlled moment, opting instead to explore the awkward, neurotic moments in between. In the writing on the homepage of his website (which seems less like a definitive assertion about the work and more like a justification to explore his past) Bradley writes:

"In an attempt to make things clearer for myself, I have been trying to figure out why exactly the work feels like it does. But my understanding is slowly evolving and shifting, which is making a clear definition difficult.

Sometimes it feels like the fragments of the distorted stories that I grew up listening to my father tell — but then again, it also feels like an investigation into how neurosis translates itself into gesture and body language; how my mother's distress influences the particular manner in which she holds her dinner fork.

Sometimes it seems like it's trying to deal with ideas of materiality — what things people love, and how they love them; how they think they need them because of what they represent."

Image © Bradley Peters

Jens Windolf

German photographer Jens Windolf sent me an e-mail the other day with a sampling of images from his series Behind The Scenes. For this project, Windolf has collaged two disparate movie stills together while striving to maintain perspectival and contextual coherence. The artist states:

The two "destroyed" images come together in a new way that plays with our imaginative capacity to project and create identities within what we see."

You can see more images from Behind The Scenes here.









All photographs from the series Behind The Scenes

All Images © Jens Windolf

Chad Muthard's Lost In Thought

I received an e-mail from Philadelphia-based photographer Chad Muthard the other day with a link to his series Lost In Thought. In the statement for the work, Muthard asserts that this project:

"attempts to document periods of time spent with other individuals. The photographs are less about the actual experience and more about how those experiences shape your day to day and come to be in a constant state of circulation within your own mind. While you drift off to sleep or daydream at your job, the people you share your life with help to construct your own thoughts, aspirations, and ideals.

The correlation between breaking down the photographic plane of the image as an object and the dissection of the shared experience through over analysis produce an image which creates a platform for a furthered understanding of both areas."

While you're at Muthard's website, you should also check out his series Missing Teeth.









From Top To Bottom:

Charles and Raymond

Linda

Yan

Alec

All Images © Chad Muthard

Photo Edition Berlin

Exposure Project member Anastasia Cazabon will be having two upcoming exhibitions at the Photo Edition Berlin gallery. The first show entitled "Storytelling", will be a two-person show with Chan-Hyo Bae. The exhibition will be up from August 28th through October 18th. Anyone in the Berlin-area should check out the show and the opening on August 18th if they can.






The second exhibition will be held in conjunction with The European Month of Photography in Berlin. The exhibition will include photographs by:

Chan-Hyo Bae, Arnaud Bianquis, Anastasia Cazabon, Sybille Hoessler, Yotta Kippe, kunstkollektiv transforma and Joachim Schäfer & Cyndi Prince. The show runs from November 2nd - 30th. Both exhibitions can be visited at:

Photo Edition Berlin
Ystaderstr.14a
D - 10437 Berlin

From Top To Bottom:

Anastasia Cazabon, Tights

Chan-Hyo Bae, from the series Existing In Costume

Images © The Artists