The Photography Post

The good people over at The Photography Post asked me to contribute a piece about The Exposure Project for this week's content. You can view the feature here.




Thanks to Kate and Rachel for the opportunity!

Flak Photo Feature

We have teamed up with the always supportive Andy Adams over at Flak Photo for a feature highlighting 7 photographers from Issue 4 of The Exposure Project Book. It runs weekdays from September 23 - October 1, 2009 and includes photographs by:

Daniel Farnum, Inka Lindergård and Niclas Holmström, Jens Windolf, Bradley Peters, Lee Gainer, Matthew Genitempo and Rona Chang.




To view the feature, visit the Flak Photo website or Facebook page.

For more information on Issue 4, visit the "Books" section of our website. Anyone interested in purchasing a copy of the special edition should act fast, as book and print sales have picked up in recent weeks.

Robert Frank's Elevator Girl, After All These Years

NPR recently aired a fascinating piece about Robert Frank's iconic image of the "elevator girl" working in a Miami Beach hotel in the late 1950's. Sharon Collins recently came forward affirming that the young girl, whose distant and melancholic gaze helped fortify Frank's vision of America, is indeed a younger incarnation of herself. The NPR story provided this interesting piece of historical context:


"Elevator - Miami Beach"
© Robert Frank


"A half-century later, Collins poses in a recreation of the scene"
© Ian Padgham/SFMOMA

"At the time, her name was Sharon Goldstein, growing up in Miami Beach. At fifteen, she got a summer job as an elevator girl at the Sherry Frontenac Hotel. She says the hotel was always full of tourists, and many of them had cameras. Although she wishes she remembers this particular tourist, she doesn't. But she pieced together what happened by looking at Frank's contact sheet.

"Robert Frank took about four photos of me without a flash in the elevator. I didn't know he was taking them. And then when the elevator emptied of its 'blurred demons,'" she says, "he asked me to turn around and smile at the camera. And I flashed a smile, put my hands on my hips. I hammed it up for about eight or ten frames."

Boston Photography Focus' Be Exposed

The PRC will be featuring images from EXPOSURE: The 14th Annual PRC Juried Exhibition on their blog, Boston Photography Focus, on Mondays and Thursdays in the next few weeks. Be sure to check in regularly for new updates on EXPOSURE artists.

The 50 States Project - "People"

The photographs from The 50 States Project's first assignment "People" were posted to the website the other day. The images below reflect a few of my favorites from this new, bicoastal collaboration.











From Top To Bottom:

"William S. Hart" © Todd Stewart (Oklahoma)

"Untitled" © Andrew Borowiec (Ohio)

"Bride to Be in Limousine" © Juliana Beasley (New Jersey)

"Untitled" © Bradley Peters (Nebraska)

"Victoria and her dogs, Coldfoot, Alaska" © Ben Huff (Alaska)

Useful Photography

Useful Photography, the brainchild of Hans Aarsman, Claudie de Cleen, Julian Germain, Erik Kessel and Hans van der Meer, is a wonderfully deadpan series of publications celebrating vernacular photography. Often stressing the functionality of photography as a visual means to an end, each issue compiles images culled from a specifically curated theme. Whether amassing images from online auction websites, photographs from the National Missing Persons Helpline, posters of Palestinian suicide bombers or the use of "before and after" photography, Useful Photography celebrates the medium's varied, often utilitarian, applications.

They also have a wonderful website with some of the funniest and most outrageous collections of vernacular photography I've ever seen. If you need some more convincing, just go the gallery section of their website and check out: Girls and Coffins and Magic Mountain. Both of which are bizarre and amazing.

You can purchase some of the publications here.











All Images © Useful Photography

MoMA's Streaming Audio

The Museum of Modern Art is stockpiling an impressive audio component on their website. Comprised of lectures, commentaries, conversations and visual descriptions, these streaming podcasts provide diverse insights into a variety of both canonical and contemporary artists. Below are a few examples of some of the podcasts I listened to:

Robert Smithson. Corner Mirror with Coral.1969




Claes Oldenburg. Giant Soft Fan. 1966–67



Nicholas Nixon. The Brown Sisters. 1993



Marlene Dumas. Chlorosis (Love Sick). 1994



These are just a few of the examples of available podcasts on the MoMA website. I would highly recommend checking out some of the other content here, here and here.

Too Much Chocolate

Jake Stangel got in touch to promote his recently launched website Too Much Chocolate. As the mission statement affirms:

"Too much chocolate specifically aims to serve and connect young emerging photographers all over the internet.

At this point, we all exist in a hazy internet bubble, not really sure who or what is exactly out there. Sure, we all have a handful of internet photographer friends, and we bounce around on informative blogs, but there is a need for a ‘hub’ where emerging photographers can reach out to one another, have a running dialogue, ask questions, just talk, and feel some sense of collectiveness.

There are three main areas on the site, meant to address the following needs:

- Rotating Gallery: Wouldn’t it be nice to be exposed to a new collection of mind-blowing work every week? How neat would it be if THAT photographer then chose the NEXT week’s artist, then interviewed him/her about their workflow, influencers, style? It would be like an internet photo conga line!

- Discussion: Wouldn’t it be great to know you can participate in a living conversation between photographers, like yourself, that doesn’t die within the week? About anything on your mind? In a nice environment of inclusion, resource-sharing, and philosophical dialogue?

- Interviews: Wouldn’t it be helpful to get the advice of photo editors, art buyers, curators, etc. that is specifically tailored to us, especially when we don’t have the money or desire to send out thousands of promos for a 1% return?

The Exposure Project Featured in Artscope Magazine

The new Artscope Magazine, a New England based art and culture publication, has a feature on The Exposure Project in their new November/December 2008 issue. The article discusses the ambitions of the project and then goes on to explore the work of Anastasia Cazabon and Adam Marcinek in greater depth.

For anyone interested interested in the article, you can read an excerpt of it here. You can also pick up a free issue of Artscope at one of many locations scattered throughout the New England area. We would like to thank everyone over at Artscope Magazine for the coverage.

Image © Adam Marcinek

The Launch of Wassenaar

The first issue of Noel Rodo-Vankeulen's Wassenaar went live today. I am honored to have work included in this inspiring new publication, which is comprised of Solo Shows from:

Julia Baum, Alexander Binder, Gustav Gustafsson, Michael Bühler-Rose, Misha de Ridder, and Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann

and Domesticity Redux, a group show with photographs by:

Ben Alper, Matthew Crowther, Stefanie Fiore, Elizabeth Fleming, Lee Gainer, Erin Nelson, Donald Rasmussen, Justin James Reed, Sean Stewart, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Tribble & Mancenido, and Paris Visone.

Additionally, there is an interview with Lina Scheynius by Johanna Reed and a number of contemporary photography book reviews. I highly recommend visiting the Wassenaar website and spending some time with the photographs and writing. Also, Wassenaar's sister site, Projects, should be online any day now so make sure to you check back for further details. Below are a sampling of the images from Wassenaar 01:

















From Top To Bottom:

Stefanie Fiore

Misha de Ridder

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

Donald Rasmussen

Andrés Marroquín Winkelmann

Alexander Binder

Gustav Gustafsson

All Images © The Artists

Women In Photography: Alessandra Sanguinetti

The new Women In Photography showcase is now up and features new work from Alessandra Sanguinetti's project The Life That Came. A continuation of The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams, the images from this series revisit Guillermina and Belinda as they grow up on their family's farm outside Buenos Aires. In the press release for Sanguinetti's current exhibition at Yossi Milo, it states:

"Sanguinetti has collaborated with the girls since 1999, capturing images inspired by the expectations, fantasies, and fears that accompany the psychological and physical transition from childhood to adulthood.

This sequel to the gallery’s exhibition of the series in 2004 carries the project forward to a new period in the lives of Guille and Belinda as they enter the adult world they once imagined. The fantastical tableaux of personal dreams and lively imagination of the early images give way to more meditative moments as the two cousins shape their own realities, encounter the fragility of changing relationships, and confront early motherhood."

If you're in New York, make sure to stop by the gallery and see the show. You can find the details below.

The Life That Came
Yossi Milo Gallery
525 West 25th St.
New York, NY
September 4 - October 18
Artist's Reception: Friday, September 12 from 6 - 8 pm











From Top To Bottom:

The wedding bed, 2007

Beli and Pablo, 2006

The real thing, 2007

Three o'clock soap opera, 2004

Still waters, 2005

All Images © Alessandra Sanguinetti

Hijacked, Volume One: Australia and America

Hijacked, Volume One: Australia and America, the recently published monograph from Big City Press, has teamed up with Flak Photo for a feature that will share some of the photographs contained within the book. Below is a description of what Hijacked aims to accomplish.

"Shunning repetitive and predictable structures, Hijacked's aesthetic is directed by the mindset and energy of young and emerging practitioners. Embracing the prevailing wanderlust, their work exhibits a fascination with international subcultures, fragmented trends, alternate life styles and urban landscapes. Explorations of suburban pleasures are placed on par with 'high' artistic experimentation.

While assembling the visions of its contributors, Hijacked delves into the practical and conceptual issues of the world of contemporary photography. Interviews provide a social comment on the socio-scape of Australia and America, and highlights talking points from discussions with artists on communication, social awareness, capitalism and the impact of commerce on identity and artistic practice."

Make sure to check Flak Photo regularly for an overview of work from Hijacked, Volume One: Australia and America. Below are a few of my favorites from the images that have been posted so far.







From Top To Bottom:

Grant Willing, Car Interior, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2006

Greta Anderson, Float Like a Feather, Mount Eden, Auckland City, New Zealand, 2003

Timothy Archibald, Notes From The Appointment With Band Aid, El Sobrante, California, 2007

All Images © The Artists

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

Sze Tsung Leong's A Picture You Already Know

If you haven't been over to Words Without Pictures lately, I'd highly recommend doing so. They are currently featuring Sze Tsung Leong's wonderful essay A Picture You Already Know, a exploration into the history of repetition in photography. In the excerpt below, Leong addresses the various demonstrations and methods of repetitious photographic practice.

"Repetition in photography comprises a wide range of manifestations that have formed a significant part of photographic practice from the early development of the medium. Repetition figured in the use of photographs in racial and criminal studies (in which the repetitive use of portraits was used to identify what were thought to be the physiological foundations of traits and behaviors); in the cumulative documentation of the photographer’s urban or social context, such as in the work of Eugène Atget and August Sander; and in the mimicry of the pictorial conventions of painting genres such as still lifes, portraiture, and landscapes. In the context of contemporary photography, repetition appears in a profusion of varieties. These include the repetition of forms, spaces, or people (such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies, Candida Höfer’s institutional spaces, Wang Jinsong’s one-child “standard families” in China, and Hans Eijkelboom’s people in public settings); repetition over time (Nicholas Nixon’s periodic portraits of a group of sisters over the decades); repetition of motifs and compositions from art history (Jeff Wall’s rejiggerings of iconic paintings, Rineke Dijkstra’s classically posed portraits); collections of repetitions in imagery from the popular media (Peter Piller’s reordering of existing imagery into distinct categories); repetitions of the self (such as those by Cindy Sherman, Yasumasa Morimura, Tomoko Sawada, and Tseng Kwong-Chi); overlapping of repeated images (Idris Khan’s layerings of multiples); the reuse of existing imagery as seen in Sherrie Levine’s and Thomas Ruff’s appropriations; and representations of representations (Hiroshi Sugimoto’s wax figures, and Thomas Struth’s museum photographs).

The layers that form the practice of photography are themselves permeated by layers of repetition and multiplication. A chain of duplications begins with the process of taking a photograph, which is, in most cases, the duplication of something existing in “reality.” From this “copy,” which takes the form of a single negative, slide, or digital file, multiple prints can be made. The image represented in these prints, when considered within the scope of a photographer’s body of work, often functions as one of a series, or as one within multiple iterations of an artist’s themes and concerns. The image also contains within it the past history of images that have influenced its conception, and the future lines of influence yet to be formed. These threads of influence—the dialogue between artists and artistic concerns both within and outside of a particular era—weave through historical contexts and future possibilities, and imprint their influence, through variations, similarities, and resonances, on visual culture."

A Conversation With Larry Sultan

I was digging through the archives of Big, Red & Shiny this evening and was pleasantly surprised to find an interesting interview with Larry Sultan. I have posted an excerpt of it below, however, you can find the whole thing here.



BRS: There seems to be a model, in the art world and especially in academia, of relating photography in terms of language. Though photography can be a non-verbal experience to a certain degree, it seems that language is often imposed on top of it. Then I wonder about the tension between the analytical mind that can critically look at a photograph versus the creative mind that can produce it. Can a photo be made from a point of view of a deconstruction?

LS: You can, and some people have done beautifully at inventing a practice around deconstruction and analytical investigation. It's not really the way I work, but I think the question is a larger one, about how we teach photography and learn photography.

If you're a painting student, the instructor can come in and push your hand, say, "do this" or "try this kind of strategy". It's an immediate intervention. We usually don't go out and physically make pictures together, so we can only help the student once the picture is made through discussion, through language.

It doesn't have to be an analytic process. Literature especially has an interesting relationship photography--to observation, to description, to fiction: taking something that you see and elaborating, jamming, and I think, staging. That weird practice between staging and finding is very much like a Ray Carver (story). You think, "he's seen this," but he's taking that moment of observation and letting it go, giving it some wings, following it, rather than nailing it. You're riffing off of reality.

I've always wanted to be a writer. The text to The Valley and the text to Pictures From Home were really important. I've actually thought about stopping photographing for a while and just writing, maybe that would get closer to the bone.

Photograph from the series Pictures From Home

Image © Larry Sultan

My First 20 X 200 Print!

I purchased my first 20 X 200 print this evening. After sifting through the available 8.5 X 11 prints I decided on Brad Moore's Dutch Club, Anaheim, California. I'm not sure why I haven't bought more of these. For $20 a piece they're kind of hard to resist.

Dutch Club, Anaheim, California (2006)

Image © Brad Moore

Daylight Podcasts

Daylight Magazine has been posting monthly photographically-minded video podcasts to their website. Although this is a reletively new feature, they have already discussed the work of Danny Wilcox Frazier, Olaf Otto Becker and photojournalist Alexandra Boulat, as well as featuring photo-essays on the 5 year anniversary of the war in Iraq and the recent Guatemalan elections. For anyone with interest in social photography, these podcasts are well worth checking out.

3030: New Photography In China

I received an e-mail from Andy over at Flak Photo today informing me of 3030: New Photography In China, a jointly sponsored feature that will run of the website in the coming weeks. In the description of the project posted to the website, it states that:

These images represent a wide spectrum of photographic practice that address new questions about identity and belonging in China as well as the practice of art-making itself. From fine art photography and photojournalism to guerilla image-making on blogs and personal websites, the project reflects the influence of tradition and politics as well as foreign media channels, growing consumerism and the development of a home-grown pop culture combining television, music, advertising and fashion.

Diversionist, 2006
Image &#169 Cao Fei