"Nithwi"
© Darren Buchanan
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Darren Buchanan
Our good friend Darren Buchanan recently began working on a series of illustrations inspired by old family photographs. His control of color, line and tonality lend these images, and fittingly so, a quality that fluctuates between photorealism and illustrative embellishment. Hope you enjoy them!
"Nithwi"
© Darren Buchanan
"Nithwi"
© Darren Buchanan
Friday, January 16, 2009
We've Finally Taken The Plunge...
Hey everyone!
I just wanted to take a moment and let you all know that the Exposure Project has created a Facebook page. Yeah, I know, we're a couple years behind the curve on this one, but it's never too late I guess. Anyways, stop by and drop us a line. We'll be keeping the page regularly updated with any pertinent Exposure Project related news.
The link to our page is here.
I just wanted to take a moment and let you all know that the Exposure Project has created a Facebook page. Yeah, I know, we're a couple years behind the curve on this one, but it's never too late I guess. Anyways, stop by and drop us a line. We'll be keeping the page regularly updated with any pertinent Exposure Project related news.
The link to our page is here.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Erika Larsen's Young Blood
Erika Larsen's project Young Blood is a wonderfully poignant investigation into a culture of adolescent hunters. As Larsen eloquently asserts in her statement for the work:
"Hunters often consider what they do to be a privilege, a ritual in which outsiders do not fully understand. Hunting reveals a world mostly hidden in an urban society increasingly divorced from its rural roots. While hunting in contemporary North America has lost its formative purpose - the search for sustenance - it is much more than merely a game. Hunting is a natural thread that connects us with our own roots, with who we once were, and with what it once meant to be human. These truths are often lost in the urban jungle. I spent a year and half traveling across the United States looking for its next generation of hunters. Setting out from New Mexico, I passed through Wyoming, Illinois, New York, Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia. Along the way I joined many hunting expeditions as I sought the perspective of child hunters.
These faces show America's youth connecting to hunting's storied past. Many children today while away their time with video games, television and movies. These subjects take a different path. For them, the thrill is learning to follow their instincts and being immersed in nature. All these children have something in common, they are at home in nature."
Make sure to also check out Larsen's related project The Hunt.
From Top To Bottom:
The Flag
Deer Slayer
The Feather
Josh's Hog
Benjamin
All Images © Erika Larsen
"Hunters often consider what they do to be a privilege, a ritual in which outsiders do not fully understand. Hunting reveals a world mostly hidden in an urban society increasingly divorced from its rural roots. While hunting in contemporary North America has lost its formative purpose - the search for sustenance - it is much more than merely a game. Hunting is a natural thread that connects us with our own roots, with who we once were, and with what it once meant to be human. These truths are often lost in the urban jungle. I spent a year and half traveling across the United States looking for its next generation of hunters. Setting out from New Mexico, I passed through Wyoming, Illinois, New York, Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia. Along the way I joined many hunting expeditions as I sought the perspective of child hunters.
These faces show America's youth connecting to hunting's storied past. Many children today while away their time with video games, television and movies. These subjects take a different path. For them, the thrill is learning to follow their instincts and being immersed in nature. All these children have something in common, they are at home in nature."
Make sure to also check out Larsen's related project The Hunt.
From Top To Bottom:
The Flag
Deer Slayer
The Feather
Josh's Hog
Benjamin
All Images © Erika Larsen
Alessandra Sanguinetti On Editorial Responsibility
Over at the Magnum Blog, Alessandra Sanguinetti opened up a timely discussion on editorial responsibility. Citing an image that recently appeared on the front page of the New York Times in which a group of Israeli soldiers sit leisurely in a rustic landscape, Sanguinetti questions the appropriateness (or usefulness perhaps) of a such benign image in light of the horrendous situation currently plaguing Gaza. She explains:
"Israel has banned all foreign press from entering Gaza, but surely there must be images that are more relevant to the situation, as can be seen inside the paper.
Maybe I'm being picky, but knowing the power an image on the front page can have on the perception of events, I'd like to open a discussion on editorial responsibility: Why would a newspaper choose to represent a conflict of these proportions with this romantic image?"
Sanguinetti raises an important question regarding the functionality of editorial processes at major news organizations like the New York Times. There is an underlying lack of political engagement and accountability present in decisions to publish images that put forth a bucolic vision of tremendous suffering. It has become increasingly apparent that acquiring an accurate sense of the gravity of world events has become harder, harder to obtain.
What do you think? I'd love to hear people what all of you out there think about this issue of editorial responsibility.
Soldiers rested on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza during the three-hour cease-fire on Wednesday
© Moises Saman for The New York Times
What do you think? I'd love to hear people what all of you out there think about this issue of editorial responsibility.
Soldiers rested on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza during the three-hour cease-fire on Wednesday
© Moises Saman for The New York Times
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Park Life - An Interview With Tod Papageorge
The new issue of Seesaw Magazine has a worthwhile interview with photographer Tod Papageorge. The discourse largely centers around Papageorge's long-term survey of Central Park and the succeeding monograph, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, which was published by Steidl in 2007. Below is an excerpt from the interview. You can read it in its entirety here.
Aaron Schuman: You mention Chaucer, and there certainly is a sense of mystery or danger in many of the photographs. There’s a sort of menacing atmosphere: ‘Do you dare go in the woods?’
Tod Papageorge: Yeah, ‘Sunday in the Park with Papageorge’!
AS: As you explain in the accompanying essay, the book’s sequence and structure are inspired by the Book of Genesis. How did that theme first reveal itself?
TP: Michael Mack said, ‘These little pictures of nature are very good. Maybe you should think about adding a few more.’ So I started to think about how I could do that, and how I would sequence it. For some reason I started with the Creation, but it was totally mad idea. It took a long time for it to make any sense at all, and I’m sure that it makes much more sense to me than anyone else. But it allowed me a certain freedom in organizing the book. There’s a kind of darkness in the beginning, which is undeniable whether you know the analogy or not. For me, one of the great streams in the history of photography is the so-called ‘narrative’ stream, and it was very important to me to reinforce the sense of that. It’s not a good word, ‘narrative’; it’s not the best word, but I don’t know what the best word would be. In any case, it’s very important in terms of the way I read and see photographs. Photography is not a simple illustration, and maybe the most important thing is that it forces an intelligent viewer to think about the relationship of the photograph to so-called ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. If you’re reading a photograph as a tale, then what does that have to do with whatever was out there in the world? It’s this transformed thing. And that’s always been my obsession while teaching at Yale as well, so I’ve had students like Gregory Crewdson and have been an effective teacher, because I was certainly never talking about photography as a deliverer of the ‘truth’. It’s all fiction to me, whether it’s a complex one or an illustrational one.
AS: Was that something you learned from Garry?
TP: I knew it from that first Cartier-Bresson I saw. That’s why it was so powerful to me – because I knew that it was another world; the photograph. It was completely different, and that’s why it was so powerful.
Photograph from 'Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park'
Image © Tod Papageorge
Aaron Schuman: You mention Chaucer, and there certainly is a sense of mystery or danger in many of the photographs. There’s a sort of menacing atmosphere: ‘Do you dare go in the woods?’
Tod Papageorge: Yeah, ‘Sunday in the Park with Papageorge’!
AS: As you explain in the accompanying essay, the book’s sequence and structure are inspired by the Book of Genesis. How did that theme first reveal itself?
TP: Michael Mack said, ‘These little pictures of nature are very good. Maybe you should think about adding a few more.’ So I started to think about how I could do that, and how I would sequence it. For some reason I started with the Creation, but it was totally mad idea. It took a long time for it to make any sense at all, and I’m sure that it makes much more sense to me than anyone else. But it allowed me a certain freedom in organizing the book. There’s a kind of darkness in the beginning, which is undeniable whether you know the analogy or not. For me, one of the great streams in the history of photography is the so-called ‘narrative’ stream, and it was very important to me to reinforce the sense of that. It’s not a good word, ‘narrative’; it’s not the best word, but I don’t know what the best word would be. In any case, it’s very important in terms of the way I read and see photographs. Photography is not a simple illustration, and maybe the most important thing is that it forces an intelligent viewer to think about the relationship of the photograph to so-called ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. If you’re reading a photograph as a tale, then what does that have to do with whatever was out there in the world? It’s this transformed thing. And that’s always been my obsession while teaching at Yale as well, so I’ve had students like Gregory Crewdson and have been an effective teacher, because I was certainly never talking about photography as a deliverer of the ‘truth’. It’s all fiction to me, whether it’s a complex one or an illustrational one.
AS: Was that something you learned from Garry?
TP: I knew it from that first Cartier-Bresson I saw. That’s why it was so powerful to me – because I knew that it was another world; the photograph. It was completely different, and that’s why it was so powerful.
Photograph from 'Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park'
Image © Tod Papageorge
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Susan Worsham's Some Fox Trails In Virginia
Susan Worsham's project Some Fox Trails In Virginia explores the artist's personal and familial history through an examination of objects and spaces once paramount in her life. Returning to photograph the home she grew up in, Worsham's images speak to the prevailing of memory in the face of contextual change. As she asserts in her statement:
"At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father's old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.
These photographs are not meant to be purely autobiographical, but rather representations of how I view things, based on my own experiences, and those of others. My work has always been a metaphor for my own growing up, and the small deaths of childhood innocence that occur on the road to becoming an adult."
From Top To Bottom:
Lively Little Rabbit
Bronze Swans
Untitled
The Beekeeper's Other Daughter
All Images © Susan Worsham
"At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father's old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.
These photographs are not meant to be purely autobiographical, but rather representations of how I view things, based on my own experiences, and those of others. My work has always been a metaphor for my own growing up, and the small deaths of childhood innocence that occur on the road to becoming an adult."
From Top To Bottom:
Lively Little Rabbit
Bronze Swans
Untitled
The Beekeeper's Other Daughter
All Images © Susan Worsham
Friday, January 9, 2009
Story Time @ Mass Art
For anyone in the Boston area the week of January 19th, there will be photography exhibition which highlights work employing narrative devices. The exhibition, entitled Story Time, compiles the work of:
Anastasia Cazabon, Caitlin Duennebier, Brittonie Fletcher, Laura Miner, Micheal Powers and Traverse Robinette.
Jan. 18th- 25th, 2009
Artist Reception Jan. 22nd 7-9pm
Student Life gallery, 2nd floor of Kennedy Building @ Mass Art
621 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA
From Top To Bottom:
Image © Michael Powers
Image © Traverse Robinette
Image © Caitlin Duennebier
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