PRC's Exposure Artists on Flak Photo

All 16 photographers who exhibited in the Photographic Resource Center's most recent juried member's show, curated by Jen Bekman, will all get the chance to be shown on Flak Photo .

"A daily photography blogzine featuring distinctive work from an international community of contributors. The blog aims to promote interesting visual approaches to seeing the world and celebrates the art of exhibiting quality photography on the web"

They will post one image a day for 16 days until all the artists have been shown. The first photograph was posted today, with many to follow. The show runs Tuesday july 10th- Friday July 27th. I recommend checking them out, as the breadth of work picked by Bekman was quite impressive.

Christina Seely's "Lux"

I recently had the chance to see some of Christina Seely's work at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston. She is currently working on a project entitled "Lux", which consists of large-scale night photographs from highly urbanized cities around the world. Seely has focused on the United States, Western Europe and Japan, the three regions that consume the most energy and consequently produce the greatest amount of environmentally harmful emissions. The project title takes its name from a system unit for the measurement of illumination.

She denies her viewers the ability to connect emotionally to these places, opting instead for geographical anonymity. Seely has simply titled each photograph Metropolis, with a corresponding compass point denoting the location of each
photograph. The most thought provoking aspect to Christina Seely's photographs is summed up in her statement, when she declares, "Lux...is a photographic project-in-progress inspired by the disconnect between the immense beauty produced by man-made light and what this light represents." Seely raises important questions about our dependence on energy in an age of environmental disregard. As beautiful as artificial light can be, this beauty comes at an extremely high cost to the economy and our planet. By avoiding individual connotations, the images can be viewed more easily for what they truly represent; a planet's excessive consumption of man-made energy.
-Ben Alper



From Top to Bottom:

Christina Seely, Metropolis: 51°29’N 0°0’W

Christina Seely, Metropolis: 40°25’N 3°41’W

All Images Copyright the Artist

A New American Portrait

Of definite interest if you are in the New York area is the show "A New American Portrait" at the Jen Bekman Gallery. Co-curated by Jen Bekman and Jörg Colberg, Conscientious Blog Editor, the show takes a look at America’s contemporary portrait photographers.

The work in the show is emblematic of current trends in the genre, documenting a wide range of ideas within the portrait genre. Included are posed shots, environmental portraits, and self-portraits.

For myself, the work that truly shined through in this show was that of Alec Soth and Jen Davis.

Soth has established himself as the pre-eminent figure of today’s environmental portrait photographers. His work, although oftentimes representing marginal circles of American culture always has an overriding honesty and beauty to it. In his portraits you can feel his compassion for the people and places he photographs, which I feel separates him from many of his peers who have set out to shock audiences or exploit their subjects.

Jen Davis’s self portraits confront America’s obsession with surface beauty. Davis uses her own body to confront our ideas of what someone is supposed to look like, and what we are supposed to be attracted to, as well as her own aspirations and happiness. This nation’s obsession with being young, thin, and desirable leave Davis a lot of room to work with, and personally I find her work to be much more poignant than work of Laura Greenfield, who is working on similar themes.



Also of interest to me was the work of Todd Hido, and Brian Ulrich. I feel that my own familiarity with Soth and Davis’s made them easier for me to connect to, but I was definitely intrigued by the work of Ulrich and Hido, and I hope to see larger bodies of their work soon.

I only wish this exhibition could have been larger to incorporate larger bodies of work and more photographers, but as it is I found the show to be very thought provoking. This show and many others have proven Jen Bekman to be a very important gallery for emerging and contemporary photography. We need to support venues like these that are breathing new life into our medium.

-Eric Watts

"A New American Portrait"

Jen Bekman
6 Spring St. New York, NY
June 22nd –August 3rd
Wednesday-Saturday Noon- 6 pm


From Top to Bottom:

Alec Soth, Candlelight Hotel

Jen Davis, 4 AM

Brian Ulrich, Untitled (from the Thrift Series)

All Images Copyright the Artists

Echoes of the New Topographics

The "New Topographics" movement emerged in the 1960's as a reaction to the pictorialist, utopian photography of photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Adams and Weston adamantly depicted the landscape as an entity of unscathed and organic beauty. The photographers of the "New Topographics" movement strove to show the rapidly increasing imprint that man was imparting on the landscape. As suburban development started to spread across the United States with fervor, artists such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, Nicholas Nixon, Joe Deal and Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others; endeavored to objectively show the effects of an increasingly industrial culture. They turned their cameras towards newly built tract houses, industrial parks, expansive highways and commercial strip malls as proof of man's impetuous development. What is so affecting about these photographs is the stark juxtaposition between humanity and its environment. The pinnacle of this movement came to fruition in an exhibition entitled, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape; which premiered at the George Eastman House in 1975.


In the 30 plus years since this exhibition took place, the expansion of residential and industrial development has continued to rapidly sprawl to meet the demands of our global community. Many contemporary photographers have picked up where the "New Topographics" artists left off, weighing the effects of consumerism on the environment and the culture. Nathan Ian Anderson, Brad Moore and Jeff Brouws, to name a few, have all investigated Urban and Suburban spaces throughout the United States. These scenes of transformation certainly conjure up both issues environmental and cultural significance. The over-development of the landscape and the accelerated use of our natural resources are prevalent in these images. However, what is more striking is the overwhelming uniformity of our surroundings. It is becoming harder to discern one place from another. No matter where you seem to go, you see the same corporate facades, or repetitious Suburban developments sprawling through the landscape. When a culture becomes too homogenous it runs the risk of not being able to think for itself. This is an unsettling thought on many levels.


Whether ultimate social change can be attained from photographs of this nature, is hard to know. What is important however, is that work of this class continue to be made. At this point it is unrealistic that we can undue the impact we've made on the landscape, but being cognizant of it is vital.

-Ben Alper








From Top to Bottom:

Joe Deal, Samoa Village, from Pomona Freeway, 1977

Brad Moore, Family Rescue Center, Westminster, California (2006)

Nathan Ian Anderson, Red Hook Park, Brooklyn, 2005

All Images Copyright the Artists

The Effect of Disaster Photographed

The disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina is quickly approaching its two year anniversary. In the two years since, the world has seen thousands of hours of news footage and viewed innumerable still photographs depicting the devastation of both the landscape, and the livelihoods of the people affected. In a media-saturated world, the bombardment of imagery can have both a positive and negative influence on how we view the world. In one respect, media has allowed information and imagery to be widely accessible to millions of people who might not otherwise be able to obtain it. On the other hand, the over-saturation of this imagery can act as a numbing agent to people's sensitivity to important world events. I have noticed this occurrence with my own reaction to significant global issues.


Throughout the past year, dozens, if not hundreds of photography projects have emerged portraying the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. Photographers ranging from Robert Polidori, Chris Jordan, Larry Towell and Katherine Wolkoff, just to name a few, have taken on the immense task of depicting the most destructive natural disaster the United States has ever seen. The vast majority of this work shows a ravaged, people-less landscape strewn with fragments of peoples lives. Uprooted telephone poles, overturned cars, collapsed roofs and water stained mattresses populate the imagery of this destruction. As potent as these images can be, their impact is often lessened by the frequency and manor in which we view them. Seeing the byproduct of thousands of ruined lives laid before you in such magnitude, has the power to desensitize one from the true weight of what they're seeing.


Catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina certainly need to be documented, in order to bring awareness and understanding to issues that require resolution. However, when this documentation becomes too abundant it can act counterproductively. The real questions that need to be asked are, is there a point of saturation where this imagery become ineffective? And to what extent is this work created at the emotional expense of those truly impacted?








From Top to Bottom:

Chris Jordan, Mattresses from an apartment building, New Orleans East

Robert Polidori, 5000 Cartier Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, September 2005

Katherine Wolkoff, NEW ORLEANS (18), 2005-06

All Images Copyright the Artists

Romanian Vacation

I was recently permitted to raid the found photo archives of The Brookline Booksmith, a wonderful bookstore that I often frequent. They had folders full of old photographs that had apparently been used as bookmarks at one time or another and forgotten about. As I was sifting through them, I found a series of 5 or 6 images that appeared to be family portraits; both candid and posed. On further examination, namely from reading the inscriptions on the back, I discovered that they were actually vacation photos from Romania. Each one had a different cryptic quote on the back. For instance, one read "A flower for an another flower"; and another stated "What do you dance? Twist in love?"

I have no idea what these quotations mean, though they intrigue and baffle me. Each one is signed "August 5, 1967, Bucharest, Romania" in scrawled cursive. Taken out of context, which these photos most certainly are, allow the imagination to run wild trying to fill in the gaps of this strange narrative. I am struck by the haunting, cinematic quality they possess. In actuality they are probably just snapshots, but to foreign eyes they convey much more.







Photographer Unknown

Manufactured Landscapes: A Film about Edward Burtynsky

Manufactured Landscapes, a new documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal (Director of The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Adams' Appalachia) follows renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky as he documents the vast industrialization of China. It played the festival circuit over the last year, receiving numerous awards and plenty of acclaim. Now it has been given a well deserved, all be it small national release. In an age of excessive production and consumption, the relevance of Burtynsky's work seems to multiply with every passing day.

Here are the Theaters I found that are playing it:

Museum of Fine Arts
465 Huntington Ave.
Boston, MA

Film Forum
209 W Houston St.
New York, NY

Ritz Five
214 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA

NuArt Theater
11272 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA




"A protracted exploration of the aesthetic, social and spiritual dimensions of industrialization and globalization... Raises some sigificant and sobering questions about the impact that we, as humans, make on our environment"
- NEW YORK TIMES

"Manufactured Landscapes tracks the beauty and the horror of industry's imprint on the earth"
- NOW MAGAZINE

All images copyright Edward Burtynsky