An Image A Week: Ben Huff

Ben Huff recently posted some new work on his blog from his series The Last Road North. If anyone is familiar with his blog, you'll know that Huff has consistently shared wonderful work from his travels in Alaska. It is quite refreshing to see imagery from a part of the world that hasn't been over-photographed to the point of total saturation. The inundation of "American" photographs throughout photographic history has, to some degree, neglected imagery of Alaska in this tradition.

Huff's portraits of the people he meets on the road are both modest and respectful. I particularly love the image above. For as simple and unassuming a photograph as it is, there is a quiet dignity in the man's expression and posture. He seems to trust Huff, and ultimately a photographer couldn't ask for more than this.

You can see more portraits from The Last Road North here.

Jeremy

Image © Ben Huff

Robert Heinecken's TV Newswomen

I discovered the work of Robert Heinecken in the book Special Collections: The Photographic Order From Pop To Now, a wonderful monograph of Postmodern photography from the 70's and 80's. A few years before Heinecken's death in 2006, Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times wrote:

"He sometimes described himself as a para-photographer, because his work stood 'beside' or 'beyond' traditional ideas associated with photography. Essentially, the artist decided that in the wake of the media explosion that had come to characterize contemporary life, enough photographs already existed. Rather than make more, he would manipulate existing ones. His art became an attempt to clarify, reveal and sometimes confound the subliminal social, political and artistic codes they contain. Heinecken was among the first to consider himself an artist who used photographs, not a photographer who made them. Today that approach is common. But in the late 1960s, when Heinecken published an influential portfolio of 25 prints titled 'Are You Rea,' the radical nature of the experiment was largely unprecedented."



TV Newswomen, 1986

Image © Robert Heinecken

Fran Osborn-Blaschke's Curve Of The Earth

In anticipation of the third issue of The Exposure Project Book, slated for release in late August, I am going to be posting some work that will be included in the publication. Fran Osborn-Blaschke is a Boston-based photographer whose project Curve Of The Earth takes a rather scientific approach to landscape photography. As the artist states:

"Think of how cities and countries appear on a schoolroom globe. To make these, the camera points directly East for sunrises, directly West for sunsets and is tilted to accurately represent how the horizon is inclined at its latitude. By making photographs of the same location at different times of the year it is possible to capture the movement of the Sun as it slides North and South along the horizon."









From Top To Bottom:

Sunset from Grand Hotel, February 24, 2003
Brugge, Belgium
51° 12' 27.75" N lat./ 03° 13' 14.00" E lon.

Sunset, Boston from Deer Island, B.H.I., June 21, Summer Solstice, 2006
Boston, Massachusetts
42° 21' 17.52" N lat./ 70° 58' 06.67" W lon.

Sunrise, Dorchester Bay from Columbia Point, December 21, Winter Solstice, 2005
Dorchester, Massachusetts
42° 18' 49.93" N lat./ 71° 01' 58.52" W lon.

Sunset with Seal Rocks, March 9, 2001
San Francisco, California
37° 46' 30.46" N lat./ 122° 30' 46.48" W lon.

All Images © Fran Osborn-Blaschke

Joe Johnson's Mega Churches

Joe Johnson's series Mega Churches investigates the architectural ornateness of the contemporary, American place of worship. As the title clarifies, however, the churches captured by Johnson are more specifically the extravagant, stadium-sized Megachurches that have quickly sprung up all over the country. According to statistics, there are over 1,300 such churches in the United States, each with a congregation of 2,000 or more. Some megachurches possess congregations that soar as high as 45,000.

What is interesting about Johnson's Mega Churches project is that he has omitted showing us any people whatsoever. Instead, what he gives us are small architectural details and images that capture these places in a state of limbo, or preparation. In essence, what they show is the conscious orchestration and gaudy presentation of a structure that throughout history has been modest in nature. Churches, until relatively recently, never looked like venues that you could imagine seeing a large-scale rock concert in. The immodesty of megachurches has become increasingly apparent, however, Joe Johnson has captured this superfluousness in quite the opposite way--with quiet, contemplative and thought-provoking photographs.











From Top To Bottom:

Stage For Childrens Ministry, Loveland, CO 2007

Amp Cover, Wilson, NC 2006

Bolt, Fort Wayne, IN 2007

Desk, Fort Wayne, IN 2007

Lighting, Raleigh, NC 2007

All Images © Joe Johnson

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

Curtis Mann's Modifications

I saw Curtis Mann's series Modifications at the exhibition The Ubiquitous Image, Leslie Martin's curatorial effort at this year's New York Photo Festival. His "modified" photographs are found, or appropriated from friends, Flickr or Ebay, and then selectively painted with varnish and bleached to erase specific parts of the composition. In his statement for the work, Mann asserts:

"The photograph is physically and contextually altered to produce a reading that oscillates between image and object, photography and painting, real and imagined. This new interpretation attempts to disrupt how we normally perceive, understand and connect with the fragmented world in which these photographs attempt to represent."









All photographs from the series Modifications

All Images © Curtis Mann

J Bennett Fitts' Images From The Center Of The Contiguous United States

I discovered J Bennett Fitts' most recent project Images From The Center Of The Contiguous United States today. Consisting of four distinct sections, Interiors, Exteriors, Lawn Ornaments and Contextual Images, the photographs from this series investigate (what I imagine) is middle America. It is hard to say with any real confidence where Bennett Fitts took any of the images, and I'm guessing that is largely intentional. The places depicted lend no geographical cues to distinguish one landscape from another. Instead, they coalesce into a visual overview of modern day suburbanization.

Out of pure curiosity, I found out that the exact geographic center of the United States is in a park in Lebanon, Kansas. I'm guessing, however, that the title of this project is not to be taken too literally, and that the photographs can be seen as a microcosm of a much larger suburban culture. In keeping with the subject matter before his camera, Bennett Fitts titles and categorizes his images with the homogeneity that can similarly be found in the facades he photographs. He largely denies the viewer anything specific or contextual, so I'm guessing that the group of images entitled Contextual Images is intended to be received with a certain amount of irony.

In any event, J Bennett Fitts is an interesting photographer with an acute appreciation for the tradition of banality throughout photographic history. Ultimately, I think the reason his images are so successful is because he can take something that's been approached innumerable times and breath new life into it.











From Top To Bottom:

Untitled 2

Untitled 1

Exterior 4

Interior 3

Lawn Ornament 8

All Images © J Bennett Fitts