Awkward Family Photos

Fellow Exposure Project member Anastasia discovered what could be one of the best vernacular photography sites I've ever seen...Awkward Family Photos. What more really needs to be said?

Do yourself a favor and revel in the awkwardness, it's totally worth it. By the way, the captions below were taken directly from the original website.


A gentle, nostalgic look back at a more innocent time.


Little Naseem is already planning for his first standing dry hump.


Have you heard? Black is the new awkward.


Red, white, and awkward.


Even the tree felt this one was awkward.

Annette Kelm

The new issue of Blindspot, guest edited by Arthur Ou, features some really interesting work. The photography of German artist Annette Kelm specifically caught my eye. As Jens Hoffmann notes in his piece about Kelm's work entitled Sculptural Moments:

"Proposing an approach to photography that is in equal measures poetic, romantic, and conceptual, Annette Kelm conflates a variety of styles, artistic genres, and historical and cultural references. Her pictures are characterized by their intense visual clarity; she utilizes the plain style of representation associated with old-fashioned advertisements or documentary photography to examine the relationship between sculpture and photography. The specific objects and found forms in her images are often dislocated from their original contexts and presented in new, unusual, or even obscure arrangements so that their lucidity belies their mysterious or fictional undercurrents."











From Top To Bottom:

After Lunch Trying to Build Railway Ties - 2005

Seiler Meteorit Piano 116 - 2007

Untitled, 2005

Your house is my castle - 2005

Untitled, 2007

All Images © Annette Kelm

Magenta: Flash Forward 2009

The Magenta Foundation has selected its annual list of emerging photographers of the year. Anastasia Cazabon was selected, as well as Exposure Project collaborators Manuel Vazquez and Jon Feinstein.

Flash Forward - Emerging Photographers 2009

"The Magenta Foundation is pleased to announce year five of its Emerging Photographers exchange. With every year our artists exchange program grows and gets stronger. Flash Forward showcases the future of photography, focusing on emerging talent that jurors have identified as having great potential.

Magenta would like to thank all the artists who submitted their work to this project. The final list of winners has been posted below, and the initial exhibition and book launch will be held at Lennox Contemporary in Toronto, in October 2009. Other exhibitions will be announced later."

You can find the list of selected photographers here.

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn-based digital artist whose work addresses the interaction between technology, culture and media appropriation. One of his primary influences can be found in old video game software, particularly the earlier Mario games developed by Nintendo. UbuWeb recently added 5 of Arcangel's videos to their website, all of which are well worth watching.



Clouds (2002)

In Clouds, Cory took an old Super Mario Brothers Nintendo video game and erased everything but the clouds.




Video Ravingz (2002)

Video Ravingz is a hacked version of Mario 2 where the user wins the game simply by inserting the cartridge. With rave-style graphics and music, there's an air of celebration about this work because everyone's a winner.

All Videos © Cory Arcangel

Matthew Connors

I just wanted to let you all know that my former professor Matthew Connors recently updated his website with some really terrific new work. I highly recommend spending a few moments and checking it out!



Aerial 5, 2008

Image © Matthew Connors

Bill Jacobson's A Series of Human Decisions

In addition to the wonderful Adam Bartos interview that I posted about last week, the new issue of Bomb Magazine contains a feature on Bill Jacobson's recently completed series A Series of Human Decisions. Somewhat of a departure from his more ethereal, softly-focused projects such as Songs of Sentient Beings, Thought Series, Untitled and New Year's Day, Jacobson's new work depicts a decidedly more lucid and descriptive world. As noted on the New York Art Beat website:

"Recently, he has used sharp focus to explore what it means to inhabit the physical, man-made world culminating in a body of work entitled "A Series of Human Decisions." From 2002-2006, Jacobson photographed a variety of interior and exterior architectural spaces, all of which allude to the idea that, unless we are in natural settings, we live in relation to man made created spaces. Such spaces suggest that one 'sees pictures' — that everyday objects exist in our minds as images."












All photographs from the series A Series of Human Decisions

All Images © Bill Jacobson

Klara Källström

Swedish photographer Klara Källström's work shares many of the same artistic virtues that Thobias Fäldt's images possess. In fact, the two are active collaborators under the moniker KK+TF. KK + TF was recently the focus of a Humble Arts Foundation's Solo Show online exhibition. In an accompanying Q & A, Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt had this to say about their collaborative vision:

Do you hope the viewer becomes an active observer and therefore projects his or her own narrative?

The story is within the viewer. The pictures function differently for each person that sees them, off course. The story is something you make up yourself and the pictures help the imagination. If an individual picture can tell a story on its own, if it doesn't need explanations, then its an interesting piece of work and can be a part of a bigger plan.

Photographic collaborations are quite interesting. How do you both choose what you will photograph?

We found each other cause we found out we find the same things interesting as motives for a photograph. We have kind of the same background and are brought up under similar circumstances and we guess that has to do with what forms the eye. Our photographs are a lot about culture and time. And Sweden. And we share that. And if you do things long enough, it becomes part of your consciousness. It works both ways; you start seeing things and in the beginning its hard to explain why certain things are more interesting than others. After a while its like these sceneries appear more frequently – maybe cause you developed a strategy to find/see these moments more easily.


Would you say you look for deliberate elements of mystery, something to preclude any one particular reading of the work?

The post construction is the narrative work and its at that moment you decide what the story really is about. You have all those fragments to play with, put together to something interesting to look at. The pictures raise more questions than answers so the mysterious part is probably an evident part of the work. Its very interesting with photography, that the medium it self in most cases serves to demystify the world – to show us what we could see with our own eyes. Its something that can be used, to produce work that plays with the idea of bringing back the mystery to the well-recognized object.











All Images © Klara Källström