SELF-GUIDED TOUR

Cruel and Unusual: Prison Photography Exhibition at Noorderlicht

2012-02-14T09:31:00.009-05:00

The Twins: Blessa and Kojak
from the series Life After
© Araminta de Clermont

from the series Captured Youth
© Steve Davis

The exhibition Cruel and Unusual, curated by Pete Brook (aka Prison Photography) and Hester Keijser (aka Mrs. Deane), opens this weekend at the Noorderlicht Gallery in the Netherlands. The exhibition showcases works by Araminta de Clermont, Amy Elkins, Alyse Emdur, Christiane Feser, Jane Lindsay, Deborah Luster, Nathalie Mohadjer, Yana Payusova, Lizzie Sadin, and Lori Waselchuk, as well as additional images by Sye Williams, Jon Lowenstein, Joseph Rodriguez, Richard Ross, Lloyd Degrane, Jenn Ackerman, Tim Gruber, Steve Davis, and others.

from the series Prison Landscapes
© Alyse Emdur

from the series The Dungeon
© Nathalie Mohadjer

Even if you're here in the U.S. or otherwise can't see this show in person, it'd be worth the time to look through the information, as Brook and Keijser have assembled an extremely compelling collection of powerful photography projects about prisons and the societal implications of mass incarceration. Go here to see an online preview of the exhibition catalogue they created to accompany the show.
With over 9 million people imprisoned worldwide, a major question to consider with this show is: what does a society hope to accomplish by locking up such massive numbers of offenders? Part of starting to answer that question relies on how citizens (aka taxpayers) understand the prison system and life behind bars, and how do they formulate their thoughts and convictions about mass incarceration based on the information they receive (and where that info is filtered through). Cruel and Unusual gets to the heart of that issue by examining how prisons and prisoners are presented in images, and how those images are created, distributed, and consumed.

Carla
from the series Valley State Prison for Women
© Sye Williams

Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center. Biloxi, Mississippi. 2009
from the series Juvenile-in-Justice
© Richard Ross

In reference to the American prison system, the curators write:

"In the U.S. the expense and failure of prisons has come under increasing scrutiny since the global economic recession. Over a period of just 40 years, failed 'tough on crime' policies, sensationalist TV media, prison privatization, and a misinformed public contributed to a near 500% increase of the U.S. prison population."

The artists in the exhibition employ a wide range of materials and techniques in addressing these issues, including vernacular photography, painted photos, digital manipulations, alternative processes, found materials, texts, and straight black and white documentary. The exhibition also includes materials gathered by Brook during his Prison Photography on the Road project, a 12-week road trip across the U.S. to visit major prisons, as well as interviews with photographers who have documenting prisons, and leading practitioners in prison arts, education, and advocacy.

Pete Brook: Prison Photography on the Road from timmatsui.com on Vimeo.

I had the honor of hosting Pete for a nite when he came through Chicago on the road trip, and in talking to him it strikes you right away that his conviction and passion for the topics of prisons and social justice go far beyond merely academic. This exhibition is a critical and thoughtful look at a crucial issue in modern societies, and points to those societies' shifting sense of decency and justice. Be sure to check it out, in one form or another.

from the series Tent City
© Jon Lowenstein

4 Years Out of a Deathrow Sentence (ocean)
from the series Black is the Day, Black is the Night
© Amy Elkins

"A penpal 26 years into his deathrow sentence in a landlocked prison, described an early childhood memory that haunted him, of walking further and further into the ocean during low tide until the sudden depth and darkness before him overcame him with fear." (from Elkins' series Black is the Day, Black is the Night)

A Society of Spectacles

2012-02-10T12:01:00.003-05:00

inside the Spectacle

Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jan. 2012

Somewhere only we know from Jesse McLean on Vimeo.

Society of the Spectacular
Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jan. 2012

Re-blogged from A Society of Spectacles, my other online project. Give a look if you haven't seen it already.

Art Openings 2/2: Sean Kelly Gallery, Klompching Gallery, wall space gallery

2012-02-02T10:47:00.013-05:00

from the series Broken Manual
© Alec Soth

In the accompanying text to his series Broken Manual, Alec Soth (via his crafted alter-ego Lester B. Morrison) writes: "Over the last few years I've studied experts of escape. Let us now praise those lonely men: hermits and hippies, monks and survivalists."

from the series Broken Manual
© Alec Soth

Sean Kelly gallery in NYC opens an exhibition tonite of Broken Manual, which takes the viewer into the lives of people who have chosen, for various reasons, to remove themselves from American society. This project sees Soth on another of the cross-country wanderings that have come to typify much of his work, gaining the trust of his subjects and revealing intimate details of their worlds -- and, in the case of Broken Manual, illustrating the oftentimes harsh and unforgiving landscapes in which they've secluded and insulated themselves.

from the series Broken Manual
© Alec Soth

In a sense, the viewer is somewhat a voyeur, peeping thru the keyhole into these quasi-dystopian scenes -- and yet at the same time, Soth's lyrical narrative (as he often employs) allows us to slow down and imagine ourselves as those subjects, maybe even to entertain the possibility of what if I were to drop out of society, to choose to live off the grid, where would I go and how would I survive? Indeed, our minds are encouraged to wander as Soth wanders, and perhaps to dream. As Barry Schwabsky writes in an essay in From Here to There: Alec Soth's America (a catalogue published by the Walker Art Center in 2010 on occasion of their large-scale Soth retrospective):

"'You feel like you're living two lives, right? In one life you haul yourself out of bed each day to fulfill another set of dreary obligations. In the other life you DREAM.' The dream as experienced by Morrison/Soth is not the gratifying wish fulfillment one might hope for. It is hemmed in by anxiety, consumed with the threat of violence and destruction. This is the paranoid world of the survivalists, those who aspire to live off the grid, to secede from both state and civil society...And yet there's always some kind of trail, isn't there? Some lead inward, into the dream world. Others lead outward, into the lives of others, which can touch us so deeply, sometimes painfully, even as we remain strangers to them. If you fear leaving a trail, it is because you fear discovery. But every path leads to solitude: one's own, or the mirroring solitude of another."

The exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery will also include screenings of the documentary film Somewhere to Disappear, which follows Soth across the U.S. in search of his subjects for Broken Manual.

Broken Manual
photographs by Alec Soth
opening Thursday 2 February
6-8pm
Sean Kelly gallery
528 W. 29th St., NYC

Another element that is often visually represented in Soth's photos (both in his portraits and landscapes) is an exploration of "place", both public and private, and how individuals correspond with that. Two other exhibitions opening tonite also tackle a similar topic. First, also in NYC, Klompching gallery shows The Architecture of Space, featuring works by Matthew Baum, Andrea Land, Sebastian Lemm, Benjamin Lowy, S. Billie Mandle, James Pomerantz, Justine Reyes, Greg Stimac and Monika Sziladi.

Untitled (Kansas City, Missouri), 2009
from the series Eighteen
© Matthew Baum

This exhibition, which sprung out of the Flash Forward Festival, confronts the perception and representation of space in numerous ways: the collapse between public and private, space as an abstract form, and space as a metaphor. And we see these ideas constructed in a variety of ways through each artist's unique approach: Sziladi's examination of social networks and subcultures, Lowy's framed viewpoint of war thru the looking glass, Baum's hyper-realistic street photography, Mandle's meditative look at mundane everyday spaces, or Pomerantz's mysterious and anonymous landscapes (perhaps the perfect place to escape to, a la Soth's characters) as captured from web cameras.

from Iraq | Perspectives (2005-2008)
© Benjamin Lowy

Remote Control #1 (2009)
from the series Remote Control
© James Pomerantz

The Architecture of Space
photographs by Matthew Baum, Andrea Land, Sebastian Lemm, Benjamin Lowy, S. Billie Mandle, James Pomerantz, Justine Reyes, Greg Stimac and Monika Sziladi
opening Thursday 2 February
6-9pm
Klompching gallery
111 Front St., suite 206, Brooklyn NY

Also taking a very specific look at "place" is the exhibition Wisconsin Tavern League, photographs by Carl Corey opening tonite at wall space gallery in SoCal.

2641 - Bill, Club 53, Amery
from the series Wisconsin Tavern League
© Carl Corey

I'm just gonna be completely forthcoming and say that, as someone with a deep affinity for Wisconsin, for the incomparable character of old school dive bars, for sociology and anthropology and any form of photography that successfully employs the camera to create sociological documents -- I am head-over-heels in love with Wisconsin Tavern League.

2761 - Kathy and Bernie Tworek, Moccasin bar, Hayward
from the series Wisconsin Tavern League
© Carl Corey

With a keen eye for the warmly familiar, the one-of-a-kind, and the downright strange, Corey captures something timeless and quintessential about the people and spaces of one of Wisconsin's favorite pastimes. His images bring us into the welcoming environs of taverns across the state, from city bars in Milwaukee (such as Jamo's, seen below, a gem of a place that I've frequented many times) all the way to rural communities in the west and far north of the state. Imbued with a sharply distinct "sense of place", his photographs remind us of the notion of a tavern -- or frankly any small, locally-owned business -- as both a microcosm and a solid cornerstone in a neighborhood or community.

2982 - Jamo's, Milwaukee
from the series Wisconsin Tavern League
© Carl Corey

Wisconsin Tavern League
photographs by Carl Corey
opening Thursday 2 February
6-8pm
wall space gallery
113 W. Ortega St., Santa Barbara CA

I just can't get enough of these pictures. In addition to the exhibition images at wall space, be sure to check out the four galleries of tavern photos on Corey's website. I've got a real soft spot for Wisconsin taverns, there's something about them that is completely unique from any other bars I've been to anywhere in the U.S. or the world. This past New Years, my special lady and I had the chance to experience a few more awesome spots in a little town called Elkhart Lake; particularly loved this quaint yet festive bar called Brown Baer (shabby hipstamatic photo below), which would've probably fit quite nicely in Corey's project.
Good times, Wisconsin, always good times...

(Brown Baer bar, New Years Eve. Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin)

Limits of Photography exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Photography

2012-01-27T14:23:00.011-05:00

Had a chance last nite to check out the new exhibition at MoCP, titled Limits of Photography and featuring photographs, video, and mixed media by Chris Naka, Curtis Mann, Daniel Hojnacki, Doug Stapleton, J.J. Murphy, John Brill, Randy Hayes, Rhona Shand, Sally Ketcham and Vera Klement.

Combined, their works explore the area where viewers lose faith in the truthiness of images. The exhibition challenges the structure of how audiences interact with photographs, and perhaps how that varies depending on the setting or arena in which that interaction takes place. The works call into question what exactly we expect from images and how those expectations ultimately define the identity of a photograph.

Untitled, 1991
© John Brill

There has been this historical assumption -- particularly in journalistic or documentary photography -- that photographs can somehow reveal an "objective truth" about the reality of the world, insofar as the photo was supposed to be a precise mirror of the scene before the camera.

The notions of authenticity and veracity in journalistic photographs have at times been upheld as next to godliness by the photos' creators, and every act of deception or manipulation that threatened the sanctity of their practice would accordingly be met with equal amounts hand-wringing, censuring, and re-affirmation of principle, as the medium struggles to maintain the sacred trust of its audience and its own credibility in the Fourth Estate. And yet the potential for manipulation in the photographic technique has been its own shadow ever since the creation of the craft. The history of documentary photography is ripe with notorious transgressions, from Alexander Gardner's setup photos in the Civil War all the way up through the digitally altered photo of Iranian missiles in 2008 and other countless examples by press photographers from the front lines of war zones to the Main Streets of daily newspaper coverage.

War Monody, Autumn, series 3, #4, 2008
© Vera Klement

What becomes a crucial question then is: how and why do we assume that photographs are imbued with some sort of "objective truth"? That concept alone seems ambiguous and misleading, and difficult to say that photographs could ever really live up to such a task. Surely there are numerous subjective decisions that get made along the entire process of creating and disseminating pictures -- so in reality, photographic depiction is infinitely nuanced and complex, as I wrote about in an essay on a similar topic in March 2011.

Indiana's Wildflowers Pt. 1
© Daniel Hojnacki

But I'm also interested in how the viewer's assumptions about photography are shaped by the context of the viewing -- more specifically: do people have different expectations of a photo they view in a magazine versus a photo they view in a museum or gallery? Are their criteria for "journalistic photography" different than their criteria for "art photography", and if so, how?

I think this territory becomes even murkier as we've seen a very recent explosion in at least the past 10-15 years of blurred distinctions between those two arenas of photography, with plenty of so-called "art photographers" being consistently commissioned to create work for journalistic magazines and vice versa with so-called "journalistic photographers" exhibiting their works more frequently in museums and galleries. So to add one more layer to the question: do viewers see a "journalistic photograph" differently in a magazine versus in a gallery? And do they see an "art photograph" differently in a gallery versus in a magazine?

A part of me has a hunch that most audiences of photography in either or both of those settings probably don't actually draw as sharp a line in the sand between the two approaches (and their respective inherent truthiness) as the creators and facilitators of those images do amongst themselves. Which leads me to emphatically believe that the continued overlapping and cross-overs of "art photography" and "journalistic photography" influencing and informing each other in certain ways is actually quite a healthy development, and a positive adaptation for the future of all photography in a complex and visually sophisticated modern society.

These are among the complicated topics addressed in the Limits of Photography exhibition. The works represent a wide range of materials and forms of manipulation, from the very subtle to others that have been so heavily manipulated as to almost not even resemble photographic objects at all -- and as such, might altogether lose their veracity as documents depicting reality.

Reduction, 2011
© Curtis Mann

I'm a big fan of what Curtis Mann is doing, and had a moment to meet him yesterday and chat briefly about his methodology. Much of his work begins with found images from a variety of sources (for example, his series Everything After is comprised mainly of photos from war and conflict zones in the Middle East), and he takes the perspective of the photograph as a physical object. He is then able to alter the image through various processes of folding, bending, cutting, painting varnish or spraying bleach onto it, thus imposing a permanent change onto the nature of the photo as well as its definition as a document and the reality it is perceived to reflect.

And just to take Mann's work as a further example, some of his photos were used on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in July 2011, for their story "Yemen on the Brink of Hell" (and to answer the paramount concern of photojournalists: yes, they were labeled as photo illustrations). How are those photos read in that context? Do viewers expect them to be real because they're presented in a journalistic publication (and on a very serious topic, at that)? What is their perceived truthiness as documents (especially if the viewer had not yet read they were illustrations)?

In the summary of curator Rod Slemmons:

"The exhibition title exploits a double meaning. The first is that many of the artists in the show push photography to the limits of recognizing it as photography. The second refers to the limitations encountered when we trust photography as if it were perception -- as if it were a window rather than a flat, constructed surface".

Limits of Photography
ongoing thru 25 March
Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago

Updated Galleries on my Website, Plus a New Online Project

2012-01-17T12:32:00.007-05:00

(detail), screen print on paper
from the series Black Friday

from the series Black Friday

Recently completed a fresh update of my website, which now includes a new series titled Black Friday, and recent edits from the ongoing Yard Sales and The Balance Sheet projects.

Untitled #7183
still photo from store surveillance video
from the new ongoing project The Balance Sheet

Keep Shopping #3
mixed media, digital inkjet print, chine colle print
from the new ongoing project The Balance Sheet

I also just started another online project called A Society of Spectacles, which, similarly to this blog, will have somewhat of a curatorial bend, although this time much more photo-heavy (minimal text) and with particular emphasis on presenting my own photographs and works-in-progress. So if you're interested in more photos and less reading, make a note of that site and check it out occasionally. Cheers.

Art Openings 1/12-1/14: Foley Gallery, threewalls Gallery, Clampart, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bruce Silverstein Gallery

2012-01-11T09:36:00.015-05:00

Throughout its existence, photography has often struggled to solidify its unique place in the art world (even despite the frequent practice by painters of using photography to record scenes and references for their works). Many would argue it has achieved noted success in recent years, as evidence by the explosion of photography exhibitions in major galleries and museums around the world, as well as the multi-million dollar sales of photographs at the big auction houses (think Andreas Gursky's record-breaking $4.3 million print sale, for example).
And yet this emergence is also taking place in the face of challenges from technology in the modern era, namely the democratization of the medium through digital cameras and software, which, greatly accelerated by the Internet, have spawned a wide proliferation of photography appearing all around us. One could argue that this larger cultural awareness of photography might have fueled the exorbitant sale prices at the auction houses, but regardless, the growing ubiquity of photography in contemporary art and culture has created a certain burden of proof on photographic artists -- perhaps both to distinguish their craft from the amateurs as well as to perpetuate its increased status in the art world. So its probably no surprise to see the craft of photography evolving in such a variety of spinoffs and approaches as we are seeing today -- often in ways that incorporate or react to the external forces acting upon it as mentioned above.

That being said, among the myriad of great photography exhibitions opening this week, it seems strangely appropriate to start on the group show Penetration, at Foley Gallery, featuring work by Danielle Durchslag, Joseph Heidecker, Marco Breuer, and Jowhara AlSaud.

Untitled (C-690), 2007
© Marco Breuer

All four artists employ their own personal methods of inserting the artist's creative hand directly into the surface (literally) of their photographic art -- in the process, manipulating and compromising the sacrosanct materials of photographic negatives and papers: Durchslag uses hundreds of pieces of cut paper to weave mosaic re-creations of family portraits as a meditation on ancestral history; Heidecker sews beads and threads into everyday images to form new identities for their subjects, often in a humorous way that questions how identities are shaped and managed by individuals; Breuer is widely known for his unique method of creating photographs without a camera, instead strategically scraping and scratching light-sensitive papers to produce abstract images that challenge our basic concepts about the nature of image-making; and AlSaud's faceless portraits, applied to her personal photographs by etching and drawing on the negative, are influenced by the practice in Saudi Arabia of censoring images deemed unsuitable for viewing.

Business Man (grey mask), 2009
© Joseph Heidecker

Penetration
works by Danielle Durchslag, Joseph Heidecker, Marco Breuer, Jowhara AlSaud
opening Thursday 12 January
6-8pm
Foley Gallery
548 W. 28th St., 2nd floor, NYC

Reacting in a similar way to the mountains of photographs in existence today (both on the Internet and elsewhere), artist Laura Mackin acts as curator and archivist in much of her work, featured in the solo show 120 Years opening at threewalls gallery in Chicago on Friday.

To Hagerman (B's postcards), c. 1910-1968
© Laura Mackin

Mackin collects images of the mundane and everyday, honing in on the vernacular photography that comprises the majority of our visual clutter today. However, in her artistic intervention, Mackin re-presents and re-contextualizes the mass of images in ways that create subtle portraits of both the visual clutter itself and the original authors/owners of the objects (who are otherwise basically anonymous or unknown).
This exhibition presents her works with two distinct collections: one of home movies shot from 1946-2006 by a man named Dean, and another of postcards from 1910-1968 predominantly mailed to a woman named Mrs. Ernst (as seen above).

Dean, driving (composite of movies from 1946-2006), 2010
© Laura Mackin

Mackin collages images together from these two ambiguous collections to form new pieces that present the viewer with everyday perspectives on landscape and travel, told through the experiences of these freshly rendered characters.

120 Years
works by Laura Mackin
opening Friday 13 January
6-9pm
threewalls Gallery
119 N. Peoria St., #2C, Chicago

Also opening on Friday nite is the exhibition A, photographs by Gregory Halpern, at Clampart in NYC. This is Halpern's first solo show at the gallery. Working in a photographic tradition very similar to what Walker Evans termed "lyric documentary", Halpern brings the viewer through tragically beautiful scenes in the Rust Belt.

Untitled, 2009
from the series A
© Gregory Halpern

The series, also part of a book of the same name published by J&L Books last year, focuses on places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Omaha and Detroit -- cities with a shared history of deindustrialization and economic stagnation similar to the artist's hometown of Buffalo. Halpern quietly and patiently renders the broken faces and landscapes in these areas that have become emblematic of the modern failures in our capitalist economy.

Untitled, 2010
from the series A
© Gregory Halpern

A
photographs by Gregory Halpern
opening Friday 13 January
6-8pm
Clampart
521-531 W. 25th St., NYC

Working in a somewhat similar documentary tradition and a shared focus on the lives of many for whom the typical American dream seems far from daily reality, the acclaimed photographer Zoe Strauss has dedicated the past decade to illustrating the plight of the working-class in/around her home of Philadelphia, and beyond. This weekend, the Philadelphia Museum of Art honors those efforts with the opening of Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, a mid-career retrospective of her works.

Half House, Camden, NJ, 2008
© Zoe Strauss

The exhibition also serves as an assessment of Strauss' ten-year project to annually exhibit her photographs under a highway bridge off Interstate 95 in South Philly -- a setting that merges art and the social sphere to create a wholly unique public space much different than the traditional museum or gallery setting.
The retrospective will feature 150 prints from her work in Philly and elsewhere across the U.S., along with a slideshow of additional images AND -- in a clever ploy to extend the show outside the museum walls -- a series of Strauss' photographs installed on large billboards around the city.
Untrained as a photographer or artist, Strauss first turned to the camera in 2000 and quickly had her first book, America, published in 2008. Her photographic approach seems to match her personality perfectly: tender and harsh, all at the same time (and I mean this as a high compliment). Her images demonstrate an ability to very quickly establish an intimate rapport with her subjects, bringing the viewer a vividly clear depiction of the joys and struggles in their daily world. Strauss' thorough and passionate documentation of the blue collar experience is probably among the most extensive and complete as I've ever seen.

Vanessa, Philadelphia, 2006
© Zoe Strauss

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years
opening Saturday 14 January (running thru 22 April)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th St. at Benjamin Franklin Pkwy., Philadelphia

Lastly, Strauss has also contributed her name to the Silverstein Annual, opening this weekend at Bruce Silverstein gallery in NYC, by nominating photographer Katrin Winkler to the show, to join other nominees Raul de la Cruz, Calum Colvin, Ludovica Carbotta, Sebastien Girard, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Ivan Mikhaylov, Nelli Palomaki, Sharon Yaari, and Katja Mater.

The Silverstein Annual is part of the gallery's efforts to promote emerging photographers. The gallery annually invites ten prominent curators and other art figures to nominate one artist each for the exhibition. Past nominees can be seen here, here, and here.

from the series The Great Unreal
© Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs

Silverstein Annual
opening Saturday 14 January
6-8pm
Bruce Silverstein Gallery
535 W. 24th St., NYC

Art Openings 1/4-1/7: Winkleman Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, Kopeikin Gallery

2012-01-04T11:47:00.018-05:00

2012 is fast out of the gate with some really kick-ass photography exhibitions already making their debuts this week.
I had the good fortune of starting off 2011 in NYC but now I almost wish I'd pushed those plans back a year to be there this week instead, for tonite's (TONITE!) opening at Winkleman gallery of the group show Corporations Are People Too. The exhibition features works that focus on corporate culture and the complex involvement of corporations in our everyday lives -- and at a particularly poignant time, amidst the expanding Occupy movements and other worldwide protests against the vast influence that corporations exert in the political process and in democratically elected governments. The show's themes also overlap often with ideas we presented in the Clampdown exhibition I curated in 2011, so there's an additional personal appeal there for me.
The show takes its name from GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's petulant whining that "corporations are people too" during a raucous campaign event in Iowa over the summer (no doubt making very clear whose interests will be prioritized if he gets elected). Although the exhibition could've also just as easily been based on the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, in which the court's pro-corporate ruling essentially allows corporations to use their profits to buy political campaign ads and otherwise support/oppose candidates for public office. "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in his dissent.
The Winkleman gallery's show includes historic photographs by the likes of Bernice Abbott, Louis Faurer, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange (illustrating a range of experiences from Depression-era child laborers to the post-WWII prosperity boom and concurrent spike in mass consumption), as well as contemporary images from Jacqueline Hassink (from her Table of Power series depicting uninhabited executive boardrooms of multinational corporations) and Phil Toledano (from his Bankrupt series, images of the empty offices of companies that have gone out of business).
Other artists included in the show -- Ian Davis, Chris Dorland, Kota Ezawa and Yevgeniy Fiks -- employ paintings, video and installation pieces to tackle the issue. Ian Davis' small paintings depict legions of suit-clad men spread across various landscapes and corporate settings, their hands raised in unison in some unknown pledge towards an unseen power figure. The work evokes thoughts about the pervasiveness of corporate culture and the assimilated fervor with which its participants blindly swear their allegiance to the goal of profit-making.

Conversation, 2011
© Ian Davis

And a huge favorite of mine is Yevgeniy Fiks' series Lenin for Your Library?, in which he sent copies of Vladimir Lenin's book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism to 100 American corporations, with an enclosed letter stating that the book is intended as a donation to their corporate library. The response letters he receives from the companies (some keep the book, some return it) provide hilarious insights into both the corporate workings/environment as well as their nuanced (and seemingly painful) interactions with the general public thru PR minions.

Lenin for Your Library? (Coca Cola), 2005
© Yevgeniy Fiks

This work is very much reminiscent of the hijinks of Lazlo Toth (aka comedian Don Novello aka Father Guido Sarducci) and his humorous mail correspondence with hundreds of politicians and corporations over the past decades (beginning during the rise of the Nixon era and continuing through the early days of George W. Bush). If you like comedy and satire, both Fiks' work and Toth's books are an absolute must-see.

Corporations Are People Too
opening Wednesday 4 January
6-8pm
Winkleman gallery
621 W. 27th St., NYC

Meanwhile, tomorrow nite in NYC is the opening at Yancey Richardson gallery of the show Let's sit down before we go, photographs by Bertien van Manen. The opening nite will also include a book signing for van Manen's recently released monograph of the same title.

Camping at Lake Baikal, Siberia
from the series Let's sit down before we go
© Bertien van Manen

While Yevgeniy Fiks' work, as mentioned above, seeks to come to terms with the relationship between the West and the Soviet experience of his youth, van Manen's photographs here also take the viewer into a journey through Russian life (albeit from the Dutch photographer's outside perspective) with particular emphasis on their adjustments in the post-communist era. Beginning in 1990 with her travels through Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Georgia, Siberia and elsewhere across the former Soviet Republic, van Manen is able to achieve a distinct intimacy with her subjects, creating photographs that allow the viewer to imagine gaining some deep knowledge of the Russian people, their daily joys and struggles. In them we see a mix of youthful exuberance as well as reservation towards a somewhat uncertain future.

Beach at Lake Baikal, Siberia
from the series Let's sit down before we go
© Bertien van Manen

Let's sit down before we go
photographs by Bertien van Manen
opening Thursday 5 January
6-8pm
Yancey Richardson gallery
535 W. 22nd St., 3rd floor, NYC

On the West Coast over the weekend, Stephen Wirtz gallery premieres an exhibition of new photographs by Todd Hido that I'm really excited to see (someday): his Excerpts from Silver Meadows, taken from the full-volume book Silver Meadows that will be launched later this year.

Untitled #9497, 2010
from the series Silver Meadows
© Todd Hido

The title references what is indeed a very real place named Silver Meadows, a hardscrabble subdivision in Hido's hometown of Kent, Ohio -- which is where my excitement and intrigue begins, if I may enter a brief anecdote: much of my family (myself included) were born and raised in/around the Kent area, and I still have family living in Kent (who actually lived for a while in a development right across the street from Silver Meadows, before recently moving to the other side of town). I spent my college years in Kent and actually for a short bit kicked around Silver Meadows in the early stages of a photo project (which I later abandoned).
So the notion of Silver Meadows is very vivid in my mind's eye, both in terms of being a real place as it exists and also the symbolism it reflects in Hido's work: the quintessential picture of Midwestern suburban childhood, the dark underbelly of sexual and psychological longing concealed behind the modest homes, and the escapism and teenage angst that festers around it. As he has done throughout the entire collection of his works, Hido weaves this tableau with a cinematic narrative of isolated places, troubled female figures, and unsettling landscapes, all the while confronting his own personal history among a larger collective experience in the hollow American suburbs across the nation.

Untitled #10106, 2011
from the series Silver Meadows
© Todd Hido

Excerpts from Silver Meadows
new photographs by Todd Hido
opening Saturday 7 January
4-6pm
Stephen Wirtz gallery
49 Geary St., 3rd floor, San Francisco

Finally, also opening on Saturday is Take Refuge, a solo exhibition of photos by Kevin Cooley, showing at Kopeikin gallery in LA.

from the series Take Refuge
© Kevin Cooley

With his large-scale photographs made in harsh remote locations in the Arctic, as well as urban scenes in NYC and LA, Cooley hones in on our physical and emotional interactions with nature. A repeated motif is the struggle between the natural environment and our built environment, particularly in relation to technology (represented by the repetition of fire and light as visual symbols).
We are reminded of our heightened emotions (most notably fear and awe) in the face of the sublime and mysterious in nature, as well as our human attempts to control this seemingly inconceivable natural world (perhaps to quiet our fears, in a sense).

from the series Take Refuge
© Kevin Cooley

Take Refuge
photographs by Kevin Cooley
opening Saturday 7 January
6-8pm
Kopeikin gallery
2766 South La Cienega Blvd., LA

As Seen in TIME Magazine

2011-12-14T10:00:00.007-05:00

Managed to snag the cover of 3 out of 4 of this week's TIME magazine with my photographs of Chrysler boss Sergio Marchionne, who came aboard in 2009 after helping to save Fiat in Italy and is now overseeing the bailout-aided turnaround of the American car-making giant.
A portrait of Marchionne in the company's new Fiat 500C was chosen for the cover of the European, Asian, and South Pacific international editions -- unfortunately TIME went for a different concept for their U.S. cover. But no matter, 3 for 4 ain't bad...? Regardless, also ended up with a nice big image on the story's opening spread in both the domestic and international editions.
Thanks to the crew at TIME for the opportunity and the nice photo play, and equally important: for helping with logistics, etc. to make this shoot happen in a way that puts me in position to make good pictures. I cannot emphasize enough how crucial that support is.

You can read a brief intro to the story here (TIME has now limited their online content to subscribers only), but take a minute to pick it up at the newsstand and read the entire piece. The fate of the Big Three automakers is an important marker for the condition of the overall American economy. With car and truck sales on a steady double-digit rise among previously-bankrupt Chrysler, GM and Ford this year, the automakers' revival could hopefully (fingers and toes crossed) lead to the creation of thousands of new industrial manufacturing jobs (particularly here in the Rust Belt).

Monothon at Zygote Press

2011-12-01T13:51:00.008-05:00

Earlier this year when I curated the Clampdown: Labor, Management and the Recession exhibition back in my home city, I had the great fortune of being introduced to the awesomeness and brilliance of Liz Maugans: genius artist / constant spark of infectious energy / brains and brawn behind Zygote Press.

from Survivor Series
© Liz Maugans

After much discussion and shared dismay about the economic and political crises of the day -- and particularly how artists respond to that in ways that engage dialogues with the public -- our conversation eventually settled on what we were each producing in our own respective works, and ultimately an invite from Liz to come get inky at Zygote and try my hand at some monoprints as part of Monothon, their annual program that gathers a select group of artists (most with little or no prior experience in formal printmaking) for a month-long fiesta of experimentation and learning new techniques. Finding her invitation too grand to resist, I scheduled a few treks back to Clevelandtown throughout November to take part in the action.

I very quickly discovered the "marathon" aspect of the equation "Monothon = monoprint + marathon", working long days in the studio while subsisting only on pho and banh mi (thankfully right across the street!), only to find myself completely exhausted at the end of each day yet sleepless at nite between excitement, anticipation, scrawling ideas on paper in the dark at 4am, and the cold sweat of monoprint nightmares about paper registration and ink consistency.

But out of it all sprang the beginnings of a new body of work that will likely end up combining photographs and mixed media. Though this as-of-yet untitled series is still in its diaper stages, I'm feeling very drawn towards lithography and collage methods, while my mind is heavily occupied by ideas about the structures of consumer capitalism and its reinforcement through popular media and advertising. We'll see where the series evolves to from here, but in the meantime I'll share a few quick sketches of some early creations:

Fool's Gold #1
lithograph
8.5x11"

Fool's Gold #3 (lithograph and plexi plate in production)

Shopping #1
chine colle print
22x15"

Huge thanks and props to Liz and the entire crew at Zygote, and also to all the other artists invited for Monothon. Being able to dedicate straight time to just working in the studio was a temporary slice of heaven that made the 12-hour workdays and mental fatigue and early frustrations all worthwhile. Zygote is truly one of those magical artist-colony-like places that many creative people yearn for in some capacity: sense of community, meeting all types of artists from different backgrounds and approaches, a selfless helping hand or soundboard for ideas when needed, inspiration around every corner, and a hell of a fun time non-stop.

If you're in/near Clevelandtown this weekend, Zygote will be exhibiting select works from each Monothon participant -- this Saturday from 1-4pm; Zygote is at 1410 E. 30th St. downtown, just north of Superior Ave. Give them some love and support and check out all the Monothon artists:

Judy Takacs
Melissa Daubert
Scott Goss
Jonathan Wayne
Nancy McEntee
Paul Rogers
Rebecca Cross
Kristen Cliffel
Mallorie Freeman
Judith Brandon
Pita Brooks
Paul Sydorenko

Art Openings 12/1, 12/4: Blue Sky Gallery, ACRE Projects

2011-11-29T12:19:00.008-05:00

Two interesting exhibitions opening this week in completely different cities but both taking a serious look at ideas of assimilation and studying a culture from afar vs. within (with a slightly divergent twist).

First, on Thursday in Portland, Blue Sky Gallery opens The Roma Journeys, photographs by Danish photographer Joakim Eskildsen.

Family in Szent Miklos, Haranglab, Transylvania, Romania. 2002
from The Roma Journeys
© Joakim Eskildsen

From 2002-2006 Eskildsen and his wife traveled to Hungary, Romania, India, Russia, Finland, France and Greece to document the lives of modern Roma communities, often living with various Roma families along the way. Though very much from an outsider's perspective (despite his investment of time and living in close quarters), the photographs in The Roma Journeys (drawn from his book of the same name) nevertheless provide a window into the daily lives of the Roma and the conditions they face.

The Roma are Europe's largest minority group, yet throughout their long history have been subjected to persecution, discrimination, slavery, suppression of their language and other attempts to banish their culture. The notion of assimilation and inclusion of Roma peoples has been a sharp point of contention across Europe, especially in light of the history of xenophobic attitudes and flare-ups in many European countries (particularly prevalent in anti-Roma and anti-immigrant violence in Italy over the past few years).

Winter V, Hevesaranyos, Hungary. 2000
from The Roma Journeys
© Joakim Eskildsen

As I've written before on this blog, the plight of the Roma is of particular interest to me personally, as I spent a brief period photographing Roma villages during trips to Ukraine, Hungary and Romania (including in the Transylvania region where much of my family comes from) in 2003-2004. And so far, Eskildsen's project is certainly among the most exhaustive and far-reaching surveys of Roma communities that I've come across. Very much worth a look.

The Roma Journeys
photographs by Joakim Eskildsen
opening Thursday 1 December
6-9pm
Blue Sky Gallery
122 NW 8th Ave., Portland OR

As a footnote, Eskildsen also recently produced a powerful series of images in the U.S. for a story in Time magazine last week titled Below the Line: Portraits of American Poverty, where he brings his same sensibility and photographic intimacy to depicting the worlds of the impoverished here in the Land of Plenty.

Meanwhile, on Sunday in Chicago, ACRE Projects will be exhibiting A Few Metaphors for Distance, photographs by Zach Abubeker as he explores his personal identity and connection to his Ethiopian heritage. The son of an Ethiopian immigrant, Abubeker initially began photographing the Ethiopian diaspora in the U.S. and the effects of assimilation, while learning of his own cultural roots. He then took his first trip to Ethiopia earlier this year.

Untitled. 2011
© Zach Abubeker

His work is, like Eskildsen's work about the Roma, a visual attempt at cultural understanding -- however, for Abubeker the process is obviously also highly personalized, as he concurrently tries to come to terms with his own identity as a person of mixed race. In a certain sense, one could say that Abubeker has comparatively more of an insider's perspective on the themes presented. Yet in a strange twist, his first experiences in Ethiopia seemed also a stark reminder that in another regard he is still an outsider at the same time. In his words:

"Often times while I was walking the streets people would shout 'Ferengi!' meaning foreigner or someone of European descent - white. My father told me it was a term of endearment, but I began to think otherwise. They are pointing me out as one who does not belong. Likely, no matter how much information I can tout about the country or its people I will always be somewhat of an outsider. Strange to think that in the U.S. my race is in more of an ambiguous state, while in Ethiopia, I am not quite black enough."

Very interesting to consider that circumstance of feeling somewhat caught between two distinctly different cultural identities -- probably a predicament incurred by many people every day facing the forces of cultural assimilation. I'll be curious to see how that emotion evolves or changes as Abubeker continues this ongoing body of work, and if/how that might visually manifest itself in his images.

Tree Mosque. 2011
© Zach Abubeker

In a way, its almost a natural extension of the photographic practice: at times the camera is a gateway into otherwise closed-off places and people and experiences. In making pictures, we are temporary "insiders" offered an opportunity to stare through the peephole, to watch and hear and smell and taste -- to feel that experience of what it means to be there with those people at that time. And yet our part in that place, as lush and lucid as it may seem in the moment, can sometimes ultimately end up like we are still on the outside. At the same time though, there are brilliant moments of clarity, no doubt -- and we can carry those with us. So again, I really look forward to seeing where Abubeker's work takes him personally, and where he will bring us along as viewers.

In anticipation of his next journey back to Ethiopia in January 2012 for a more extended stay, Abubeker is currently selling small prints (very reasonably priced) to cover some expected costs for film, equipment and living expenses. Head over to his blog and check them out.

A Few Metaphors for Distance
photographs by Zach Abubeker
opening Sunday 4 December
4-8pm
ACRE Projects
1913 W. 17th St., Chicago

Black Friday (redux): "Consumer" vs. "Citizen"

2011-11-23T13:25:00.005-05:00

The calendar turns over to that page once again, as Black Friday descends across the land like a rancid green cloud of rotten garbage on neighborhood trash day -- a distinct annual ritual of our consumer capitalist culture, a delirious celebration of humanity's moronic willingness to be manipulated by deliberate and pernicious mass-marketing techniques.

For my part, I recommend considering Buy Nothing Day -- which isn't to say that consumerism will or should vanish completely, but rather to point out that this weekend is a particularly poignant time to stop and think about the overall function of shopping and consumption (and, by extension -- wastefulness) in our everyday lives, and to take part in a brief moratorium, of sorts.
Of course, its understood that shopping is inevitable to some extent, and we all participate in whatever way. If your primal urge to shop is far too overwhelming to ignore, at least please consider choosing from any of the numerous Buy Local campaigns instead, to support your local artisans and small businesses.

At a time when many people are expressing concern about the economy and how to create jobs in America, one shouldn't need a PhD in Economics to understand that shopping at big box stores who peddle cheap plastic shit from China does almost nothing to support jobs for American workers (just like its short-sighted to believe, by extension, that we can just shop our way out of the Recession -- as if job creation were based only around the solitary factor of how much worthless crap that people buy... but this is a dialogue for another day).

One of the biggest traps I think we've fallen into as a society is to have confused the line between what it means to be a "consumer" versus what it means to be a "citizen". There is an important relationship between these two ideas, and a balanced understanding of both can actually strengthen each side individually.

The "consumer" by his very nature is selfish, impetuous, irresponsible, and feels little obligation to his fellow man. This is the mentality that caused the death of Jdimytai Damour and injured dozens more (including a pregnant woman) when a mob of crazed Black Friday shoppers trampled through the doors of a Wal-Mart in Long Island a few years ago.

By contrast, if the "citizen" realizes the ramifications of his behavior and takes the long view of his unique position in a community or society, then it makes sense that citizen-minded consumers, when acting rationally instead of impulsively, have the power to create certain forms of market demand -- and its therefor crucial to harness that force to dictate the conversation on economic decisions (some call this "ethical consumerism").

Knowing that then, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that the disproportionate American demand for cheap products has been a major contributor to the outsourcing of domestic jobs to overseas nations where the low-price plastic junk we crave is produced by exploiting cheap labor and materials. So when we lament the national unemployment statistics we're currently faced with, it needs to be understood that the object of some of our anger lies squarely in the mirror.
Behold, Exhibit A:

Anyway, obviously a little comedic interlude, but also carries some serious points to it as well. Not meant as a lecture, but just food for thought while preparing for your upcoming shopping experience.
And on a last note, if you're a photographer and you're hitting the sales, be sure to take your camera and shoot some images to submit to the national Picture Black Friday project.

Observations from an Object in Motion

2011-11-02T12:08:00.029-04:00

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -- its the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
(Jack Kerouac, On the Road)

Gas station and wind farm. Remington, Indiana. June 2011

Beach trail. St. Petersburg, Florida. August 2011

Lake Superior. Silver Creek, Minnesota. October 2011

Travelers Club International Restaurant and Tuba Museum (featuring Tuba Charlie's World of Beer).
Okemos, Michigan. September 2011

Yard sale. Painesville, Ohio. July 2011

Research lab. Madison, Wisconsin. July 2011

Green Giant statue. Blue Earth, Minnesota. October 2011

Dilapidated billboard. Black River Falls, Wisconsin. October 2011

Pumpkin pie (or, alternately, Apologies to Ai WeiWei). Two Harbors, Minnesota. October 2011

Alex's wedding. Peninsula, Ohio. August 2011

Motel room. Hinkley, Minnesota. October 2011

When I was a kid, my mother had this collection of fancy spoons -- not the type for stirring tea or scooping ice cream, mind you. These were strictly for decoration, and my brothers and I were often sternly reminded to keep our grubby pre-school hands off them. She stored them in a 16x20" wooden box, the insides lined with soft green (or was it purple?) felt, and each spoon was provided its own secure holding spot. For the longest time, that chintzy relic of suburban home decor sat mounted on the wall in the dining room with the big window overlooking our modest backyard, above the long table where we'd feast with our extended family on holidays and birthdays.

There were 50 of these spoons, each being of an unpolished silver varnish but proudly proclaiming one of the 50 states and emblazoned with an image underneath that somehow related to each place. After inspecting them long enough, my young brain supposed that every state was exactly as it were depicted in these miniature pictures -- after all, the symbol of our home state Ohio was a bushel of grain, and I'd seen all the farms and fields of wheat and the silos out the car window every few weekends when we'd drive out to the countryside where both sets of my grandparents lived. Soon enough, my easily-excitable imagination was ignited with swirling fantastical thoughts about far-off locations, and surely these spoons must've been something magical to induce such grand visions (of course you can imagine my disappointment later on when I began to discover them in every truckstop off every interstate highway ever driven in America, right next to the state thimbles and shot glasses and other tchotchkes, or advertised in catalogues and TV for $19.99 plus S&H).

And every spring, when the rivers and creeks flowed high and fast with the muddied brown runoff of melting snow, we'd awkwardly cram into the family stationwagon (the one with the backwards-facing backseat that my brothers and I would fight over for the supreme right to stare and make faces at the cars behind us) for the grueling 22-hour drive down to some middle-class paradise in Florida where all normal people go to vacation. Along the way, I could see some of the states depicted on those spoons -- mountains in West Virginia, peaches in Georgia, etc. -- but to my wide-eyed surprise, they were infinitely more vast and varied than those oversimplified thumbnail pictures made them appear! (Granted, yes, when you're 10 years old, even teenagers and adults look huge -- but when you begin to wrap your still-developing brain around the fact that the world is huge?!)

And there is so much of it to see. And now our adult minds burn with a similar insatiable curiosity for unknown roads and peoples. It is constructed from the DNA of every greasy roadside cafe, every rotten truckstop bathroom, every awful '80s love song played on the radio that you sing along to every time, every neon sign and every billboard, every new conversation with strangers over $2 bottled beer in every crossroads bar, every identical-looking airport and train station and bus depot, every traffic jam, every manicured curb-cut on-ramp and off-ramp, every cliche gift shop, every hotel and motel, and every pretty girl whose passing glance stabs you in the heart a little bit because you both know that in a day's time you'll be far out of here.

Its the sustenance for every early morning when the light is low and orange and the air is crisp and the entire day sits before you with all its potential adventures and misadventures -- but you can't fucking tolerate it yet because there's no coffee in this goddamn shitty town and now its time to get back in the car and keep moving.

Its the narrative of every vibrant dream when your weary head sinks into those cheap pillows that are always too small or too firm, at the $30 motel where you arrive cross-eyed at 2am and hope for just a few hours of continuous, uninterrupted rest.

And its the reason why we forge along, battling the solitude and loneliness that the road also brings -- the sinking pit in your gut of sometimes being only a passing ghost moving in and out of the lives of people in that place. We come and we go, arrive and depart, to change locations and destinations.

But when you get there, to stand in that place and to see! To smell the pine in the forest, to quiver and wrinkle in the ocean, to destroy the fear of unknown streets and darkened alleys lost on the wrong side of mysterious towns, to experience that place and the toils and troubles of its inhabitants, to know they are real, to reach out and touch them -- to taste life and to find the clarity that eluded you at the annoying dawn. This is why we traveled here.

But nowadays, my brother says its possible to get from Ohio to southwest Florida in something like 16 hours -- that's straight through, non-stop. And he should know: he's made the drive countless times on his own, each trip likely a test against the previous, a time trial for some imaginary race.

Is this the foregone conclusion of transience? Racing against time, against the setting sun, past small towns on the horizon, to reach points intended and random, or to reach nowhere, to meet strangers, to hug far-away friends, to eat, to drink, to laugh, to fuck, to sing, to drink some more, to say hello, and always to say good-bye.

Another sad epilogue for another passing journey of warmth and brightness and movement, left now to the approaching stillness when the streets sag under weight of a lonely, frigid nighttime. Though yes, indeed we will scrape and shiver and persist. And for the time being, these 12 photographs will temporarily suffice, and will flicker in and out and by, just like all of the fleeting in-betweens in our peripheral vision as we restlessly rush to the next destination.

And then, eventually, to home.

On my back porch, dusk approaching. Chicago. September 2011

Art Openings 10/26-10/29: Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, Howard Greenberg Gallery, Robert Mann Gallery, threewalls Gallery, LVL3 Gallery

2011-10-26T10:51:00.010-04:00

The renowned contemporary photographer Edward Burtynsky is the subject of two exhibitions opening in New York this week. First, opening tonite at Bryce Wolkowitz gallery is Burtynsky's newest project Dryland Farming. Created in the remote Monegros region of northeast Spain, his photographs show us a landscape of fertile patchwork farms woven amongst ragged gypsum foothills.

Dryland Farming #30, Monegros County, Aragon, Spain. 2010
© Edward Burtynsky

In his typical fashion, Burtynsky photographs these areas from above, rendering them into abstract fields of line and color made vivid through the immense scale of his prints. What becomes clear is a certain juxtaposition between the rich natural beauty of the region versus the human desire to harness the power and bounty of the land.

Dryland Farming
photographs by Edward Burtynsky
opening Wednesday 26 October
6-8pm
Bryce Wolkowitz gallery
505 W. 24th Street, NYC

During this show, Wolkowitz gallery is also partnering with Howard Greenberg gallery, who will concurrently be hosting a retrospective exhibition of photographs from the span of Burtynsky's 25-year career -- providing a long view of the artist's repeated examination of man's impact on the environment and the relationship between industry and nature.

Retrospective of the works of Edward Burtynsky
opening Thursday 27 October
630-830pm
Howard Greenberg gallery
41 E. 57th St., 14th floor, NYC

In another NYC exhibition that also touches on the human ecological footprint, Robert Mann gallery premieres The Machine in the Garden, from photographer Jeff Brouws.
Training his camera on everyday subjects such as highway vistas and shopping plazas, Brouws has forged his own long career by photographing the vernacular American landscape of his time (much a la Walker Evans). His book Approaching Nowhere -- a visual critique of suburban sprawl and the subsequent loss of a sense of place -- stands as a personal favorite of mine.
In his recent body of work The Machine in the Garden, Brouws turns his attention to the forgotten legacy of the railroad industry -- perhaps somewhat romantically yearning for a time and way of life outside of (or completely removed from) the dominance of the car-centric lifestyle and development models so pervasive today.

from the series The Machine in the Garden
© Jeff Brouws

Drawing his inspiration from Leo Marx's book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Brouws worked within a 10-mile radius of his home in upstate New York to document the visual remnants and clues of the train lines that used to criss-cross the rural landscape there. His photographs weave together a narrative about a historical era when railroads (instead of cars and highways) delineated space and tied communities together -- but also hint at a larger dialogue about the effects of technology on rural areas.

The Machine in the Garden
photographs by Jeff Brouws
opening Thursday 27 October
6-8pm
Robert Mann gallery
210 11th Ave., 10th floor, NYC

Elsewhere, in Chicago this Friday, threewalls gallery opens the group exhibition Voices from the Center, a multiform project featuring works by Central European artists who tackle the notion of life in their respective countries before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show includes art by Janeil Engelstad, Grafixpol, Oto Hudec, Magda Stanova, Miklos Suranyi, Matej Vakula, and Tehnica Schweiz.

from the series Weekend Houses
© Miklos Suranyi

The project initially grew out of Engelstad's conversations with former dissidents, artists, writers, teachers, politicians, and villagers throughout post-communist Central Europe, as they discussed their hopes, dreams, and fears about their lives, their country, and the world.
Their answers become the central tenet of the exhibition as it illustrates the circumstances of people caught in transition between two distinct political and cultural eras. It then becomes an important question of how this transition affects their daily lives -- or, more succinctly: was life better before or after the Berlin Wall?
Considering the vast number of Central and Eastern European ethnic groups present in the Chicagoland area, I'm sure this will be a very poignant exhibition.

Voices from the Center
opening Friday 28 October
6-9pm
threewalls gallery
119 N. Peoria St., #2d, Chicago

Last but definitely not least, on Saturday nite LVL3 gallery in Chicago opens the exhibition Real Space, a partnership with the ACRE Residency featuring the works of Alyse Ronayne, Bryan Lear, Dan Bradica, and Zak Arctander.
Each artist begins their process with standard materials and forms and then re-contextualizes them to spawn a transformation into something entirely new and unfamiliar. For example, consider Bradica's images of his constructed interventions into the natural landscape, where he introduces man-made objects and, thru precise sculpture, challenges our standard perceptions of the environment.

Real Space
opening Saturday 29 October
6-10pm
LVL3 gallery
1542 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago

Art Openings 10/21: Thomas Robertello Gallery, Co-Prosperity Sphere

2011-10-20T10:27:00.010-04:00

Two really great shows opening in Chicago on Friday nite -- curiously enough, both dealing with the oft-discussed human footprint on nature, but approaching the topic from two distinct perspectives.
First, in the burgeoning West Loop, Thomas Robertello Gallery hosts Transmissions From the Outpost, works by Adam Ekberg.

Outpost #1, 2011
© Adam Ekberg

Transmissions From the Outpost is a continuation of Ekberg's solid practice of imposing man-made materials into natural and domestic spaces through careful sculpture and performance.

Levitating Pink Umbrella, 2010
© Adam Ekberg

The construction of his scenes results in images that transform and give new meaning to everyday settings and scenarios. By placing equal emphasis on the "happening" of creating the photograph (i.e. the work done prior to composing and capturing the image) as is on the final power of the exhibited photograph itself, his works ultimately exploit an alternative potential of the documentary tradition in photography.

Arrangement #2, 2010
© Adam Ekberg

Transmissions From the Outpost
works by Adam Ekberg
opening Friday 21 October
6-8pm
Thomas Robertello Gallery
27 N. Morgan St., Chicago

From there, jet down Halsted to Bridgeport and the south end of Morgan St. to Co-Prosperity Sphere and check out Future Perfect, featuring photo, video, sculpture and audio works by Judy Natal.

from the series Future Perfect
© Judy Natal

Future Perfect consists of four chapters (appropriately titled 2040, 2030, 2020, and 2010) and centers around three scientific research sites: a desert preserve in Las Vegas, an experimental Biosphere in Arizona, and geothermal landscapes in Iceland.

from the series Future Perfect
© Judy Natal

Natal's works detail the notion of futurity being explored in these sites, and the subsequent influences of human intervention and land use -- particularly as it relates to environmental sustainability. In her words, "the photographs establish unexpected but compelling resonances that distill and display our hopes, perceptions and misunderstandings of nature, and suggest both the potential and pitfalls of our future on earth."

from the series Future Perfect
© Judy Natal

Future Perfect
works by Judy Natal
opening Friday 21 October
6-9pm
Co-Prosperity Sphere
3219 S. Morgan St., Chicago

As Seen in Smithsonian Magazine

2011-10-11T12:16:00.024-04:00

Last autumn I had the opportunity to work on a 3-day series of shoots for a story (written by Brendan Borrell) in Smithsonian magazine about competitive vegetable growers. We spent most of our time concentrated on a small group of farmers in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, and their pursuit of the sacred giant pumpkin. After a very long waiting period (that being the only bummer about this gig), the piece is finally here -- so see us in print in the October issue on newsstands now, or online here.
This project will definitely go down as one of my favorite editorial assignments ever, precisely because it involved photographing a perfect triumvirate of autumn, farming, and pumpkins.
Specifically the pumpkins -- those who know me well can attest to my love of many things pumpkin: pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, pumpkin seeds, pumpkin beer, and more (if you're keeping track at home, so far this season I think my favorite pumpkin brews are the Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale and the Hoppin' Frog Double Pumpkin Ale).
Even managed to snag the lead image on the contents page, so a huge thanks due to the crew at Smithsonian, and especially to photo editor Molly Roberts. Every shoot I've done for this magazine I felt like has put me into situations to make decent pictures, and I appreciate the staff for understanding and fostering that with a healthy balance of guidance vs. hands-off. And to see the magazine respond by giving the images big play in print is a nice cherry on the sundae.
Here's some outtakes from the giant pumpkin farmers and their competition (this year's winner weighed in at 1,663 lbs.)

Reflecting back on all these images, and particularly after a refreshing recent trip up to the Northwoods (more to come soon about that), really makes it quite clear to me that yes, as ancient civilizations discovered long ago (even though they might not have had a name for it yet), autumn is a magical time. There's something mysterious and fascinating about it that invigorates me -- something physiological that I always feel very deep in my bones but can never quite fully identify. I think maybe it has to do with the light (both literally and figuratively), every photographer's obsession.
It begins by the equinox, the precise day when the sun is directly overhead at the equator, creating a distinct balance of light across the Earth of exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. From that point we embark on the descent into the cold darkness of winter, but not before celebrating the final harvest of summer's bounty of crops to be collected for the journey.
Though most profoundly felt, to me, are the radiant visual components of autumn, revolving around the symbolism of fire and light:

The farmers burning their fields to get rid of straw or weeds or other old growth left over after the harvest, to prepare the soil for new seeding in the spring;
How the landscape appears ablaze with red, yellow and orange tones of fading leaves;
The calm of a bonfire as it brings warmth and chases away nite;
How the sun glows in a different way as it positions itself lower on the horizon for more hours in the day, its shadows cast much further, its hues more golden and orange and contrasted against deep dark clouds.

Welcome, autumn.

Art Openings 10/4: Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Aperture Gallery

2011-10-04T11:24:00.011-04:00

The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco re-examines the photography program of the Depression-era Farm Security Administration (FSA) in its newest exhibition More American Photographs, which opens today. The show incorporates contemporary photographs made during the current "Great Recession", placed alongside FSA images from the 1930s and 1940s, seeking to more or less update the catalogue of documenting economic plight in the U.S.

Josh. Joelton, Tennessee, 2008.
© Alec Soth

The FSA (1935-1944) was created as a component of Roosevelt's New Deal Program, and headed by Roy Stryker, who relentlessly tasked its photographers with documenting the vast poverty across the nation (and in particular, rural poverty). The works of FSA photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and others, soon became not only iconic images of American life during this time of economic disaster, but also developed an aesthetic of photographic realism that remains a cornerstone of documentary photography today.

Anonymous, 2008.
© Katy Grannan

With growing assertions that the current American economic recession is the country's worst since the Great Depression of 80 years ago, now seems like an apt time for an exhibition like this, to pair modern images with the historic FSA works. More American Photographs features the efforts of 12 contemporary photographers (including Katy Grannan, Hank Willis Thomas, Alec Soth, and others) who were commissioned to travel the U.S. to document its land and people.

Outside AB Tool Crib: Matt, Mike, Carey, Steven, John, Mel and Karl. 2008
© Sharon Lockhart

More American Photographs
ongoing from 4 October - 17 December
Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
1111 8th St., San Francisco

In New York, another huge Fall book release from Aperture, this time an updated version of Subway, by Bruce Davidson, which coincides with a new exhibition opening today at the Aperture Gallery of Davidson's photographs from the NYC subway system.

from the book Subway
© Bruce Davidson

Davidson photographed along the city's subway lines from 1980-1985, resulting in the original publication of Subway by Aperture in 1986. Utilizing a stark palette of bold light and deep shadow, his photographs capture a distinct essence of the subway: equal parts intimidating yet intimate, gritty yet vibrant, massive yet soulful.

from the book Subway
© Bruce Davidson

In Davidson's own words:

"The people in the subway, their flesh juxtaposed against the graffiti, the penetrating effect of the strobe light itself, and even the hollow darkness of the tunnels, inspired an aesthetic that goes unnoticed by passengers who are trapped underground, hiding behind masks, and closed off from each other."

In truth, it was upon first seeing Davidson's subway images in the mid-'90s that I started to develop an intense infatuation with subway trains (for both the visual and the macabre), and the desire to feel that certain rush of adrenaline: from the speed of zipping thru the dark, mysterious, unknown catacombs; from the amazing vantage points of the elevated tracks where you can feel the city's aggressive embrace as it swallows you into its pulse and flow; and from the catharsis of vanquishing one's own fears of what characters or circumstances might be encountered along the way (although by the time I finally had a first chance to explore the NYC subway myself, 15+ years after Davidson's images, of course the look and feel of the system was entirely different, much like NYC in general).

from the book Subway
© Bruce Davidson

Subway
photographs by Bruce Davidson
ongoing from 4 October - 29 October
Aperture Gallery
547 W. 27th St., 4th floor, NYC

Opening This Weekend at Hyde Park Art Center: No Place Like Home (curated by Dawoud Bey)

2011-09-23T11:55:00.004-04:00

This Sunday, Hyde Park Art Center opens the group exhibition No Place Like Home, curated by Dawoud Bey and featuring photographs by Lisa Lindvay, Jon Lowenstein, Jason Reblando, Jessica Rodrigue, David Schalliol and Leilani Wertens.

Isolated Building Study 1, 2008
from the series Isolated Building Studies
© David Schalliol

The exhibition addresses the modern mainstream notion of "home", in particular the complexities of creating a sense of home that is primarily defined by security, safety and stability. The artists in this show examine the myriad of forces influencing that stability, such as race, class, socioeconomic factors, and political agendas.

Electrical towers and homes, Burnham, IL. 2010
from the series Working Neighborhoods 2009-2010
© Jessica Rodrigue

No Place Like Home
works by Lisa Lindvay, Jon Lowenstein, Jason Reblando, Jessica Rodrigue, David Schalliol and Leilani Wertens
curated by Dawoud Bey
opening Sunday 25 September
3-5pm
Hyde Park Art Center
5020 S. Cornell Ave., Chicago

Big Photography News from (ahem) Cleveland

2011-09-19T09:13:00.007-04:00

Traveled back to my old stomping grounds in Cleveland last week to attend an opening reception at the Cleveland Museum of Art for the new exhibition of Copia, the culmination of a decade photographing the American consumer landscape by Brian Ulrich.

Granger, IN. 2003
from the series Copia
© Brian Ulrich

The exhibition consists of over 50 images from the three subsets of Copia: Retail (2001-2006), his early documentation of shoppers in malls and big box stores around the U.S.; Thrift (2005-2008), focusing on thrift stores and their collection of unwanted or discarded consumer products; and Dark Stores (2008-2011), which explores the impact of the 2008 financial crisis thru images of abandoned malls and stores across the country. Taken as a whole, they remind us of the deep economic, social, and political ramifications of consumer culture.
The exhibition also coincides with the release of his book Is This Place Great or What, published by Aperture and CMA and including the entire Copia series.
As many of you know, I've been a huge supporter of Brian's work for a long time, so of course I highly recommend checking out this show if you're in/near or passing thru Cleveland. The print reproduction is phenomenal and the museum's presentation accentuates the works and gives the viewer a nice space in which to navigate the series. And as always, there's a wealth of little surprise details to be found in the images on close inspection -- treasures only revealed thru viewing the works in person instead of online. The exhibition will continue at CMA thru January 2012.
If you're not familiar w/ Ulrich or the Copia project, there's a number of great interviews out there to read on the web. I've written about them frequently on this blog, so I don't wanna go overboard or rehash old territory, but only to say, a good place to start would be this 2010 interview w/ him from BOMB Magazine.

Copia -- Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores. 2001-2011
photographs by Brian Ulrich
ongoing thru 16 January 2012
Cleveland Museum of Art
11150 East Blvd., Cleveland

Last but certainly not least, while in Cleveland last week I was very excited to hear the official announcement about the groundbreaking for a new gallery to be opened there called Transformer Station, which will be a collaboration between CMA and the Akron-based art collectors Fred and Laura Bidwell.
The gallery will be located on W. 29th St. in Ohio City (my old neighborhood!) and is scheduled to open in late 2012. This promises to be a tremendous boost to the emerging contemporary arts scene on the city's west side, between Ohio City and the nearby Gordon Square Arts District.

(rendering of the new Transformer Station gallery to be opened on W. 29th St. near Detroit Ave.)

For six months each year, the Bidwells will run programming in the gallery and host exhibitions from their extensive collection of contemporary photography. Then for the other six months, CMA will program the space w/ experimental shows in painting, sculpture, photography, video and digital media. After 15 years, the structure and the project will revert to the full control of CMA.
In other words...if this all hasn't fully sunk in yet, this is HUGE news for photography and contemporary art in Cleveland and surrounding region. I had heard inklings over the summer about the arrival of this amazing gallery and resource, so its really awesome to see it now coming to fruition. Congrats to everyone involved, and a big thanks to the Bidwells, who are essentially covering the entire cost of this project.

Art Openings This Week: Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Clic Gallery, Amador Gallery, Nailya Alexander Gallery

2011-09-14T12:49:00.012-04:00

Chockablock week of exhibition openings in NYC once again for part two of the opening of fall gallery season.
Thursday nite in Chelsea, Jenkins Johnson Gallery hosts the show Plugged In, featuring works by a group of artists who merge various forms of photography and image-making with new technology and electronic arts. On display are works by Jeremy Bert, Andrew Bovasso, Daniele Buetti, Tim Etchells, Gregory Scott and Timotheus Tomicek.

Lourdes
© Daniele Buetti

Buetti creates radiant installations w/ traditional c-prints mounted on lightboxes, with rays of light infused through perforations in the print surface. He incorporates methodologies from the advertising industry to address the notion of seduction in imagery and media, and to reveal the frailty of popular culture.

Taxi, 2009
© Gregory Scott

Scott combines photography, video and painting into single artworks that recall 19th century trompe l'oeil paintings. The still image above doesn't do total justice to the experience of seeing his works in person; to get a better sense, see this video of Taxi, 2009 from his website, or the video below from his 2009 exhibition at Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Plugged In
the works of Jeremy Bert, Andrew Bovasso, Daniele Buetti, Tim Etchells, Gregory Scott and Timotheus Tomicek
opening Thursday 15 September
6-8pm
Jenkins Johnson Gallery
521 W. 26th St., 5th floor, NYC

Also on Thursday nite, Clic Gallery opens the exhibition The New Gypsies, images from the recently published book by Ian McKell.

from the book The New Gypsies
© Ian McKell

I recently featured McKell's project here on the blog, so I won't rehash all the info again today, but please see that post in the archive if you want to read more about his work.

from the book The New Gypsies
© Ian McKell

The New Gypsies
photographs by Ian McKell
opening Thursday 15 September
6-8pm
Clic Gallery
255 Centre St., NYC

Also, two other NYC shows well worth a look that opened earlier this week:
Amador Gallery has an exhibition of one of my favorite photographers, Lars Tunbjork.

Oland, 1991
from the book Landet Utom Sig
© Lars Tunbjork

This show will feature a selection of Tunbjork's color photographs from 1988-2002, his visual and sociological observations of work, leisure, and home as reflected in his books Landet Utom Sig, Home, and Office.

Lawyer's Office, New York, 1997
from the book Office
© Lars Tunbjork

photographs by Lars Tunbjork
ongoing thru 19 November
Amador Gallery
41 E. 57th St., 6th floor, NYC

And in the same building, Nailya Alexander Gallery is hosting the show Distant Relations, photographs by Lori Grinker.

Untitled, Ukraine, 2008
from the series Distant Relations
© Lori Grinker

Grinker's project is comprised of color photographs made from 2002-2011 in Lithuania, South Africa, Ukraine, and the US. The series traces her family's migration from western Lithuania (and eventually to the US) beginning in the late 1800s. I'm particularly compelled by Grinker's project as I've taken on an interest in sloooowwwly (as in, very very very very slowly) photographing my own family's roots from Transylvania.

Untitled, California, 2011
from the series Distant Relations
© Lori Grinker

Distant Relations
photographs by Lori Grinker
ongoing thru 15 October
Nailya Alexander Gallery
41 E. 57th St., suite 704, NYC

Art Openings 9/8-9/10: Robert Koch Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, Bold Hype Gallery, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Wall Space Gallery

2011-09-07T07:56:00.012-04:00

Fall gallery season kicks off this week w/ a slew of big shows all over the place.
Starting Thursday nite on the West Coast, Robert Koch gallery in San Francisco presents Here, Anywhere, photographs by Tamas Dezso, his documentation of the passing relics (both places and people) swept up in the post-communist transition in his native Hungary.

Night Watchman (Budapest), 2009
from the series Here, Anywhere
© Tamas Dezso

I had a chance to travel thru Hungary a few years ago and it is an enchanting though tragic country, with a rich culture (its language, part of the somewhat rare Finno-Ugric languages, is one of the most beautiful I've ever heard spoken), yet a people scarred by their own history. Even spending only a day in Budapest and a day in the eastern countryside, you still can get a sense of pervasive unsettling and isolation in its lands and people, as Dezso's images capture.

Ruin (Budapest), 2011
from the series Here, Anywhere
© Tamas Dezso

Here, Anywhere
photographs by Tamas Dezso
opening Thursday 8 September
5:30-7:30pm
Robert Koch Gallery
49 Geary St., 5th floor, San Francisco

On the opposite coast, Yossi Milo gallery enters the fall in Chelsea featuring Permanent Error, photographs by Pieter Hugo. Permanent Error is Hugo's documentation of Agbogbloshie, a sprawling dump site of technological waste on the outskirts of Ghana's capital city, Accra, and the locals who scavenge the parts for resale.

Kofi Abanga, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana (2010)
from the series Permanent Error
© Pieter Hugo

Thousands of broken computers, games, cell phones, and other devices are shipped to Africa as "donations" from the West, under the guise of providing technology to developing countries. Instead, the equipment becomes piles of noxious trash that contaminates the local water and soil.

Yakubu al Hasan, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana (2009)
from the series Permanent Error
© Pieter Hugo

There will also be a book signing on opening nite for Hugo's newly published book of this series.

Permanent Error
photographs by Pieter Hugo
opening Thursday 8 September
6-8pm
Yossi Milo Gallery
525 W. 25th St., NYC

Also on Thursday nite in NYC, Bold Hype gallery opens the group exhibition Frontiers, featuring photographs by Corey Arnold, Peter Beste, and Celine Clanet.

Seljord Dansefestival
from the series Scandinavian
© Peter Beste

Each photographer captures distinct worlds on the edge of society -- Arnold's chronicles of the commercial fishing industry (himself a commercial fisherman in Alaska), Beste's newest project about Danseband culture in rural Scandinavia (a follow-up to his previous works about Norwegian black metal, Houston hip hop, and other fringe subcultures), and Clanet's explorations of the Sami people in the Norwegian Arctic Circle (much akin to a project by Erika Larsen on the same topic).

from the series Maze
© Celine Clanet

Frontiers
photographs by Corey Arnold, Peter Beste, and Celine Clanet
opening Thursday 8 September
6-9pm
Bold Hype Gallery
547 W. 27th St., 5th floor, NYC

Here in Chicago, Catherine Edelman gallery hosts the exhibition opening and book release of Double Life by Kelli Connell.

This Morning (2008)
from the series Double Life
© Kelli Connell

At first glance, Connell's images show us intimate and candid everyday moments in an enigmatic relationship between two women. On closer inspection, the viewer confronts a bit of mystery, as the women appear to be twins -- Connell has photographed the same model playing both roles, then seamlessly combined them together in one picture, using digital imaging to address the complexities of identity and sexuality.

Carnival (2006)
from the series Double Life
© Kelli Connell

In Connell's own words:

"I've always seen identity as something that is very fluid and as such I usually shy away from labels altogether. Still, a larger part of this work explores the nature of identity formation. In my own personal history, the process of questioning my sexuality was confounding, because the conventional categories, and even the need to categorize in the first place felt like...something being pushed on me."

Double Life
photographs by Kelli Connell
opening Friday 9 September
5-8pm
Catherine Edelman Gallery
300 W. Superior St., Chicago

And finally, on Saturday back on the Left Coast, Wall Space gallery presents Imagine, bringing together images across multiple series from the works of Aline Smithson.

from the series Hollywood at Home
© Aline Smithson

My favorite project of hers, Hollywood at Home, grows out of Smithson's curiosity about the line between real vs. manufactured in Hollywood (wherein I might cynically ask "wait, as in there IS anything 'real' in Hollywood?!"), fueled by her experience of growing up near that area. In this series she enlists family members and friends to play out staged domestic dramas -- elevating her own cast of actors into a false stardom and artificial glorification.

from the series Hollywood at Home
© Aline Smithson

Imagine
the photographic projects of Aline Smithson
opening Saturday 10 September
2-5pm
Wall Space Gallery
113 W. Ortega St., Santa Barbara CA

As an aside, I should say that as I've started to write more on this blog about exhibitions, it is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list. My only goal is to mention a few specific shows and give some text about the artist and their works and a few sample images of the series being shown, to go into a bit more detail than a general listing might.
For more basic or comprehensive listings, a few good places to start might be Art Slant or Photograph Magazine, both of which have sections for art openings in various cities around the country.

Art Openings 8/11-8/12: Rayko Photo Gallery, Arts Collinwood Gallery

2011-08-11T08:13:00.005-04:00

Summer exhibition season is winding down, and some big shows in September and into autumn are right around the corner. But in the meantime, a few more good ones to check out:
On the Left Coast, if you're in/near San Francisco check out the Fraction Magazine exhibition, opening tonite at Rayko Photo Gallery.

The show features 30 prints culled from the 160+ contemporary photographers whose works have been featured over the past three years in Fraction, the brainchild of David Bram.

Fraction Magazine: 3 Years in the Making
opening Thursday 11 August
6-8pm
Rayko Photo Gallery
428 3rd St., San Francisco

And for my friends and comrades back in Cleveland, tell all your friends and comrades to join you tomorrow nite at Arts Collinwood Gallery for the opening of Sommer Sequence, the paintings of Mark Keffer.

Sommer Sequence (Spinach Tree), 2010
© Mark Keffer

The paintings in Keffer's solo exhibition are based on the modernist works of Ohio artist William Sommer (1867-1949). In addition to the show, Mark will speak about his work during a Gallery Talk at Arts Collinwood on Thursday 18 August at 7pm.

Sommer Sequence (Viaduct), 2010
© Mark Keffer

Mark was my neighbor when I had a studio space at the complex w/ Front Room Gallery, and I was very quickly drawn to Mark's bold and colorful pieces when I started working there. I became even more intrigued after watching them evolve and talking further w/ Mark about the theory and process behind the works, and to see more and more of them as he'd hang new finished pieces around his workspace. Great to know that this series is now out there for more eyes to see.

Sommer Sequence
paintings by Mark Keffer
opening Friday 12 August
6-10pm
Arts Collinwood Gallery
15605 Waterloo Road, Cleveland

Shameful Self-Promotion: New Editorial Portfolio

2011-07-26T14:35:00.009-04:00

millionaire car collector. Auburn Hills, Michigan. (photographed for Forbes magazine)

Indulge me a moment of shameful self-promotion to mention some new works I've recently added on the www.gregruffing.com

laid off auto worker. Austintown, Ohio. (photographed for Time magazine)

I've updated the Editorial gallery with a revised selection of photos (including outtakes) from commissioned work and miscellaneous personal projects, and tossed a few previously-unseen images into the evolving edit of my ongoing Yard Sales series as well.

shuttered factory where my dad worked for 43 years. Mantua, Ohio. (personal work)

The editorial images have really been a culmination of the past 5-6 years documenting this region (call it the Rust Belt, Middle West, Breadbasket, Fly-Over Country, Heartland, Midwest -- whatever nickname you prefer). I consider much of that documentation to be a socioeconomic survey of life, love, family, land, work, and play, in this region, particularly in the realities of the modern economy.
Hope you'll take a few minutes to check out the new stuff, and tell someone about it.

gun museum. Claremore, Oklahoma. (personal work)

Art Openings 7/14-7/15: Catherine Edelman Gallery, VII Gallery

2011-07-13T09:54:00.008-04:00

Slippers and Flannel (2009)
© Matt Austin

In Chicago this Friday, Catherine Edelman Gallery opens a new exhibition of works from The Chicago Project, a resource started by the gallery in 2003 to help find a larger audience for unrepresented photographers in Chicagoland.

Virginia Ave., Saint Paul, MN (2008)
© TJ Proechel

This show selects 12 artists from the project; check out The Chicago Project main page to see work from all artists in the entire group.

Busse Woods (2010)
© Dan Bradica

The Chicago Project IV
opening Friday 15 July
5-8pm
Catherine Edelman Gallery
300 W. Superior St., Chicago

And in NYC tomorrow, VII Gallery in Dumbo opens a show called 31 Contemporary Photographers, which highlights the winners of the 2010 Lens Culture International Exposure Awards.

from the book My Brother's War
© Jessica Hines

Interesting to note that the top 6 prize winners (3 for portfolio, 3 for single image) this year were all women.

from the series Tête-à-Tête
© Martine Fougeron

31 Contemporary Photographers
opening Thursday 14 July
6-8pm
VII Gallery
28 Jay St., Brooklyn NY (Dumbo)

The New Gypsies by Iain McKell

2011-07-01T11:54:00.017-04:00

Recently came across this very stunning and seductive project The New Gypsies, by London-based photographer Iain McKell. He spent the better part of the past decade documenting the nomadic lives of a post-Punk, anti-Thatcherite subculture known as the Horsedrawns, a modern-day British version of the more traditional Roma people (though of no actual ancestral relation) who have eschewed most (though not all: their "modern" adaption of the traditional lifestyle now includes such devices as mobile phones and solar panels) of modern western capitalist society in search of a simplified existence closer to nature and away from the grid. The project was recently published as a book by Prestel.
(*all photographs below, copyright Iain McKell, from the book The New Gypsies*)

McKell writes in the intro of his book about his first actual encounter with the subculture during Summer Solstice in 1986:

"I was immediately taken with this idea of punk in the landscape, and these larger-than-life characters, who seemed to hark back to the extremes of the Post-Industrial Revolution -- a blot on the British landscape. It was Biblical, filmic, gangs of urban subcultures let loose in a rural setting. It put the fear of God into the likes of Thatcher and the establishment. She [Thatcher] thought she had smashed the opposition, the miners and the unions, but new opponents were taking their place -- road protesters, rioters, gypsies, outlaws, subversives."

You can read McKell's introduction in its entirety in a recent article about the book from the New York Times' T magazine.
McKell continues:

"These are modern, predominantly city people who have moved out of largely working class urban communities, out of poor accommodation, escaped the shit being dumped on them. The greatest irony is that they took Norman Tebbitt's advice, got on their bikes (or wagons in this case), on the road and found freedom. Their freedom is not in this country, but in their heads, where freedom is in the journey."

The underlying principles of the group's countercultural leanings surely evoke any wide variety of associations in the popular imagination -- from the negative stereotypes carried by traditional Roma labeled as thieves and liars, to the more romanticized, spiritualized pursuit of a life freed from the rat race of contemporary urban living that might coalesce rather well with some of today's New Age or eco-conscious thinkers.

"We are happy to ignore what we're really doing to ourselves and to our environment and what we're leaving behind for our children. We seem quite comfortable in our way of thinking but psychologically, deep down inside somewhere, perhaps we've become aware that it is fashionable to be aware. We might still regard these people as the Untouchables like in the Hindu caste system -- the unwashed, unclean hippie gypsies, the lowest of the low."

One way or another, to move past the seeming shock value that initial imagery of the New Gypsies might present and instead consider an honest reflection of what their lives symbolize, is to at least ask some serious questions (after all, isn't that one of the greatest things that compelling, engaged photography can offer us: not to give direct answers, but instead to ask questions?) about how we each individually measure and decide what constitutes a life fulfilled.

Photo News Galore: Pre-order Brian Ulrich's Book; New Photo Curator at CMA; and Facing Change Collective Partners with Library of Congress

2011-06-24T12:04:00.006-04:00

Fresh back from doing the portfolio hustle in NYC, very excited to see and share the news officially about the upcoming book Is This Place Great or What by Brian Ulrich. The book, a culmination of his decade-long Copia project documenting American consumerism, will be released later this summer by Aperture and is available now for pre-order thru Amazon.
I had a chance to see Brian briefly right before he flew to China to go "on press" last week for the book's printing, and as anticipated, there's plenty of good stories and insights to read about from his experience there -- see more here on Brian's blog, and here on Aperture's Exposures blog.
The release of Is This Place Great or What will also coincide with a huge exhibition opening at the end of August at the Cleveland Museum of Art -- who, in another major news bit I'm very happy to see and share, recently announced that they've chosen Barbara Tannenbaum from the Akron Art Museum to be CMA's new curator of photography, replacing Tom Hinson. Anyone who knows Tannenbaum and the programming she brought to Akron understands that this is a tremendous gain not only for CMA but for contemporary photography in particular, as she has been an active and strong supporter of contemporary works.
Finally, big news earlier this week from the Facing Change: Documenting America collective, as they announced the start of a partnership with the Library of Congress to publish and archive the group's photos and stories.

Read more here, including the statement from Library of Congress. Definitely an important step for documentary photographers and getting their works published. Kudos to all involved, should be interesting to see where this collaboration goes.

Chicago

2011-06-09T11:13:00.004-04:00

As mentioned previously, winds of change are blowing at the HQ of Greg Ruffing Photographic Enterprises & Solutions Ltd. Inc. LLC, as I have shifted executive operations to a new branch in Chicago.
For now, we'll continue to maintain a scaled-down presence in Ohio, so don't panic, our goods and services will be equally available in both locations, as well as throughout the Midwest and nationwide, from sea to shining sea. However, in these trying economic times, our management core (at the suggestion of a paid staff of highly-qualified consultants and financial advisers) may eventually have to face the always-difficult decision to streamline the Ohio annex and absorb into central command in order to realize greater efficiencies.
In the short-term in Chicago, we've taken up interim residency in the belly of the Transparent City for the next few months until a more suitable permanent housing structure is secured. Naturally, Michael Wolf (not the controversy!) immediately came to mind as we settled on a temporary abode and shot this picture out our window...
(Wolf's Transparent City, shot right here in Chicago, is a revealing observation and documentation of the modern urban landscape, and its implications for private and public life).

from the book Transparent City
© Michael Wolf

Chicago is also home to an extensive roster of photographers (Chicagraphers) whose works we've counted as inspirators for quite some time now, so our team here at Greg Ruffing Photographic Enterprises & Solutions are really looking forward to getting to know some of them, and the Chicago photography world as a whole. Hope to see you soon.

On Making a Living Through Photography

2011-06-02T10:44:00.003-04:00

Aline Smithson at Lenscratch, Joerg Colberg at Conscientious, and Bryan Formhals at La Pura Vida have all recently ignited some frank discussions about the notion of making a living with photography, and the considerations and difficulties therein. See Smithson's "Can We Afford Success?", Colberg's "Money and Art, Art and Money", and Formhals' "The Dreams and Delusions of Photographers".
Obviously these are prominent questions for any of us who read this blog or theirs, as well as the frequent subject of both introspective thought and collective commiseration over a drink with colleagues.
For myself in particular, the path has been winding and arduous, equal parts pleasant surprises plus frustrating dead-ends. Each decision we make along that route is heavily weighted and always hard. The easiest part is the second-guessing.
And its in this very moment of writing that I am in the midst of one such major decision, which has consumed much of my time and energy over the past month, hence the lack of writings here recently. I feel good about the new direction, and I've wasted nothing second guessing this impending change (yet... HA!)
Coming very soon you'll see some updated works from me, new projects, and more. Stay tuned.

Exhibition Opening, Saturday May 21 -- Beauty Culture, at The Annenberg Space for Photography

2011-05-17T09:17:00.006-04:00

from the series Miss Rodeo Texas

I'm honored to have been given the opportunity to have photographs from my series Miss Rodeo Texas selected for the new exhibition Beauty Culture that opens at The Annenberg Space for Photography this weekend in Los Angeles.

from the series Miss Rodeo Texas

The show runs from 21 May - 27 November and will feature images from over 100 photographers. Its a very humbling list to be included on next to some folks like Susan Anderson, Lauren Greenfield, Colby Katz, David LaChapelle, Zed Nelson, Erwin Olaf, Terry Richardson, Martin Schoeller, and many many others.

from the series Miss Rodeo Texas

From the show statement:

"[The exhibition] explores the links between beauty and violence, glamour and sexuality, and the cost (in its multiple meanings) of beauty.
...Beauty Culture encourages a social discussion about the allure and mystique of the pursuit of female beauty, as well as its cult-like glorification and the multi-billion dollar industries that surround it.
Ultimately, the exhibition illustrates the power of the still image in shaping cultural ideals and expectations of feminine beauty -- and photography's undeniable influence on conceptions of the Self."

Beauty Culture
opening Saturday 21 May (continuing until 27 November)
The Annenberg Space for Photography
2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles

Art Openings 5/5-5/6: Center for Fine Art Photography, Stephen Wirtz Gallery, Newspace Center for Photography

2011-05-05T10:02:00.009-04:00

24-61a
from the series Damaged Goods

An image from my series Damaged Goods has been chosen for inclusion in the new exhibition Center Forward, which opens tomorrow at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Ft. Collins, CO (just north of Denver). The group show is an informal survey, of sorts, of the continually changing photographic medium. Go here to see a preview of the artists and images presented.

Center Forward
opening Friday 6 May
Center for Fine Art Photography
400 N. College Ave., Fort Collins, CO

Another exhibition opening this weekend, if you're in/near San Francisco, is A New American Picture, images from a book of the same title by Doug Rickard, showing at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. Also a body of work that relates to the evolving practice of photography, Rickard (of the photography site American Suburb X) employs Google Street View software to create images of the often unseen mean streets of economically ravaged urban neighborhoods in cities like Detroit, New Orleans, and elsewhere.

#78.840713, Durham, NC. 2009
from the book A New American Picture
© Doug Rickard

Much attention and heated discussion has been paid lately to photographic artists using the Street View technology to create works, and at this point I'm not interested in rehashing the arguments or the vitriol. I wrote a post about the topic a few months ago after the World Press award won by Michael Wolf, and for now I'm gonna leave it at that.
But regardless of your feelings on the issue, I'm pretty sure this exhibition will be much worth your time to see. Makes me wish I were in SF to check it out though I get the feeling this important and timely body of work might do some more traveling.

A New American Picture
photographs by Doug Rickard
opening Thursday 5 May
5:30-7:30pm
Stephen Wirtz Gallery
49 Geary St., 3rd floor, San Francisco

Also on the West Coast, the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland opens a new exhibition tomorrow nite called Fringe Economies. The show features photographs by Sarina Finkelstein, whose series The New 49ers chronicles the re-emergence of gold prospectors in California, and Maureen Drennan, whose project Meet Me in the Green Glen documents the life of a marijuana farmer in California.

from the series The New 49ers
© Sarina Finkelstein

Adam, 2008
from the series Meet Me in the Green Glen
© Maureen Drennan

Fringe Economies
photographs by Sarina Finkelstein and Maureen Drennan
opening Friday 6 May
6-9pm
Newspace Center for Photography
1632 SE 10th Ave., Portland

Clampdown Exhibition Continues Until 21 May

2011-05-04T09:40:00.006-04:00

Big thanks to everyone who came out to see the opening of Clampdown: Labor, Management, and the Recession over the weekend. We had steady numbers thru the doors the entire time from 6-10pm, and I overheard/partook in a good number of conversations about many of the topics raised in the exhibition -- which in my mind was one of the biggest hopes for the show, to just get people discussing and thinking critically about the issues at hand. So thank you everyone for the engaging dialogue.

installation view, Clampdown exhibition
left: © Liz Maugans
right: © Kevin Miyazaki

I definitely also want to give a huge thanks to Douglas Max Utter, a renowned local artist who has also been writing art reviews for 25+ years, for coming out to see our exhibition and for his write-up in Scene Magazine that hit the presses this morning. Click here to read his review of the show.

installation view (detail), Clampdown exhibition
© Dante Rodriguez

Lastly I've included a few installation photos here as a teaser for anyone who hasn't had a chance to see the show yet. If that's you I'm talking about, know that the exhibition is open until 21 May, with hours as follows:
Saturday 7 May, noon-3pm
Sunday 8 May, noon-3pm
Saturday 14 May, noon-3pm
Sunday 15 May, noon-3pm
Saturday 21 May, 6-9pm (closing reception)

installation view, Clampdown exhibition
© Joseph Carl Close

installation view, Clampdown exhibition
© Benjamin Wirtz Siegel

Art Openings 4/28-4/29: Museum of Contemporary Photography, Jen Bekman Gallery, Michael Mazzeo Gallery, Bonfoey Gallery

2011-04-28T08:55:00.008-04:00

All kinds of art going on this weekend, wherever you are. Starting in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography opens a new group exhibition on Friday entitled Public Works. The show employs images from a wide roster of artists to analyze geographically and chronologically diverse examples of the built environment.

Untitled, 2004 (1523 Plum Island, MA)
© Frank Breuer

From the intro by MOCP curator Natasha Egan:

"Robust infrastructure has become a defining characteristic of modern civilizations. It enables the economic productivity that drives prosperity and confers the public safety that citizens of the developed world have come to expect. Indeed, a state's (or regime's) legitimacy and competence are often measured in large part by the sophistication of its infrastructure..."

The list of photographers is chock full of big hitters old and new, such as Andrew Borowiec, Frank Breuer, Tim Davis (images of the desks of Washington's political insiders), Gina LeVay (from her recent book Sandhogs), Martin Parr (from his series Boring Postcards), Daniel Shea, Mark Slankard, and many many more.

Public Works
opening Friday 29 April
5-7pm
Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago

On a parallel topic, Jen Bekman Gallery in NYC opens an exhibition examining the manufactured consumer landscape, through the paintings of Michelle Muldrow. The solo show, titled Cathedrals of Desire, also opens Friday nite.
(A quick personal aside: I'm very happy for and excited to congratulate Michelle, who is my studio neighbor, on her NYC solo show debut! Kudos, Michelle!!)
In her works, Michelle references forms of traditional landscape painting to create a critical depiction of what I consider to be the new, modern landscape of our time: the phony, contrived landscape of consumerism manifest in ubiquitous big box retail stores that litter the horizon from coast to coast.

Icon
acrylic on canvas
© Michelle Muldrow

In Jen Bekman's words:

"Michelle's work is an exploration of the idea that consumerism has replaced religion as a social anchor in contemporary culture. The places and things she is depicting are so mundane that there is no doubt as to what they are as actual things. But, to some extent we've blinded ourselves to the meaning that we've invested in them. By placing manufactured landscapes and their contents in a religious/devotional/ecstatic framework, Michelle makes plain the uncomfortable truths of our consumer culture."

Having Michelle as my neighbor and seeing a few of her pieces as they progressed, I know this will be a very special show. The exhibition runs until June 5th, so even if you can't make the opening, be sure to check these out before June. Also, Jen Bekman's 20x200 project just recently released editions of Muldrow's work from this series, so give that a look as well.

Cathedrals of Desire
paintings by Michelle Muldrow
opening Friday 29 April
6-8pm
Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring St., NYC

Also in NYC, for this weekend only, Michael Mazzeo Gallery hosts 48 Hours, an exhibition of photographs by Will Steacy in which he examines the struggles of middle class America through the lens of the economic challenges of two Midwestern cities. (In addition to tonite's opening, the gallery will also host an Artist's Talk with Steacy on Saturday 30 April at 3pm).
Shot in a 48-hour period, Steacy spent his first 24 hours in Madison, Wisconsin, photographing in and around the massive, historic protests against Gov. Scott Walker's anti-union legislation. He then spent the following 24 hours in Gary, Indiana, a hard-luck town that, through little choice of its own, has become somewhat of a poster child for the ravaging effects of deindustrialization in America.
I think Steacy's images from Gary are another prime example of the difficulties of photographic portrayal, as I wrote in a previous blog post. We already know that he spent only a very limited amount of time in Gary, and while he's definitely created some very striking images, as a whole group I don't think they can even begin to fully represent the vast complexities of what has happened in that city.
That being said however, I still believe this is important work, particularly in light of the recent political environment that has fostered a perplexing demonization of an entire chunk of the American workforce.
Because of that, I'm very drawn to Steacy's images from Wisconsin and the way in which he has shown us that scene with a set of fresh eyes, from a vantage point that is somewhat slowed down and removed from the intense and frantic nature of the 24-hour-news-cycle coverage we saw from those events.

Shame, Madison, 2011
from the series 48 Hours
© Will Steacy

Along that same line, Steacy's photos from Madison make a great companion to the portraits of protesters done by Kevin Miyazaki, which I'm honored to feature in the Clampdown: Labor, Management and the Recession exhibition that opens this weekend in Cleveland.

48 Hours
photographs by Will Steacy
opening Thursday 28 April
6-8pm
Michael Mazzeo Gallery
508 W. 26th St., suite 318, NYC

Last but certainly not least, another artist whose work I'm honored to have in the Clampdown exhibition, and who continues to blow me away with both the clarity of his vision and the consistency of his output, is local painter Randall Tiedman. In addition to his inclusion in Clampdown, Tiedman has a solo show opening Friday nite at Bonfoey Gallery in Cleveland.

Promethean Web 5
acrylic and oil on paper
© Randall Tiedman

Tiedman is a self-taught artist who constructs these gigantic, semi-apocalyptic industrial landscapes on paper. He works without any photographic reference or preliminary sketches, instead relying on memory to create his scenes.
Much of his work is derived from mental mapping (the production of mood-based maps) and Psychogeography, a study of the effects of geographical setting on the emotions and behaviors of an individual.

In, Around & About
new works by Randall Tiedman
opening Friday 29 April
5-7pm
Bonfoey Gallery
1710 Euclid Ave., Cleveland

Exhibition Opening, Saturday April 30 -- Clampdown: Labor, Management and the Recession

2011-04-26T12:23:00.010-04:00

Humbled and excited to share that I've had the opportunity to curate an exhibition that opens this weekend in Cleveland, entitled Clampdown: Labor, Management and the Recession.
The exhibition features work from 20 regional artists across a variety of mediums: photography, printmaking, painting, glasswork, sculpture, collage, installation art, neon, mixed media, and more.

from the series This is What Democracy Looks Like
archival inkjet print
© Kevin Miyazaki

Clampdown: Labor, Management and the Recession
exhibition opening Saturday 30 April
6-10pm
Zaller Gallery
16006 Waterloo Road, Cleveland

66th and Euclid
painted and silkscreened glass
© Scott Goss

The roster of artists includes:
Kristen Baumlier
Joseph Carl Close
Andy Curlowe
John G.
Scott Goss
Jacob Wesley Lang
Robin Latkovich
Ross Mantle
Liz Maugans
Amber McElreath
Alex Meranto
Kevin Miyazaki
Michelle Marie Murphy
Claudio Orso
Joshua Rex
Dante Rodriguez
Ben Siegel
Randall Tiedman
Elizabeth Ross Yurich

Get Laid Off
neon
© Liz Maugans

A bit more about the show, from the curator's statement:

Since the Recession began in December 2007, the American economy has lost nearly 8 million jobs. The unemployment rate, which stood at 5% at the end of 2007, is now inching at double-digits, and many of the unemployed have been without a job for at least six months.
For those workers who kept their jobs, the picture is also bleak: many have had to accept wage freezes and furloughs, and yet are being demanded to increase productivity even as their co-workers are laid off and departments and resources shrunk. Many rank-and-file endure all of this out of fear for losing their own jobs, and express gratitude to even be employed at all. How does this affect the way in which we assess the value of our work?
The newest stormy cloud for workers is the recent controversial legislation in Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, that would effectively eliminate a wide range of workers' rights, including the right for collective bargaining. And while that fight is currently focused on public sector unionized employees, its wider implications for all workers -- public or private sector, union or non-union -- seem inevitable.
Meanwhile, corporate profits continue to skyrocket, and during the Recession have grown particularly fast during the last seven quarters consecutively: the Commerce Department reported that in the 3rd quarter of 2010, American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion -- the highest amount ever recorded in the 60 years since the department began keeping track.
As rank-and-file wages have stagnated, executive pay has more than doubled -- perpetuating a steep trajectory of salary inequalities that began 30 years ago.
Historically, during times of financial growth and productivity that led to an increase in company profits, that rise was generally accompanied by an increase in labor wages as well, and thus everyone would be able to share a fair slice of the pie.
However, this formula began to deteriorate in the early 1980s, and has accelerated to a point now where in the last 10 years, the wealthiest 10% of Americans have accounted for nearly 100% of all annual income growth in the U.S.

Dream Job
archival pigment print
© Ben Siegel

With help from the indefatigable Dave Desimone, we've assembled a legion of artists to examine this economic issue. Our main hope with this show is to contribute to a larger, non-partisan dialogue about where we are as a society in terms of income inequalities and labor-management dynamics, and to analyze how we got here, what transformations have taken place in context of the Recession, and where we might go from here forward.
Again, opening night kicks off this Saturday, April 30th, 6-10pm, at the Zaller Gallery in Collinwood (right down the street from the Beachland Ballroom). After that, the gallery is open from noon-3pm on Saturdays and Sundays on the next three consecutive weekends, concluding with a closing nite reception on Saturday 21 May from 6-9pm.
If you're in the area I hope you'll try to come down and check out the exhibition.

Portrait Machine Project by Carlo Van de Roer

2011-04-13T16:45:00.013-04:00

Martynka Warzyniak
from the Portrait Machine Project
© Carlo Van de Roer

Say whatever you might about the notions of psychic phenomena, auras, etc. -- but regardless, the Portrait Machine Project by Carlo Van de Roer is certainly worth a look.

Amani Olu
from the Portrait Machine Project
© Carlo Van de Roer

Van de Roer creates the surreal, hazy images using an AuraCam, a Polaroid camera developed in the 1970s. From Van de Roer's explanation:

"This project explores the idea that a camera can reveal an otherwise unseen insight into a subject's character and their relationship with the photographer and viewer.
...The subject is connected to the camera by sensors measuring electromagnetic biofeedback. It translates these readings into information about the subject and how they are seen by the photographer and others -- suggesting the camera bypasses the control of the photographer and subject in making the portrait."

In a sense, the tiny genre of aura photography seems to be loosely related to another rarity -- spirit photography, which more or less attempts to capture ghostly spirits. And somewhere in the mire between these two avenues, I'm reminded of the project The Spiritualists by Shannon Taggart:

Woman said to be channeling her grandmother, an Egyptian princess or voodoo priestess Marie Laveau
from the series The Spiritualists
© Shannon Taggart

Shirley asks the spirit of a man to leave her
from the series The Spiritualists
© Shannon Taggart

Give it a look. For additional info, Taggart writes more about the project here.
And you can read more about Van de Roer's Portrait Machine Project in a recent post on Wired magazine's photo blog Raw File. In addition, if you're in southern California, an exhibition of the project opens this weekend at M+B gallery in Los Angeles.

Portrait Machine Project
works by Carlo Van de Roer
opening Saturday 16 April
6-8pm
M+B gallery
612 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles

Art Openings 3/31-4/2: Asya Geisberg Gallery, ModernFormations, Pink Eye Gallery

2011-03-31T09:02:00.009-04:00

Asya Geisberg gallery in Chelsea opens the group exhibition First Class/Second Class tonite, featuring works by Chris Verene, Devin Troy Strother, Rebecca Morgan, Miles Ladin, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Holly Jarrett, Conor McGrady and Brian Shumway.

from the series Black Girl
© Brian Shumway

First Class/Second Class investigates class structure through a combination of personal narratives and outsider perspectives, and shows the tribal nature of class. The exhibition posits that "class is omnipresent as an identity marker, and frequently undermines race, gender and nationality, while simultaneously being dependent on individual circumstances" (from the show statement).

Nan Kempner at the International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show, 1995
© Miles Ladin

First Class/Second Class
opening Thursday 31 March
6-9pm
Asya Geisberg gallery
537B W. 23rd St., NYC

In Pittsburgh on Friday nite, ModernFormations opens a two-man show of new work by Ron Copeland (Echoed From Empty Walls) and Steve Ehret (Buried by the Daisies).
Copeland has been avidly documenting abandoned buildings (of which there are no shortage) throughout the Rust Belt, finding inspiration from their textures, colors and moods to create large-scale installations using found objects such as wood, paper and much much more.
Ehret's paintings are influenced by low-brow artists and stylized by graffiti-like and cartoon-shaped figures, himself also often employing found materials to the piece.

Echoed From Empty Walls (Ron Copeland)
Buried by the Daisies (Steve Ehret)
opening Friday 1 April
7-10pm
ModernFormations
4919 Penn Ave., Pittsburgh

Elsewhere in the Rust Belt, on Saturday nite our group North Coast Collective opens a show at Pink Eye Gallery in an interpretation of Ken Nordine's (yes, the Ken Nordine of the iconic voice-over) Colors album from 1967.

Black #1 - My True Love's Hair, 2011
20"x16", archival inkjet print

Each artist in the collective has created new works drawing from one of the colors so vividly brought to life by Nordine's spoken-word jazz tracks. I've chosen "Black":

Internet display is really not good enough to accurately reproduce the subtle tonal variations and gradations in these dark images, so I hope that if you're able, you'll come out to the opening and see it larger in print.

Black #2 - Midnite (at the lake), 2011
20"x16", archival inkjet print

Colors
An interpretation of Ken Nordine's songs by the North Coast Collective
opening Saturday 2 April
6-11pm
Pink Eye gallery
3904 Lorain Ave., Cleveland

Why Blog About Photography Anyway?

2011-03-30T10:45:00.008-04:00

Pete Brook over at Prison Photography had a very well-written post yesterday on some reasons behind blogging about photography (and why he believes this is a political act, which we'll get to in a minute). By and large I find myself in agreement with many of his assertions, so for the sake of time I'll try not to duplicate them too much here.
However, one major point he raises that is worth reinforcing is what he calls the "sprawling...visual superstructure" of images we encounter in daily life -- a topic I've frequently mentioned on this blog in the past (i.e. the recent post about the collision of photography and modern technology). And again, we're talking about more than just the 60 billion photos on Facebook or the 5 billion on Flickr, or anywhere else on the web versus in the real world. Regardless, obviously these are overwhelming and nearly incomprehensible figures.
So yes, here is where writing about photography can play a crucial role: to sift and sort through that overload of images, to perhaps focus our attention, and to ultimately attempt to make some sense of this massive visual archive we're all actively and collectively contributing to.
And throughout the photo blogosphere you'll find this happening in a myriad of ways, from highly intellectual writings all the way down to strictly marketing- and promotion-base blogs (in the end I'd say there's a place at the table for all types). And this is to make no mention of online photo magazines, which we might consider slightly distinct from photo blogs per se...but that's an argument for another time.
In terms of this blog, when I started nearly six years ago the posts were mostly centered around my own work: publications, exhibitions, personal projects, outtakes, what I ate for breakfast, etc. I guess the blog in some ways was like a journal or a sketchpad. But I very shortly decided that I wanted it to be less about me (although yes I will still occasionally post about my own work) and more about what other artists are doing, as well as a larger look at issues and current topics across the wide spectrum of photography and art (maybe its overly ambitious). In other words, to make the blog less of a personal journal/sketchpad and more of a photographic resource that might (hopefully) be valuable to people beyond just myself.
There might still be a long way to go in reaching that final point as refined as I'd like, but I gotta say I've grown to enjoy the curatorial exercise of writing about photography in this way (although its extremely time-consuming!). The simple fact is that yes, among the murky swamp of contemporary photography, there are so many artists doing honest and compelling works that confront and address and ask questions about how we live today. Coming from a background in documentary photography, I do find myself most drawn towards those methods of photographers who involve themselves with the world at large (be that through documentary, conceptual, mixed media, or any other visual avenue).
I think its a difficult yet imperative battle for artists to continue to interact with and examine the world in that way, for within the enormous swath of visual stimuli we encounter daily, by far the great majority of them are concerned with distraction, escapism, self-indulgence, intellectual and civic disengagement, selling us a product, and entertaining us to death.

Pete makes the case that the photographic writer, who filters the works and passes them along for others to see and read, is completing a political act -- and I think its safe to assume we can say that by extension then the artist's original efforts are political in nature too (without projecting our own motives or desires onto the artist). Whether you agree or not, all labels aside I'll re-emphasize that I think the artist whose work reflects the society in which it is created, who is aware and involved in the world, is definitely on a task of utmost importance. From where I'm sitting, they are a great reason to blog about photography.

So to that end I must of course mention the Antiphotojournalism exhibition and the "What's Next? (A Search Into the Future of Photography)" series, both a project of FOAM. If you haven't seen these yet, they're very much worth taking the time to flip through.
In the context of this blog post, I'll specifically point you to Fred Ritchin's words, part of a back-and-forth with Joerg Colberg (slightly condensed by me):

"Will all this media help us understand what we have done to our planet and what we should do about it? Will we want to help? Or will we remain increasingly oblivious, as if we don't live here but in some virtual spaces?
...the problem is that few are engaged in such reflection, so the world is allowed to evolve without much effective oversight (moral as well as practical). By killing the messenger -- the photograph -- we no longer have to worry very much about what it has to say to us. In the information age, we are allowed to -- even encouraged to -- know very little, because knowing without ever doing anything about what one knows is hardly worth the effort. [emphasis mine]
Instead of becoming a photographer, figure out what to do with the enormous number of images -- how to find the relevant ones, present them, contextualize them, link them, meld them with other media, use them effectively."

Photographic Depiction and the Complexities of Portraying Home

2011-03-28T13:20:00.023-04:00

I'm happy to have done the photography for the Cleveland story written by esteemed author Charles Michener in the April issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Thanks to the mag for the call on this one, for leading with one of my favorite images from the shoot, and for some beautiful reproduction quality in the print edition.
Although I'm personally not as quick to paint a rosy picture about Cleveland as others might be, I do think that Michener's piece touches on some important positive things going on right now: Gordon Square Arts District (one of my favorite parts of the city), the development along E. 4th St. downtown (love it or hate it depending on your sensibilities or income bracket, but its good to see foot traffic in the city core after 5pm for something other than a ballgame, and the Greenhouse Tavern is worth the occasional splurge if you can do it), and the renovations at the Cleveland Museum of Art (still ongoing, but I was there as recent as mid-March and it looks pretty damn awesome so far).
I'll also add to that list the larger topic of creatives-driven revival and using previously abandoned space in new ways to engage a public that might otherwise steer clear of certain parts of the city; gigs such as Ingenuity Fest (utilizing the former subway lines on the underside of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, as seen in my photos for the magazine), Pecha Kucha nite, and pop-up galleries in Collinwood all come to mind.
Here's a few outtakes from the assignment (which included portraiture of Michener in addition to a laundry list of locations around town).

(downtown Cleveland looking east towards University Circle)

(Michener at Superior Viaduct)

(Cuyahoga River and the industrial valley)

(Michener at the Shaker Square train station)

(Gypsy Cafe, Gordon Square Arts District)

(Ingenuity Fest, underside of the Detroit-Superior Bridge)

Again however, I'd caution anybody against being too quick to turn the blinders on and assume that Cleveland is on the fast track to full-blown prosperity. The metro area continues to lose population in every Census, with the city shrinking probably five times faster than the suburbs at large. And there's a world of difference between the grittier blue-collar base of west Cleveland (where I currently live, full disclosure) versus the comparatively wealthier far east suburbs of Michener's childhood (a class disparity that he kindly points out in the article).

In my mind, these important nuances are a telling example of the complexities of depicting a place through photographs -- its furthermore interesting to consider the experience of photographing one's own city compared to how its documented and portrayed by outside photographers. The images made in Cleveland by Anthony Suau come to mind immediately, and I've had many people ask for my thoughts on Suau's interpretation (many questions coming from people elsewhere in the Rust Belt who have experienced similarly drab depictions of their cities).

Obviously in a number of ways my shoot for Smithsonian couldn't be more different than Suau's projects. We're working in completely difference scenarios: I was more or less bound by the particular demands of a 2-day assignment on the topic of Michener and his Cleveland writings (which mostly focused on the positive end of the scale), whereby Suau has committed much more time in working on his award-winning foreclosure series (although "revival" and "decline" are equally complicated ideas).

Some would say that Suau's work paints a very bleak image of Cleveland -- although I think that in his later visits to the city, his photographs turn a bit more towards hopeful signs of life and rebound here.
So by comparison, does this mean that my photographs are of the opposite motive: a pull-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps tableau of post-industrial adaptation and reinvention?? I think its important to not read too much further into Michener's piece than basically it being a telling of Cleveland through his personal experiences and perspective. I don't mean to imply that he is misleading whatsoever -- but instead to say that for those still smarting from previous media reports that have dragged the city through the mud, its convenient to want to see Michener's article as setting everything back in its proper place (emotionally or otherwise).

So, really, what is an honest depiction of this city? In other words, where does the truth lie about the current condition of Cleveland? That is, of course, swimming amongst the vast swirls of grey in between, the area that can oftentimes be hardest to portray photographically. In the eye of some viewers there is little tolerance for ambiguity or pondering questions in photographs; they expect images to be direct, to-the-point representations that oftentimes serve to merely confirm previously-held suppositions. If a viewer wanted to believe that Cleveland is on the upswing, then their experiences with my photographs versus Suau's would be markedly contrasting, and vice versa for someone who feels that Cleveland is not quite out of the woods yet.

Long story short, I'm happy with some of these images I created for the magazine, and happy to contribute to an editorial piece that may provide a temporary feel-good for the audience that seeks it (current or former Clevelanders, or whoever else). And I appreciate Michener for not sliding too far off into the realm of blind optimism.
But I can't stress enough that pictures and words such as these should not be taken as a declaration that everything in this city is all rainbows and puppies, or further that an "I love Cleveland (even though I only ever go into the city itself for sporting events and complain about the potholes and the parking)"-type of absentee boosterism is an acceptable form of civic engagement.
I know we're all ready and hoping to celebrate crawling out of the "Great Recession", and ultimately this article serves a positive purpose by helping to temporarily inject a sense of confidence in a city I've long felt was lacking in that category (we do love our self-deprecating humor, after all). However, in context this article should be heralded for exactly what it is: one small chapter in the very long and very complex novel of this city.

Blake Andrews' March Madness Photobook Bracket

2011-03-21T12:36:00.005-04:00

Blake Andrews, mastermind of the blog B, has unveiled a photobook version of March Madness (click on image above for a larger view). This bracket is a tough one, lots of difficult picks in there!
Nan Goldin vs. Weegee? Ed Ruscha vs. Edward Weston? Brassai vs. Andre Kertesz? Gilles Peress vs. Bill Brandt? Daido Moriyama vs. Eugene Smith? And the worst one for me to decide on: Larry Clark's Tulsa vs. Bill Owens' Suburbia?!?! And I'm not even out of the first round yet...
Check it out, and cast your votes -- first round polling ends Tuesday!

Moving Walls 18

2011-03-15T13:43:00.007-04:00

The newest installation of Moving Walls, part of the Open Society Institute's Documentary Photography Project, opens Wednesday nite in New York.

Moving Walls 18 features the works of seven photographers who examine the relationship between identity and home--

Invisible: Homeless LGBT Youth, by Samantha Box
Option of Last Resort, by Gabriela Bulisova
Persecution of Homosexuality in Uganda, by Benedicte Desrus
Country Without Parents: Labor Migration from Moldova, by Andrea Diefenbach
Paradise Rivers, by Carolyn Drake
The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, by Abdi Roble
Being Gay in Uganda, by Tadej Znidarcic

Moving Walls 18
opening Wednesday 16 March
5:30-8:00pm
OSI-New York
400 W. 59th St., NYC

Bill Cunningham New York

2011-03-10T09:47:00.006-05:00

from the film "Bill Cunningham New York"

The documentary film "Bill Cunningham New York", chronicling the life and work of New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, makes its big kickoff in NYC next week. The 82-year-old Cunningham has pedaled his bike around the streets of New York for the past 30+ years photographing the well-dressed and well-connected out and about in the city, all seen in the frequent "On the Street" and "Evening Hours" columns in the Times' Fashion sections.

"On the Street", photographs by Bill Cunningham / New York Times

He has no doubt shot thousands and thousands of images over that time (only a fraction of which have ended up being published), creating a rich anthropological documentation of high fashion in NYC since the late 1970s. "We all get dressed for Bill," says the famous Anna Wintour.

from the film "Bill Cunningham New York"

An early screening of the film can be seen tonite at 7:30pm in Washington D.C. at the Hirshhorn Museum, and then the NYC showings begin next Wednesday, March 16th, at the Film Forum, where it will continue screenings until March 29th.
In Ohio, the movie will also be shown at the upcoming Cleveland International Film Festival, with screenings on Saturday April 2nd and Sunday April 3rd. The film begins a national tour from there out (see listing here for other show times and locations).
You can read a bit more about the elusive Cunningham and the making of the movie (it took the filmmakers nearly eight years to get Cunningham to agree to participate) in a feature here on the Times' Lens blog.
And here's a look at the trailer for the film:

Art Openings 3/10-3/11: Michael Mazzeo Gallery, Philadelphia Photo Arts Ctr., Minneapolis Photo Ctr.

2011-03-09T10:37:00.010-05:00

With the Armory Show and a week of NYC art fairs now in the rearview, some goings-on back in the regular circuits:
Michael Mazzeo Gallery opens a solo show on Thursday of the work Home Theater by Croatian photographer Hrvoje Slovenc.
The series explores domestic scenes in which sadomasochistic sex acts take place, and how each inhabitant constructs their own space. From Slovenc's statement:

"I am intrigued by the 'scenes' that people construct in their homes with all their semiotic referents not just to their individual pleasures but, more importantly, to the ones that are socially prescribed. What strikes me in the spaces I photograph is the proximity and even overlapping of performative spaces and traditional domestic spaces. By dividing these two spheres into separate photographic panels, I am ultimately questioning the notion of a traditional domestic space as something that is spontaneously, creatively designed -- or 'authored' -- by us as individuals."

Home Theater
photographs by Hrvoje Slovenc
opening Thursday 10 March
6-8pm
Michael Mazzeo Gallery
508 W. 26th St., suite 318, NYC

Also on Thursday, the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center opens East of Eden, featuring works by Amy Stein, Doug DuBois and Mark Steinmetz. The show investigates America thru the lens of Steinbeck's famous novel, drawing upon themes of transformation, prosperity, family and the death of small towns.

As an additional component of the exhibition, Steinmetz will give an artist lecture on Friday nite from 6-7pm at the gallery, where he will discuss his projects documenting the American South over the past 20 years.

East of Eden
photography by Amy Stein, Doug DuBois and Mark Steinmetz
opening Thursday 10 March
6-9pm
Philadelphia Photo Arts Center
1400 N. American St., suite 103, Philadelphia

And on Friday, the Minneapolis Photo Center opens the group show Woman as Photographer: Documenting Life as a Woman. The exhibition centers on photography from a female perspective, as well as the ways in which women are represented in photographs and the subsequent implications for identity and gender expectations.

Woman as Photographer: Documenting Life as a Woman
opening Friday 11 March
7-10pm
Minneapolis Photo Center
2400 N. 2nd St., Minneapolis

Art Openings 3/4: Johalla Projects, F.L.O.A.T. Gallery

2011-03-02T10:44:00.006-05:00

Johalla Projects in Chicago opens a solo show this Friday of the work of Matt Austin. The exhibition, Talking With Fear About Dying Tomorrow, features new photographs and writings from his book of the same name that sprung out of a month-long solo cross-country trip where he ended up documenting the individualized ways in which people interact with their environment. The show is also another in a weekly series of ACRE Exhibitions in Chicago.

Austin talks more about the project and exhibition, his experiences, and his overall work, in this two-part interview (here and here) with Sixty Inches From Center:

"Given the circumstances of our current world -- economy, time, all of the things that make our generation what it is -- when you think of any generation you tend to ask, 'What did they do with that?' I tend to think about that question while considering my family's experiences with the recession and the universal concept we all have in trying to figure out what to do with our lives. On this mostly solitary trip, I think I was subconsciously making observations that answer that question in a literal way, with physical evidence of someone doing something. So I made these photographs of different people's gestures, whether they be funny, clever, or even scary sometimes, and wanted to look at them more closely and attempt at understanding the significance of their messages. I choose to look at what I found like this: many of us have made attempts at talking or saying something but they're kind of, over and over again, overlooked or abbreviated, and often uncertain, unclear, or misunderstood. Though, I guess that is the inherent nature of putting your efforts and ideas into the world to be taken and interpreted how they will be. Its a vulnerable position, but all you can do is deliver your own messages out as best as you know how. After that, it depends on how people will receive them. I'm not necessarily talking about art, I'm thinking more along the lines of just being a person in society."

Talking With Fear About Dying Tomorrow
the works of Matt Austin
opening Friday 4 March
7-10pm
Johalla Projects
1561 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago

In NYC, check out the group show Art of Attraction, opening at F.L.O.A.T. gallery on Friday and featuring images from Brian Finke, Stephen Irwin, Ellen Jong, Sandy Kim, Zed Nelson, Cass Bird, Lober Nogen, Yisook Sohn, Joseph Szabo, Caroll Taveras, Therese + Joel, Camille Vivier and Christian Weber.
From the show statement:

"Art of Attraction delves into the global obsession with an increasingly narrow Western ideal of physical beauty and sexual attraction, uncovering the extreme lengths taken in the pursuit of appearing physically 'attractive' to the opposite sex and to others."

Art of Attraction
opening Friday 4 March
6-9pm
F.L.O.A.T. gallery
300 W. 22nd St., NYC

Art Openings 2/24: Julie Saul Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery

2011-02-23T10:51:00.003-05:00

Julie Saul Gallery opens the solo show Arctic Wonderland by Canadian artist Sarah Anne Johnson this Thursday nite. From Johnson's statement:

"We are in the process of creating irreparable damage to the earth and will soon have no choice but to gamble on increasingly dubious theories. A favorite theory of engineers as a last resort to stop global warming is the blocking out of the sun. With this body of work I have been assessing and questioning western ideas of progress, growth, and innovation. What are we progressing toward? Where does innovation lead us?..."

Arctic Wonderland
photographs by Sarah Anne Johnson
opening Thursday 24 February
6-8pm
Julie Saul Gallery
535 W. 22nd St., NYC

While you're in the building, head to Yancey Richardson Gallery as well for the opening of The Border, an exhibition of works by Victoria Sambunaris. She has criss-crossed nearly the entire U.S. highway system in creating a decade-long collection of landscape images; this show focuses on the hotly contested U.S.-Mexico border. There's a recent interview here in PMc magazine with Sambunaris about her work.

The Border
photographs by Victoria Sambunaris
opening Thursday 24 February
6-8pm
Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 W. 22nd St., NYC

The Soccer Landscapes of Hans van der Meer

2011-02-17T10:50:00.018-05:00

In my series of posts over the last month about contemporary Dutch photography (here, here and here) there's one Dutch artist whose images I've very intentionally neglected to highlight so far, specifically because I wanted to make an individual mention of his work: the soccer landscapes of Hans van der Meer.
In 1995 van der Meer began documenting the football pitches of lower league amateur games in his native land, resulting in the book Dutch Fields published in 1998.
(all photographs copyright Hans van der Meer)

Aartswoud, The Netherlands

Glanerbrug, The Netherlands

Hoogmade, The Netherlands

Gouda, The Netherlands

Van der Meer then expanded the project and traveled to photograph amateur leagues throughout the whole of Europe, resulting in the 2006 publication of European Fields: The Landscape of Lower League Football.
(all photographs copyright Hans van der Meer)

Frauenhagen, Germany

Celerina, Switzerland

Perafita, Portugal

Bors, Romania

St. Chamas, France

Budapest, Hungary

Berlin, Germany

La Mede, France

Lourmarin, France

Bastendorf, Luxembourg

Bradford, England

Knippla, Sweden

I love these images because on a personal level they combine photography and soccer, two of my biggest passions. But deeper than that, I'm really drawn into van der Meer's images because he steps back and allows the landscape to unfold in the photograph around the field, giving the viewer a beautiful context of the surrounding location (be it seaside, mountains, village, cityscape, etc.). Further, I appreciate how he has very deliberately ignored the flashy Champions League professional settings and instead focused on the amateur leagues of Europe, where the everyday working players go for recreation and sport, just like my friends and I in rec leagues here.
A fitting companion to the portraiture of amateur players done by the likes of Alan Powdrill (Reality Football) and Andrew Hetherington (Park Celtic FC), both of whom I mentioned in a post here leading up to last summer's World Cup.

Yard Sales Project Featured in the Newest Issue of Fraction Magazine

2011-02-15T11:09:00.005-05:00

Fraction Magazine is featuring a selection of images from my ongoing Yard Sales project in their newest issue of Fraction-J, which focuses on documentary photography and photojournalism. The issue launched online today.
A huge thanks to Fraction mastermind David Bram and partners Jason Houston and Stella Kramer for choosing my work for inclusion in the magazine.
And definitely be sure to give a look to the other photographers featured in the new issue: Ami Vitale, Deb Schwedhelm, Jeane LaRance, Jenn Ackerman, Kirk Crippens, Larry Mills and Scott Schuldt.

On Technology and Photography: Damon Winter in POY, Michael Wolf in World Press

2011-02-12T15:32:00.015-05:00

Its been a rough week for photojournalists, particularly those concerned with contest results: first, POYi awarded a body of work by Damon Winter of the New York Times that was photographed with the iPhone Hipstamatic app; then second, World Press Photo awarded a body of work shot by Michael Wolf using Google Street View technology. Both cases illustrate the growing impact of technology both in our lives and in photography. And all of this is taking place against the backdrop of the continuous nagging question: "is photojournalism dead?"

On the first topic, here's a take from both sides of the spectrum: photojournalist M. Scott Brauer from DVA Foto explaining his support for allowing Winter's story "A Grunt's Life" in the contest, and counterpoint by newspaper photojournalist Chip Litherland on his blog detailing his feelings against the images and their ramifications. For his own part, the photographer Winter's own thoughts can be read in a posting on the NYT's Lens blog.

Damon Winter, "A Grunt's Life"
3rd place, Feature Picture Story

Photojournalists will lecture you that "content is king", and most of those up in arms about the POY problem are generally asserting that the Hipstamatic app alters the content of the image in ways that make the photo not valid for consideration in a photojournalism contest.

I'm gonna try to avoid spending too much time wading into an argument about the Hipstamatic because frankly I think discussions about technique are kinda boring and can sometimes miss the larger point. In short, my personal feeling is that if you want to limit the dialogue to the specific parameters of admissible technique, then the Hipstamatic is basically no different than, for example, photographs using night vision technology, photography utilizing infrared film e.g. Richard Mosse, or even a photographer's use of a warming gel on the fill flash (a long-held practice among photogs at National Geographic, likely considered one of the pantheons of traditional photojournalism). And all of these techniques have resulted in images that have historically won awards in photojournalism-oriented contests.

The larger idea though is that the majority of modern society is very visually sophisticated and highly literate when it comes to photographs (be they photojournalistic images or otherwise). People are bombarded by images every day, and from a wide variety of sources -- photojournalism needs to recognize and understand those very important realities.

Making arbitrary demarcations as to what is/isn't considered acceptable imagery for visual communication can only aid in accelerating the disconnect between photojournalism and its readers/viewers -- especially in the younger, more tech-savvy demographics. This may perhaps be a situation of photojournalism stubbornly clinging too tightly to its traditions and conventions, even as they rapidly become outdated modes of communication. This isn't to say that the singular photograph has completely lost its intrinsic power -- if anything, I'd argue that in this age of video and moving imagery and the rapid flicker of visual stimuli through TV, internet, cell phones, billboards, advertisements, consumer products, etc., the frozen photograph has the ability to take on even greater impact: to force the reader/viewer to slow down, to look longer, and to contemplate.

But the important difference to see now is, in context of the rising ubiquity of the visual sources mentioned above, press photographs are no longer considered to be such a lone authoritative beacon like they had been 30/40/50 years ago. The ways in which people interact with, experience, analyze, and learn from images has changed drastically, and seems likely to continue evolving at a rapid pace.

Which is why its almost a bit pointless, this predictable annual ritual of hand-wringing in photojournalism circles. Meanwhile at this very moment, readers/viewers are more likely engaged in analyzing and digesting still photos from Mubarak's resignation in Egypt, not caught up in arguments about how the images they consume are created or disseminated... even if, frankly, maybe they should be -- and here is where the week's other photojournalism controversy, Michael Wolf's award in World Press, comes directly into play (as does the Egyptian revolution too, actually).

If you know me or this blog, you know that for a while now I've been a pretty big fan of Michael Wolf (himself a former photojournalist, after all). So yes, I will attempt (with objective intentions) to make the case that his A Series of Unfortunate Events is a valid award winner in the category of Contemporary Issues (because I also believe that it wouldn't have fit as well or stood as powerful in any other category in the contest) -- and further, that the body of work itself as well as his admittedly provocative act of entering it in World Press, are poignant, symbolic, and highly appropriate at this juncture in photography.

Michael Wolf, A Series of Unfortunate Events
Honorable mention, Contemporary Issues

I think a good place to start understanding the work is to read these two interviews with Wolf that launched this week: here with the British Journal of Photography, and here on the street photography site Seconds2Real. In both, Wolf talks about photojournalism (which he used to consider his work to be), street photography (which he somewhat does/doesn't consider his work to be), and more details about the background and concept of the Google Street View series.

What's pretty clear here is Wolf's technique: in one sense he has performed a virtual version of street photography a la Winogrand, and the Street View software functions as a democratic, automated remote camera that the browser can control in ways very similar to a regular camera (zoom in/out, pan left/right/up/down, etc.). And then the final image-making occurs when Wolf sets up his camera on a tripod and clicks the shutter. Wolf describes his approach in the BJP interview:

"I use a tripod and mount the camera, photographing a virtual reality that I see on the screen. Its a real file that I have, I'm not taking a screenshot. I put the camera forward and do an exact crop, and that's what makes it my picture. It doesn't belong to Google, because I'm interpreting Google; I'm appropriating Google. If you look at the history of art, there's a long history of appropriation."

So, technically, as to whether or not A Series of Unfortunate Events fits some mutually agreed-upon definition of "photojournalism", it might be possible to say that Wolf is acting as a quasi-journalistic documentarian whereby the Google technology itself is the subject of his documentation. In other words, in a way he is documenting the fact that Google software has captured these images -- placing less emphasis on the images themselves or his own capturing of them. Photojournalist Matt Lutton from DVA shares his thoughts here on the photojournalistic merits of Wolf's series.

Addressing the notion of appropriation, Wolf is very correct that it is more or less an acceptable practice in the art world, made famous through the works of Richard Prince or in Sherrie Levine re-photographing Walker Evans' Depression-era images, just to name two examples. So if it becomes an issue of ownership, then shouldn't there also be questioning of another series awarded in World Press this year -- the 3rd place Arts & Entertainment winner by Amit Sha'al? Those photographs also include the use of another photograph (presumably not belonging to Sha'al) within the photo, that Sha'al has selectively manipulated through composition and cropping. Intriguingly, it appears that what Sha'al's winning series actually hints at are the limitations or potential pitfalls of how photojournalism represents reality -- in the case of that series specifically, the topic is historic sites in Israel.

Amit Sha'al, Altneuland
3rd place, Arts & Entertainment

However, by and large I think the most important part of Wolf's project to consider -- and that which makes it absolutely relevant and qualified in that contest -- is his conceptual framework. From what I gather, this can be seen as taking on two parts:
1) the proliferation of images in the world today, particularly online, and
2) the consequences of that deluge of images in terms of personal privacy.

On the first point, Wolf says in the BJP interview:

"Our world is full of images. Its part of the future of our imagery. We have to deal with this [emphasis mine] -- curate them or incorporate them into our work."

Just through the web alone, or even through photography-centric sites like Flickr, there's access to millions of photographs at any moment and on any subject imaginable. The artist Penelope Umbrico addresses this topic in many of her works, one of the most well-known being Suns From Flickr (which for example at the 2008 New York Photo Festival included the piece 3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial), 3/31/08, where the title is a comment on the ubiquity of collective content as seen through search results on the web -- a 2007 version of Suns From Flickr counted only 2,303,057 in its title, meaning that the number of available images online had increased by nearly a million in a year's time). Read her artist's statement for more info.

Also on the topic of images online, you might find it interesting that the 2nd place Portrait Stories award in World Press this year went to Wolfram Hahn for his series about self-portraits for social networks, images of people creating photos of themselves to be uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Wolfram Hahn
2nd place, Portrait Stories

And consider the proliferation of those social networks, their usage numbers around the world, and their capabilities -- again, coming back to the recent news from Egypt, where some have called the protests and eventual ousting of Mubarak a "Facebook revolution".

So what are the ramifications then if we're willing to accept -- indeed, contribute to -- this massive visual catalogue online? We surf the internet knowing that our privacy (both in terms of private details such as credit card numbers and contact information, as well as our visual representations through the photos we place online) is somewhat surveilled or compromised to an extent... and to what degree are we okay with that? I think this is a major purpose of Wolf's Street View projects, as they reinforce our potential loss of privacy through imagery online. Even in the public street, all photojournalists and street photographers already know there is essentially no legally guaranteed right to privacy, and that image-makers are free to more or less photograph at will. Now Wolf has reminded us that through online imagery there is also a right to photograph in the streets virtually, thus adding that cyber element to privacy invasion.

As a quick side note for some added context, there have been many other photographers who've used Google Street View to create images to varying degrees, among them the artist Jon Rafman, and Doug Rickard (the brains behind the photography site American Suburb X) with his recent book A New American Picture.

Back to the timely issue of privacy in the internet age though, one final thing I wanted to mention is the work of Josh Harris. An internet pioneer who got rich before the dot.com bubble burst, Harris then developed an acute interest in the effects of technology on individuals and created a series of controversial human experiments that incorporated webcams and various forms of surveillance. His work culminated in the film "We Live in Public", which you can see the trailer for below, or, fittingly, view in its entirety online here.

Lastly, in terms of Wolf's submission and World Press itself, I think A Series of Unfortunate Events perfectly fits the guidelines of that specific category, Contemporary Issues. As detailed in the paragraphs above, he is prompting a multi-faceted dialogue about a number of just such contemporary issues in both society AND photography today (and how they're interconnected). If the ultimate goal of photography is visual communication, then I think Wolf's series has done so effectively and with brutal timing. By those criteria his award seems wholly legitimate. I give credit to the judges for recognizing the complexity, poignancy and importance of the points being raised in his work.

Art Openings 2/11-2/12: Star Gallery, Project Pop-up

2011-02-09T13:33:00.007-05:00

As previously mentioned, I've got works in two shows coming up this weekend.
First off, select images from my series Damaged Goods will exhibit as part of the Lonesome No More traveling show, a project of our artists group the North Coast Collective. The show hits the road for an exhibition on Friday nite at the Star Gallery (part of Oakland Center for the Arts) in Youngstown, OH.

3-62A
from the series Damaged Goods
40" x 27", chromogenic print on canvas

Lonesome No More
a traveling art exhibition by the North Coast Collective
opening Friday 11 February
6-10pm
Star Gallery (at Oakland Center for the Arts)
220 W. Boardman St., Youngstown OH

And on Saturday I'll be part of the Transformation show in Collinwood, a component of Project Pop-up Galleries designed to bring art to abandoned places in the city. The diverse roster of artists from all over the city also includes a few of my colleagues from North Coast Collective. We'll be taking over an empty commercial space above the Key Bank on Waterloo Road -- its an interesting spot that used to house small offices for a variety of neighborhoods businesses, and each participating artist has been given their own individual room to show their works.

Composite #1112. 2011
36" x 24", digital C-print

I'll be exhibiting a series of architectural/landscape composite photos, created from scanning multiple pieces of film on top of each other to construct a separate new image.

Composite #1117a. 2011
20" x 16", digital C-print

If you're nearby for either of these shows, I hope you'll have a minute to drop in and say hello. In addition to the Transformation exhibition, there's a bunch of other art gigs going on in Collinwood this weekend (including the return of hallowed political post-punks This Moment in Black History, and the Love Stinks exhibition down the street), so check them out too.

Transformation (Project Pop-up Galleries)
opening Saturday 12 February
6-11pm
15619 Waterloo Road (2nd floor of Key Bank bldg.), Collinwood

Contemporary Dutch Photography, pt. 3

2011-02-07T11:13:00.017-05:00

One final note on contemporary photography from the Netherlands (see previous posts here and here), this time focusing on genres of portraiture and landscape, where as I've mentioned you can often see references to the paintings of the Dutch Old Masters.
Obviously names like Dijkstra, Sassen and Olaf are some of the more well-known heavyweights in their groups, though again please remember that these lists are in no way meant to be representative of all the great work being done by artists from the region. If there's any other greats that are worth an extra mention, don't hesitate to let me know.

Art Openings 2/5: Pink Eye gallery

2011-02-02T14:29:00.007-05:00

Ian P-E and Leigh Ring, the tag team behind Pink Eye magazine, are bringing the arts mag to life in 3-D with the opening of the official Pink Eye gallery this weekend in Ohio City -- and as a resident of the neighborhood and someone who lives only a few blocks down from their spot on Lorain Ave., I'm really psyched to have this duo as a force here.

Intersect. Pittsburgh, 2007
36"x24", archival inkjet print scanned from B/W negative film

As part of their inaugural show, I'll have some of my works (including the above image Intersect) on display alongside the art of Dave Cintron, Ron Copeland, Alan Dunn, Steve Ehret, Jim Karpinski, and Bob Peck. Its all going down this Saturday nite, come check it out.

Pink Eye gallery
opening Saturday 5 February
5-11pm
3904 Lorain Ave., Ohio City

And a quick heads up for some goings-on next weekend: the traveling show Lonesome No More (a project of our group the North Coast Collective) hits the road for an opening on Friday nite 11 February, and I'll also be part of the Transformation pop-up show at an interesting abandoned space in Collinwood, opening on Saturday nite 12 February. More details to come next week.

Contemporary Dutch Photography, pt. 2

2011-01-26T09:41:00.008-05:00

More Dutch photography, following up on last week's post--

Art Openings 1/20-1/21: SPACES, ICP, Aperture, Hartman Fine Art, i-witness, Johalla Projects, CSU

2011-01-20T09:35:00.019-05:00

Art goings-on this week:
The controversial video "A Fire in My Belly" by artist David Wojnarowicz that was removed from exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in December after protest by Speaker Boner and other Christian conservative kooks, is now finding new life as many galleries around the country have rallied to show the film in counter-protest against the censorship. In Cleveland, SPACES Gallery will be screening the film tonite to kick off their new quarterly video art series "From the Vault".

"From the Vault" video art series
featuring a screening of "A Fire in My Belly" by David Wojnarowicz
Thursday 20 January
630-8pm
SPACES Gallery
2220 Superior Viaduct, Cleveland

Wojnarowicz's film is also running daily at the International Center of Photography until 13 February as part of their regular gallery schedule. ICP kicks off their 2011 exhibitions with three new shows opening on Friday -- Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide (the first U.S. solo show by Qingsong, one of China's most well-known contemporary artists, who creates massive staged scenes that address China's new material wealth and growing consumerism); Jasper, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan (historical images of the unseen African-American community in segregated Jasper, whose longstanding racial problems came to national attention in June 1998 with the horrific killing of James Byrd, Jr.); and Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms (a collection of vintage postcards and photographs depicting traditional river baptisms that flourished in the South and Midwest between 1880-1930).

Wang Qingsong: When Worlds Collide
Jasper, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan
Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms
opening Friday 21 January
International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas, NYC

Also in NYC, Aperture Gallery is hosting an exhibition opening tonite of images from reGeneration 2: Tomorrow's Photographers Today to accompany the book's launch.

reGeneration 2: Tomorrow's Photographers Today
opening Thursday 20 January
6-9pm
Aperture Gallery
547 W. 27th St., 4th floor, NYC

On the left coast, Hartman Fine Art in Portland opens the exhibition Daido Moriyama: Photographs from Five Decades tonite, featuring the work of one of Japan's most important postwar photographers. See more of Moriyama's work here.

Daido Moriyama: Photographs from Five Decades
opening Thursday 20 January
Hartman Fine Art
134 NW 8th Ave., Portland OR

Elsewhere in Portland, also check out the quirky and funny show Roadside Distractions, photographs by George Olson, an ongoing exhibition at the i-witness Gallery (part of the Northwest Center for Photography).

Olson's extensive documentation of odd and humorous signage from around the U.S. recalls Walker Evans' work capturing scenes of the vernacular American landscape. I first saw Olson's sign photos in 2002 while a student at the Missouri Photo Workshop (wow, its really funny to look back now on the photographs I created that week). Olson was one of the faculty members and presented the work during one of our nightly sessions, and I remember the entire room just erupting in laughter, one slide after another. Its a peculiar body of work, and something very specific, but certainly worth a look (especially if you're capable of not taking everything so serious all the time).

Roadside Distractions
photographs by George Olson
ongoing thru 3 February
i-witness Gallery (housed in the Northwest Center for Photography)
1028 SE Water Ave., suite 50, Portland OR

On a related note, to see the complete deconstruction of everyday signage, check out the work of Matt Siber, opening a solo show Friday at Johalla Projects in Chicago. In conjunction with the ACRE residency program, the exhibition presents new photographs, videos and three-dimensional objects from Siber's projects exploring advertising, branding and commercial signage.

Matt Siber solo show
opening Friday 21 January
7-11pm
Johalla Projects
1561 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago

Finally, circling back to Cleveland, Siber's work is also being shown as part of the group show Life Imitates Artifice at the CSU Art Gallery.

Geolocation (Location Thing for Twitter), 2009
from the series Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream
© Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

The show is curated by artist and professor Mark Slankard and features, alongside Siber's Untitled Project (North America), the photographs of Nate Larson/Marni Shindelman (Geolocation), Brandon Juhasz (Mechanical Bride), Kerry Skarbakka (The Struggle to Right Oneself) and Lori Nix (The City).

Exhibition opens Friday nite and includes a gallery talk with Brandon Juhasz and Kerry Skarbakka at 6pm.

Life Imitates Artifice (curated by Mark Slankard)
opening Friday 21 January
5-7pm
CSU Art Gallery
2307 Chester Ave., Cleveland