The Isolation Diary is a gentle meditation on mental health and the value of human companionship amid the COVID-19 crisis. The final project is presented in the form of a visual diary, combining photography and text as if the viewer were reading a very intimate, private journal.
Returning in March from a six-month commission in London to isolate with my girlfriend Rosie, I faced almost no employment or income, and like many across the country, this crisis hit hard, causing feelings of worry, fear, isolation and loneliness.
The following article will reference Beirut explosion and how this unfortunate turn of events elicited an analysis of the ethics behind photojournalism and documentary photography. I am primarily concerned in discussing how the notion of 'morality' plays a part in the practice of a photojournalist and documentary photographer. The boundaries between what can be considered 'good practice' and 'bad practice', summarising this article with an analysis of Richard Mosse's 'Enclave' series.'
Photography has always occupied an important place in my artistic career. It's not just about correctly framing the subject and getting a nice picture. It's the concept itself of capturing a unique moment in the fabric of time and space that attracted me the most, since the beginning of my journey into this creative media.
We don't load cameras much anymore but we still aim them and shoot pictures. With that in mind, I have fun describing my pursuit of portraits as a predatory sport: hunting big game. I don't stalk my prey but get close enough for a good clean shot - close enough for rapport as much as proximity - to avoid inflicting gratuitous wounds. I bag my quarry with a lens instead of looking down the barrel of a gun but I still hang their heads on a wall to admire like trophies.
In the last few weeks, since Italy has been affected by this Coronavirus emergency, I have chosen to continue working by photographing and interviewing (together with my friend Gea Scancarello) people who are locked in their homes in Milano in compliance with the quarantine imposed by the government to fight COVID-19. I left lights outside their windows, disinfecting them first. The subjects then brought them into the house and I gave them directions on how to position them by talking from outside. To take these photos, we've complied with all the necessary safety instructions.
The Amazon is the world's largest rainforest and the largest river basin on the planet. More species are found here than anywhere else. But it is dying. Brazilian photographer Victor Moriyama is a first hand witness.
Time stands still for most of us. It is a sensitive time, we all feel vulnerable and anxious. During the days prior to the pandemic I was ultra-busy planning a photographic shoot with a large team of people, assistants, stylists, hair and make-up team, prop stylists, set designers etc. and was in-line for a couple of jobs, suddenly everything stopped. The assignments were cancelled and I had to postpone my project two days before the shoot as the risk appeared too great.
"Barbie around the World" is a photography project born out from my long distance relationship with my girlfriend: at that time I was living in India while she was in Italy, and we were planning a trip to meet "halfway" in Israel.
Looking at the protests the first night in Minneapolis I realized that a generational movement was taking place, all the anger I saw online for years was manifesting itself physically. On that first night, I found myself wondering the same thing I often wondered looking at old war or protest pictures: how did these events shape their lives, and more importantly, how did their lives shape these events?
Humans face new parts of their spirit throughout each crisis in their lives; aspects which may not have that much of a chance to express themselves throughout routine life. During a crisis, a person having lost normalcy, imagines that they have lost the light by which they create an image of the world around and recognize it, so they see themselves in the darkness. Although not all humans stay in the darkness. They search within themselves instead of depending on the source of light which lights up their life, the world and path.
Have a safe spring break, I said to my photo students at Furman University on a Wednesday in early March 2020. Then I said something like, Please don't bring that virus back into our classroom when you return, at which point most of us chuckled because it seemed so farfetched, even to me. One week later, I began to plan for my black and white film/darkroom class and digital photography to go online due to the Coronavirus; my students weren't returning to campus.
Indonesia's Sumatran orangutan is under severe threat from the incessant and ongoing depletion and fragmentation of the rainforest. As palm oil and rubber plantations, logging, road construction, mining, hunting and other development continue to proliferate, orangutans are being forced out of their natural rainforest habitat.
Jose Zurita was a photographer's photographer - he was more interested in making images than exhibiting his work or the attention that comes with publication. Originally from Bolivia, he settled in Greenville, SC, where he worked as a Rehabilitation Specialist for adults living with mental illness. Most days, when Jose left his job at 5 PM, he directly hit the streets with his camera making portraits of strangers he encountered along his path – poignant images of underserved populations. That's how Jose was – someone who wanted to validate others that frequently go unnoticed.
The common imagery of the prison life is fed by the photographic and cinematic depiction that nearly always represents the male population.
In the era of the #MeToo movement and of a resurgence of the female voice I have decided to investigate what incarceration is like for a woman: the maternity, the relationship with family and partners, the harsh condition with other cell-mates of different countries and cultures
Photography is a powerful visual art medium. It can convey emotions, sensations, deep perception of the moment. Now, imagine that the photo is made from the air and shows an absolutely breathtaking view? Wouldn't it inspire and energize even more? Breathtaking, inspiring and energizing - that is exactly how our planet looks from above! And that is the kind of aerial images I look for, when I am on my photo trips.
The Rohingya Muslim minority of Myanmar, who are subjected to discrimination and human rights violations and have been stripped of all rights including citizenship, are now living in IDP or internally displaced person camps.
To capture this religious practice taking place under lockdown, Canon has partnered with Jordanian Canon Ambassador and two time Pulitzer prize winner, Muhammed Muheisen and Dubai-based photographer Reem Falaknaz
This photographic project has been inspired by the events that followed the rapid spreading of the COVID-19 among the Italian population, which started at the end of February 2020.
In a place called White Sands, New Mexico, you can get lost in no time on a cloudy, windy summer day as your footsteps are erased nearly as quickly as your bare feet make them. With no sun to guide you, it's like being on another planet. The pull of places like that might be the same as the emotional grip that the tip of Mt. Everest has on champion climbers, or in the photographs of Ivan Murzin, the magnetic pull of a national park in Siberia where multitudes flock in winter to tempt gravity off the surface of an infinite tabletop of ice.
I remember the first time I looked at the works of street photographers like as Bruce Gilden, Martin Parr and Nick Turpin and strangely remembered how images under this documentary style of photography drew me further into this artform, making me appreciate a photograph as something more than an object in a frame, but rather an expression of an individual in that moment of time. In the coming years I focused solely on documentary photography and gradually became more fascinated about the relationships between the photographer and his subjects. To this day Bruce Gilden's work is central to my photographic practice, not so much in viewing his images as final pieces but rather in the process of capturing them. I'd like to believe that he himself is far more concerned with staying in those moments of pure photographic expression, with the images being only an intervention in time.
As the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic continues to cause major disruptions to our daily lives with more than two billion people worldwide isolated in their homes, we asked renowned photographers what impact the current situation has on their life and work.
Here are their personal and heartfelt answers as well as a sample of their work.
As artists, we expend a lot of our emotional energy and other resources into building our resumes, seeking relationships with peers and influentials, and working on series and portfolios.
Belgium is currently in lock down. We can only go outside to get food and some people are allowed to go to their work. We can go outside for a walk and once a day around 6:30 pm, Stephan Vanfleteren leaves with his camera to the sea, forest, fields... He named his walks: Corona walks.
Natalie Obermaier's gaze is honest and sympathetic. Absent of pretense, shyness, or posturing, nothing comes between Obermaier and her subjects. Every image expresses the subtle context of his unfettered access. When they gaze directly into the camera, her subjects seem to be looking directly at us. The conjecture of photography is shaped with contradictions... ambiguously-specific, empowered-vulnerability, truthfully-inaccurate. The nuances of these paradoxes are burned into the silver halide crystals of Obermaier's film.
Global climate change is real and has observable effects on the environment. It affects all regions of the world. The polar ice caps are melting and the level of the oceans is rising. In some regions, extreme weather events and precipitation are becoming more frequent, while others are facing increasingly extreme heat waves and droughts.
Many plants and animal species are endangered. Some terrestrial, freshwater and marine species have already moved to new territories. Plants and animals will be in serious danger of extinction if the average temperature of the planet continues to rise uncontrollably.
Global climate change is real and has observable effects on the environment. It affects all regions of the world. The polar ice caps are melting and the level of the oceans is rising. In some regions, extreme weather events and precipitation are becoming more frequent, while others are facing increasingly extreme heat waves and droughts.
Many plants and animal species are endangered. Some terrestrial, freshwater and marine species have already moved to new territories. Plants and animals will be in serious danger of extinction if the average temperature of the planet continues to rise uncontrollably.
Extradition bill gave birth to a new Hong Kong political awakening. It is powerful, resilient, and it seems here to stay. It is a leaderless movement, fighting for democracy and against Chinese mainland-style authoritarian rule spilling into Hong Kong.
On Tuesday, October 8, North Dakotan wet plate collodion artist Shane Balkowitsch had the chance to make several portraits of Swedish environmental activist and 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg during her visit to North Dakota in support of indigenous groups fighting Dakota Access oil pipeline. Many in the Standing Rock tribe consider the pipeline a threat to the region's clean water and to ancient burial grounds. The shoot took place at Standing Rock, ND where Thunberg was being honored by tribal leaders for her work to fight climate change. During the closing ceremony, Thunberg was bestowed with a Lakota Native American name "Maphiyata echiyatan his win" which translates as "woman who came from the heavens."
It's really strange to return to a city that I first knew at half of the age I am today. We are afraid to find it unchanged, intact, which, by contrast, would accentuate the awareness of one's own aging. But we are equally afraid of no longer recognizing it, which would mean that time has erased our memories, which we will not find traces anywhere.
Returning to Saint Louis in Senegal, 26 years after going there for the first time, I felt threatened by these two perils.
The christian religion had a flock of 2.19 billion believers at the year of 2010. 14 thousands of them (0.0005% of the world population) were living around the area of Jerusalem during that time. The city of Jerusalem is known to share a pivotal point in each story of the three monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Over the course of thousands of years, Jews, Christians, and Muslims look up to Jerusalem as it has been dedicated to each of these three religions. Each religion by its believers share with the city an unbreakable bond that was kept for thousands of years.
Emily Garthwaite has achieved what most of us could only dream of. At age 26, she has gained global recognition for her innovative photojournalism, having been twice named a finalist in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. Outside of the industry, she has featured on Forbes 30 Under 30 list, which identifies leading international creatives from across the globe.
I first met Paula Riff in 2015 at the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego. Her mother had just died or maybe I'm making that up because my brother had recently died, but she had a number of photographs, straight photographs (well, as straight as hand-colored gelatin silver prints can be), and then she had a small box of cyanotypes and she said, "Well, I wasn't going to show these..." Which, of course, meant I had to see them. They were small enough to fit in my hand and they at first looked like constellations against a deep blue sky...and then I thought, no...dust...and then Paula said, no...ashes...and bones. Her mother's ashes and bone fragments from when she was cremated. Wow. Just when I thought I couldn't be surprised anymore at a portfolio review, there I was. And speechless too. And more than a little impressed.
In 2002 I began photographing New Yorkers of mixed heritage. Since my own children and many members of my family are of mixed heritage I was drawn to mixed ethnicities as a subject for my photographs. It is this portfolio that morphed into the series ALL AMERICAN, some of which are published here. I widened my interest from mixed heritage people to all immigrants to New York who had come from cultures worldwide and adopted New York and America as their home.
British wildlife photographer, Will Burrard-Lucas, in partnership with Tsavo Trust and Kenya Wildlife Service, has photographed a remarkable female elephant in Kenya. Her tusks were so long that they scraped the ground in front of her as she walked. If there were a Queen of Elephants, it would surely have been her. These are amongst the last images ever captured of her, for shortly after they were taken, she died of natural causes.
Faces of Addiction is a photography-based art project which presents addicted people as real individuals - just like you or me. Only then does compassion become a possibility. Accordingly, the work has to be accessible and to be most effective, it will need to be experienced by many thousands of people.
On the night of October 8th, 2017, at 11:00pm, I received a call from a friend who told us that she could see a wildfire spreading on the hills behind our house. Unaware that we were in harm's way, my husband and I walked up to a fire road behind our home and saw a bright glow in the distance.
My path in photography began some time ago, and went through the most varied challenges, from the search of my own (photographic) identity to the perception of how that same identity could be used in concrete and realistic terms
At a time when many a photographer's reliance on equipment and software is incessant and endemic, Art Shay maintained his curmudgeonly simplicity, as if saying "fuck you!" by toting around a rangefinder Leica
The International Collaboration Project founded by Francisco Diaz (USA) and Deb Young (New Zealand) bring global artists together in a virtual collaboration in the photographic medium.
I receive a lot of portfolios throughout the year at All About Photo. Most of the time, I put them aside, overwhelmed by the quantity of things to do, hoping I will be able to take the time later in the day or the week to give a proper answer to each project.
It's my favorite time of year...no, not the holidays, but Critical Mass. And no, that's not a massive bike ride where some of the people are riding naked, even in San Francisco in the wet fog.
I first saw Shannon Johnstone's photographs when I was jurying PhotoLucida's Critical Mass back in 2010. RayKo Photo Center happened to be hosting the traveling Critical Mass Top 50 exhibition and it was a year in which the images ranged from triumphant to beautiful to majestic to heartbreaking to challenging.
When I was jurying The Creative Portrait show for the Los Angeles Center for Photography a few weeks ago, I saw the picture of a woman's black and white portrait being sewn with a thick red yarn.
I reviewed Krugh's latest portfolio at PhotoLucida this year and here were objects and images that piqued my curiosity. Here were all my favorite cameras (and some I'd never heard of) captured with x-rays.
In the spring of my junior year of college, I took a course called, "Southern Contemporary Fiction." Haunting works by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Peter Taylor, Pinckney Benedict...there were others, of course, but perhaps most important to mention here is Flannery O'Connor.
I first met Norm Diamond at the PhotoLucida portfolio reviews in Portland, Oregon, in 2015. He had a number of prints of beautiful still lifes and interiors, the color palette perfect, the spaces familiar, the objects loved and worn.
While jurying PhotoLucida's Critical Mass, I found some images that had the energy of Ernst Haas' photographs of motion, but these weren't color and they weren't bull fights or galloping horses.
Takayuki Narita's project, "Rose Garden," at first reminded me of Martin Parr's "Last Resort" for a moment in the way he used the flash in the sun, but here these people are not clad in bathing suits or waiting in ice cream parlors or clamoring across rocky beaches.
Nicolò Sertorio in his portfolio 'DisConnected' explores different aspects of landscapes in a counterpoint of bridging the gap between opposites in our life. 'DisConnected' is Sertorio's fine art photography that reached the conceptual level of the essential idea of Sartrean Existentialism and philosophical principles of the New Escapism of contemporary art.
When I lived in Maine and I would travel the 3,000+ miles to Los Angeles, I would often head straight to Venice Beach from the airport. It seemed like such a foreign place compared to the rocky, deep harbored coastline where there was literally no one on the cliffs but me (and maybe Paul Caponigro catching some fleeting rays if the weather was warm enough).
I don't usually find myself drawn to pictures of children. Actually, it's become a bit of tendency when I'm jurying or critiquing and I see those photographs, I almost involuntarily announce, "No cute kids." (Kids that aren't adorable are OK. Give me Diane Arbus' grenade boy anytime. Or a host of other images of fierce or far out youngsters.)
Sometimes I forget, when I'm looking through thousands of images, why I love photography and what attracted me to it in the first place. The light. It's the photographer's basic tool and yet I think often image-makers forget that this is what creates the mood and the tone of the picture.
I first met Maureen Drennan at Review Santa Fe in 2010. She had a secret project about a pot farm back when marijuana was illegal in California and was an even more taboo subject.
While looking through the nearly 800 portfolio submissions for Aint-Bad Magazine's curator's issue, I discovered British photographer Simon Martin's images of young cadets.
My work on this project began on On December 22nd 2008, the failure of a containment pond dyke spilled 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash belonging to the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant into the Emory River and the surrounding landscape. Coal ash is a waste product of burning coal for power production, collected and stored in these massive ponds, much like our solid waste is collected in landfills.
Using the Voyager Space Probes as a metaphor, Transit of Venus is an exploration of the human desire to search beyond one's self. While embracing the quiet solitude of the search, perception of time slows. Days fold into moments, while moments transform and mix with longings. Once beyond the obvious realm, the exploration becomes an act of looking inward while embracing that which is beyond. To explore, is to drift through time.
My first trip to Zanzibar was in 1993, I had just spent three months traveling overland through Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and only intended to stay in Zanzibar a few days. Instead I got stuck waiting an additional seven weeks for my visa to India. As I meandered through the labyrinthine streets of Stone Town, it was only a matter of days until the locals sitting in front of their homes began engaging me in conversation: "You have walked by me for several days now, sit down and tell me who you are and why you are here." A sparked mutual curiosity led to daily conversations and deeper connections, soon I began to feel like I belonged. My unexpected ‘holding-tank' time in Zanzibar ended up being more meaningful than I could have imagined.
In 1998, I found myself in New Zealand, a world away from coastal Maine where I had been living. Glaciers extending to the road, fjords and mountains and deserts, sandy beaches where I could dig a hole and they would fill with hot water to soak in, thermal activity like Iceland, the Bay of Islands with its green hills, the pancake rocks, the glow worm tunnels, kiwi birds and kakapos, Stewart Island with the surprise of the Aurora Australis, the Otego peninsula with those round boulders, but also with those tiny sapphire blue penguins that are only a foot tall (where did they come from?) and down somewhere near Bluff, the world's 8th largest aluminium smelter where I could take a free tour and walk across a magnetic field that not only made all the nails I was holding in my hands stand up on their metal points, but which probably changed my body forever...
In April, I was reviewing portfolios at PhotoLucida in Portland, Oregon, and there at my table was an unassuming young woman who I initially thought was French and who had 2 things with her: a mock-up of a book as well as a huge stack of prints, all diptychs. I found myself flipping through the pages of the book and then pausing to look through a substantial number of prints and then back to the book and then back to the prints and back again to the book. The photographer was looking at me like I was a bit crazy and I actually don't think I've ever viewed anything in quite that way, but there was so much to see and there were also moments in the book that I didn't want to miss and pairings in the prints that were different than the book. The 20-minute review went by much too quickly and I found myself wondering how it all ended. Well, luckily for me, Michal Greenboim sent me a copy of her book, ''Orchard Trail.''
My artwork is intrinsically tied to my own family's photographic legacy. At age 18, I moved from India to the United States, a couple of years after my parents passed away. Before I emigrated, my sister and I split our photographic inheritance arbitrarily and irreparably in half - one part to remain in India with her and the other to be displaced along with me, here in America. For the past decade, my archive of family photographs has been one of my main source materials in creating bodies of work, which explore the genre of personal narrative.
In 1972 I was watching the Fellini film, Roma, and was captivated by splashes of light involving sparks from a street car at night. That scene with its dark nature and surreal quality motivated me to emulate a specific photographic style. It seems strange to me (almost absurd) that such a momentary scene became a motivation for an entire body of work that is interwoven throughout my artistic career. I call these images Evidence and Inhabitants. They are the evidence of places and people I have never been able to fully remember, but manifest themselves in the photographs I make.
Not Waving But Drowning is a look inside an Evangelical marriage. These images show the truth of a life lived in the confines of oppressive gender roles, cult-like manipulation, and the isolation of Fundamentalism.
Sur La Route (French for "On The Road") is a series of portraits taken outside the house where I live along the narrow dirt path that stretches from Bereba to the small family farms that surround the village. Around sunset the inhabitants return to their homes carrying firewood or items that have been harvested during the day. I make the photographs using the simple landscape as my studio, employing a fill flash to illuminate the farmers against the darkening sky. The fleeting light lasts only about 45 minutes. Because I return to the village every year I am able to give away the images from the previous year. These photographs have become prized possessions and are proudly displayed throughout the village.
I first met Ben Huff in 2011 in China of all places. There was an international photography festival there, through the lush valleys and surreal mountains on a 13-hour train ride (I'll mention briefly that I was standing for this entire ride) straight west from Shanghai, in the small city (3 million people) of Lishui. This place was picturesque and humid and a mix of ancient and brand new (they were still building the hotel we were staying in). The festival unfortunately no longer exists, but I remember walking into the "American Pavilion" (for lack of a better description for the amazing abandoned factory building that housed our photography) and seeing Ben's photographs from his documentary project, ''The Last Road North.'' It was as if I was transported straight out of steamy China to the desolate Dalton Highway and a barren stretch of tundra in Alaska. I spent a lot of my time in that corner of the exhibition hall in Lishui, thinking about distances traveled and about how Ben photographed the land and the people.
The quick capture of an image and the passage of time over its manipulation is combined in my series "The Accidental Photograph." With the photographic image, a Polaroid print as the foundation, slowly over days, weeks, or months I have a dialog with a variety of casually collected items. The techniques and materials of collage become the possibilities for what I see in the final piece. The images ask to be deciphered by a viewer's own internal logic and are not suggestive of any one particular notion of mine. It seems the nature of collage to be in flux through process and as likely through interpretations over time.
One of my favorite things about jurying an international competition is discovering photographers that I would never encountered otherwise. I've finally finished looking at the last portfolio (#780) in the jurying process for Issue 12, the curators' issue, of Aint-Bad Magazine and was miraculously transported to a place that at first I didn't recognize as being real. It looked like a movie set, the clouds parting to reveal an old building that could be an abandoned factory or an asylum (and when I say clouds parting, it's like that moment at the Sun Gate when the clouds descend into the valleys of Peruvian Andes and the mountaintop city of Machu Picchu is unveiled.
Every Breath We Drew explores the power of identity, desire, and connection through portraits of myself and others. Working within the framework of queer experience and from my actively constructed sense of masculinity, my portraits examine the intersection between private, individual identity and the search for intimate connection with others. I photograph people in their homes, often in their bedrooms, using medium and large format cameras to create a deep, sustained engagement, resulting in an intimate and detailed portrait.
The once romantic notion of travelling the ocean to distant and exotic lands has become an accessible and affordable way to vacation thanks to cruise tourism. About 10 million Americans take to the sea aboard cruise ships every year, and cruising is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the tourism industry worldwide. My ongoing project At Sea is a light-hearted exploration of the leisurely world of cruise culture.
Being housebound means enduring an ongoing shift between reality and the surreal. The safety of objects; plants, books, television, the internet, wrap around us and we are home. The outside world becomes irrelevant and fades away. Moments that are constructed bear resemblance to ones that are spontaneous and both serve as representations of living. These are the photographs that make up Homelife.
Throughout every stage of photography exists the act of encountering. As a photographer I'm confronted by my vision, or particular desire to photograph a specific subject amongst a crowd. I'm confronted by obfuscation; am I capturing the subject's truth, or mine- does it matter? In many ways, the act of engaging with photography is like stepping in front of a mirror and encountering some version of the self. And I wonder how it is to have a physical reflection of the self with a twin: some person that is within and apart.
This ongoing series documents the annual twins festival in Twinsburg, OH; the same fair that Mary Ellen Mark attended while producing her body of work, Twins.
In the American West, vast areas of remote, arid terrain were disregarded by early settlers and described as "the lands nobody wanted." In the Upper Snake River Valley of Eastern Idaho, parts of these sagebrush desert expanses, now overseen by the Federal Bureau of Land Management, are regularly used by local gun-owners for target shooting. My work is an examination of this culture and tradition, which is rooted in the concept of rugged individualism, the myth of the frontier, and a strict championing of the Second Amendment. Through the documentation of landscapes, artifacts, and individuals, I am considering the social, political, and ecological issues that intersect and complicate this once undesirable frontier.
These photographs were made while roaming the American West in search of true solitude. It's a search that's becoming more of a challenge as civilization spreads, so these dreamlike moments are reminders of how quiet the wilderness can be.
It might be close to a decade ago that Jacqueline Walters walked into RayKo Photo Center. At the time, she had a small box of prints tucked under her arm (as the years passed I noted that the dimensions of the portfolio box grew and grew). These first prints were images of a misty landscape buried in dense fog, but this wasn't San Francisco, her most recent home. This was a flat land with a creek like glass running through fields of lush grass with animals and rounded trees emerging from the mist. It's not only that the air is diffused and I have to squint my eyes to see better through the vapors. No, no, it's not just that holds me spellbound. It's also not that I can feel how the air cloaks itself around me, around the photographer, around the trees, how it sits on the ground, because despite its visual appearance, it's not heavy.
Hair Pieces explores the fickle relationship most have with their body hair. We consider some hair very desirable and grow and groom it with care, while we treat other hair as shameful and cover or remove it. Once hair has become disconnected from our bodies, we treat it with disgust, yet it has an archival, lasting presence that outlives the body and defies death and decay.
I first saw Laura Parker's work at Review LA. This was a portfolio review run by the great folks at Center who also organize Review Santa Fe. Review LA, which unfortunately no longer exists, happened concurrently with Photo LA, so it felt the entire city was submerged in photography. It may have been 9 years ago now that I saw Laura's work and yet it still resounds with me. Back then she showed images of horses and water printed through circles or what appeared to be lenses on large sheets of chromogenic paper, unfurling like scrolls with looking-glass glimpses of equine legs and chests appearing on the black paper. Laura had photographs of pot bottoms too (wonderfully textured and rusted and showing a life lived). She also did things with c-prints that I'd never seen done: she made rubbings of different objects.
Cromwell Schubarth was one of the first photographers to submit Polaroid images to the show. I had noted each time I saw him that he was wearing a different Polaroid camera around his neck.
Photographer Pamela Gentile first began photographing at local San Francisco music venues, including the Warfield and the Fillmore, and on tour with Chris Isaak. She soon becoming staff photographer and photo editor for the newspaper, SF Weekly. Gentile then focused her camera on her first love, the world of cinema.
As I grew older and began to question my religious teachings, I became more and more fascinated by the idea of Jesus and Christianity as a sociological or anthropological idea rather than a purely religious one based on faith.
Fauxliage documents the prolific disguised cell towers in the American West. I was initially drawn to their peculiar appearance; I then found it disconcerting how technology was clandestinely modifying our environment.
The moon drawings are a byproduct of my process of working on the moon alphabet. The latter I started while waiting for my visa. Originally, I was so preoccupied with validating my existence to this state, that I could not think about art or creating it.
The toy camera is a simple recording device with an emphasis on fun and imperfection. It allows me to be deeply absorbed in a far away place and time where creating new scenarios for the overlooked and insignificant becomes possible.
Stephen's painstakingly created dioramas take me into his world, just far enough, and then I am left to discover what has happened. Each artist has a way to express themselves and to translate their experience.
Peter Wiklund from Sweden started with photography in the mid 80's and has ever since experimented with a lot of techniques and cameras. Nowadays, he mainly uses different plastic and pinhole cameras. These tools add a moment of chance into his photography, something that is very important to him.
Akira Seo was born in Tokyo, Japan. After working as a director for a satellite broadcasting station for 4 years in Japan, he moved to the U.S.A. in 1997. He graduated with a Masters degree from the Brooks Institute of Photography in 2002. His fascination with art was cultivated from a young age as he grew up in a family of artists.
The soft focus and timeless quality is the perfect tool to reclaim his past and also to document the passing landscape as he traveled to and from his ailing father.
Becoming is a continuum of Rania Matar's work from the past several years, and it's a feast to view her multiple projects together. Through this collection of portraits, Matar leads us through many stages in the life of a woman. She photographs girls and young women from the US and from Lebanon, her country of origin. Matar notes, "These are not meant to be a comparison, on the contrary, as the lines blur quickly. Regardless of place, background and religion, girls that age everywhere seem united by similar feelings, aspirations and attitudes."
As a child growing up in Berkeley, California, I was fascinated by the late night passage of the once daily Amtrak Coast Starlight race through town for points North which opened up a list of questions I wanted to explore later in life.
There's this picture of a woman enveloped in steam, standing in a yard where just visible in the mist are big white chickens and a distant paddock and weeds taller than the woman who is earnestly plucking a dead chicken that is strung up by its feet. It's an image I can't stop looking at, its mysteries manifold. It has a force of its own, outside of the rest of the Beverly Conley's powerful documentary project about the Ozarks. There is something about this woman, age indeterminate, place almost mystical, ritual vague until told. Having lived all over the world, I thought perhaps this was the beginning of some ceremony, but no, it is life. Life in the Ozarks. I had the honor of including this image in a recent exhibition of documentary photography at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco.
Award-winning photographer Craig Varjabedian's new book The Light of Days Gone By was 45 years in the making. It celebrates with stunning imagery the journey of a photographer and the beautiful light he has witnessed and captured along the way. The Light of Days Gone By is a testament to Varjabedian's vision and years of hard work and will appeal to anyone who appreciates fine photography.
Varjabedian's photographs from the magnificent red hills of Ghost Ranch and gleaming white dunes of White Sands to more faraway places—from strong Native Americans to weathered cowboys and more—these expansive landscapes and intimate portraits are all presented in this beautifully printed book.
The 48 color and black & white photographs were carefully curated by Varjabedian's long time studio director Cindy Lane, to not only share the breadth of this photographer's career but also to reveal relationships between individual images and from the themes he has explored over the years. Complementing the images are two essays. Cindy Lane provides insight into the photographer's artistic vision and Myra Bullington looks at the importance of photographs to memory and shares an appreciation for the photographer and his work. The book is not signed.
Museum curator Catherine Whitney writes “Craig Varjabedian's photography captures, with arresting clarity, the ineffable whispers of time and spirit layered deep in New Mexico's cultural landscape. Through the artful combination of his compassionate eye and technical virtuosity, he evokes the past in the present and the holy in the everyday."
Craig Varjabedian is a photographer who explores the back roads of the American West, making pictures of the unique and quintessential. 45 years behind the camera, 14 books, 42 museum exhibitions and hundreds of fine art photographic prints all comprise a rich and rewarding career. His images share awe-inspiring stories of the land and the people who live on it—one photograph at a time.
British photographer Tariq Zaidi presents a fashion subculture of Kinshasa & Brazzaville: La Sape, Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes ("Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People"). Its followers are known as 'Sapeurs' ('Sapeuses' for women). Most have ordinary day jobs as taxi-drivers, tailors and gardeners, but as soon as they clock off they transform themselves into debonair dandies. Sashaying through the streets they are treated like rock stars - turning heads, bringing 'joie de vivre' to their communities and defying their circumstances. Traditionally passed down through the male line, many Congolese women and their children have recently begun donning designer suits. As Papa Wemba (1949-2016, Congolese singer and fashion icon who popularized Sape) once said: 'White people invented the clothes, but we make an art of it.'
Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public.
Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the world: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Latvia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Serbia. The subjects were identified as couples by that unmistakable look in the eyes of two people in love - impossible to manufacture or hide. They were also recognized by body language - evidence as subtle as one hand barely grazing another - and by inscriptions, often coded.
Included here are ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, cabinet cards, photo postcards, photo strips, photomatics, and snapshots - over 100 years of social history and the development of photography.
Loving will be produced to the highest standards in illustrated book publishing, The photographs - many fragile from age or handling - have been digitized using a technology derived from that used on surveillance satellites and available in only five places around the world. Paper and other materials are among the best available. And Loving will be manufactured at one of the world's elite printers. Loving, the book, will be up to the measure of its message in every way.
In these delight-filled pages, couples in love tell their own story for the first time at a time when joy and hope - indeed human connectivity - are crucial lifelines to our better selves. Universal in reach and overwhelming in impact, Loving speaks to our spirit and resilience, our capacity for bliss, and our longing for the shared truths of love.
Of all the firearms in the world owned by private citizens for non-military purposes, half are in the United States. Numerically they exceed the country’s population: 393 million for 372 million people. This is no coincidence, nor a matter of market alone: but of tradition and Constitutional guarantee. It is the history of the Second Amendment, ratified in 1791 to reassure the inhabitants of the newly independent territories. Two hundred and fifty years later, it is still entrenched in all aspects of American life. This book frames its current status through what are seen as four fundamental American values: Family, Freedom, Passion, Style.
Gabriele Galimberti has travelled throughout the USA, from New York City to Honolulu, to meet proud gun-owners and see their firearms collections. He has photographed people and guns in their homes and neighbourhoods, including locations where no one would expect to find such collections. These often unsettling portraits, along with the accompanying stories, provide an uncommon and unexpected insight into what today is really represented by the institution of the Second Amendment.
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