photo-eye Gallery artist Jo Whaley has an exhibition of The Theater of Insects opening at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University. The opening reception on April 8th runs from 7-9 pm. On April 10th the de Saisset Museum presents Jo Whaley in Conversation, a free event starting at 2pm. See Whaley's work at photo-eye Gallery here.

Anna 17, Winchester MA -- Rania Matar

The de Santos Gallery in Houston is hosting a exhibition of A Girl in Her Room by Photographer's Showcase artist Rania Matar, opening on April 2nd with a reception starting at 5:30pm. In this series, Matar photographs teenage girls in their bedrooms, capturing their transition from adolescent to adult in a space that they can control and express their personalities.  See this series on the Photographer's Showcase here.

From Release Form -- Jon Naiman

Open now, work from Photographer's Showcase artist Jon Naiman is featured in the exhibition for Photography Prize 2011 of the Canton of Bern, Switzerland at PhotoforumPasquArt in Biel. The show runs through May 29th. Naiman is exhibiting work from his Release Form series, images depicting players of the unusual and indigenous Swiss sport called Hornuss.

Jon Naiman's series Familiar Territory on the Photographer's Showcase investigates the relationship between people and the farm animals they keep. Naiman's images are portraits taken inside the home, domestic scenes but where the creatures that typically occupy the outside are invited inside with the family. See Naiman's images on the Photographer's Showcase here.

Arrangement in Green and Black#12 -- Aline Smithson

Photographer's Showcase artist Aline Smithson has three upcoming exhibitions. On April 8th, Smithson will have six images in Still.Life at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta. The show runs through May 28th. Also opening April 8th, LA: mecCA: Los Angeles as the Promised Land, a group show featuring five artists from Southern California at the Terrell Moore Gallery in LA. Smithson will show 11 images from her Unreal/Reality series. On April 9th at The Loft at Liz's in LA, About Face will show the entire series of Arrangement in Green and Black, Portrait of the Photographer's Mother. See this series, as well as Smithson's People I Don't Know series, here on the Photographer's Showcase.

Von Ferne and Magico
Photographs by Andreas Trogisch. Published by Peperoni Books, 2010.

Von Ferne and Magico
Reviewed by Colin Pantall
________________________
Andreas Trogisch Von Ferne and Magico
Photographs by Andreas Trogisch
Peperoni Books, 2010. Softcover. 36 pp., black & white illustrations throughout, 9-1/2x12".

Von Ferne is the first of an eventual six volumes of black and white photographs by Andreas Trogisch, a German graphic designer and photographer. Von Ferne means From Afar and consists of 30 pictures of black and white pictures taken in Eastern Europe in the 1980s.

The first thing you notice is the design. It is lovely - White Album clean with only the photographer's name and the book title on the white paper front cover. Open the book and the pictures start. There are 30 of them, one to each numbered page, but no text or page breaks of any kind.

Von Ferne, by Andreas Trogisch. Published by Peperoni Books, 2010.

A picture of a child, a priest and a dog is followed by a decrepit road, a rickety fence and a piece of graffiti that is reminiscent of both an eye and a vagina. A man walks the street, a telephone pole casts a hard shadow on a roadside wall and another man gets off his bicycle in a sunlit corner of a sunlit street.

Von Ferne, by Andreas Trogisch. Published by Peperoni Books, 2010.

The street ephemera carry echoes of Evans, Frank, Cartier-Bresson, Gossage, Adams, Friedlander and Moriyama, but the tone is softened towards the end of the book. Here Mitteleuropa comes to the fore. Trees, weeds and a comfortably upholstered armchair add a somnolent air, while the children's playground and the very black cat suggest a life beyond the frame. It is all very mysterious, perhaps too mysterious, a European tour in 30 styles of black and white. If that's the case, then the book is quite an achievement, a street version of Jens Liebchen's DL 07 Stereotypes of War. But I might be completely wrong on that and the book could be something completely different.

The second book, Magico is as beautiful in design as its partner-book but instead of 31 pictures there are 28 with two blank pages at the back.

Magico, by Andreas Trogisch. Published by Peperoni Books, 2010.

The motifs of street debris dominate the book, but this time there is a more global feel to the pictures. Stairways, mannequins, harsh shadows of tufted palms and a breeze block wall make up the visual vocabulary and texture of the early part of the book. A man in a Stetson closes his hands around something on a night-dark street, a pair of severed pigeon wings line a tram rail, evidence of roadkill recently past, and ladders, more mannequins and a final shadow of the photographer complete the picture.

Magico, by Andreas Trogisch. Published by Peperoni Books, 2010.

Magico is more disjointed than Von Ferne, there is less sense of place and the stream-of-consciousness-street-photography that Trogisch selects is somehow harder. Trogisch's travels take him to places with skewed perspectives and an uninhabited  land, where tracks, shadows and traces are the only evidence of humans passing through. It's an unnatural world of dark shadows and harsh light, US, German, French and Japanese sensibilities rolled into one overarching package. What it means is anyone's guess. It is up to the viewer to decide as, pictures aside, Trogisch is not going to give us any clues. It looks good and is stylish. Perhaps that is enough?


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Colin Pantall is a UK-based writer, photographer and teacher - he is currently a visiting lecturer in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales. His work has been exhibited in London, Amsterdam, Manchester and Rome and his Sofa Portraits will be published as a handmade book early next year. Further thoughts of Colin Pantall can be found on his blog, which was listed as one of Wired.com’s favourites earlier this year.

Currently on Display is our on-going weekly feature investigating the individual works that are included in the show currently on display at photo-eye Gallery. These artist features include the images selected for this exhibition as well as the artists' thoughts and inspirations behind the individual image or images.

The featured images this week are: Eva, La Porge, France 2003 by Jock Sturges, Torn Poster, Road to Villa Real, 1995 and Donkey Grazing, Road to Miranda, 1995 by Mark Klett and August 25th, Spring Bamboo Boat by Don Hong-Oai.

Jock Sturges

Eva, La Porge, France 2003 by Jock Sturges

"A photographer with a camera, a model without clothes.

To my way of thinking, if the photographer speaks by suggesting, controlling, imposing pose, the model is not heard. The photographer's ideas are heard. Seen. But how much truth is there? We all have a relentless appetite for truth after all. We want to know: what is true, what is false, what is honest, what is deceit – or the lesser crime of conceit.

To my way of thinking, if the photographer accepts what the model does naturally then the image is by definition at the very least far closer to the truth. The model is heard. Visible. Is this easy? No.

Relationships take time and accrued trust – and trust does not happen in a blink. It coalesces from shared experience over time. When first we meet we are always a cipher to one another. As the years pass, that mask is worn away by experience and we come to know one another. One does not trust strangers with the truth of self after all. This is only conferred on those whom we have come to know mean us no harm. Who respect and even love us.

What truth is here in this little portrait of Eva, made in a canal in Southwestern France? She is naked because she and her family are naturists and spend their summers in a resort dedicated to the absence of shame. So her deshabille is honest, natural to her circumstance. But this is only the second year I had worked with her so there remains a natural wariness in the turn of her head, the angle of her eyes. I saw her look back at me as she played with her hair as it glided through her hand and asked her quickly, ardently, not to move. She did not.

As the years and my relationship with her and her family progressed she would become one of the best models with whom I have ever worked. She, the truth of her, is remarkable, my luck in knowing her enormous." -Jock Sturges, Seattle, 2011

See more images from Jock Sturges here.


Mark Klett

Torn Poster, Road to Villa Real, 1995 by Mark Klett

"In 1995 I was asked by the Portuguese Center for Photography to photograph the Douro River area in Portugal, the place where Port wine grapes are grown. I had a rental car and spent over a week on the road driving and exploring this area of northern Portugal. I saw this torn poster on a tree and stopped. I don't know what the poster was advertising, parts of it were gone, but I liked the jagged edge the woman appeared to be looking at."

Donkey Grazing, Road to Miranda, 1995 by Mark Klett

"I was driving towards the town of Miranda and I saw this open field with a donkey in the middle just standing there, very still. The grain had been cut recently and there were several animals grazing on the stubble. In the background a small stand of trees stood out like a brow.

For both pictures I was using a hand held camera that used Polaroid film, the old type 665 that gave both a negative and a positive. After I made the exposures I processed each negative on-site, and put the negatives in a bucket of solution to clear and for storage. Each night in whatever hotel I ended up in I'd wash the negatives and hang them up to dry." -Mark Klett

See more work by Mark Klett here.


Don Hong-Oai (1929-2004)

August 25th, Spring Bamboo Boat by Don Hong-Oai

Mr. Don was born in Canton, China in 1929, but spent most of his life in Saigon, Vietnam. As a young boy in Saigon he was apprenticed to a photography studio. He stayed in Vietnam through the war, but fled by boat to California in 1979. He lived in San Francisco's Chinatown where he had a small darkroom to create his photographs. While living the US he returned to China every few years to make new negatives. Only in the last few years of his life was his work discovered by a wider public, and he was kept very busy making prints for collectors across the US and elsewhere. Mr. Don passed away in June 2004.

The photographs of Don Hong-Oai are made in a unique style of photography, which can be considered Asian pictorialism. This method of adapting a Western art for Eastern purposes probably originated in the 1940s in Hong Kong. One of its best-known practitioners was the great master Long Chin-San (who died in the 1990s at the age of 104) with whom Don Hong-Oai studied. With the delicate beauty and traditional motifs of Chinese painting (birds, boats, mountains, etc.) in mind, photographers of this school used more than one negative to create a beautiful picture, often using visual allegories. Realism was not a goal.

Don Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to work in this manner. He is also arguably the best. He was honored by Kodak, Ilford and at Fotokina in West Germany and was a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art in Switzerland and the Chinatown Photographic Society.

See more work from Don Hong-Oai here.


Please contact me if you would like additional information or would like to receive email updates about Jock Sturges, Mark Klett or Don Hong-Oai.

Anne Kelly, Associate Director photo-eye Gallery


*Next week's blog post will conclude the currently on display series. The featured artists next week will be Jamey Stillings and Edward Ranney.

Read the first five posts:
PART ONE - Jo Whaley and David Trautrimas
PART TWO - Tom Chambers and Laurie Tümer
PART THREE - Hiroshi Watanabe, Michael Levin and Julie Blackmon
PART FOUR –Zöe Zimmerman, James Pitts and Kevin O'Connell
PART FIVE – Nick Brandt and Raymond Meeks

My Wild Places, Photographs by Luca Campigotto.
Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

 My Wild Places
Reviewed by Daniel W. Coburn
_________________________________
Luca Campigotto My Wild Places
Photogarphs by Luca Campigotto.
Hatje Cantz, 2011. Hardbound. 144 pp., illustrated throughout, 13-1/2x11-1/4".

Luca Campigotto's landscape photographs initially entice the viewer with a technically brilliant description of the desolate. Each photograph is pristine and concise in its representation of the landscape, but most lack any defining characteristic that would reveal its exact whereabouts, reinforcing the concept of a homogenous geography. By discriminately choosing locations and carefully framing the image, Campigotto is able to completely abandon an exotic representation of "the other," instead creating a tangible representation of a world that isn’t easily divided by vast geographical or superficial boundaries. Campigotto's My Wild Places intelligently presents a landscape that each of us can comprehend imaginatively and subconsciously.

The key to Campigotto's success lies in his ability to break from the paradigm of what is expected from a contemporary landscape photographer. He ignores the impulse to create an aesthetically cohesive body of work by presenting a succession of singular images that encourage a psychological dialogue. One is forced to contemplate how each image is connected to the previous in terms of its history, its aesthetic and its sublime presence, and by choosing to sequence the pictures in a manner that encourages this type of discourse, he completely abandons the notion of narrative. Black and white images are juxtaposed against those of vibrant color. An image made near the artist's home in Italy is presented subsequent to a photograph made on another continent. Campigotto carefully points at differences and similarities in these environments, steering clear of obvious juxtapositions that might have the viewer turning pages too quickly. He provides a universal experience devoid of the expected distractions. One is not tempted by the allure of travel to an exotic location or confronted with a heavy-handed political agenda. Instead, these images plead for an imaginative and emotional response from the onlooker.

My Wild Places, by Luca Campigotto. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

 A majority of Campigotto's photographs lack any type of social commentary. One exception depicts an arid landscape inscribed with a web of pathways carved by the recreational use of motorcycles and off-road vehicles. One doesn't immediately realize that the riders are present due to an overwhelming scale. They are represented as minuscule and irrelevant perpetrators, dwarfed by the expansive tangling of lines and patterns carelessly scrawled over the landscape. Another image depicts the ruins of a building, seemingly war torn and dilapidated. However, there are no flags, nor any indication that this place represents a specific nation or political faction. This ambiguity points the viewer toward an implied narrative that is powerful and engaging. A majority of these photos lack any indication of civilization, showing only vast sprawls of ground, most composed with no focal point in an attempt to suspend the viewer's eye in a state of unrest. Themes of isolation and despair communicated via the landscape transport the viewer beyond the superficial representation of place.

My Wild Places, by Luca Campigotto. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

My Wild Places, by Luca Campigotto. Published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.

 One of my few criticisms of this book lies in its reproduction of color. The over saturation of hue in several of the photos leaves me wondering if this was the artist's intent or a distracting artifact exaggerated by the printing process. Several of the images look a bit over manipulated in terms of their contrast, which makes me question whether this volume accurately represents Campigotto's artistic vision. A photograph that is easily identified as Easter Island seems contradictory to the artist's intent and would be my only critique in terms of editing. The book is handsome and well bound, including over 60 plates and 3 thoughtful essays that carefully analyze and expand upon the complex nature of the work.—Daniel W. Coburn

 

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Daniel W. Coburn is a contemporary photographer whose visually arresting images have garnered national and international praise. Selections from his body of work have been featured in prestigious exhibitions, including Top 40 at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the National Competition at SOHO Photo Gallery in New York. His photographic works are held in the permanent collections of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, the Mariana Kistler-Beach Museum of Art, the Mulvane Museum of Art and the Moraine Park Museum. Daniel has published two monographs of his work: Between Earth and Sky and Rediscovering Paradise. His most recent body of work, OBJECT:AFFECTION, represents a photographic study on the process of self-objectification. Coburn received his BFA with an emphasis in photography from Washburn University and is currently studying photography as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico.

We are pleased to welcome a new portfolio from Showcase artist Hiroyasu Matsui -- Labyrinth

Hiroyasu Matsui -- Labyrinth#04

Hiroyasu Matsui has been featured on the Showcase for a number of years and it's been fascinating to see his work grow in complexity as time progresses. In his newest body of work, Labyrinth, Matsui continues a theme first explored in his series Untitled which drew inspiration from the myth of the Minotaur. Conceptually layered (not unlike Matsui's process), Labyrinth is a series depicting an unending city, largely featureless structures made up of edges that seem to perpetually connect to yet another edifice. Matusi's creations are based on the elaborate overlapping design of fortress cities like Shibam in Yemen and the theories of architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, but also take inspiration from myths and mathmatics. He presents a cityscape that is familar, but unlike any in existence.

Thematic parallels to Escher can be drawn, but these images subtly depict the unreal. The dimensionality of these spaces is hard to parse, shadows fall unexpectedly and the edges of buildings do not always lead to where one would have guessed. They are cunning in their complexity. Walls and stairs continue out of the frame building a sense of impossible endlessness, yet they are also claustrophobic, complicated compostions that draw the viewer inward. Though the images show the exterior of buildings, these spaces feel as if they exist in the interior of something much larger. I am reminded of the book House of Leaves where an ominious, dark and seemingly limitless interior space provides a metaphor for the mind. These spaces too entice similar connections. A dream-like interior maze, still and lifeless though an apparent host of action or occupants -- something -- though perhaps delayed indefinitely.

Hiroyasu Matusi constructing a photograph

Masterfully articulated, Matsui's images are clearly rendered, though it may not be clear just how. Matsui's images arise from an unusual multi-step process he calls light sculpture. They are three dimensional forms created in two dimensions, involving a computer to plan the composition and generate multiple transparency masks which are then layered on a light box and shot with a camera. It is this technique which creates the unique look of the images -- the velvety grays and blacks, sharp lines and soft gradients, presented optimally in silver gelatin prints.

Hiroyasu Matsui -- Labyrinth#11

 View Matsui's Labyrinth, Untitled and Cubes series on the Photographer's Showcase here.

For more information please contact photo-eye Gallery Associate Director Anne Kelly by email or by calling the gallery at (505) 988-5152 x202

Currently on Display is our on-going weekly feature investigating the individual works that are included in the show currently on display at photo-eye Gallery. These artist features include the images selected for this exhibition as well as the artists' thoughts and inspirations behind the individual image or images.

The featured images this week are: Abandoned Ostrich Egg, Amboseli 2007, by Nick Brandt and, August 25th, 2006 and Fallen Tree, 1996 by Raymond Meeks.

Nick Brandt

Nick Brandt -- Abandoned Ostrich Egg, Amboseli 2007

"One October afternoon, I found this ostrich egg abandoned on the lake bed in Amboseli. The sight struck such a chord in me that I stopped in my tracks and immediately set up the camera on the tripod in front of the egg, turned it in the direction of where the sun would eventually set,and waited several hours until it did. The image seemed the appropriate final photo in the second book - A Shadow Falls - of my trilogy, partly because of its ambiguity. Is it an image of hope or despair, the end of the world or some kind of hopeful new beginning? However the viewer may choose to interpret the photo, the photo sets up the final book that I am currently working on in the trilogy, with attendant darker vision." -Nick Brandt

See more work by Nick Brandt here.


Raymond Meeks

Raymond Meeks -- August 25th, 2006

"Blue/green and silent."  -Raymond Meeks

Raymond Meeks -- Fallen Tree, 1996

 "I was driving towards the pine ridge reservation in South Dakota, the home of the Oglala Sioux nation and the birthplace of Leonard Peltier, who was convicted for aiding and abetting the execution style murder of two F.B.I agents during a 1975 shootout on the reservation. The indictment has been controversial, the subject of a film by Robert Redford and Michael Apted, Incident at Oglala, which portrays Peltier as a political prisoner.

I had just come from the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas where I’d made a few portraits of Leonard Peltier for a magazine commission. The fallen tree, partially submerged in this dried, frozen river bed, seemed a fitting metaphor to accompany the story I was illustrating." -Raymond Meeks

See more work by Raymond Meeks here.


Please contact me if you would like additional information or would like to receive email updates about Nick Brandt or Raymond Meeks.

Anne Kelly, Associate Director photo-eye Gallery


*Next week's featured artists will be Jock Sturges, Mark Klett and Don Hong-Oai

Read the first four posts:
PART ONE - Jo Whaley and David Trautrimas
PART TWO - Tom Chambers and Laurie Tümer
PART THREE - Hiroshi Watanabe, Michael Levin and Julie Blackmon
PART FOUR –Zöe Zimmerman, James Pitts and Kevin O’Connell

Emmett, Photographs by Ron Jude.
Published by The Ice Plant, 2010.

Emmett
Reviewed by George Slade
______________________________________
Ron Jude Emmett
Photographs by Ron Jude
The Ice Plant, 2010. Softcover. 80 pp., 40 color and 9 black & white illustrations, 6-3/4x9-1/2".


What do drag racing funny cars, chopping wood, lens flares, horror movies, mountains and woods, and groovy eighties haircuts have in common? Judging from Ron Jude's photographs and the title he's given this enigmatic compilation, the common denominator must be Emmett. This book, while intimate and diaristic, is also cinematic in scope and emotional suggestiveness. It could be the storyboard for a movie; maybe Heart Like a Wheel meets Brokeback Mountain by way of The Deer Hunter? An elegiac air of love and loss is palpable, even some of the inevitable tragedy of Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves.

I do enjoy the suggestiveness, and the challenge of constructing a narrative around the visual crumbs present in Jude's work. Is Emmett someone known, a friend captured in a set of photographs made during various teenage adventures and now being presented in recognition or memoriam? Or is this a random collection of anonymous snapshots found in a box at a garage sale? The open-endedness is intriguing, and narrator Jude plays his hand close to the vest.

Emmett, by Ron Jude. Published by The Ice Plant, 2010.

The mystery of landscape offsets the automotive passion. The woods loom and threaten, though they also seem to be the stage for rapture. There's a queasiness that comes in part from discoloration (time's damage to our drugstore-processed memories), in part from threatened horror movie faces shot from screens, in part from the repeated, close-up attention paid to the main character, an amiable-looking young blonde man.

Emmett, by Ron Jude. Published by The Ice Plant, 2010.

And, finally, the book closes (after an uncommon series of five blank pages) with two disturbing images of a muddy street in front of some low, rustic buildings. The first seems willfully distant, though from what isn't perceptible until the page is turned and what appears to be a rushing flash flood of whitewater seems to be rounding the bend and entering the picture field. The point of view changes between the two images; was the photographer running away? Are we experiencing manipulation, or the last frames before a young photographer, drag racing fan, and nature-lover was inundated in a small mountain village? Whatever, the ambiguity is Hitchcock thick, and we are left with "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" as Winston Churchill once described Russia.

Emmett, by Ron Jude. Published by The Ice Plant, 2010.

One could, I suppose, Google search this and resolve the story. Or read, and read into, the closing copyright page acknowledgments; are the quotes from Sartre and Pink Floyd just red herrings? And who is this shiny Kenny W. character? Sometimes knowing the answers makes the puzzle less interesting. Project your own film into Emmett's pages, or just let Jude's image stream carry you away.—GEORGE SLADE


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GEORGE SLADE is the program manager and curator at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, and the editor of the PRC’s magazine Loupe. He maintains an on-line presence at the PRC’s blog, here on photo-eye, and at re:photographica. Occasionally his writing even appears in print.

Virgins by Aline Smithson
featured in the 2011 International Plastic Camera Show

Photographer's Showcase artist Aline Smithson is keeping busy with a number of exhibitions. Currently on display, Smithson has several photographs in the LQQK Portrait Show at Hous Projects in Los Angeles and an image featured in the 2011 International Plastic Camera Show at the Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, on display through April 30th. Opening March 24th, some of Smithson's images will be included in The Pleasure Is All Mine, an exhibition about happiness curated by Elizabeth Barragan and Kathleen Mahoney-Cobbat at the Finch & Ada Gallery in New York. Smithson will be present at an Afternoon with the Artists on April 2nd from 3-5pm. On March 26th, Smithson's work can be seen in The Next: LA Photographers 2011, an exhibition of 11 emerging Los Angeles photographers. The opening reception runs from 7-10pm. See Smithson's work on the Photographer's Showcase here.

Diver by Bee Flowers

The National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow is just finishing up an exhibition entitled Seeing Sound, a group show featuring a photo installation from Bee Flowers. Called Diver, Flower's describes his piece as a musical score in visual images, the accompanying music, presented on head phones, providing a possible reading of the collection of images.

Flower's work on the Photographer's Showcase, Megastructure, investigates the urban spaces of Russia, largely composed of exceedingly similar concrete structures and arranged in such a way that well achieved city planning appears to be a happy accident. Taken during the winter, the images are striking in their colorlessness -- almost entirely in shades of pale, though captured on color film.

Dick Sanders from his Black Angeles portfolio

Congratulations to Dick Sanders, whose work has been selected for exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO, in the upcoming show Human + Being curated by Phil Borges. The exhibition runs from March 25th to April 23rd with a public reception on April 1st from 6-9pm. Sanders will present images from his new Black Angeles body of work. Sanders is a skilled portrait artist, setting up on the street and using passers-by as his subjects. You can see some of Sanders other wonderful portrait projects here on the Photographer's Showcase.

Michael Donnor

 The CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY is opening a show of work by Michael Donnor on March 25th with an opening reception from 7-10pm. When In My Little Room: A Visual Exploration will feature work from four of Donnor's portfolios: Silent Moan, We Fall Down Through the Rabbit Hole, March Across My America and All Before Upon Awakening. The eerie images from Donnor's Silent Moan portfolio can be seen on the Photographer's Showcase here. Donnor consistanly presents a dream-like vision, his images always darkly-fascinating, though perhaps also quietly frightening.

What Can We Believe Where?, Photographs by Robert Adams.
Published by Yale University Press, 2010.

What Can We Believe Where?
Reviewed by Tom Leininger
________________________________
Robert Adams What Can We Believe Where?
Photographs by Robert Adams, with an afterword by Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds.
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2010. Softcover. 120 pp., 110 tritone illustrations, 7x9-3/4".

Robert Adams is one of the most influential photographers of the 20th Century. He is prolific with both the image and written word. What Can We Believe Where? brings together his best known works of the last 40 years into one book. It is more than just a best of collection. This is Adams on Adams, he selected the images for the book himself from the holdings at Yale University.

Adams also helps the reader understand the artistic framework from which he has worked for so long. In the forward, Adams writes of the three questions he asks himself when photographing: "What does our geography compel us to believe? What does it allow us to believe? And what obligations, if any, follow from our beliefs?" These questions are both a challenge and guide to the reader.

What Can We Believe Where?, by Robert Adams. Published by Yale University Press, 2010.

Adams' early work posses the voice of a fully formed photographer. Much like the first photographers who traveled west to record the landscape, Adams shows us the modern day manifest destiny of the suburbs. It is presented in clear terms. It is the life he lived and he shows what it looked like. could be read as a critique, but it is more of an insider's view. What is the reader to believe? Where else would these people go? These later day settlers needed homes and the suburbs were built. Adams shows us a place that was once in transition.

What Can We Believe Where?, by Robert Adams. Published by Yale University Press, 2010.

 Toward the end of the book his current work from the West Coast shows us a land that is still in transition. These images are a reminder of what the original American western landscape was about, a recording of facts for those back East who may never see it in person. Adams is more pointed in his intentions by asking the reader to what obligations we might have to this geography. Is Adams suggesting that his work is a reaction to the land and not just a documentation of it?

What Can We Believe Where?, by Robert Adams. Published by Yale University Press, 2010.

 More books need to be made like this one. This book is well printed and due to its size, travels well. The writing helps the reader understand the work, without taking the mystery from it. Overall, this is the one of the strongest books I have seen in a long time. Adams is a master of his medium this book celebrates it.—Tom Leininger

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Tom Leininger is a photographer and educator based in Denton, Texas. He received his MFA in photography from the University of North Texas. Prior to that he was a newspaper photographer in Indiana. His work can be found at http://tomleininger.net. 

New to the Photographer's Showcase -- Natural History by Traer Scott

Pandas, 2010 -- Traer Scott

The museum diorama has been garnering attention from a number of photographers recently, but Traer Scott's take on the subject stands out. Natural History is a series of curious images, scenes from natural history museums across the United States depicting not just the carefully presented dioramas that are always a huge attraction, but also the world that buzzes around these infinitely still scenes. The first of these images taken by Scott was a mistake -- a reflection of her husband appeared when photographing a diorama of an ostrich. But a few months later, Scott began attending natural history museums looking for just this occurrence -- when the human world outside interacts with the artificial wilderness inside on the surface of the glass that divides them.

They are spooky images, though what is happening is quite instantly recognizable when taking a closer look. We've all caught these moments in our sight, but they are typically fleeting -- distractions solved by an adjustment of the eye. But by focusing on them, suspending them in photographic time, these brief interactions speak to the complexity of our human relationship with animals and nature. The animals are frozen, the images of their living admirers just ghostly reflections on the glass that separates these intricate facsimiles of the wild from the well-planned and maintained museums in which they are contained. With the humans trapped in mere refelction, a role reversal takes place -- it is the animals who have more substance, stuffed and stuck in their posed post-mortem positions. Though alive, the humans assume the translucent spectral form, haunting these dead creatures in the fabricated approximations of the environments in which they met their ends.

But still there is something more, a personal element resonates. Scott has captured something typically hidden by the spectators orientation towards the diorama -- the expressions of awe and fascination. These creatures and their manufactured worlds are simply mesmerizing, and while humans are largely responsible for the demise of the species pictured, we are also captivated by them. Caught in the mirror of glass is an intimate human moment -- the private gaze from viewer to animal, one that is not meant to be seen by anyone but the creature who cannot return it. -- Sarah Bradley

Rinoceras -- Traer Scott

Scott came to the Photographer's Showcase as selected from PhotoLucida's Critical Mass Top 50. View her Natural History portfolio on the Photographer's Showcase here.

For more information please contact photo-eye Gallery Associate Director Anne Kelly by email or by calling the gallery at (505) 988-5152 x202

 Rome-based Punctum Books publishes a diverse number of titles, but also has a distinct focus on Italian related works -- whether that be books by Italian photographers like Marco Delogu and Giuliano Matteucci, whose Ecclesia is a quite and powerful monograph looking at the enduring markers of colonization through missionary-erected churches in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali -- or studies of Italy itself, currently offering a group of titles on The Eternal City.

from the book Roma, Citta Di Mezzo

from the book A Question of Time

Guy Tillim's Roma, Citta Di Mezzo is a lovely accordion fold book showing modern-day Rome depicted as a living city, not an icon. Selected as a Best Book of 2009, it was also reviewed in photo-eye Magazine by Charles Dee Mitchell, which you can read here. A Question of Time investigates Rome as a place of enduring artistic inspiration, merging photographic images of days long past with images from today. The book portrays a before and after of sorts, the present living within the past as shown through a collection of photos chosen from the American Academy Photographic Archive and images of the city taken by a number of contemporary photographers. A Question of Time highlights both the shifting and lasting features of the city, but also how we choose to see it over time. Featuring photographs by Tim Davis, Marco Delogue, Veronique Ellena, Juan Fabuel, Brad Farwell, Agnes Geoffray, Graciela Iturbide, Giuliano Matteucci, Matthew Monteith, Luca Nostri, Tod Papageorge, Leonie Purchas and David Spero, the book also contains a significant number of essays presented in English and Italian.

Opera Citta by Tod Papageorge

The forthcoming Opera Citta by Tod Papageorge began with an invitation from the Commissione di Roma 2010 and some suggestions from Marco Delogu. What Papageorge came up with was unexpected -- he deviated quickly from Delogu's concept to capture different view of Rome, a closer look at details, and without grandeur typical of depictions of the city.

Quota Mille steps outside Rome, showing a world far away from the modern city, the inhabitants of the rural Matese mountains. They are sensitive pictures, showing in saturated colors a slower way of life, quite, simple and agrarian. There is something timeless about this world, though if the deeply lined faces of the subjects of these pictures is any indication, it is, perhaps, a way of life that may be aging out. Read more about Quota Mille (and Ecclesia) in our February 19th Newsletter.

from the book Quota Mille

Several other books of note: Graciela Iturbide's El Bano de Frida, spare yet emotional resonant images of the bathroom of the great painter Frida Kahlo. Pieter Hugo's Messina/Musina continues his extensive investigation of Africa, this time focusing on this native South Africa. Musina is the northernmost town in South Africa, on the border of tumultious Zimbabwe. Recently renamed Musina to correct a colonial misspelling of the name of the people who once lived in the region, Musina, like the name, is a town in transition.

Four Equestrian Studies by Marco Delogu is an interesting take on the horse and its representation in art. The double-sided book is divided into four portions. Opened from the white side, the images start with The White Studio -- striking full-body portraits taken in a white-back-dropped studio. The Black Studio images follow, intimate close-ups of the horses long faces, their bodies lost in the blackness of the background. The book shifts at the next section, The Fresco by Cavalier d'Arpino. First depicting the entire painting, each subsequent page focuses on the rendering of the horses in the battle scene, phenomenal for their expressiveness, particularly in the eyes. The book transitions again after this series of images, switching to the Bronze Horse from Vicolo delle Palme. This portion of the book can also been the beginning of the study, and features its own cover on the reverse side of the book.

from the book Four Equestrian Studies

See books published by Punctum here.

Currently on Display is our on-going weekly feature investigating the individual works that are included in the show currently on display at photo-eye Gallery. These artist features include the images selected for this exhibition as well as the artists' thoughts and inspirations behind the individual image or images.

The featured images this week are: Origin, Bound and Biologique by Zöe Zimmerman, Crushed Bottles, Sayulita, Mexico by James Pitts and Observations on Lenticular, 1996 and Road and Crop Lines, 2001 by Kevin O’Connell.

Zöe Zimmerman

Origin by Zöe Zimmerman

"Simply, I think we all came from Africa originally. So, this young woman represents the first woman. An African Eve. The origin. The nest is also a symbol of our origins or birthplace, but really it is included in the image because it mirrors the spiral of her hair and I'm a sucker for symmetry."
-Zöe Zimmerman

Bound by Zöe Zimmerman

"Following loosely in the tradition of symbolic meaning in the elements of still life, I invent my own aesthetic vocabulary. In this image, the tulip represents beauty and the twine and box and pins are a depiction of the desire to own that beauty or contain it or capture it. This picture is a metaphor for what I feel is my task as a photographer. It is a discussion about the attempt to capture beauty." -Zöe Zimmerman

 Biologique by Zöe Zimmerman

"OK. Bluntly. This image is about sex. Really. Look at it. You need more of a map? The seed in the box is a spermatozoa in its own dark universe and up above it is a plethora of... vessels. Or choices. Or potentials. Or accidents. Or fantasies. Or hopes. Really." -Zöe Zimmerman








 See more images from Zöe Zimmerman here.



 James Pitts

Crushed Bottles, Sayulita, Mexico by James Pitts

 "What interests me is documenting and juxtaposing marks casually left by man. These semi-identical, multitudinous images are everywhere, but draw minimal attention. The grid panel of Sixteen Crushed Plastic Bottles Sayulita, Mexico, is one example of my attempt to expose veritable urban artifacts."
 -James Pitts
 
See more images from James Pitts here.


Kevin O’Connell

Road and Crop Lines (2001) by Kevin O'Connell

 "These pictures were made near the beginning of a journey that was to become (unbeknownst to me at the time) a lifelong obsession with vastness and the experience of being on the Great Plains. Then, my pictures were filled with mark making and were heavily influenced by artists such as Rothko and Newman. While somewhat abstract, these pictures rendered in the delicacy of platinum on paper, were intended to speak to some of the primal responses that could arise when navigating that wonderful sea of grass - awe, serenity, isolation, and fear. Today, my images continue with many of these themes in the context of the contemporary Western landscape." -Kevin O'Connell

Observations on Lenticular (1996) by Kevin O'Connell

See more images from Kevin O'Connell here.


Please contact me if you would like additional information or would like to receive email updates about Zöe Zimmerman, James Pitts or Kevin O'Connell.

Anne Kelly, Associate Director photo-eye Gallery


*Next week's featured artists will be Nick Brandt and Raymond Meeks.

Read the first three posts:
PART ONE - Jo Whaley and David Trautrimas
PART TWO - Tom Chambers and Laurie Tümer
PART THREE - Hiroshi Watanabe, Michael Levin and Julie Blackmon