Plane of Focus
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Walker Pickering’s “Nearly West” Explores Where South Meets West in Texas
Kudzu from Walker Pickering’s Nearly West, 2010Walker Pickering’s Nearly West hovers somewhere amongst Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Stephen Shore. He seems to be channeling several eras of Shore all at once: the tight, sharp interiors feel like they could be in American Surfaces and the carefully composed exteriors could be right out of Uncommon Places.
Bulb from Walker Pickering’s Nearly West, 2011
Pickering uses Frank’s repeated symbols, with vintage cars and worn out store fronts showing up throughout the series just as Frank honed in on jukeboxes and the flag. The road trip is there, too, but full of places that feel empty and without a human presence.
Meal from Walker Pickering’s Nearly West, 2009
Pickering seems to be following Evans in a geographic and aesthetic sense. Many of the images feel like he’s revisited the same places as Evans, to give us an update, or to show us that there’s no need for an update, everything is still the same. Nothing seems new or even young in Pickering’s images. They almost seem like static monuments to themselves, a testament to a past that has been fading away since before it was built.
(Source: fototazo.com)
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SONO, Chicago, 2012
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Emil Kozak: “Its basically walking until I get scared, or can’t go any further…take the photo and go back…”
46°52’31.2038”N 9°52’28.331”E from his series “Big Black Nothing”Emil Kozak has an awesome design studio (and blog for that matter), but I recently discovered his wonderfully creative photography. This guy has an eye for awesome, I’m telling you.
41°26’33.0479”N 2°8’26.1067”E from the series “Big Black Nothing”With “Big Black Nothing” Kozak says he’s exploring boundaries by following one simple rule: walk until you get scared, then take a photo of that point. I love this series, partly because it totally captures the vibe of walking around alone at night. Areas that seem safe by day — and are almost surely safe by night — become terrifying as soon as you’ve heard one too many strange noises. Or, really, for me, as soon as my mind has had enough time to run through the terrifying possibilities that the night contains. That’s when it is time to turn around.
38°49’50.1085”N 0°8’54.7465”E from the series “Big Black Nothing”I’d like to see the map of the boundaries Kozak is exploring, with little fingers for each path he has taken out into the darkness before turning around. Or perhaps the boundaries are purely psychological as Kozak tests his own limits of comfort.
(Source: booooooom.com)
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[T]he most coherent thing about the show is William A Ewing’s catalogue essay, which begins by stating the obvious – “Photography is a very strange place to be right now, either inside looking out (the producer) or outside looking in (the public)” – then takes us on a humorous journey though the various continents that currently make up “the entire World of Photography”: Commercia, Documentaria, Amateuria, Artistica and Artcontemporanea. As Ewing rightly points out, these continents view each other across vast oceans of mutual disdain. Many commercial photographers, for instance, think documentary photographers are hopelessly old-fashioned, while the latter view the former as corporate whores in thrall to the filthy lucre of advertising. Both watch the continent of Amateuria, “a continent so vast it has never been properly mapped, never mind explored”, with a mixture of pity and contempt that cannot quite conceal their nervousness.
Sean O’Hagan’s review of Saatchi’s Out of Focus, a new show of contemporary photography.(Source: Guardian)
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Figures, Movement, and Transitions in Chen Jiagang’s “Smog City”
“Dazed, Confused (Chongqing) （重庆)”Three things immediately struck me about Chen Jiagang’s “Smog City”.
- The images are formally stunning. The compositions are impeccable, with a great sense of depth and space.
- The use of figures not only provides a great sense of scale and space, but…
- The blurriness of the figures (which I imagine is an intended consequence of long exposures) takes the images into a whole new realm of meaning for me.
“Chemcial Plant in Changshou （长寿)”The blurriness of the figures does several things for me. It makes them seem all the more fragile — people are the delicate inhabitants in these landscapes full of hard edges and decaying infrastructure. In “Dazed, Confused” up above the blurriness reiterates the uneasiness of the title: the figures seem to want to leave the image but are nonetheless anchored there, unable to escape.
“On The Other Side Of The Water (Chongqing) （重庆)”More than anything else, though, I read the blurriness as a passage of time, as if even within these monumental landscapes everything is actually in a period of transition. People are come and going. Infrastructure is being torn down and rebuilt. It’s as if, somewhere in the haziness that permeates the images, the past and future are in conflict and everyone is unsure to react until there is a clear winner.
“Smog City” is but one of many great series of work from Chen Jiagang. I recommend exploring them all.
http://www.chenjiagang.com/enindex.aspx
(Source: 500photographers.blogspot.com)
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Paul Yem’s Night Photography in a “Surrogate World”
All images (c) Paul Yem, from his series Surrogate World
By now you’ve all probably gathered that I have a thing for night photography. Lately I’ve been intrigued by the idea of “magical images”, the power within an image to surpass the sum of its pieces, and for whatever reason I find photos taken at night especially magical.
Maybe it is the elongation of time in long exposures, as with smoke and water in the image above. Maybe it is the mysteries that reach out from the negative space of a dark sky, I’m not sure.
My guess is that there are lot of implications we are able to read from photos like this: lights left on imply a presence, blurriness implies a passage of time, a light in the sky tells us something is just over the horizon, but what?
I really like Yem’s work here. Of late I’ve realized that good work raises as many questions as it answers, if not more, and Surrogate World definitely fits that bill.Yem ends this series with a poem:
It’s impossible to find
All you can see is black
You sit and stare
You inhale and exhale
Your mind is as far as the horizon
And as your eyes adjust
The light beyond begins to take over
It reveals the foreground
As your thoughts fade into the background
You have escaped into the land
And what you’re left with
Is a photograph
Yem’s site has another great series, The Modern World, that is also definitely worth checking out.(Source: jmcolberg.com)
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Franklin Street at Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, 2011
(I think I’m going to shoot a ton of these this year, these strict one thirds things.)
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Traveling “Feet First”: Tom Robinson’s Oh-My-Gosh-This-So-Adorable Photo Series
“Tuc-tuc ride. Chiang Mai, Thailand.”You should go to Tom Robinson’s site and check out his work, because his work is great, and because this post is only going to be about one of his series, Feet First, and I kind of feel like I’m doing the rest of the (great) work a disservice. So make me feel better by checking out all of his work, OK?
“Switzerland.”I mean, how can you not love these. Tom and his girlfriend, (now wife, I think?) Verity, traveling the world and documenting their adventures with the simplest of statements: we were here. These are the feet that got us here. The bonus points come in 2011 when their newborn daughter, Matilda, joined in the fun and adventures.
“Matilda Robinson, born 4.03.11. St. Georges Hospital, London.”Really, though, you should just go look at the whole series. I can’t get enough of it and I hope to see more of the Robinsons in the future.
“100 metre pool, Hotel Arribas. Praia Grande (near Sintra), Portugal.”(Source: featureshoot.com)
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Alexi Hobbs’ “Instincts and Convictions”
“Constellations”, from Alexi Hobbs series Instincts and ConvictionsI’m deliberately posting this after yesterday’s quote from Joerg Colberg’s thoughts on Photography and Trust. Hobbs’ wonderful series Instincts and Convictions reinforces Colberg’s main claim: if a photographer trusts in his images he can keep them simple and let them speak (or, I think, in Hobbs’ case, sing) for themselves.
“Release”, 2011, from Alexi Hobbs series Instincts and ConvictionsEverything in Instincts and Convictions is direct and simple: the color palettes, the compositions, the lighting. But each image feels somewhat like a furtive glance: a brief but knowing glimpse of something greater, something we feel is implied but we don’t quite see or understand. And that is probably the great pleasure of this series, that Hobbs has charged such seemingly simple photos with the tensions of many layers of possible meaning.
from Alexi Hobbs series Instincts and ConvictionsI’m not sure where my current theory on dreams comes from — I read it somewhere, maybe Sartre. (To me) dreams are the random firings of our brains, which can encompass whatever happens to be in our short term or long term memory. The overwhelming randomness of what our brain can conjure up would drive us insane every night if it weren’t for a neat trick: our minds are very, very good at forming narratives around fragmented information. It is these on-the-fly narratives that we think of as dreaming.
To me, I guess, when I look at Hobbs’ work the images become the brain’s collection of memories and it is up to me as the viewer to create a narrative around them. There’s something about this that gives them the enchanting, friendly (or sometimes ominous) feeling of dreams.(Source: featureshoot.com)
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As a photographer, you have to trust your photographs. You have to trust that they say what you want them to say. Or more accurately, you have to realize that your subconscious mind is bringing more things to photography than your conscious mind might realize.
“Photography and Trust”, an article by Joerg Colberg
I think this is a problem I’ve had: trusting my own photography. I think I’m getting better at it, though, so we’ll see.
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24 Hours of Photos from Flickr
“24 Hours of Photos from Flickr”, a show at Foam last December curated by Erik Kessels, a publisher of KesselsKramer Publishing
About a million photos.
(Source: creativereview.co.uk)
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“The elemental forces and processes that underlie and shape the planet.”
“St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. 25 and 26 June 2009. Low water 1.15pm, high water 8am”, from the “South-West” section of Michael Marten’s series Sea Change“Recent landscape photography has often focused on human shaping and reshaping of the environoment: agriculture, urbanisation, globalisation, pollution,” Marten writes, “Even when critical and committed, this approach can emphasise — even glamorise — humanity’s power over nature. I’m concerned to rediscover nature’s own powers: the elemental forces and processes that underlie and shape the planet.”
“Worms Head, Glamorgan. 25 June 2005. High water 9.45am, low water 4pm”, from the “South-West” section of Michael Marten’s series Sea ChangeI know exactly what Marten means. In my own work I’ve been struggling with the opposite: how to glamorize the taming of nature by focusing on the assertion of the cityscape into the landscape. This is part of why I’m so terribly intrigued by Marten’s work. Instead of vacuous but beautiful images of a clichéd topic like the American southwest, Marten presents with images of nature untamed. Because of something as magnificent (yet quotidian) as the moon moving oceans, our cities must know limits.
“Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall. 25 and 31 August 2007. High water 4.30pm, low water 2pm”, from the “South-West” section of Michael Marten’s series Sea ChangeIn terms of the photographs themselves, I love how Marten plays so dramatically with perspective. “Perranporth, Cornwall, 28 and 29 August 2007. High water 6pm, low water 11.20am” demonstrates this best, with what feels almost like a portrait at high water contrasted against tiny figures in a sweeping landscape at low.
You can read more about Marten’s thoughts on the work over at Camera Obscura.
If you’re lucky enough to live in London you can see an exhibition of the images at Gallery@OXO this fall, from September 25 through October 1. If you’re not lucky enough to live in London, Marten will be releasing a book of the work this fall as well, so keep an eye out!
(Source: lensculture.com)
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Jonathan Blaustein Explores the Value of a Dollar
“panko breadcrumbs from japan”, (c) Jonathan Blaustein, from his series The Value of A DollarBlaustein describes his project better than I can, so I’ll quote his statement: “The photographs in this project attempt to strip back the artifice; to depict food items as they were sold, (minus packaging,) without styling, retouching, or artificial lighting. Each image represents a dollar’s worth of food purchased from various markets in New Mexico. The subjects exist as equivalent amounts of commodity, and nothing more.”
“beef shank from supersave”, (c) Jonathan BlausteinA simple idea done simply and incredibly well, Blaustein’s The Value of a Dollar series is one of my favorite so far this year (although everyone ever seems to have seen it last year). The project does no more than he says above, but the series is so charged with potential interpretations that any food related interest group could, I imagine, find their own agenda hidden within this one little typology.
“early season organic blueberries”, (c) Jonathan Blaustein
A year or two ago I was exploring a long-abandoned grocery store with Brian Ulrich and we discovered a packet of brand new, never used 1970’s price tags. It was amazing: a little snapshot of a forty year old consumer price index. Mushroom soup for 23 cents. Bars of soap for 29 cents. So, as much as I love Blaustein’s work today I’m thrilled to hear The Library of Congress has picked up a copy of the portfolio. The economist-nerd-in-me can only imagine how incredibly fascinating the series will be in 40 years.
(P. S. Also worth checking out is a conversation between Colberg (of Conscientious) and Blaustein regarding “why isn’t art used to change the world”.)
(Source: petapixel.com)
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Robert Schlaug’s “Limited Area” Series of Landscapes
(c) Robert Schlaug, from his series Limited AreaAll photographers impose their will on the landscapes they photograph. There can be a variety of goals — Ansel Adams famously tried to capture the scenes as he saw them, contemporary photographer Laura Plageman rips, folds, and tears her images until they come closer to how the scene originally felt to her.
(c) Robert Schlaug, from his series Limited AreaGerman photographer Robert Schlaug has taken a different approach, taking individual lines of pixels and extending them to the edges of the frame. Visually, to me, these extensions usually read as either foreground or background. But Schlaug also uses them to play with our sense of perspective entirely, which kind of hurts my brain — but usually in a good way.
(c) Robert Schlaug, from his series Limited AreaI really like the series, but the images that work best for me are probably the landscapes (although you look at the series in full there are also some streets-that-become-walls that I also like). It is a fun, visually interesting idea.
(I also just want to say that, while the ideas are different, Schlaug totally beat Gerhard Richter’s “Strip” series by at least a year to a visually similar idea. So go Robert.)
(Source: newlandscapephotography.com)
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