Erika Neola

Work by Erika Neola. 

Jim Goldberg

Above photo by Jim Goldberg. More to come on this.

Gustav Gustafsson

Gustav Gustsafsson's photos are fashionably stark and simple, even when they portray a spontaneous catastrophe like a house on fire.  See more of his ultra cool work here.

Will Govus

Will Govus has it. "It" being the eagle eye for scenes that create photographs that carry with them a Benjaminian aura of epic proportions. Maybe my use of the word "aura" as described for us by Walter Benjamin, is a bit of an oxymoron in this case, considering that Benjamin's idea of the aura hinged on the notion of the one-of-a-kind work of art, and I'm looking at the images on the internet, but in our post-Google age, I think the idea of the aura has morphed into another monster, the notion of which we have yet to pin down (maybe this is something for our 21st century art theorists to tackle?????). 

If there is a 21st century aura for the photo-hungry to imbibe, it is to be thoroughly enjoyed in Govus' haunting color photographs. His images are not as elaborate or as carefully orchestrated as those of Gregory Crewdson, nor do they project such seediness as Brassai's Parisian Alley ways, but Govus's images are equally thought-provoking, with a similar sense of mystery and otherworldliness. They lure us into a world in which we are able to quickly identify the seemingly obvious similarities between an abandoned chair and a fog-encased teenage boy.

  See more of Govus's work on his website here, or on his blog here or on his Flickr site here.

Igor Omulecki

Images by Igor Omulecki. Igor is Polish. His photographs are worth my time.  

Pelle Cass

Photo by Pelle Cass. Part of her Fugitives series.  One Pound of Nails. 

Alana Celii

Above photos by Alana Celii. 

Chad Muthard

 

Both images above from Chad Muthard's series, Missing Teeth. See more here.

Betsie Genou

More on this later. Beautiful. Image by Bestie Genou. Find more here. 

Light creates form. Line cuts through space. Few colors, but not black and white. 

Lena Amuat

I love this photo by Lena Amuat. You can find more here.

How can dirty feet be so beautiful? 

The seemingly weightless flesh so quietly positioned on the stark white background. It is a simple spectacle, but a spectacle nonetheless. This photograph grabs me with instantaneous shock value....oh no! dirty feet on a clean sheet!... I can't take my eyes away. I can't stop looking. I look for a moment longer than I should when I am struck by the interaction between the two feet. The image creates an allegory for a larger, more complex and emotional narrative of human relationship...I won't go so far as to say the two feet represent any concrete or specific narrative, but what I will dare to say, is that the interaction between the two feet is recognizable to the viewer as human emotion.  It is in the thin line created where the two feet meet that the viewer recognizes the energy as distinctly human, which then references that which falls just out of the frame of the photograph. 

Like Christian Patterson's photograph of the gas stove that I posted below, this photograph leads our mind outside of the immediate moment of the photograph itself. In Patterson's photo, the intrigue lies in a potential catastrophe that could happen in an unknowing future. In this photograph, however, the attractive element lies in the past. The mystery is in the events that preceded the moment that is revealed to us in the image. Those feet inevitably belong to a person who sleeps between those clean white sheets. We get just a glimpse or a hint of the ankle, which leads us to wondering what could have led up to this moment in which the owner of these feet was so tired that he or she fell into bed with such dirty feet...and where were these feet that led to them acquiring so much grime?  

Christian Patterson part deux

Work from Christian Patterson's book, Sound Affects. See more here.

Christian Patterson's work interests me because it is simultaneously subtle and entirely alarming. The subtly comes with the territory of his chosen subject matter. We've seen this type of subject matter before. It covers ground previously explored by earlier color photography pioneers such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who made dirty hotel lampshades worth looking at...or so they seemed to convince us. Like his predecessors, Patterson revels in the imperfect geometry and muted colors of every drab hotel room corner, but in this work, Patterson adds a fourth dimension: urgency.

In his photograph of the lit gas stove, Patterson presents his viewer with, what at first appears to be a snapshot of a nondescript kitchen interior. But rather than allowing his audience to settle there and quickly move on, Patterson leads the viewer into a space of tension that holds the viewer's gaze just long enough for him/her to realize that the image is not a snapshot, but rather a clearly an orchestrated scene composed specifically for the camera. I can not help to think of Jeff Wall's photograph, Insomnia, which suggests a documentation of a domestic scene, but on closer examination, is clearly a carefully constructed scene created for the overall emotional effect it will have over the viewer's psyche.

The tension in Patterson's photograph (similar to Wall's) is created by the suggestion of time (past, present, and future) within the still the image. The photograph, by nature of being a photograph, marks the click of a shutter, and single moment in time. In Wall's Insomnia, the passing of time is suggested by the open cabinet doors, which show the movement of the subject through the space prior to the taking of the photograph. In Patterson's photo, the image of the burning flames with no one in sight suggests a future catastrophe, which then alerts the viewer to a sense of the passing of time.

The collision of the static and the dynamic in Patterson's photograph makes me think of Roland Barthes's notion of time collapsed as he outlines it in Camera Lucida. In his discussion of a photograph of an executed prisoner, Barthes argues that the photograph is death itself insofar as it is the collapse of linear time. The photograph is simultaneously past, present and future.

(In the background of Patterson's photograph, there are words that reference the Book of Revelations from the Bible. That is another discussion, perhaps even more interesting than this one.)

Christian Patterson

note to myself: remember to check this out http://www.christianpatterson.com/
Christian Patterson reminds me that "a beautiful landscape is not always an innocent one."

Roger Ballen

These two images are from Roger Ballen's New Project series that can be found here.

Ballen's earlier work planted itself firmly within the realm of documentary photography, but this more recent work delves into a tactile and fragmented sculptural aesthetic. The visual juxtapositions within his work enter into the realm of the fantastical and remind me of the hyper-real world created by Surrealist artists in the 1920s and 30s. In the above photo, the contrast between the urgency and motion of the outstretched fingers with the heavy and still presence of the severed boar's head are reminiscent of the gruesome portrait of the human psyche as laid out for us in the surrealist film, Un chien andalou.

Joachim Schmid

I also really love Joachim Schmid's Archiv series. Here are just two samples from the series. You can see more of this work here.


Archiv #28, 1988

Archiv #122, 1991

Seeing is believing...or just seeing?

Joachim Schmid
From his 2007 series, Untitled Portraits:

See this more of Joachim Schmid's work here.

Michael Wolf
From his series, Transparent City:

See more of Wolf's work in this series here.


What is it about photography that automatically drops the viewer into the guilt-ridden position of voyeur? Is it the similarity of the camera's mechanics to the mechanics of the human eye?

While Wolf and Schmid's projects and agendas may be entirely separate from one another, the above images strike a similar chord. They locate the photographer and viewer as voyeur, and the person in the photo as the object of the voyeuristic gaze.

The large pixels obscure the image, and in doing so, mimic an out-of-focus gaze, drawing our attention to our own act of seeing and perceiving, and to our status as viewer and creator of the image in front of us. The enlarged pixels in the frames reference human optical capacity, as well as the mechanical operation within the camera itself. They reference the viewer and the camera together and underline the act of seeing and the creation of the image itself.

Our status as viewer only exists in the hierarchical relationship between viewer/viewed. Both Schmid and Wolf create a binary relationship in which the picture plane draws a crystal-clear boundary between photographer/subject and viewer/viewed. In this relationship, the hierarchy is such that the photographer is not simply an unassuming viewer, but a voyeur. The voyeuristic act is created as soon as the control of the image is placed in the hands of the viewer, rather than the subject.

In Schmid's case, I think his work references traditional portraiture as well as past photographers' large scale portraiture (think Thomas Ruff's large-scale portraits of his classmates)....but by creating pixels, Schmid draws attention to the photo AS a photo. As an object, as a creation by an author, rather than an unobscured and true representation of an individual. It is a representation of representation and of the act of seeing. Schmid pulls the rug out from under the viewer, forcing us to recognize our status on the near side of the picture plane.