Yann Gross

Yann Gross is a Swiss photographer. These images are from his series Horizonville, in which he captures a vision of the wild west enacted by Swiss mountain men. The myth of the American West might gain poignancy when transposed on the landscape of the Rhone Valley. Without the burden of historical accuracy, a myth takes on a new life with greater mysticism than the original. See more here.

Sebastian Mejia

You should check out Sebastian's website. It is very clever the way he subdivides his work according to traditional categories, despite the subject matter. His vision of anthropomorphic trees is like none other. See his webiste here.

Laura Letinsky

See more of her work here.

With these photographs Letinsky urges her viewers to explore notions of memory. Referencing Flemish and Dutch still life paintings, Letinsky replaces flowers and fruit with contemporary detritus of an abandoned dinner party–styrofoam cups and plates and paper streamers stand in as signifiers for what was.

Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff.  "jpeg sak01" (2005) from the series JPEGS.

(These images are pixelated on purpose by Ruff)

Thomas Ruff.  "jpeg se02" (2004) from the series JPEGS.

Thomas Ruff. From Portraits series (1981-85).

        Thomas Ruff gained significant notoriety as part of the Düsseldorf school of photograph, where he studied with Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer under Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ruff’s early work was centered on large-scale portraits of his Düsseldorf classmates. He photographed his subjects in a clinical deadpan style, asking them to avoid facial expressions. These emotionless portraits intentionally lack background information and narrative cues, suggesting that no real truth about the subject can be learned from the photograph aside from the subtle facial attributes that point to the reaction of the subject to the camera and to the photographer (2). Even in this early work, Ruff’s interest in the ontological status of the photograph was evident. 

        In Ruff’s more recent work, he has abandoned portraiture, but his sharp awareness of the photographic medium continues to inform the theoretical framework that motivates his images. Ruff now turns his attention towards appropriated imagery from the Internet. For Ruff, the Benjaminian aura, tied to the object-ness of a work of art, has long since been buried in the annals of art history and replaced by artwork defined by its absolute resistance to physical presence. For his series, JPEGS, Ruff downloads images from the internet and then blows them up and pixelates them beyond their original density, so as to indicate their removal from the "original." These images are so far removed from physical reality and so entangled in notions of reproduction and appropriation that a new kind of sublime aura emerges that is based on the non-existence of the work of art. The work of art, for Ruff, is a phantom of passing ideas and representations of representations. Its physicality is no longer connected to any single point in space or time, but exists within a floating network of reproductions. The work of art exists only within the plurality of its own being. 

Daido Moriyama

One for Benjamin. I guess they have lighthouses in Japan, too.

Robin Rhode

Untitled, Harvest, 2005.

Wheel of Steel, 2006.

Table of Contents, 2006.

Snake Eyes, 2004.

        All images by South African photographer, Robin Rhode.

  See more of his work here.

Marco Breuer & Anna Atkins

         Cyanotype, 1843. Anna Atkins.

Untitled, 1997. Marco Breuer.

  Silver gelatin paper burned.

I've never been attracted to abstract photography, but when I saw these works by Marco Breuer in person, I was an instant convert. In these works, Breuer references the indexical nature of the photographic medium first realized by early photographic explorations by Anna Atkins in the 1800s. Atkins's cyanotypes engage in post-enlightenment scientific inquiry at a time when the photographic medium was in its infancy. Over 100 years later, Breuer works in what I would call a post-photographic digital age in which technological advances have long since entombed the physicality of the medium. Although I am not usually a proponent of Greenbergian notions of pure artistic formality, Breuer's work presents a convincing argument that on occasion, pure explorations of medium and form can yield sublime results. 

You can see more of Breuer's work on the Von Lintel Gallery website.