Mid nineteenth century is calling

By Gustav Le Gray. Cavalry at Chalons, 1857.

By Francis Frith. 

By Francis Frith. Travellers' Boat at Ibrim. ca. 1863. Albumen print.

Alec Soth

"Nome, Alaska"

"West Point, New York"

"Ron, San Antonio, Texas"

How could you not love Alec Soth's recent project, The Last Days of W (currently on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery)? The project is a compilation of photographs from the past eight years of the George W. Bush presidency. I was surprised when, in 2004, Magnum Photos accepted Soth as a member of their famous (and famously traditional) photography collective. Not because I don't believe Soth deserves it, but because Soth's photographs do not ring with that classic documentary style of the old documentarians by whom Magnum was founded. Soth's photographs are are so perfectly fraught with prophetic insight that if the viewer didn't know better, she would probably assume the photographs were planned in advance. See more of Soth's work HERE.

Also check out the newsprint publication that was published as part of The Last Days of W project. Thumbs up (of course). See it HERE. In it, he includes this poem by Lester B. Morrison:

Whether dawn or dusk,

Don Knotts or the deputy,

There is nothing left but gas

You've exhausted

You've laughed your head off

Wrapped it in black burlap

And bounced on the branch

Till sticky with candy and maché.

Now the ranch is quiet,

Brush cleared,

Fields burnt,

Almost bored.

These are the last days of W.

-Lester B. Morrison

Matthieu Gafsou

If I were to imagine a post-apocalyptic "future," it might look something like Matthieu Gafsou's images of the Tunisian landscape. A few camels lie stagnant in the foreground of  the expansive whitewashed picture-plane. Dwarfed by two robotic towers, the camels serve as place-holders for organic life, long after the past has dripped into a sink-hole somewhere in the desert. Gafsou’s photographs of beach shelters compliment his post-apocalyptic landscape, suggesting that perhaps inside the shelters survivors of the apocalypse sit in a semi-circle playing chess and drinking tea. The simplicity of composition and the muted color palattes of the beach-shelter series make the photos easy companions to his futuristic desert landscape.

Matthieu Gafsou lives in Switzerland. See more of his work  here.

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.