February 2008 Archives

Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan has a provocative and thoughtful approach to using photo-based art to underline the excesses of human consumption and other atrocities. His series, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, uses cleverly designed huge images to convey the vastness of waste and other ridiculous human behavior.

Barbie Dolls, 2008, 60"x80", depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006:





Partial zoom:





Detail at actual print size:

The artist has this to say on his website:

"This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

"My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so."

Thanks to Patrick Nagle for pointing us to this one.

Blake Andrews runs an intelligent and interesting blog about photography called B: Rumblings from the Photographic Hinterlands at blakeandrews.blogspot.com. One of the recurring features is a series called "What was he thinking?" which invites photographers to discuss some of their own work. Photographer Richard Bram, who participated in an audio interview for Lens Culture last year, is the latest candidate to share some of the back-stories of his photography in Andrews' blog.

Here is an excerpt from that blog:

"One evening in March 2004, after dropping off some film at Metro Imaging in Clerkenwell (I haven't hand-processed film in many years) I was walking back to the Tube through a back courtyard. This man hanging outside a window immediately caught my eye. Out of curiosity - what was he doing? Burgling or perhaps just fixing the window? - I got as close as I could and took 4 frames before he ducked back inside. I love the ambiguity as well as the way he nonchalantly stood on a tiny ledge outside of a window three floors off the ground. As I looked at the enlarged photo later I realized it was the latter - he was working on the windows as part of a renovation. But there is still a mystery to the photo, perhaps brought on by the darkness, by the scale of the streetlamp in the foreground or the converging verticals that makes it one of my favorites."

Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto has intrigued me since I first held several of his tiny energy-charged photos in my hands at a photography festival in California in 2003, and I could not leave without taking three of these precious objects home with me (at a price I could barely afford at the time). Five years later, those same photos float on the wall in my home where I can see them every day, in all kinds of light, and they still exert that same emotional pull on me every time I stop to look at them.

I had the pleasure of meeting him in Paris in 2007 during an opening at Galerie Camera Obscura, and we communicated verbally through an interpreter. But what was much more memorable was the way he silently placed eleven of his small photos on a glass table and started to arrange and re-arrange them into a kind of visual haiku. Each slight shuffle changed the poetry and context, and the possibilities seemed almost limitless.

So, I was delighted to discover this brief video interview with Masao Yamamoto made by Laetitia Berthomé and Fabien Bosdedore. Colleen Leonard, who has been contributing to Lens Culture, first pointed it out to us a couple days ago, and then, generously, provided this English translation:

Introduction:

"Masao Yamamoto is a photographer, born in 1957 in Japan. He studied fine arts and painting before finding his expression through photography. Since his debut in the 80s he has explored the emotional power of the intimate images that each one of us keeps with us as amulets."

Yamamoto, talking:

"In the past, when I was a child, I collected insects. I have a tendency to collect things. As an adult, instead of killing the insects, I began to take photos of them to collect the images.

"When I photograph, I start out with an open mind. If I start out with a precise idea of what I want to photograph, I might miss an interesting event or object. So, I begin with an open mind and try to photograph all kinds of objects.

"As you can see, my photos are small and seem old. In fact, I work so that they’re like that. I could wait 30 years before using them, but that’s impossible. So, I must age them. I take them out with me on walks, I rub them with my hands, this is what gives me my desired expression. This is called the process of forgetting or the production of memory. Because in old photos the memories are completely manipulated and it’s this that interests me and this is the reason that I do this work.

"If I take small photos, it’s because I want to make them into the matter of memories. And it’s for this reason that I think the best format is one that is held in the hollow of the hand. If we can hold the photo in our hand, we can hold a memory in our hand. A little like when we keep a family photo with us.

"I construct a story by hanging several small photos. I don’t do it chronologically. Sometimes I start with the end, sometimes with the middle, I never know where I will start. I attach one, then another, and then a third. Even I have no idea of the story it tells before I start hanging. It’s only in the theoretic hanging that the sense appears to me.

"In fact it’s as if I’m climbing a staircase and at the same time picking up some lovely stones. Even if I had decided to only take the white stones, if I see a black one I like I’ll take it too. It’s the same thing when I’m hanging, the story unfolds in a random way.

"Long ago, there was a man named Ryokan, who was a calligrapher and a poet. I have an enormous amount of respect for him. In one of his Haikus he describes simply the movement of a leaf trembling as it falls. But in reality, this poem can be interpreted in several ways. For example the falling leaf could be a metaphor for life, the right side up, the bad, and the reverse side, the good. From this simple natural phenomenon he speaks of much deeper things. I find this remarkable. I would like to take these kinds of photos.

"For me a good photo is one that soothes. Makes us feel kind, gentle. A photo that gives us courage, that reminds us of good memories, that makes people happy."

You can see more images by Masao Yomamoto here at his web site.

Lens Culture is very pleased to announce the launch of our very first commercial venture: an on-line fine-art photography gallery. Lens Culture Editions offers a unique opportunity to discover and collect some of the world's best 21st century photography made by emerging international artists as well as world-renowned photographers.

Our inaugural launch includes work from 5 great photographers: Ingar Krauss from East Berlin; Myoung Ho Lee from Seoul, South Korea; Alexei Vassiliev, a Russian photographer working in Paris; lauren e simonutti from the east coast, USA; and Oyvind Hjelmen from Stord, Norway.

These signed, limited-edition photographs are available only through Lens Culture.

Since our inception in April 2004, Lens Culture has grown to be one of the premiere spots on the web to discover new contemporary photography. We have earned the respect and praise of photographers, educators, museum curators, galleries, publishers, collectors, and photo enthusiasts from over 110 countries. Our readers consider Lens Culture to be one of the most reliable resources on the internet to learn about new contemporary photography in the world today. We are very selective about the work we present — our unique, informed, opinionated point-of-view sets us apart. This same subjective, critical approach will guide the selections for Lens Culture Editions. We will add new work and new photographers on a continual basis.

Please browse the gallery, and bring some original art into your life. It's a rewarding experience for all involved.

Jacob Riis, Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street, c. 1889

VERLYN KLINKENBORG has written a thoughtful article in "The New York Times" about the photographs of Joseph Riis, and how they were used to affect social change in the slums and ghettos of New York in the late 1880s.

She writes, "His pictures are a harsh, unofficial census, a record of impossible conditions in immigrant New York. On each face he photographed, there is a look of personal extinction except, that is, on the faces of children, who somehow manage to look only hardened."

She also explains how these photographs were used — in books, and as "lantern slides" in personal lectures by Riis, who mixed rough humor, spirituality, and factual reporting to make an impact on his audiences.

You can find useful links to more information about Riis, and to see or download his books which have been digitized, at his Wikipedia entry.

2nd prize Spot News Stories, Roberto Schmidt, Colombia/Germany, Agence France-Presse, Kenya election unrest, Nairobi, 29-31 December

The annual World Press Photo contest offers a global overview of the best, recent photojournalism in a wide variety of categories. The results are always compelling — some are outrageous moments, some are horrifying, a few are quite funny, and all seem relevant to our contemporary world.

This year's winners were announced a few hours ago. We are very pleased to present 21 of the winning photos here in Lens Culture. Inspiring!

3rd prize Sports Action Stories, Chris Detrick, USA, The Salt Lake Tribune, Sports portfolio

1st prize Arts and Entertainment Stories, Rafal Milach, Poland, Anzenberger Agency, Retired circus artists, Poland

Stockport Viaduct, England, 1986, © John Davies

Four photographers were named this week as finalists for the annual £30,000 ($60,000) Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. The finalists are: John Davies (UK), Jacob Holdt (Denmark), Esko Mannikko (Finland) and Fazal Sheikh (USA).

Exhibitions of work by all four photographers will be on display in London at The Photographers' Gallery, February 8 - April 6, 2008. The winner of the award will be announced Wednesday, March 5, 2008.

Lens Culture is pleased to present more than 40 photographs from the finalists, right here. So take a look, and try to pick the winner yourself.

We'd love to read your comments about the finalists, and your guess as to who the winner will be.

18th c. Pigeonnier, Betteville, France (Seine-Maritime) 2005 © Vicki Topaz

A new series of photos made by American photographer Vicki Topaz documents a little known quirk in French architectural and cultural history: elaborately designed pigeon houses (called pigeonniers or columbiers in French) built for status-conscious aristocrats from the 14th century up until the French Revolution. These photos by Topaz, made with her plastic Diana camera over the course of four years, call to mind to the architectural typology studies by Bernd and Hilla Becher (though without the rigid precision and obsessive discipline of the Bechers). They remind me even more of Atget's loving photos taken in and around Paris at the turn of the century.

Lens Culture is pleased to present an overview of 24 images from Topaz's series, Silent Nests, plus a brief text she wrote about these architectural oddities.

A solo exhibition of this work is now showing at Galerie Ardi Photographies in Caen, France, February 2008 - April 2008.

Topaz's artist's book, Silent Nests, was nominated for the 2007 Aperture West Book Prize, and can be purchased through booksellers, Vamp & Tramp.