June 2008 Archives

Like a modern-day Weegee, Harri Palviranta cruises the night streets of Finland, armed with his Hasselblad camera and a big flash, looking for a fight to photograph, or the bloodied face of a drunken party-goer, or the scene of a recent brawl. See his series, Battered, in Lens Culture.

Every day, people from all over the world contribute their photos of Buddha to Lens Culture's Buddha Project. The collection now numbers over 400 Buddha pictures, with a goal of 1,000 photos or more. It's amazing to see the range of Buddha images that crop up in diverse cultures around the globe. Here are just three from the latest batch posted online.

Lens Culture is showing 81 preview photos from the annual international photo festival in Arles, France. The theme this year is "Fashion" which is not the same as "Photographing Clothes" (although that is the title of one of the scheduled exhibitions).

I was happy to discover that there will be plenty of photography that is "off-topic" as well. Here are just three from the vast, eclectic mix. Check the Lens Culture feature for the whole preview and a high-rez slideshow.

The staff of Lens Culture is happy to announce that another all-new volume of great, eclectic contemporary photography is now online.

Settle in with a good cup of coffee and enjoy important new photography from: Israel, France, Germany, Argentina, USA, Britain, and beyond. We also feature extensive previews from Photo Espana in Madrid, and the Look 3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Topics include 18-year-old girls in the military, urban and suburban sprawl, the illusions of levitation, psychic readings by cell phone camera, urban tree portraits, shuttered businesses, digital photograms, and more.

So, something for everyone, we hope. Please check out the latest issue of Lens Culture online now — free!

French photographer Denis Darzacq is an acclaimed photojournalist (he won a World Press Photo award last year) who likes to work on artistic projects, as well.

In his latest series, Hyper, people seem to hover and glide, weightless, through surreal shopping scenes. The colors and poses are delightfully cartoon-like, yet they become all the more fascinating when you realize that there are no hidden wires or pulleys, nor any digital manipulation to the photographs. These are honest, undoctored photographs — albeit taken with high-speed film at a fraction of a fraction of a second. They depict real people, at real moments in real space.

Darzacq says:

For many years now, I have questioned the place of the individual in our societies in my photographic work. This is achieved through the use of artistic but also purely documentary photography.

In Hyper, this questioning is structured around a formal opposition: between the body and its surroundings, or between being and having.

All my photographs are the fruit of shared real-life experience. There is no digital manipulation. I asked young dancers and athletes to jump around, encouraged by the violence of their surroundings – hypermarkets – and movements inspired by mannerist painting: unreal, overacted and pointless.

I see these as movements of resistance to a consumerist world invading our lives more and more. But they are also simply an artistic proposition free of any social or political interpretation.

American photographer Andrew Phelps has created a minor masterpiece of a photobook that documents in an artful way, the end of the town of Higley, Arizona, as it is swallowed up and completely transformed into just another sprawling generic suburban development in the desert lands to the east of Phoenix.

The story, which took three years to photograph, is particularly interesting since all four of Phelps' grandparents lived in the sleepy outlying town of Higley while Phelps was growing up in Phoenix. So, we can watch in an intimate way as the funky little town gets bulldozed to make way for instant suburbia, American style.

Check out our book review and a dozen photos from Higley, here in Lens Culture.

The 11th annual Photo Espana festival in Madrid will host 69 exhibitions: 32 at the Official Section and 37 at the Off Festival, with works by 230 artists from different disciplines and 35 different countries.

There are also lots of events, workshops, conferences (Joan Fontcuberta is heading up a multi-day symposium about "The Future of Photography"), a photo book fair, portfolio reviews, and more.

Lens Culture is delighted to be an active part of this year's festival. Editor Jim Casper will be reviewing the portfolios of 70 finalists from over 900 applications. We plan to feature the work of several of these great, emerging artists in upcoming issues of Lens Culture.

And of course, we will try to present some of the best picks from the great exhibitions, as well.

In the meantime, here is a random sampling of some of the work that can be seen in the exhibits.

Eyemazing, a great, oversized print magazine from Amsterdam, features the work of Lens Culture Editions Artist lauren e. simonutti is the latest issue. You can see more of simonutti's work here in Lens Culture. And you can buy signed, numbered, hand-printed, hand-toned silver gelatin prints made by simonutti online through Lens Culture Editions.

Congratulations to lauren — her feature is in good company: right before an interview with Joel-Peter Witkin (an appropriate pairing), and along with work by other favorites like Alec Soth. Be sure to check out the issue of Eyemazing at your local arts magazine shop.

The Look3 Festival of the Photograph returns to Charlottesville, Virginia for "3 days of peace, love, and photography", June 12-14, 2008. Lens Culture is proud to be a partner with Look3 for this year's event. If you can be there, don't miss it.

You can see a preview of images, and highlights of some of the coming events, here. You can check the festival web site for more info. And you can get an idea of what last year's event was like from this video: