I love photographers who see beauty in the mundane and then make you see what they see. Mike Sinclair is one of those photographers. I blogged one of his images 3 or 4 years ago and was pleased to come across his work again while helping judge the most recent Hey, Hot Shot! competition.

The photographer collective still-dancing highlighted the work of Azerbaijani photographer Rena Effendi today. Effendi's most compelling work takes us into places most of us would have no access to, showing us the facade presented to the outside world, and then digging deeper and breaking down stereotypes and mythology in the process. As a jumping off point check out her portfolios House of Happiness and Twenty-something in Tehran, you won't be disappointed.

I'm excited we're releasing 2 prints (not the image above) by Michael Lundgren on 20x200 this afternoon (the prints can be found here and here). Michael is a photographer who works in the grand tradition of American landscape photographers who roamed the West in the late 19th and early 20th centry... He writes of his work:

I once read that "the twilight is the crack between the worlds." When dusk comes, a grayclarity permeates the air. It is a dark that one can see into. As Emmet Gowin once said, it is here that one can "participate in the game of feeling the unknown."

That's what I like so much about Lundgren's work... he works in the shadows and in those in-between places...

His recent book Michael Lundgren: Transfigurations strikes me as an instant classic.

Benedikt Partenheimer was one of the winners of the Hearst 8x10 Biennial. His winning entry was a series of portraits of famous artists and photographers taken from behind them as they were (presumably) engaged in the act of looking/contemplation. While many fo the artists are surely posing, the series still works.. and it's interesting how the viewer's relationship to the series shifts after reading the titles of the pieces. Take a look at the pictures above and note youfrresponse to them without knowing the subjects (one of them should be known to all photography nerds)... then click through to Partenheimer's site and find their names...

Enjoy the wonderful mixed up world of Gilbert Garcin. He's sort of a surrealist Reni Burri.(via Yijun Liao's blog)

Whether he's shooting in Asia or India or the Middle East, Peter Bialobrzeski takes his 4x5 out in the world and makes evocative images. When he's shooting on the street and including people, because of their long exposure times and subject matter, the images evoke 19th century photography. But when he's shooting from a distance especially when he's shooting around Asia's megacities his work evokes Blade Runner using the same technique. It's a tension I like and find fascinating. Bialobzeski's site is actually a collection of links to other sites that showcase his work... While most of the images are presented too small you get a sense of how spectacular they could be as prints. Also of interest is Bialobrzeski's early work which is shot in a completely different documentary style. Fascinating to see what happened after he found his calling.

NYTimes Review

Recommended Bialobrzeski's books: XXX Jouney - Journeys into the Spiritual Heart of India & Heimat

The Kominek Gallery in Berlin is opening a show and selling a few precious copies of the cult classic book by Pekka Turunen, Against The Wall. I've loved this body of work for years and would be thrilled to see it in person (Tickets to Berlin anyone?). The website only shows a small fraction of this project which unfortunately isn't available anywhere I know of online. Turunen is in good company in this gallery which also shows Joakim Eskildsen, Misha Kominek, Andrew Miksys, Birthe Piontek, and Simon Roberts. An impressive crowd.

I've been a big fan of Birthe Piontek the photographer and the person since seeing her work a few years ago at Review Santa Fe. She's just released a new project titled The Idea of the North, full compelling environmental portraits and quietly emotional landscapes.

The project was shot over three months in a small community in the Yukon, Piontek writes:

I experienced first hand the mystery and fascination of life above the 60th parallel, and met people who came here as part of their quest for the idea of North.

I’m not the first observer to be simultaneously intrigued, yet remain a visitor. Glenn Gould, whose work inspired the title, wrote after visiting the North briefly, "I've read about it, written about it, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Yet like all but a few Canadians I've had no real experience of the North. I've remained, of necessity, an outsider. And the North remained for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tales about,” and in the end, return South.

Li Wei is a Chinese photographer born in Inner Mongolia (part of China). He documents the region of his birth in a project titled simply The Earth. I've travelled through the region several times and have a great affection for the harsh emptiness of the land and the warmth of the people. His photos bring some of that back to me.

Tomoko Yoneda is a Japanese photographer based in London whose books I've been studying lately. I'm intrigued by her quiet photos that reveal histories hidden in plain sight. In one portfolio she shoots the locations of foreign spy rendezvous, in another she documents the indirect impressions we make on houses (discolorations from radiator heat for example), and in another she photographs banal landscapes that were the scenes of battles and historical events (a pretty sea view at night turns out to be the location where Dr. Mengele drown himself for example). Her portfolios are little puzzle poems, and reminders that we are all surrounded by ghosts.

More on Yoneda: Deutsche Bank Art Magazine, Japan Times

We're featuring the Lyon based, Portuguese photographer Christian Chaize on 20x200 in the next few weeks. I can pre-announce because the cat's already out of the bag (Our Chaize image, not the one above, was featured in the Febrary Domino magazine). Chaize's images have an easy appeal, are also interesting studies on time and group dynamics, and are the perfect antidote to a cold winter's night.

South African photographer Pieter Hugo has produced yet another intriguing punch-you-in-the-gut project titled Nollywood. It's a collection of portraits of actors in the Nigerian Film Industry recreating typical scenes from Nollywood movies which are produced by the thousands often direct to video. I haven't seen many Nollywood films but what I have seen reminds me very much of pulp-filled Mexican cinema of the 60's of the 70's which were filled with stories the extreme and the macabre. I grew up on the Santo series for example in which El Santo a masked hero would battle vampire women, martians, the blue demons, and of course (always) the armies of the undead. There were similarly extreme Mexican westerns, telenovelas (soaps), musicals, and science fiction. All were making movie magic and capturing the popular imagination of millions of people with the slimmest of budgets and improvised props. If you had undertaken an analogous photography project in Mexico 30 years ago you would have ended up with many similar archetypes— images influenced by Western cinema, but made uniquely local and encoded with popular mythologies.

Pieter's work also always brings up questions of race, identity, and of the photographer's gaze and this project like so many of his projects provokes questions, demands attention, and is at once intriguing, maddening, and exhilarating.

Related: Stefan Ruiz and Pieter Hugo worked together at Colors Magazine for a few years and intentionally or not they seem to influence each other. Check out Stefan's project called Telenovelas in which photographs the stars of telenovelas on the Mexico City sets of their shows.

Via my work with 20x200 and Hey Hot Shot I see the portfolios of hundreds if not thousands of photographers, and I'm struck by is how very few photographs—even photographs by very good photographers—are truly memorable. Juliana Beasley has a knack for taking memorable photographs often of subjects who live in the underbelly of society (drunks, strippers, the insane, and the unloved). When I first encountered Beasley's project "Rockaways" a few years ago I think my impression was that the images were striking but that the work showed little compassion for their subjects. But over time the portraits of broken men and hard weary women photographed in harsh light worked their way into my subconscious. I realized my original assessment was completely off base. I mistook her bracing clarity for sarcasm. Many of the images are simply unforgettable. They stick with you. I've since been impressed by the range of Beasley's work and her ability to tell stories most people don't want to hear. She recently started a blog and I'll definitely be following along.

Note: The image above is from Beasley's series on Cambodian land mine victims, it came to mind today while watching this tangentially related but equally courageous story on Cambodian Sex Slavery by Nicholas Kristoff in today's New York Times.

While browsing the brand new Radius Books website I came across a a photographer named Debbie Felming Caffery whose work I did not know, but now feel I should have known. She's a super story teller. The images above are from a portfolio titled Night Life in a section of her website titled Other Worlds.

Christopher Handran, in his project Happy Birthday To Me rephotographs his own birthday snapshots using macro lenses he modifies himself. The results are intriguing and evoke Gerard Richter's candle paintings. At the risk of sounding arty, for me they also speak to the gauzy uncertainty of memory and the mutability of time. I like 'em.

Virtually every traveling photographer I know takes pictures of the roads on which they journey, but some do it better than others. Bert Teunissen has a great little show right now titled The Road, that is simply that, pictures of roads he followed while shooting Domestic Landscapes... The show can be seen here in New York at the Wizenhausen Gallery or online at Bert's website.

I've met Bert a few times via 20x200 and he seems to have fashioned a rich life for himself. As I say around the house about people I admire and respect, "He's my kind of human being."

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There are many similar/related projects but I was reminded of John Divola's Dogs Chasing my Cars in the Desert (main site), which is one of my favorite books.

Mu Ge is a photographer from Chongqing living in Chengdu. I think his work is super. (via erebung)
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On another China related note, I was pleasantly surprised to see one of my favorite photostudios (the one in the sidebar) photographed by Le Monde's China blog. Looks like the studio has had an upgrade! (my version, my picture taken in the studio, and more pictures taken in this studio and similar studios by local Chinese photographers...)

Lot's of interesting imagery on this blog. I love this picture of a restaurant in Yarkland... in fact I'm pretty sure I've eaten there.

I have great respect for artists who successfully produce minimalist abstract photography, because this kind of work is so darned hard to do well (Ever try to take a decent picture of snow?). But with the right person behind the camera, the results can be spectacular. Nicholas Hughes, is a mid-career English photographer whose work is rigorous but never feels forced. He titles his many of his portfolios as 'verses' and indeed they seem to be verses of some epic poem. I'm a fan.

Istanbul based Mexican photographer Andres Gonzalez recently sent me a short preview of his new project Tarlabashi, photographed in the Kurdish neighborhood he calls home. It's a promising start. Gonzalez' website contains several more projects taken along roads that inspire deep wanderlust, a reminder that the world is too vast and beautiful to be left unexplored.

I am not particularly a fan of the genre of photography that covers abandoned buildings or of the subgenre that covers abandoned amusement parks. Photographers are drawn to these places (myself included) because of the easy analogy to death and the perverse beauty of decay. Like many subjects imbued with easy emotional shorthand (unmade beds, grandparent's houses, strangers staring into the middle distance, gas stations at night, etc) the very attraction of hordes of photographers to abandoned theme parks turn most images of these things into tired clichés. But of course the thing about clichés is that they are also challenges. A good artists will take a cliché and turn it on it's head, or they will take an image so iconic that it becomes the defining image of the genre, or they will find subject matter so extreme in it's beauty that it forces us to consider it outside the context of the banal stream of other similar less beautiful images.

Argentinean photographer Pablo Cabado's 37*57'35"S 57*34'47"W is one of those projects that breaks from the pack. It's not just a bunch of pictures of a beautiful old abandoned amusement park, it's a self contained world gone topsy turvy. Large pigs roam the amusement park grounds only to be butchered by a band of rough looking men one would never like to encounter after dark. It's dark and heady stuff.

Also check out Cabado's much praised book, Cuba the 90s (Coleccion La Vista Gorda).

As a side note Cabado's bio notes he drives a 1971 Ford Falcon and anyone who drives a 71 Falcon is cool with me.

One of the special thrills in photography is coming across a photographer who has travelled some of the same roads you have travelled, looking at their images, and saying 'I have stood right there, I have seen those things.'

I know nothing about Chinese photographer Eris Yo's life, but I know we've walked some of the same paths, and I love the way she's seen things along the way.

If navigating her website is too abstruse, you can find more of her work on flickr, and on her blog (written in Chinese).

I was thumbing through a months old copy of the NY Times Magazine in a doctor's office this morning and happened upon Sara Stolfa's project titled The Regulars which documents the patrons of McGlinchey's tavern in Philadelphia (where she worked as a bartender). It's a fascinating study in loneliness.

Stolfa was also in the band The Delta 72 (now defunct). She played organ. How cool is that?

Related: NY Times Article

Dave Jordano's project documenting storefront African American churches titled Articles of Faith, just made made my otherwise blah Friday. Storefront churches have long been a source of fascination for me. (found via Andrew Sullivan who also links to this super interview)

I recently saw the Beate Gütschow image above in person. She creates large scale idealized collage landscapes from scores of electronically grafted together images. The results are both seemless and unreal. For me the images evoke classic landscape painting more than they do other photographs and in thinking about this I realized that her process is probably not much different than tradtional landscape painters who generally either sit out in nature and take in a scene going from detail to detail or they sit in a studio culling details from memory. EIther way the result is idealized nature in which each element recieves more scrutiny than it would normally... These images are part of show/monograph by Aperture titled LS/S which features pastorals like the one above as well as similarly artifical black and white cityscapes. I haven't seen the book yet so I'm curious to see how the seemingly very different bodies of work work together.

More on Gütschow's work can be found on 52 photographers.

In 2007 at Review Santa Fe I got a chance to check out a new body of work by Ferit Kuyas. The project, a series he had been working on for some time on the city of Chongqiang had just been renamed City of Ambition, a play on the iconic Steiglitz body of work documenting New York's rising skyline. The images stuck with me and I've come back to them many times. There are scores of photographers trying to capture a rising China, but Kuyas has a poet's feel for the place. His images feel like Chongqiang to me. Anyway I wanted to report that Ferit's website has recently been revamped and he now has a full set of images from this epic project online. Even better, if you happen to be in London, you can see his beautiful prints in person at Photofusion where he has a solo show running. Also he will be speaking at the gallery on September 18th.

I noticed that one of Bertien Van Manen's photos, Couple and Painting, Grooves Bar - Shanghai, 1998 (not the image above), is available as an edition via MOCP. If you don't know about the MOCP store you should check it out, MOCP offers prints from a super lineup of contemporary phtographers. Couple and Painting led me to revisit Van Manen's website which has several more pictures from that project which expertly evokes a certain stratum of urban life in late 1990's China. More images as well as other projects over at Yancey Richardson

I first came across the Bianca Brunner's work at Aperture's ReGeneration show a few years ago where the image above from her Limbo series was prominently featured. Google Brunner a Swiss born photographer living in England and most of the top results are bloggers wondering where they can see more of her work. A bit of digging reveals work from both her Limbo and Hotel series on commentart.com (text here). Another enigmatic series titled Wood is also online. Enjoy.

Melting Ice on Gunnar's Land by Olafur Eliasson

Sure Olafur Eliasson is famous for his blockbuster art projects like Waterfalls that currently graces this fair city, and sure his big museum installations are thought provoking and spectacular, but I am most moved by this artist's photographs which are usually presented as series in a grid. They are simple and soulful and for me at least are humanizing. There are several photo series on the official Eliasson website, although they are shown in horribly small image sizes. If you are interested you are better off seeking out his books.

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Note to artist's everywhere. Show decent sized pictures of your work online. It's 2008, time to size up.

It's hard to image a more hostile working environment for a Western female photographer than a Pakistani brothel, and yet photographer Kate Orne has managed to make a series of compassionate even tender photographs in red light districts there. Powerful stuff.

Portuguese photographer Virgilio Ferreira's portfolio Daily Pilgrims is one of those projects that sort of snuck up on me. I looked at it a week or two ago and have kept coming back to it. I'm not sure if this will make sense to you (it does to me), but the portfolio evokes the memory of the memory of stepping off a plane into a new and foreign city full of too many new sights and sounds to be processed. When you remember back everywhere there were fleeting glimpses of untold stories, but in being a memory of a memory wires get crossed—in the overload details blur leaving an evocative impression without actually describing the specifics of the place.

(via his Hey, Hot Shot! entry)

Finnish photographer Markku Lahdesmaki's high profile editorial work doesn't do much for me, it's too finished and perfect in the way the editorial world demands, but I love many of his personal portfolios, especially the ones taken in Chinese Space Museums and in the Finnish countryside. (via my friend Tina who I've been trying to have lunch with for over a year even though we run into each other all the time)

A reader named Mu Qian turned me on to the work of Zhuang Xueben who travelled the Tibetan regions of Amdo and Kham in the 1930s. I don't think it's just my history in this region that makes the pictures so fascinating. Anybody have any more good Xueben links or book references outside what is easily googleable?

another site

Seyeon Yun is a Yale MFA student with several knockout projects. Incomplete Journey is a astute wander through Korea... The portfolio is split into three chapters and, as the title suggests, it feels that more chapters are on the way. Homecoming is an equally powerful project delving into the lives of war veterans. Yun is part of the Yale MFA group show at Danzinger Projects opening on May 27th.

Mark Powell is a prolific maker of compelling enigmatic images. If you hang out with Mark for any time you realize his world follows him around. Strange things happen. He has kind of a force field that creates mystery.

I hadn't checked in on his website for a while and found that it is full of new work.

If you happen to be at the New York Photo Festival be sure to check out Andrew Miksys' show called BAXT, an exploration of the Gypsy community of Lithuania. The exhibition coincides with the release of a book of the same title. Baxt is the Roma word for Fate. Many of the images on the web don't do the prints justice. For example one of the signature pieces of the show is a portrait of a crying bride. On the web you can't see that she is crying which mutes the impact of the image. The show is on display at the Nelson Hancock Gallery through July 5th.

Sometimes all it takes is a slight shift in perspective to make an ordinary photograph extraordinary.

If you have ever been to Ahmedabad in India you know it's characterized by it's crazy chaotic street life. It's a dense warren of a city, home to 5.6 million people, that has been around since the 11th century, so to see it empty is something. Frederic Delangle made a series of photos of Ahmedabad at night which exposes the city beyond the people. (via one of my favorite photography blogs, Hippolyte Bard)

I received a nice email the other day from Alejandro Cartagena, a Dominican born photographer, who has lived for many years in the city of my birth, and the city closest to my heart, Monterrey, Mexico. Cartagena was a researcher on one of my semi-obsessions, a book titled Nuevo Leon, Imagenes de Nuestra Memoria and he is also responsible for a photo project I've been meaning to post titled Lost Rivers . If you've spent much time in that part of the world you know the significance of the often empty river beds that lead off into nowhere. In fact Monterrey itself is split in half by a lost river, the Santa Catarina, that is a chaotic mix of sand, overgrown palms, squatter homes, markets, and soccer fields. But you don't have to have experience in Mexico's northern states, to appreciate the melancholy of photographs of rivers vanishing into the dust; some photographs speak for themselves.

Have you ever stood on a beach and looked out over the water to some distant boat on the horizon and wondered about the people out there? I have, which is why I enjoy Mårten Lange's project The Sea so much. The little boats give scale to the sea's vastness, humanize the incomprehensible, and provide a space for your mind to fill with a story.

Lange is an editor at Farewell Books which specializes in delightful (but cheaply constructed) photo books.

The American tendency is to associate any display of skin with sex and because of this I imagine many here would have a hard time wrapping their minds around the traditional Japanese sentos (public baths) and onsens (hot springs) you find all over Japan. In the most traditional village sentos families, neighbors, and co-workers bathe together, male/female, young/old with everyone gloriously and unabashedly naked. During my visits to Japan I was sometimes invited to join friends for baths after work and was always struck by the family atmosphere in these places—everyone with their little washcloths resting on their heads washing, gossiping, and just enjoying the warm soak.

Hiroyo Kaneko's series titled Sentimental Education gives us a bit of the feel of these places. When I compare these nude figures to the contrived "we're all so so naked and we don't care!' figures in Ryan McGinley's recent work I'm reminded that often the best way to showcase someone's humanity is by catching them in the middle of their most ordinary daily rituals.

Related: Sento at 6th and Main by Gail Dubrow.

I was lucky to see Raimond Wouda's show School last year at FOAM in Amsterdam, but didn't had a hard time finding the photographer's images online. Happily that has changed and Wouda now has created an eponymous website featuring School and several other projects. The image above is from one titled On Scale. Scale is an important aspect of Wouda's work. He shoots hyper detailed large format images and displays them at wall size. His revamped website only hints at the impact these prints have in person. (The prints are immersive without being monumental and self important.) I hope some smart New York gallerist hooks him up with a show. I'd love to have a chance to commune with the prints again.

I got to know Gail Albert Halaban's work while hanging around Gabe Greenberg's print studio and came to be a big fan of her highly stylized slightly offkilter peeks into the world of upper crusty New Yorkers.

For her new project titled Out My Window NYC she invites New Yorkers who see their neighbors only through the window and have an interest in connecting with them, to contact her. She states, "I would like to photograph you looking into their place and them looking back at you."

She's posted a few early images from the project and the results are promising. Be sure to click on the images to get a nice large version of the image.

Alexy Titarenko is best known for his long exposures of Russian commuters like the one above. The grim loveliness of that project speaks to both photography's early history and to more recent Soviet reality. ( You can here Titarenko speak about this series on the lens culture website).

Titarenko has a new show at the Nailya Alexander Gallery titled simply Venice. The photos are a nostalgic look at Venice. The images are as pretty as all of his photography is, but I found them to be misleading in the way tourist board postcards are misleading. They hide the ugly overcrowded overtouristed reality of the city today. This seems to be a missed opportunity as Titarenko's technique would have lended itself well to both showing Venice's teeming tourist masses and commenting on the nature of the city itself, instead we get images that evoke an empty romantic Venice that exists primarily as fantasy. This comes off as fluff.

The phrase that came to mind while looking through Christopher Talbot's portfolio titled Transformational Light was "backwoods, Crewdson light". Sounds horrible, but it sort of works, at least for me. Reminds me of East Texas.

I'm a fan of Brad Temkin's project titled Relics. The Illinois based photgrapher shot the image above Iceland which features regularly (and for good reason) in the portfolios of landscape photographers.

I like photographers who work in places with history.
I like photographers who use natural light.
I like photographers who get out there in the world.
I like photographers who shoot with a specific point of view.

Bert Teunissen has done and continues to do all these things traveling around the world shooting what he calls Domestic Landscapes. His photographs are a vivid protest against the prefab readymade corporate world that seems to encompass more and more of our lives and are vivid arguments for living life connected to a specific place. In interviews he estimates that 90% of the locations featured in Domestic Landscapes no longer exist.

I've blogged about Mr. Teunissen before, but he is doing an edition with us tomorrow at 20x200.com so I've posted again as a heads up. If you want to purchase a print, the best way to get notified is via the 20x200 mailing list which give you a bit of a jump on the edition.

Teunissen has blogged about Domestic Landscapes over at Aperture.org.

I have a soft spot for photography made in the world's more visceral places. Davin Ellicson is working on a long term project documenting rural life in Romania where according to his bio he lived and farmed with a peasant family for a year in the Maramures region. He knows the people he's covering and it shows.

While I don't necessarily understand some of the editing choices he has made, the portfolios of California based photographer Victor Cobo contain some compelling images full of narrative delight and mystery.

John Chiara by using archaic techniques and hand built cameras has become of photography's most innovative landscape photographers. Working with giant truck-sized cameras that he actually crawls inside of while creating an image he produces one of a kind prints that manage to evoke not only the grand tradition of making landscape pictures but also of the essence of photography itself.
If you happen to be in New York, there are only a few days left to visit his exhibition at The Von Lintel Gallery. Go See the works in person as they demand to be seen.

This short video (real player format) of Chiara shows something of his technique.

John Davies is on the short list of four finalists for this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2008. His large scale prints are best seen in person as they contain an incredible amount of detail. They're currently in a show of prize finalists in London. Of course any British readers of this blog have probably already seen the exhibition.

The Photographers’ Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street
London WC2H 7HY

Unlike many photographers who visit to Pyongyang, North Korea only return with images of the Potemkin Village spectacles put on for tourists, Charlie Crane manages to capture the some of the stark emptiness and weirdness of the place. Crane's recent Welcome to Pyongyang is one of the best of the recent spate of North Korea books and has been widely hailed as one of the best photo books of 2007.

We have a Charlie Crane print available on 20x200 this week!

Next Thursday here in New York Nicholas Nixon will be opening a show titled Patients which is a must see... It features arresting images of terminally ill patients. Nixon turns the photographic cliché of shooting the dying it's head by making savagely beautiful almost sensual portraits that are at once sculptural and delicately, tragically human. Most of the images from the show aren't online yet, but I expect they will be soon.

Nixon became part of the modern art photography canon for his Brown Sisters project, but his portfolio is wide ranging. I wish galleries/phtographers would realize the value of putting up older projects online. Nixon's Photos from one Year for example is a no brainer for the web.

Long time readers of this blog know that I have something of an obsessive relationship with snow, a product of a largely snowless childhood in a hot corner of Texas. Simply put I love snow. It makes me a little bit crazy, so I guess I was predisposed to be a fan of Lisa Robinson’s Snowbound, photographs taken over several years of snows. Her landscapes remind us of the thrill of being the first to tread on new snow and the wonder of discovering a world made new. The understated images achieve power through subtlety which is a hard trick indeed given the challenges of shooting and of printing such images.

This work deserves to be seen in person as digital files viewed on screen don’t do the prints justice, so make the trek over to DUMBO and check out the show at the Klompching Gallery, it’s up through February 29th.

If aren’t in the New York area, Robinson’s book of the same title was cited by PhotoEye editor and photobook connoisseur Darius Himes as one of his favorite photobooks of 2007.

Tangential: And while we’re on the subject of snow and photography why not re-read Alec Soth’s snow-tagged posts. Of all the blogs that have come and gone over the years, his is the one I miss reading the most.

Stefan Ruiz is a San Francisco born photographer of Mexican-Italian descent. His wide ranging portfolios cover everything from African refugee camps to the sets of Mexican telenovelas, to Cuban Psychiatric hospitals. They give us much to chew on.

His book, simple titled People features portraits from many of these projects presented in sequence.

As a response to yesterday's post a friend asked if I had ever seen the work of Mikiko Hara. I haven't seen it in person, but I recently read a nice post on Hara on Japan-Photo.info, one of my favorite photography blogs. Hara's work is quiet and poetic, a rare quality in street photography. Works for me.

Update:Lesley Martin, who always writes incisively about photography has written a nice piece on Ms. Hara in the Winter 07 issue of Aperture. I've met Lesley a couple of times while sitting on Jen Bekman's Hey Hot Shot Panel, she also happens to be swell in general.

Hiromi Tsuchida always included on the short list of great Japanese photographers for his books Hiroshima and Counting Grains of Sand. He's recently released New Counting Grains of Sand, a continuation of the original project. It's a delightful book and worth tracking down (you can find it on PhotoEye .)

If you don't visit Tsuchida's website for the photography, go for the 20 year timelapse of his head... I have a weakness for time based projects...

And if you happen to be in London you still have a week to see some of Tsuchida's prints in person. They are part of a show titled The Eyes an Island: Japanese Photography 1945-2007.

Related: Noah Kalina, Time Photography

In interviews Melanie Schiff often references music. "You hear a sad song and you feel like it's your experience, and I wanted to make art like that, to make photos like that." And many of the images in her current portfolio literally reference music. There are still lives with skulls and cassette tapes, another of light bouncing off cd cases, and a self portrait with a Neil Young album. It might sound silly when described but it all just works. The image selection is eclectic and personal and for me it does play like a very good album.

I read on MAO today that Ms. Schiff was recently chosen for the 2008 Whitney Biennial which is good news indeed. I look forward to seeing her enormous prints here in NYC.

More of Schiff's work can be seen at the Kavi Gupta Gallery.

If you've ever found yourself in a taxi roaming a part of the world far from home, you'll appreciate Stefan Rhoner's essay from Morroco "The King Is Coming"...

This morning I was reminded of this exhibition of photographs of South Africa from 1998 by a friend who attended with me. Then this evening I got an email about an upcoming Goldblatt show. If you don't know his work you should check it out. The photographs are quiet but powerful, especially in person.

If I were in a band I'd want my album cover to be photographed by Michael Schmelling who is known for his atmospheric band portraits. He also has a terrific set of personal stories online. The image above from his series titled El Paso.

Today I came across the website of Dinu Li a Hong Kong born artist whose family emigrated to England when he was a young child. His work from China/Hong Kong is especially remarkable, and strike me as the images of someone both looking for himself and trying to picture a past that doesn't necessarily exist anymore.

I should note I found this work via Asian Photography Blog which is fast becoming one of my favorite daily reads.

After writing a post about Hendrik Kerstens' Dutch Masters-inspired photos, a friend recommended I check out the work of Pierre Gonnord who also makes portraits heavily influenced by Vermeer Rembrant and the like. This time the photographer is a Frenchman who lives in Madrid. My bet is that he uses simple lighting setups-one big diffused light or a big northern facing window-to achieve this look.

If you have to be born into a national artistic tradition you could do worse than being born Dutch. The love of natural light, the emphasis on quiet emotional portraits, and the long history of reverence of the everyday interiors gives the modern artist much to chew on whether working within the tradition or in opposition to it. I remember seeing Bert Teuissen’s Domestic Landscapes series for the first time and my first thought, was, "ahh he must be Dutch"- the national DNA is just so embedded in the work.

Another fascinating unmistakably Dutch artist is Hendrik Kerstens. For the last 12 years Kerstens has been almost exclusively photographing his daughter Paula creating photographs that consciously evoke Vermeer and other Dutch masters and yet are unabashedly modern. He’ll make a photograph of his daughter in an archaic hairstyle and in a classic pose, but then you notice her arms peeling from a sunburn. A hoodie will substitute for a 17th century bonnet, and so on... The play between the contemporary and traditional as well as the natural tensions between the photographer and his daughter give the series an unsettling frission and make it worth keeping on your radar.

Related: on tradition and tronies, on his technique, a clickable map of all the known vermeers (generally lousy scans), Vermeer's Camera

Celine Clanet is a versatile photographer with a wide ranging set of portfolios covering editoral and photojournalistic work, but I'm most drawn to her personal portfolios. Check out her sets titled Maze and Une mélodie japonaise.

I've mentioned Dylan Chatain on this blog before... he recently updated his website... there are no new images, but the edit is somewhat different than before and it's fascinating to see how a new edit can dramatically change the mood of a particular project... The work on the site was culled from thousands of images taken during some very long road trips in which he did nothing but shoot film for days on end....and from what I've seen there are several projects in there just waiting to be curated...

Like many young photographers Miranda Lehman's portfolio is full of moody pictures of couples in bed, but the photograph on her site that hooked me is one above that evokes classic Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia imagery..

I'm almost always a fan of photography of interiors of places that look well lived in... the type of photography that people like Bert Teunissen or Seth Thompson do so well, so I was pleased to come across a team of Polish photographers who work in this subgenre. Their projects can be seen here or (in bigger sizes but with fewer images) here.

It is much too late to be looking at photography but these images by Asako Narahashi from her series half awake and half asleep in the water matched my mood perfectly. Indulge yourself.

More can images can be found on the artist's website.

Donald Weber is a Guggenheim fellow and a Lange-Taylor prize winning photographer based in Moscow. His portfolios whether they be from the Ukraine or Turkish Kurdistan or Chad are reminders of just how muscular and illuminating photography can be when in the hands of a fearless observer... Please stop wasting your time here and click over to his site right away.

The image above is from an Austrian artist named Lois Hechenblaikner who shoots the "iconography of mass tourism". This series is part of an exhibition of 21 Austrian artists titled '21 Positions' at the Austrian Cultural Forum here in NY (pdf catalog of the exhibit). It's a nice lineup of artists most of whom were new to me...

As an aside, and I know this is completely unfair, but when I heard about an exhibition of Austrian artists my head instantly went to that scene in the film Before Sunrise where the two characters meet a pair of non-professional actors on a bridge:

Continue reading Lois Hechenblaikner (and 21 other Austrian Artists... »

Image ©Neil Rough
I always like hitting up my photo minded friends for the names of photographers to watch for.... today a friend forwarded the above image and recommended I check out Neil Rough's Tunisia Portfolio which she described as "mysterious and enigmatic"... It is indeed. "Who are these people," I kept asking myself. "People he met along the way? Guests at a party?" They seem to exist outside of normal time. This is the kind of portfolio I love.

I should also note that Mr. Rough does a great self portrait.

I first heard about Denis Dailleux from an Egyptian friend who said the photographer 'gets' Cairo like no other photographer she knows. Later I found a few of his images in the Aperture book Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World (more info on the Nazar show on the 2005 Fotofest site). Now I've finally found a few of his images online. While he has several portfolios of other subjects, Cairo seems to be where his heart lies.

Images can be found here, here, and here. Can't find his book anywhere...

I generally refuse to browse photography sites with hover based navigation because I find that convention so darned annoying, but I really like Katie Murray's photography so I suffered through her site... I especially like her series on Queens which I've always found to be New York's most impenetrable borough... A few more images can be found on Jen Bekman's site.

In response to my previous post a friend sent along a link for Rachel Hope Feierman's site with the promising beginnings of a project on kids hanging out in parking lots. As someone who grew up in a small town where this was the only form of entertainment on a Friday night, I instantly connected with these images. I also like the way the photographs have been laid out on the page. The juxtapositions lend a cinematic quality the images might not have had on there own. Somehow though the project as presented feels incomplete to me, I hope there is more to come.

Feierman is recent SVA MFA graduate from an impressive class.

I received an email the other day about a new exhibition from South African photographer Pieter Hugo and, as usual, it's provocative and inspiring work. Pieter is on my very short list of contemporary photographers whose work brings me back over and over again for repeated viewings. The new project is called Messina/Musina and was taken in an around a colonial town on the northern border of South Africa. The gallery site also points to an interview with Hugo about the project that will be included in a forthcoming book.

More Hugo Links:
Witnessing the End 2007 interview
interview on the making of the Hyena Men May 2005 (images from the hyena men series)
another interview 2005
Pieter Hugo (personal site)

Update: Someone just emailed that Amy Stein wrote an almost identical entry to this one complete with the same title yesterday. Except that she one ups this post by noting she has one of Pieter's prints hanging in her house. So don't listen to me, listen to Amy who is doing great work of her own and delve into Pieter's portfolios!

Laura Letinsky has gained art world fame for her evocative still lives, but of her projects Venus Inferred is still probably my favorite. She talks about these projects and others in this 2004 interview with mouth magazine.

From: oilpainting-a@sohu.com
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:04:52 +0800
Subject: From the oil painting studio

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About a month ago I pointed to a set of photographs from Eastern Europe by my friend and gallerist Nelson Hancock. Now Nelson has put up a new set of images, this time for an upcoming exhibition called Kamchatka, Photographs from Russia's Far East. As he notes, "Most people in the US have only heard of Kamchaka because it was an important territory in the old board game Risk..." His portraits from the Kamchatka River valley both bridge the distance and add to the mystery of this far away place.

The show opens June 14.

I'm a fan of the portfolios of Yale MFA student Kathryn Almanas... She mastering the hard trick of mixing images rooted in reality with imaginary tableauxs to create projects with emotional heft...

I was going to blog these all separately but it would take forever, so here are a few more portfolios I saw at Review Santa Fe that caught my eye:

I've mentioned Birthe Piontek on this blog before. Meeting her in person and discovering her to be modest, sensitive and funny made me like the work all the more.

Paula McCartney showed a portfolio of fake birds in nature. Not sure if that description sounds appealing, but I assure you the prints had a touch of magic to them. She also handcrafts jewel-like artist's books.

I noted the work of Ferit Kuyas before heading out to Santa Fe and his work did not disappoint. While his website is still down it's worth checking back in to look for his project on Chongqing. One of the things that came out of the review was a name change for the project. The working title was Double Happiness which was a deeply personal choice (his wife is from Chongqing), but during the course of one of the reviews he realized a more apt title would be City of Ambition riffing on Stieglitz... I like the new title and love the images from the project.

Daniel Traub was also showing work from China. His project called The City's Edge an especially relevant in a time where Chinese cities are growing at an almost unfathomable pace. Daniel lives in Shanghai and was just selected to be in Jen Bekman's spring Hot Shots show (full disclosure I was on this Hot Shot's Reviewer Panel)

Rachel Herman was another photographer with really beautiful prints. The web doesn't do them justice.

Sarah Wilson is a photographer for Texas Monthly which is known for it's deeply researched stories and sharp photography. Her photographic essay on the murder of James Byrd in Jasper Texas reveals the ripples and scars left by the events of that night nine years ago.

Finally I hope you visit the work of Kay Lynn Deveney who presented a project called The Day to Day Life of Albert Hastings, a Welshman she she met while in graduate school. For each of her photographs she had Mr. Hastings write a caption and the images were presented together with his text. A book of their collaboration will be available soon from Princeton Architectural Press.

One of the nice things about a portfolio review is that you get to look at a broad range of work outside of your own specific interests. I rarely seek out industrial or architectural photography, but at the review I got a chance to look at several excellent portfolios in this genre including the work of New York based Israeli photographer Shuli Hallak. She makes big powerful prints of the world's largest cargo ships and factories and so on... Ms. Hallak was also a pick in PDN's 30 emerging photographers for 2007. The portfolio worth checking out even if this isn't normally your kind of thing.

I'm back in New York and have nothing but good things to say about Review Santa Fe...

For the next few days I'll highlight work from photographers I met at the review...

First up, Karolina Karlic whose portfolio of images from Detroit was notable not only for the loving handling of her subject matter but also for her luscious prints. Karolina now lives in Minneapolis home to a strong community of smart young photographers.

The other day I mentioned a photographer named Li Yu in passing and said his portfolio on the Beijing Fotofest site suffered from lack of explanation. Thomas Wain of Stoke-on-Kent, England who saw one of the photos on Tim Atherton's site wrote me asking if I knew of a web page that had those explanations (the images are recreations of scenes from local newspaper crime blotters)... indeed I do.

The portfolio is called 13 Months in the Year of the Dog and contains English translations. In describing the work Li Yu writes:

"A boy was riding a bicycle with a girl on the backseat in the street. Many passers-by accused them of violating the traffic rules, which forbade bikers to have anyone on the backseat. Instead of following their advice, the boy rode faster. All of a sudden, the girl shrieked in alarm. Her skirt was tangled up into the wheel and completely torn up. Soon the boy fell onto the ground with the bicycle while the girl stood aside, blushing and only appearing in her underwear. This was a news story I read in high school and it still remains vivid in my memory. The extremely critical writing of the reporter who wrote the story severely condemned certain uncivilized phenomena in the society and met the needs of his readers.

The year of 2006 was the year of the dog according to the Chinese lunar calendar. It consisted of 13 months and four Valentine's Days, totaling 385 days. In the same year, Liu Bo and I launched an art project entitled "13 Months in the Year of the Dog." We picked out two local news stories from newspapers in Wuhan, restaged the reported scenes, and shot large photographs of them. During this process, we brought our own imaginations and other everyday experiences such as the secondhand experiences we had obtained from films, TV and news photos into this project.

Our selection of the news stories was inspired by the early-mentioned news report. But nowadays, the magic power and literary value of news has far exceeded our anticipation and even films: deceit, murder, eroticism and violence…so striking and unimaginable. How can one decide whether these stories have truly happened or not simply relying on written words? Maybe it's not important, at least they have truly existed in the papers. But as for the readers, these stories are as eye-catching as the blushing girl in her torn-up skirt. That's the so-called media truth. The life of today is the history of tomorrow. Someone says that history is like a girl ready to be dressed up by anyone. Now, let's put the girl with the torn-up skirt back into another beautiful outfit."

I love this picture by Luo Dan of a performer waiting to go on stage... It was included in the photographer's portfolio for Fotofest Beijing. Luo Dan has a nice touch, many of his images are infused with quiet lyricism and hints of narrative that draw the viewer right into the work... The fotofest portfolio was a short selection of images from his project National Highway 318. (National Highway 318 is longest east-west highway in China stretching 3314 miles from Shanghai to Tibet ...) Many more images from the project can be found on Luo Dan's personal website. This is a link to the actual images.

The fotofestbeijing site is worth checking out on it's own for it's varied portfolios by Chinese photographers of all stripes. Some suffer from lack of explanation, for example I think it helps to know that Li Yu is recreating stories found in local crime blotters... but even without text there is plenty of food for thought here...

One of the many things I love about early photographs of seemingly empty street scenes is the slight blur that comes from the people who were passing by during the long exposures. Michael Wesely does modern versions of those long exposures taking the technique to the extreme sometimes leaving the shutters on his custom constructed cameras open for months or even years at a time. In the longest exposures people vanish completely, but the sun and moon leave streaks in the sky...

While his website features obtuse navigation and an extremely poorly coded javascript that occasionally hangs Safari and slows Firefox to a crawl, the site is still worth exploring for it's visually rich and thought provoking images which include still lives and motion studies in addition to the landscapes...

The image above was taken over two years during the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz... (via Pruned)

related: PBS interview

I had a dream last night in which I looked out the window and kept seeing Peter Garfield's mobile homes flying through the air... Luckily a detailed Peter Garfield website exists with many of his flying house pictures as well as lots of behind the scenes info to fill my waking hours...

vaguely related: Dreams (an mp3)

Talking about his project Be Yourself Tonight in which he rephotographs images from his family photoalbum Norwegian photographer Dag Nordbrenden says, "[this project] very much deals with the sadness of returning home... there is the experience of returning home to something that appears to be exactly as it always has been, but at the same time confirms that things have changed, since you have changed. The family photo album is in a way a celebration of the family - a celebration of the family that used to be. It is both something very private, but still something that one is eager to show in social gatherings to resent the official image of the family. But still photographs of holidays and celebrations will never guarantee that family members actually know each other."

(via Foam #7)

My gallerist Nelson Hancock is a fine photographer in his own right (and also, for good measure, a trained anthropologist). He's known for his sumptuous large format landscapes, but I also love his medium format portrait work... He just updated his gallery website and on it has posted a set of portraits taken around the eastern fringes of Europe in the early 90's. They are wonderful.

One of the great evocative travel experiences of my life happened in a dingy windowless room in a Rajastani guesthouse. I was bed-ridden with both dysentery and giardia and had not been outside in two or three days. I wanted to change rooms but was literally too weak to move. There were a tiny pinholes in the wall letting in shafts of light and a dim 5 watt bulb overhead which only worked a few hours a day. Hours were spent watching the ceiling fan circle ever slowly around and around and killing flies... so many flies. The nights were absolute black which was actually a relief as even the flies would stop buzzing.

One morning (at least I think it was morning as time had little meaning in there), when I awoke I noticed a dim but unmistakable image projected on the opposing wall... actually several images. There was the inverted village and the red hills, a tree with a swing, the train... dusty blue skies and clouds... The pinholes in the wall were turning the room into a natural camera obscura... They had been there all along but I had been too sick to notice. It is hard to express what comfort those images gave me and I think they were the boost I needed to get well enough to get out of there. I've never seen the camera obscura phenomena in any room since, although I've often dreamed turning a room of our house into one for a while.

I was thinking of those days in Rajasthan today which led me to revisit the work of Abelardo Morell the great creator of roomsized camera obscuras... His work is a reminder all rooms have secret lives as silent witnesses not only of the comings and goings inside but of the world beyond... and this is as true in the great rooms of New York City as it is in some miserable flyblown guesthouse on the Udaipur to Jodhpur railway line.

Related: a camera obscura fan site, Wifi Camera Obscura, Did Vermeer use a camera obscura?

Perhaps it's the vestigial art historian in me, but I love still lives with fruit. I like them precisely because they are so mundane. Artists have been attempting them for something like 3000 years and so often they fail which is why a good one jumps off the wall.

'Portraits of fruit' as I refer to them were one of the first impulses of photographers. Daguerre himself took many. For the next hundred years most photographic still lives were primarily lush 'our bounty overfloweth' type images taken by painter/photographers like Roger Fenton (the image at the beginning of this post is one of his from 1860) or vanitas of decay (again usually taken by photographers schooled as painters).... After almost 100 years of this the surrealists finally punched life back into the form starting in the late 20's.

(In my fantasy art collection I would own this little Man Ray peach from 1931)
Anyway this is all a long winded way of saying making an interesting still life is a tough artistic challenge so when I see one I like, I immediately pay attention. Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky has a series of still lives taken in her freezer. She says the images "to show the condition things are in when they are photographed," but I read them as vanitas. She lives in Holland—so definitely vanitas whether she knows it or not. For me they = instant happy.

I have seen some of Rinko Kawauchi's images around the web but had never explored her work until today when I got a chance to check out two of her books, Cui Cui ("a family album for 13 years") and Aila on births and deaths. Both are beautiful intelligent explorations of sharply focused themes. While many individual images are stunners (the shocking birth portrait for example) the books make it clear these images were meant to be seen together and viewing them any other way (on the web for instance) is like taking a single line from a long poem. Many have deemed Aila an instant classic and rightfully so. A few more images can found here and here.

More links: An interview, a 15 month cameraphone diary

I love straightforward beauty of so many of Vancouver based Birthe Piontek's photographs. Her project Sub Rosa on teenagers at the cusp of adulthood was selected as a "Juror's Choice" for this years Project Santa Fe (now known as Center) Competition by New York Times Magazine photo editor Kira Pollack.

Jennifer Trausch has been traveling around the country with the legendary 20x24 Polaroid camera shooting black and white portraits of people she finds along the way... Her brand spankin' new website features a few shots from this ongoing project as well as many images from Skateland which was shown last year. My interview with Jen is up Andrew Long's Daily F'log which is highlighting polaroid photography this week. (Polaroid Week has already produced many fun articles including a Michael David Murphy's interview with Mike Slack, check it out.). If you've ever seen the 20x24 in person it's a thing of beauty and being so in awe of the camera itself most of my questions were about process...

Working in the formal language of late 19th century and early 20th century photographers such as George Barnard and Paul Strand, New York born MacArthur Fellow Fazal Sheikh tells stories people forgotten by the rest of the world, people often misrepresented by popular media. Several of his books are now available in abbreviated online editions. I recommend starting with "The Victor Weeps". (As a side note the book is available for only $17 on Amazon.)

You can view an interview with Sheikh on the Tate Modern's site, a second interview is available here.

Related: Jake Miller's essay on Sheikh's book and Edward Grazda's Afganistan Diary, Simon Norfolk's Chronotopia, Photostudio portraits of the Taliban

I found Erkia Svensson's work via Michael Julius' linklog who describes the images as "haunted pictures" with "strangely beautiful color". My thoughts exactly.

The new Jeff Wall show at MOMA has managed to stir the soup pitting those who admire Wall against his detractors. Here's a roundup of show reviews and blog posts (most from the last couple of days).

The New York Times profile and show review.

The New Yorker show review.

The Tate mounted Wall retrospective last year. The Tate site includes many images... good to check out for a bit of perspective.

Chris Keeley's thoughtful review.

Wall's show inspired Time to write a somewhat dismissive article on "staged photos". They group Wall with Cindy Sherman, Gregory Crewdson, and AES&F.

Alec Soth's blog entry on the Wall portrait by Justine Kurland in the Times article sparked this interesting discussion on artists doing editorial work.

An article on the Vancouver art scene and Wall's place in it.

Of course there is a wikipedia entry on Wall.

The Landscapist says he likes some of Wall's work but is annoyed by the underlying premise of the work...

Paul Butzi on Wall and 'nowhereness'.

Jon Anderson muses on Wall's constructed images as compared to found images

In Wall's work Dan Ng sees some redemption for creative people in advertising.

Doug Pummer is of two minds on the work...

As for me, I respect Wall. His recent images almost never hit me in the gut as did his earlier ones (sometimes I see the seams of the photoshop trickery which is a turnoff), but he's an important artist with something to say and I pay attention when he makes art... I appreciate the pure richness of his large lightboxes and enjoy decoding his art historical allusions. Much of the criticism of Wall comes from other photographers who find his work somehow threatening. I believe the opposite is true, and that his work has enlarged the range and scope of what people accept as art photography. I'm excited to see the show.

Weng Fen is an artist from Hainan Island in China. Many of his projects—'Bird's Eye View', 'On the Wall', 'Staring at the Lake' and so on—feature figures, usually schoolkids, with their backs to the camera staring out over the landscape. To my eye they recall Casper David Friedrich's The Wanderer. It's compelling stuff especially when viewed in multiple. I'd love to see a exhibition of his one day. Anyone know if he's ever been shown in New York?

Weng Fen's personal website (with installation photos)

found via Moca Taipei

Update: Speaking of Freidrich, the Sunday Times today has a nice article on Justine Kurland who admired Friedrich so much that she named her son Casper. Her monumental landscapes with their tiny figures owe something to Friedrich but more to 17th and 18th century European painters who used their tiny naked figures to suggest something of the fecundity of unspoiled nature. I am most compelled by her work that keeps that distance using the smallness of the figures to emphasize the vast scale of the land. When she gets closer to her subjects and they are photographed from a few feet away all the uniqueness of the work falls away and they just become pretty nudes... well at least to my eyes. You can see examples of both types of kurland's images in her current show which runs through April.

I'm always surprised when my fellow photographers don't know the work of Romualdo Garcia. After Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Agustin Casasola he's one of the icons of early Mexican photography. Garcia was based in Guanajuato where he ran a busy portrait studio for almost 60 years. Unlike most studio photographers who toil in obscurity his mastery was recognized in his own lifetime and he won the bronze medal at the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris. Despite his fame, he never travelled outside the city of his birth, always giving the excuse that there were too many clients waiting, too many portraits to take.

There are several Spanish language books on Garcia. The best is probably Romualdo Garcia, un fotagrafo, una ciudad, una epoca.

Related: Seydou Keita, more on Seydou Keita, part of my collection of photostudio portraits from tibet, Colors Magazine issue on Photo Studios

I discovered Dorthe Alstrup's photography via her entry in Jen Bekman's Hey Hot Shot competition more than a year ago. Her body of work is full of evocative imagery suggestive of fairy tales or short stories. Look at this one for example... or this one or this one... oh hell, they're all great, just go browse yourself. I hope someone gives her a show here in New York soon. I'd love to see these as prints.

For years I've tried to find a cheap copy of Ugo Mulas' The New York Art Scene to no avail. I saw the book for the first time 15 years ago at house of one of my friend's parents. I didn't really get far through it as I was grabbed by the cover which seemed almost criminally perfect. It's an image of two New York City cops watching over a gathering at Warhol's Factory. Can an image capture a cultural moment? That one seemed to. A few minutes into my book browsing, I had to leave never to return.

Anyway today I discovered a Mulas web site maintained by a foundation that bears his name (he died in 1973). The site is surprisingly rich complete with long texts and a portrait archive of 60's art world figures like Giacometti, Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and so on.

The book keeps going up in price. When I first started looking for a copy you could find a first edition for $100 which seemed outragous to my 25 year old mind. In recent auctions good quality copies have been going for 3 to 20 times that. Grrr.

A friend of mentioned I might like the photography of Linn Schröder and indeed I do.
Making Room did an interview with her a while back and features a gallery of her series "Sind Sie ein echter Frosch". The image above is from a series titled A Play (sometimes translated "A Piece"). One or two more shots from this series can be found on a page called The Art of Being German which is chock full of interesting photography.

If you have ever tried to make photographs in the New York City subway system, you know what a difficult task it is. The lighting is terrible. People are wary. It's hard to get a clear shot because of the crowds. Etcetera. And yet Travis Ruse has managed to take countless beautiful candid shots in the subway, day after day, year after year.

Tonight a show of his subway photos will open at 6:30 at Redux Gallery (116 E. 16th St. 12th Flr). I happened to see several freshly printed images over at Gabe Greenberg's studio and they look spectacular, so much more alive than any image on a screen could ever be, can't wait to see them on the wall. The show runs through March 9th.

Related: Bruce Davidson's Subway

If you've ever wandered the streets of Tokyo you've no doubt wondered what was going through the minds of all those Japanese salarymen in their identical suits... Click through to the world of Yamasaki, a salaryman with a camera to find out...

The online magazine Polar Inertia is featuring a set of images of wonderful Soviet era bus stops. Good stuff. You used to find similar bus stops (and bus stations) in rural china featuring exuberant off kilter designs. Sadly most have been modernized out of existence.

Mark Powell is a photographer who never fails to delight, intrigue, and challenge his audience (he also happens to be a great guy). His book of photos from Mexico City and Detroit titled V.I.P just came out and is reviewed by Michael David Murphy who also provides a link to purchase the book. Note that right now the only place to buy the book is via a Mexican online bookstore so you need to be able to read Spanish to order (this said the store is reliable). I'll update with links to American stores when the book becomes available here.

Mark's Alor Powell

Update: Mark just put up a mini book site with more info.

I've been a fan of Dylan Chatain's photography since I saw a few of his prints at the Jen Bekman Gallery last year... He's recently posted more work online from project The American Imagination. When I saw his prints lat year and when I checked his work online, the phrase that kept floating into my head was quietly evocative... but instead of reading a description, why not just look at the pictures...

Mexican crime photographer Enrique Metinides' work often leaves viewers unsettled. He is compared to Weegee because of the macabre subject matter and yet Metinides work strikes a darker chord. We look at Weegee's dead mobsters and think they got what they deserved, but when Metinides shoots a kid floating on bottom of a pool the tragedy is palpable...this could be someone you know. Reviewers always compare Metinides photos to film stills maybe because he shoots wide tableaus including bystanders—passersby frozen in a moment of contemplation—this gives the images a larger than life reality that competes with the unreality of the subject matter and distinguishing the images from common tightly composed flash-bulbed newspaper pulp (as an aside it's an effect many art photographers especially those from the Yale school of photographic thought keep trying to replicate). Many of the pictures are hard to look at and yet you are drawn to them. This is not exactly rubbernecking, it's a more primal pull. These are views of death that carry the shade of hard reality. We viewers become bystanders ourselves.

Today the New York Times is featuring a review of a Mentinides show up at Anton Kern Gallery through January.

Andrew Kern
532 West 20th Street

related: another good article on Metinides

Other shows I want to check out this weekend:

Girls Room featuring work from some 30 odd artists...
@ Jen Bekman
6 Spring Street

New Photography 2006
@ MOMA

Jonathan Moller spent ten years in Guatemala photographing rural Mayan communities at war with the government. The stories he tells are tragic, heartbreaking, and beautiful. A monograph of this body of work is titled Our Culture is Our Resistance. (Note the images on Moller's personal website are presented with lots of compression. Slightly better quality images are viewable, although without context, here.)

One of the most compelling recent trends in blogging has been the artist interview. This Simon Norfolk interview on his war photography (and much more) by blogger-extrordinaire Geoff Manaugh is a prime example.

The pictures that have made Gregory Crewdson famous, his large scale tableaus, don't do much for me. I admire their artistry and recognize why they have created such a stir in the art world, but having worked on movie sets, they look familiar, and I always wonder, why not just make a movie?. Add star models and that feeling/question is heightened. For me the big cinematic images lack the kind of emotion and truth I look for in photography...

...but the mark of a great artist is someone who is willing to take risks and exhibit work not normally associated with his signature style and Crewdson has done this in a small and lovely show titled simply Fireflies now showing uptown at Skarstedt Fine Art. According to the show notes the pictures were taken over two months of nights outside a cabin in Becket, Massachusetts in 1996.

Crewdson writes about the night of the show opening in this article.

Because these images are so subtle and dark seeing them on web doesn't don't do them justice. If you aren't near NY, you might be able to find a copy of the current issue of Blind Spot magazine which features work from the show on the cover and has semi-decent reproductions. A book with all 62 images is also forthcoming.

I don't know why these images took 10 years to come out, but I'm glad they did. Each is like a small poem infused with sweet smell of summer evening. Seeing them on the wall is something special.

related: nice review in the Village Voice

I just discovered this video of photographer Ed Burtynsky discussing his 'manufactured landscapes' as part of last years TEDTalks conference. If you haven't discovered it yet, TEDTalks has a fantastic video archive of lectures of world class artists and innovators. You can also grab these via their blog or itunes (search for TedTalks in the store). The itunes versions are higher quality.

One small goal of mine (which will now never be reached) was to make portraits with one of the famous 20x24 polaroid cameras. A few months ago I was hanging out in a print studio with Jenn Trausch, a 20x24 camera operator (and a photographer in her own right), when she mentioned that Polaroid would stop making 20x24 film effectively retiring the camera forever. But before the camera was to be mothballed, she convinced Polaroid to let her go on one last photographic adventure. Images of Jenn (and the camera) in action out on the road can be found here and here.

related: 20x24 Studio West, 20x24 faq

One of my favorite recent photography discoveries is of the work of Seth Thompson who happens to be represented by my gallery. Seth's work includes scores lush interiors of homes in rural Mexico and Cuba shot with medium format cameras. The work recalls Eliot Porter's Mexican Churches series which came out of an extended trip to Mexico in 1956. Seth recently added many images to his website which he groups under the project name Poco Luz. Poco Luz which means 'little light' (almost all his images are long exposures shot in dim natural light). Perhaps it's something about those long thirty second to several minute exposures that saturate the silver because his images are drenched in almost unbearably beautiful color. The bedrooms, kitchens, churches in these pictures leave me with a visceral sense of lives lived simply, but well and with passion. If you like what you see on the web, you'll be floored by his big, finely made prints which you can view by appointment at the Nelson Hancock Gallery.

Livia Corona produces a wide range of work from commercial illustrative images to art photography. If you're someone who grew up going to bullfights in Mexico you'll understand the appeal of her Enanitos Toreros series... to me it feels distinctly Mexican...

This evening I heard photographer Holly Lynton speak about her current show Solid Ground. We happen to work with the same printer (Ben Diep at ColorSpace Imaging on 20th Street) so I had seen some of her images a few months ago around the print studio before I knew anything about the show. They are luminous prints, each one exotic and yet familiar. Taken together they put the viewer in a distinctly feminine and mysterious dreamworld full of blossoming life but also full of hidden dangers and even death. Looking at the images and having heard they had all been taken in the artist’s backyard, I formulated what I thought was a strong theory about the motivation behind the work. I was certain that the artist was trying to show us a child’s perspective where the back yard is indeed the entire world. The low angles, tight crops, short focus and subject matter all seemed to confirm my theory.

For me the work recalled the deep forest I remember behind an apartment that was our home for about a year in the 70’s. I was 5 then and would go exploring with my 3 year old brother. Each journey like all good adventures was fraught with giddy joy and perceived danger. Would there be trees to climb, wild blackberries, or kidnappers and snakes? The trips often ended with us running full tilt, simultaneously laughing and yelling at the top of our lungs, back home.

A few years ago I returned looking for the forest and was puzzled to find only a grouping of tightly bunched thin trees. Convinced the forest must have been leveled I looked back at old photographs to find the scene virtually unchanged, a small stand of trees behind a parking lot ... and yet even with irrefutable proof, it is hard to resolve the memory of the deep dark forest dimly illuminated by occasional shafts of light.... endless.

All this is a roundabout way of saying I had convinced myself I knew what the artist had intended... and of course I was totally wrong. In her talk this evening she said the series had been inspired by a trip to Tanzania shortly after September 11th. In Africa she found death and beauty lurking all around in a real and visceral way. The unresolved feelings the trip inspired, as well as returning during a time when imagined boogiemen were being touted daily led her into her backyard searching for the kind of beauty and danger she experienced in Africa... and to this project...

And yet like that stand of trees, even knowing the truth, it is hard to resolve my original conception of the project. Both narratives remain in my head and both seem equally true.

Rineke Dijkstra is photographer whose work always makes me stop in my tracks. I was reminded to look up her work from this post on MAO. Her portraits of bullfighters who have just left the ring are new to me. I don't think this show ever made it to New York.

also: her foreign legion series

I've only spent a very short time in Finland, but I found the place and it's people to have that rare quality of simutaneous seriousness and silliness. Pekka Turunen's photography catches a bit of that. The online galleries available don't show his work well (there are some bad scans, odd edits), but some of his images can be seen here and here.

I was reminded of Turunen by this post on fellow Finn, Tiina Itkonen today.

Related: Tiina Itkonen

The Michael Stevenson Gallery has posted a number of galleries of Pieter Hugo's work. I hung out with Pieter a few months ago here in New York. He perfectly embodies the image of the brash hard drinking photographer. In conversation he is often dismissive of the art world and indeed of photography itself, but his work speaks for itself. Powerful stuff.

I look forward to his upcoming book.

Wild Honey Collectors, Techiman District, Ghana
Boy Scouts, Monrovia, Liberia.

Related Post: Hyena Men

Krisanne Johnson tells powerful stories with her pictures.

Brian Lesterberg's photographs from North Dakota strike me as unmistakably and viscerally American. I love the clarity and sensitivity of his vision.

I've only been through Wisconsin twice (and then on road trips), but Christian Patterson photographs it just as I remember it: here's part of his continuing On Wisconsin series. His show Sound Affects shot in Memphis opens here in NY on October 25 at Yancey Richardson.

Don't miss Baldomero Fernandez' lush set of photographs titled "Santiago De Cuba" taken on his first visit back to his native Cuba.

I always love a photographers who look their subjects directly in the eye without flinching or hiding behind a long lens. Check out Nadia Sablin's Baba series. (via Jen Bekman)

One of the best photojournalists out there, Stephanie Sinclair, has photo essay on Afghani child brides in this week's New York Times magazine. The writing accompanying the article is a bit annoying, but the pictures are, as always, extraordinary.

Her personal website was recently updated to include a number of new stories.

Sigh still I don't have the underlying problems fixed on this blog yet, so I've been spending my nightly blog time working on getting the issues fixed as opposed to writing... In the meantime here are a few photographers portfolios pointed to me by friends...all well worth the clicks...

Michael Christopher Brown - Make sure to check out portfolio titled "The Great Experiment." (via Travis.)

Paul D'Amato - via Daniella.

Hamid Sardar - Heartstoppingly great images. (via Youngna.)

In searching for more work from photographer Tina Iltkonen (listed below), I ran across the work of fellow Finn Ville Lenkkeri which is also worth checking out. Images on Fotofinlandia and 30 by TaiK: the Helsinki School.

The portfolio of Finnish photographer Tiina Itkonen is a delight. Check it out. More photos here.

I've noticed the photography of Aaron Ruell before but I never never noted the photgrapher's name. Today I discovered his website.

I recently asked a friend of mine who is a fairly serious photography collector about artists who have caught his eye recently. "Rut Blees Luxemburg," he answered, and showed me a few prints of her images from Dakar. I found them intriguing. You won't find one site with a good catalog of her photographs, but a google image search will find many of the better known images.

I love the camera in this image from Afghanistan by photojournalist Sergey Maximishin. More images from Afghanistan from Mr. Maximishin can be found on the stories section of his website. Be sure to check out his recent North Korea set.

I noticed an image by Brian Ulrich in a magazine some time ago. Tonight I finally tracked down his website. Of his many projects, the one titled Copia really gets me.

Via Mr. Ulrich's site I discovered Greg Stimac's work, The project titled 'Recoiled Portraits' is the vision of Americans held by most Europeans I meet these days. In polyglot Brooklyn it has the shock of the foreign and yet for me all the images are familiar. These are the Americans of my teenage years in East Texas.

Mr. Apagya is photostudio photographer based in Accra in Ghana. He takes studio portraits in front of hand painted backdrops. I find the text in the accompanying article a both mildly patronizing and silly (and obnoxiously all in lower case), but ignore the text, enjoy the images. More images here and here.

Photostudio portraits from other places can be found in the flickr photostudio group. BTW if anyone who loves photostudio portraits should watch the Burden of Dreams, a Werner Herzog documentary about his epic Fitzcarraldo and wait until the very end when you can see a the entire process by which a local Amazonian photographer makes his beautiful black and white prints. I would kill to have some of those... almost worth a trip to the middle of the jungle. The documentary is running on some of the independent film channels this month...

Related to yesterday's post in sort of perverse way, the photography of Sarah Pickering. An interview with the artist.

I discovered the photography of Andrew Moore a few days ago and keep going back to his site for more. His Russia portfolio is magnificent, a visual feast.

A few years ago I caught wind of an exhibition by photographer Yto Barrada documenting life in Tangier. As Tangier is on my "I want to experience before I die" list it piqued my interest and I wasn't disappointed. The image above was from that previous show. The new exhibition is titled A Life Full of Holes and it should be interesting. I'm sad I'll be out of town.

Friday April 7th, 2006
6:00 to 8:00 PM
Cocktail Reception for the Artist
at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street

I stumbled upon the work of Michal Chelbin today. Her photography is one part Balthus, one part Arbus, made stranger by being set in the Russian hinterlands. The images are creepy, beautiful, and foreign. The site suffers from an awful flash interface, but if you can get past it, there are some compelling images to be had.

One day if you are lucky, you will travel across the the Taklamakan desert of Xinjiang. And on the journey you will stop in the small oasis towns along the way. And if you do find yourself in this situation, if you are the type of person to find yourself in the middle of the Taklamakan, inevitably you will walk to the outskirts of those villages where the irrigation ends and the desert encroaches, it is here you will find holy sites marked with prayer flags, a practice perhaps borrowed from Tibetans or perhaps inherited from distant Sythian ancestors. Lisa Ross has visited these places and stood there and photographed them. Her fantastic new show is called Traces of Devotion. It opens tomorrow and if you are in Dumbo you should check it out.

I've tinkered with making Polaroid panoramas, but I've never done it as well as Paul Schiek.

More of Mr. Schiek's elliptically delicious work can be seen at the Stephen Wirtz gallery site.

Angel, Chile
by Marcelo Montecino.

Check out Chilean Photographer Marcelo Montecino's incredible collection of vintage latin American photographs.

Ever wonder what it feels like to hang out in Hanoi? Check out Thinh Le's Hanoi Panoramas.

Landscapes generally don't have much impact on me, but Sze Tsung Leong's work is something special.

Tonight I attended an opening for Seth Thompson at my friend Nelson's gallery in Dumbo. Mr. Thompson's show is titled "Interiorismo Popular" and features images of Mexican homes and churches taken with a 6x7 camera and natural light. Beautiful work. This image of a church was one of my favorites as it reminds me very much of the church in which Jenn and I were married. Don't judge the image by the website jpeg which is washed out. In person these photographs are spectacular. The show will be up until March so I recommend heading over to Dumbo to check it out.

update: Another Seth Thompson link. (annoyingly also with washed out jpegs!). Mr. Thompson your work is fantastic make some better scans!

Want to see photography that will knock your socks off? Check out South African photographer Pieter Hugo's series The Hyena People of Nigeria.

Update: This link provides even bigger images as well as strong sets from several other African photographers. (via Steve)

A few months ago I posted a link to some of Sedou Keita's (the great Malian photo studio photographer) work. Last weekend the New York Times ran a long story on Mr. Keita and the convoluted tale of how his photographs went from being small images meant to be mailed to rural families in Africa to wall sized images sold in the Gagosian Gallery.

My friend Gabe got me all jazzed about seeing the new Edward Burtynsk show at the Brooklyn Museum. I've been a Burtynsky fan ever since I saw his shipbreakers show a few years ago. My plan is to make it out there this week. Do any of my photo geek friends care to join?

Striking images from a local photostudio in Mali by Seydou Keita.

I've been a big Tomoko Sawada's amazing self portraits ever since I saw a show of hers in Osaka in 1999. Tonight I happened upon her website. Check it out.

Go check out Dylan Chatain's site. Beautiful and evocative photography over there.

. . . . .
Totally unrelated but also cool is unphotographable.

If you feel you feel the need for some concentrated visual eye candy, head over to Dumbo and check out a show of John Hinde's work at Wessel + O'Connor Fine Art at 111 Front Street. Hinde was apparently a postcard photographer for English Holiday resort camps. His deep focus minutely detailed images are gorgeous and weird and worth seeing blown up. The phrase that came to mind while viewing was "Hieronymus Bosch, but jolly and English, and at camp." A book of his work is available on Amazon, it's called Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight (a large sign at one of the resorts).

A review of Hinde's work can be found here. Many Hinde links can be found on I like John Hinde.