Daniel Shea

Work from Removing Mountians.

Check out his work on NPR here.

“In the summer of 2007 I began shooting a body of work examining the coal industry in Appalachia. What started as an interest in the modern coal mining process known as mountaintop removal quickly evolved into an extensive study of the social/political institutions surrounding these practices. Above all else, I became interested in surveying the cultural implications of extracting coal from Appalachian Mountains. What I found over the course of the trip was that these coal mining operations had rapidly developed into one of the most destructive and pervasive forms of modern industry in the world.
 

Coal, the number one energy-based resource domestically, is responsible for mass environmental destruction, and some, if not most of the United States would suggest that it’s a necessary sacrifice. Consider our energy-usage on a daily level, which is more than likely powered by coal-burning power plants, fueled by coal from the Appalachian region. The issue’s complexities clearly go above and beyond this apparently less-than-polemical “sacrifice.” The human cost, above all, presented itself clearly and potently, rendering notions of “necessary evils” and “sacrifices” relatively useless political rhetoric.
 

Appalachian culture is historically defined through coal practices and popularly defined by an unfair misconception about its people and the conditions in which they live. In reality, I found communities sustaining culturally rich legacies, and I was fortunate enough to observe from the periphery, as a witness. Over the course of three months, I became more involved with the people I was around, and was quickly shown nothing short of Southern hospitality. A lot of these photographs represent time spent in these quiet and dauntless communities. In terms of mountaintop removal, I found people both embracing and vehemently opposing these practices. Even more did not fit this neat polarization, but undoubtedly the ideological and economical battle was and still is being waged ferociously in the mountains.
 

As for my approach, I embraced the histories of my medium, and set out to essentially make a social documentary narrative filtered through an ongoing evaluation of the historical delineation of landscape, and a strong recognition of the image’s influence in Western visual culture. My goal is to build a narrative out of context, where my point of view, and my limited perception are not ignored. After all, I consider this body of work to be art about a political issue, not political art. By default, many associations will immediately be made, but my hopes are that the viewer will eventually look at the group of photographs as a complex series of potential contingencies, much like the issue being dealt with.” – Daniel Shea

Yola Monakhov

Work from Once Out of Nature.

“My work deals with human drama from the point of view of its minor players. I photograph people, landscapes, architecture, parks, animals, and streets – locales and actors animated by difficult desires, comforts and resentments, spiritual longing, promises of amends, and a feeling of exile. I approach my subjects as if an astute visitor to my own time and place. I search for metaphor, and sustain belief in the transcendent possibilities of truthful description. 
I work primarily with large- and medium-format cameras, but deploy a variety of tools.In recent years, I rediscovered the pleasure of the black and white darkroom and launched a portraiture, architecture, and street photography project in Manhattan, inspired by thework of Atget in Paris and Helen Levitt in 1930’s New York. This undertaking, called “Empire Pictures,” has since grown into a mission to photograph the entire State of New York. In those corners, especially, that conceal a faded glory and unheralded populations, I wish to find dignity, formality and relevance..” – Yola Monakhov via Conscientious

Kelly Shimoda

Work from I guess you don’t want to talk to me anymore.

“I guess you don’t want to talk to me anymore serves to document mobile phone text messages and preserve a form of communication that is fleeting by design and rarely seen by anyone other than the original author or intended recipient. Taken as a whole, it also begins to ask deeper questions about human communication.

Because people can use texting to avoid the most uncomfortable parts of face-to-face interaction, they often feel liberated to spontaneously communicate intimate and revealing thoughts, but by being forced to encapsulate those thoughts in a mere 160 characters, the best messages read like haiku poems – brief, but full of meaning.

In my approach to shooting and editing the messages, the project becomes an informal sociological study, creating an intimate yet fragmentary portrait of a disparate network of people.

In the end, these enigmatic photographs ask as many questions as they answer, and force the reader to reflect and draw upon his or her own experience to make sense of them, ultimately pointing to the fundamentally fragile nature of human communication.” – Kelly Shimoda

Jay Gould

Jeff Wall

“There have been times (and particular pictures) in the past when it seemed that Jeff Wall was determined to take the technical image from classicism to mannerism in one digital swoop. But in his recent works, the style (or stylelessness) of the pictures definitely acts as a vehicle for meaning.

Even though the six images displayed in the front gallery (three large black-and-white photographs and three color light boxes) were not made as a series, the correspondences among them lead inexorably to linked narratives. Four images depict social scenes in the “near-documentary” mode, wherein the apparently instantaneous is laboriously limned. In Forest, 2001, a woman strides away from a rough campsite in a wooded ravine. In Dawn, 2001, a graffiti-covered stone, power pole, and Dumpster occupy a dead-end commercial zone, a waste place protected by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. We see the backs of four hurrying travelers in Overpass, 2001, schlepping their bags over a bridge as a storm gathers in the distance. And in Night, 2001, a woman sits against a concrete abutment, her meager possessions strewn along the edge of a dark pool.

All four images depict events and conditions that occur daily around the edges of Capital: peripheral transitions highlighting the ultimate precariousness of possessions. Two images show women without shelter, another shows people in harried transit, and the tagged stone and Dumpster mark the contested boundary between private ownership and public expression. Two other pictures in this gallery (Logs, 2002, and Cuttings, 2001) show nature (trees) transformed into product (building material and fuel) and act as transitional still lifes among the larger narrative pictures; they also remind us of the utter artificiality of these documentary-style images.

How do images so extravagantly made (not taken) still draw on photography’s special relation to the real? Because the individual elements in Wall’s images register as photographic, our photographically derived belief in them carries over to the whole. This synecdochic leap across the mechanical/digital divide (from photograph to pictograph) gives these synthetic pictures a residual believability that Wall exploits to great effect.

In the second gallery was After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Preface, 1999-2001, fresh from its debut at Documenra 11, where it was one of the most effective interventions in the documentary-aesthetic dialogue that defined that exhibition. It shows Ellison’s narrator in his Harlem basement, where he has festooned the ceiling with 1,369 incandescent lightbulbs in order to make the dank hole brighter than “the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night.” The Invisible Man sits under this canopy of light, on the edge of a folding chair, listening, we imagine, to Louis Armstrong on the phonograph singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue.”

It is a powerful composition, full of telling detail. At its center is an altar of sorts, with a small bust (of Beethoven?), a lucky horseshoe, a crucifix, cowboy hat, bull’s horn, and blackface ceramic mask. To the left hangs a yellow rabbit’s foot, and on the wall to the right is pinned an American flag, a torn picture of Christ as Shepherd, and a few illegible old photographs. Paired here with Rainfilled Suitcase, 2001, an image that seems to depict the aftermath of a catastrophe involving fire and water, Wall’s Invisible Man becomes a kind of threnody, perhaps even a prescient threnody for post-September 11 New York” – Art Forum International Magazine

Asger Carlsen

“Asger Carlsen continues with great lucidity and dazzling talent his personal survey on the perception of reality and the common acceptation of so-called normality.

With slight deviations of sense, images result in lightening emotional stories, film frames able to dig into the unconscious, moving revelations as involuntary reactions, hints and insights, unhinging certainties, and baring indefinite fears and anxieties, most linked to an inner world than to reality.

Mickey Smith

Work from Collocations and Belive You Me.

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Volume documents bound periodicals and journals in public libraries. Most of these publications are being replaced by their online counterparts. Several titles photographed in the process of this project have been destroyed. Searching endless rows of utilitarian text, I am struck by the physical mass of knowledge and the tenuousness of printed work as it fades from public consciousness.

The act of hunting for and photographing these objects is fundamental to my process. I do not touch, light, or manipulate the books and words – preferring to document them as found in the stacks, created by the librarian, and positioned by the last unknown reader. I focus on simple, provocative titles that transcend the spines on which they appear to create conceptual, language-based, anthropological works.
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Collocation is defined as “the act or result of placing or arranging together, specifically: a noticeable arrangement or conjoining of linguistic elements (as words).”

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Believe You Me is based on found portraits and live footage of people photographed with books set behind them as symbols of intellectual status. This formula for photographing scholars, politicians, and sometimes celebrities, implies a certain level of expertise and authority. – Mickey Smith