Mitch Epstein

Work from American Power

“Mitch Epstein’s current work examines how energy is produced and used in the American landscape. Made on forays to energy production sites and their environs, these pictures question the power of nature, government, corporations, and mass consumption in the United States.”

Review here.

Also check out his work from Berlin.

Lazy post today, I had friends suprise visit.

found via The Exposure Project

Daniel Eatock

Work from Quarter Mile Groove (video), Closed Loops, and Best Before October 26, 2008. Eatock’s site is a massive database of work that should be perused at leisure.

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Quarter Mile Groove

“The recording translates the length of its vinyl groove into audio allowing listeners to experience the 1/4 mile length of the spiral as the record is played. Every inch of the needle’s path is audible in the form of a click, each foot as a beat and distances of 10 feet are heard as a blip. These sounds gradually slow as the stylus approaches the center, (the stylus travels less distance in the groove with each revolution of the record). Along the way, the voice of the narrator mentions the horizontal dimensions of particular objects.”

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Closed Loops

“…examples of a burgeoning collection that enact a form of circular, if not familiar frustration induced by the conflicting imperatives of consumer packaging and product safety.”

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Best Before October 26, 2008

“This work documents a collection of seemingly random, mass produced
consumer items unified by each product’s expiration date, October 26, 2008, a day which coincided with the closing date of the exhibition Daniel Eatock: Extra Medium.

The first of the two photographs documenting the collection as exhibited was taken in the gallery on the day of expiration. The second photograph was taken the day following the expiration date.

Items donated by:
James Robert Edward Boynton (UK) – Honey Roasted Ham & Dijon Mustard Crisps
Casey Brooks (USA) – Aunt Millie’s Bratwurst Rolls
Juliet Hoffman (USA) – Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies
Ugolini Marco (Netherlands) – Roze Koeken Cakes
Elisa Platteau (Belgium) – Mokabon Coffee and Gevulde and Lekkernijen Cakes
James Rosenthal (USA) – Little Debbie Apple Pie
Serra Tansel (UK) – Marks and Spencers Wafer-Thin Ox Tongue”

Bradley Dean Wollman

Work from the series The Little War

“The Little War began in my mind about a year ago. I thought I would begin to comprehend the war in Iraq if I immersed myself in images and stories from the war. However, the more I watched, looked and listened, the further I felt from any perspective or understanding. All the footage began to manifest itself in my art as images of recreations and fantasies. This work addresses the conflict between how the war is idealized, how it is in actuality and how it is presented to us in everyday life. Our culture is saturated with visual media, and as we absorb information from all types of outlets, it is important to realize the removal of the viewer from the reality presented to them. “

Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek work from Exactitudes.

Exactitudes is a phenomonal (and phenomonaly large) exploration of photography as typology and visual classification, the website is a huge database of all types.

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Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 14 years. Rotterdam’s heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, although since 1998 they have also worked in cities abroad.
They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

Wim van Sinderen, Senior Curator Museum of Photography, The Hague

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“L’ exactitude n’est pas la vérité”
Henri Matisse

Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, the Rotterdam-based photographic team of Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek have been systematically hamstringing such permutations of received identity for ten years. They call their series Exactitudes, a contraction of “exact” and “attitudes”. It’s August Sander and Eugène Atget turned on their heads by Bernd and Hilla Becher – a direct assault on the mythic formula that photography plus the street equals authenticity.

By dragging the repertory of the street kicking and screaming to the studio backdrop, the series offers a purposely absurd response to the sentimentality of Jamal Shabazz (“Back in the days”) and the beloved and utterly bogus spontaneity of the photo booth. It’s a perfect fit for an age that’s made the “cool hunt” a corporate pursuit. Of course the photos are starchy and obdurately posed and ever so consciously styled, because there can be no meaningful limit to the cross-contamination between those notions of a authenticity and supreme self-awareness.

GIL BLANK
INFLUENCE Magazine, NYC

Nik Mirus

Work from the series Blackboard Landscapes and People and Quiet Spaces.

Blackboard Landscapes:

“There is something to be said about sitting in an empty classroom, (generally a very static/clinical environment) and staring at a 4 x 12 foot black chalkboard. I became very interested in observing these classroom blackboards. They’re surfaces always seemed to be in a state of motion, shifting appearance and form through out the day as various people marked them up and wiped them clean. They take on the appearance of vast, empty landscapes. I found them to be beautifully simple and very enjoyable to watch as if I were sitting on an open plain or looking over a vast expanse of water.”

People and Quiet Spaces:

“Very rarely do I use the camera as a means of capturing a specific event or instant in time. Rather, I prefer to use it as a tool with which to build a moment or create a feeling. I like to construct my photographs from the ground up. I enjoy choosing the subject, location and composition while designing the appropriate lighting, and then put everything together like building blocks. The result is often theatrical in its presentation. People and Quiet Spaces is a collection of work that has been in development over the past two years and represents my approach to portrait photography. I’ve always been drawn to the people around me, and their unique environments. In the series I present to you, the space is as much a subject of the photograph as the person is. I invite you to explore the relationship between both as well as the individuality of each.”

Scarlett Hooft Graafland

Work from the pieces, Polar Bear, The Journey, Salt, and Lemonade Igloo (in order).

“Using naïve and childlike colour palettes her photographs draw on the language of the surreal showing familiar objects out of context (a llama wearing balloons, top hats flying through the desert and a pair of naked legs entwined around a cactus). Her humorous and unsettling juxtaposition of these everyday objects with the sparse, unforgiving landscape echoes the aesthetic of surrealists such as René Magritte. Hooft Graafland utilizes the medium of photography, associated with the representation of truth, to represent the fantastic and the irrational. “

Thanks to Michael Hoppen Contemporary for the statement.

Kevin Van Aelst

This work reminds me of the Isabella Krieg show I saw last week, check out her work too.

“Subjects of my color photographs include every day foods and objects: bread, doughnuts, crackers, candy, floor tile, sweaters, and lint. These simple materials are arranged into shapes and patterns inspired by formulas found in science and mathematics, such as fractal geometry, chaos theory, biology and chemistry. The palette is informed by the colors of these mundane objects, so that colorful frosting finds its shape as the organelles of a dividing cell, or that bright gummy worms become the chromosomes on a chart of the human genome.

This work calls upon historical tenants of conceptualism and minimalism. Conceptual art has shown that the ideas behind a specific artwork can be more important than the aesthetics or visual appeal of the piece itself. The serial process, showing each successive permutation of a fractal pattern, refers to minimalism. Equally important to this body of work is humor—via odd juxtapositions of sophisticated content with banal subject matter.

This Body of work is about creating order where randomness is expected, defying natural probabilities, so that lint stuck to a sweater forms an accurate star chart of the summer sky over New England, and milk spills from its carton into a logarithmic spiral. I use common everyday objects and foods to illustrate timeless and lofty ideas. While the subjects of the photos are artifacts of modern culture, the content of the photos, such as the Golden Mean, are often ancient and revered notions. This work involves finding materials that bear a certain semblance to common scientific illustrations and visual displaysÑa common snack cracker having the shape of the fundamental unit of a three dimensional fractal, and an Oreo cookie having the same shape and colors as a yin yang.”

*Thanks to The Exposure Project for this one.

Helmut Smits

Work from: Dead Pixel in Google Earth, Parking for White Cars Only, FLAMMA and Skirting Board Sunset. I urge you to check out his entire public works section, all of the pieces are smart and compelling.

“I believe that every situation, thought or object carries a good work of art in itself. I search for this artwork by going back to the basis and to observe from that point an inner contradiction and to find a simple solution for this contradiction. Subsequently I use the medium most suitable for that concept.” – Helmut Smits

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Dead Pixel in Google Earth, 2008.

82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.

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Parking for White Cars Only, 2006.

Temporary project in a parking garage where the best spots were accessible for white cars only.

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FLAMMA, 2008.

By using the fire arc technique fire can be made with the following IKEA products:

BUMERANG coat hanger,IKEA 365+ knife,TÅT rope,HUTTEN wine rack,IKEA 365+ PLOCKA egg cup,SMYCKA everlasting,sSNILLRIK table mat, FANTASTISK napkins

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Skirting Board Sunset, 2008.

Koheis Yoshiyuki

Work from The Park (1971-1979). The work is not new at all, but it really is great and I wanted to put it up today. If you haven’t seen these yet, you have been missing out.

Great write-up from Philip Gefter at the New York Times.

“WHY are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?
If the social phenomena captured in these photographs seem distinctly linked to Japanese culture, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s images of voyeurs reverberate well beyond it. Viewing his pictures means that you too are looking at activities not meant to be seen. We line up right behind the photographer, surreptitiously watching the peeping toms who are secretly watching the couples. Voyeurism is us.
The series, titled “The Park,” is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, the first time the photographs have been exhibited since 1979, when they were introduced at Komai Gallery in Tokyo. For that show the pictures were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight. Mr. Yoshiyuki wanted to reconstruct the darkness of the park. “I wanted people to look at the bodies an inch at a time,” he has said.
The oversize prints were destroyed after the show, and the series was published in 1980 as a book, one now difficult to find. Last year Mr. Yoshiyuki made new editions of the prints in several sizes, which have brought renewed interest in his work. Since April images from the series have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Mr. Yoshiyuki was a young commercial photographer in Tokyo in the early 1970s when he and a colleague walked through Chuo Park in Shinjuku one night. He noticed a couple on the ground, and then one man creeping toward them, followed by another.
“I had my camera, but it was dark,” he told the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in a 1979 interview for a Japanese publication. Researching the technology in the era before infrared flash units, he found that Kodak made infrared flashbulbs. Mr. Yoshiyuki returned to the park, and to two others in Tokyo, through the ’70s. He photographed heterosexual and homosexual couples engaged in sexual activity and the peeping toms who stalked them.
“Before taking those pictures, I visited the parks for about six months without shooting them,” Mr. Yoshiyuki wrote recently by e-mail, through an interpreter. “I just went there to become a friend of the voyeurs. To photograph the voyeurs, I needed to be considered one of them. I behaved like I had the same interest as the voyeurs, but I was equipped with a small camera. My intention was to capture what happened in the parks, so I was not a real ‘voyeur’ like them. But I think, in a way, the act of taking photographs itself is voyeuristic somehow. So I may be a voyeur, because I am a photographer.”
Mr. Yoshiyuki’s photographic activity was undetected because of the darkness; the flash of the infrared bulbs has been likened to the lights of a passing car.
“The couples were not aware of the voyeurs in most cases,” he wrote. “The voyeurs try to look at the couple from a distance in the beginning, then slowly approach toward the couple behind the bushes, and from the blind spots of the couple they try to come as close as possible, and finally peep from a very close distance. But sometimes there are the voyeurs who try to touch the woman, and gradually escalating — then trouble would happen.”
Mr. Yoshiyuki’s pictures do not incite desire so much as document the act of lusting. The peeping toms are caught in the process of gawking, focused on their visual prey. Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum, suggested in a telephone interview that this phenomenon was not uncommon in Japan. She cited the voyeurism depicted in Ukiyo-e woodblock erotic prints from 18th- and 19th-century Japan, in which a viewer watches a couple engage in sexual activity. “It’s a consistent erotic motif in Japanese sexual imagery and in Japanese films like ‘In the Realm of the Senses,’ ” she said.
Karen Irvine, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work is important because “it addresses photography’s unique capacity for observation and implication.” She locates his work in the tradition of artists who modified their cameras with decoy lenses and right-angle viewfinders to gain access to private moments. Weegee, for example, rigged his camera to capture couples kissing in darkened New York movie theaters. Walker Evans covertly photographed fellow passengers on New York subways.
“Like the work of these artists,” Ms. Irvine said, “Yoshiyuki’s photographs explore the boundaries of privacy, an increasingly rare commodity. Ironically, we may reluctantly accommodate ourselves to being watched at the A.T.M., the airport, in stores, but our appetite for observing people in extremely personal circumstances doesn’t seem to wane.”
Mr. Milo also noted a connection between Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work and surveillance photography. “The photographs are specifically of their time and place and reflect the social and economic spirit of the 1970s in Japan,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Yet the work is also very contemporary. With new technologies providing the means to spy on each other, a political atmosphere that raises issues about the right to privacy and a cultural climate obsessed with the personal lives of everyday people, themes of voyeurism and surveillance are extremely topical and important in the U.S. right now.”
Yet earlier artists also went to great lengths to capture transgressive behavior. In the 1920s Brassai photographed the prostitutes of Paris at night; his camera was conspicuously large, but his subjects were willing participants. More recently, in the early 1990s, Merry Alpern set up a camera in the window of one New York apartment and photographed the assignations of prostitutes through the window of another.
Susan Kismaric, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, agrees that Mr. Yoshiyuki’s work falls into a photographic tradition. “The impulse is the same,” she said. “To bring forth activity, especially of a sexual nature, that ‘we’ don’t normally see. It’s one of the primary impulses in making photographs — to make visible what is normally invisible.”
“The predatory, animalistic aspect of the people in Yoshiyuki’s work is particularly striking,” she continued. “The pictures are bizarre and shocking, not only because of the subject itself but also because of the way that they challenge our clichéd view of Japanese society as permeated by authority, propriety and discipline.”
Sandra S. Phillips is organizing an exhibition on surveillance imagery for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year. “A huge element of voyeuristic looking has informed photography and hasn’t been studied as it should be,” she said. “Voyeurism and surveillance are strangely and often uncomfortably allied. I think Yoshiyuki’s work is amazing, vital and very distinctive.
“It is also, I feel, strangely unerotic, which I find very interesting since that is the subject of the pictures. I would compare him to Weegee, one of the great photographers who was also interested in looking at socially unacceptable subjects, mainly the bloody and violent deaths of criminals.”
The raw graininess in Mr. Yoshiyuki’s pictures is similar to the look of surveillance images, but there is an immediacy suggesting something more personal: that here is a person making choices, not a stationary camera recording what passes before it. As Vince Aletti writes in the publication accompanying the current show, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s pictures “recall cinéma vérité, vintage porn, frontline photojournalism and the hectic spontaneity of paparazzi shots stripped of all their glamour.”
Surveillance images, so far, do not have that signature.”

Jason DeMarte

Work from the series Utopic and Commercial Appeal.

DeMarte’s use of the dyptich is really stunning. Shown in order. 

“Utopic investigates how the artificial nature of our modern day interpretation of the natural world compares to the way we approach our immediate consumer world. I am interested in modes of representing the natural world through events and objects that have been fabricated or taken out of context. This unnatural experience of the so-called “natural” world is reflected in the way we, as modern consumers, ingest products. What becomes clear is that the closer we come to mimicking the natural world, the further away we separate ourselves from it.
 
I work digitally, combining images of fabricated and artificial flora and fauna with graphic elements and commercially produced products such as processed food, domestic goods and pharmaceutical products. I look at how these seemingly unrelated and absurd groupings and composites begin to address attitudes and understandings of the contemporary experience. I represent the natural world through completely unnatural elements to speak metaphorically and symbolically of our mental separation from what is “real”, and compare and contrast this with the consumer world we surround ourselves with as a consequence.  

The project grew out my treasured experiences visiting natural history museums. I grew up in Colorado and visited the Denver Natural History Museum quite often. As a child, I remember being transfixed by the exhibits of animals and of environments for their ability to transport me to another time and place. I recently went back and visited these vistas again and it stuck me how convincing and surreal this experience was, almost hyper real, a perfect real, the way the natural world should look in its most utopian state. Yet nothing I was viewing had anything to do with the natural world. It was all a placebo of handmade painted flowers and stuffed carcasses which trick the mind into believing one is having this epic “natural” experience. 

I began to see this metaphor everywhere in my immediate world; I saw this symbolically played over and over, from the food and medicine we ingest, and the spaces we inhabit, to the products that promise a “better” life. I began to construct images that spoke about this universality of contemporary experience. By comparing these objects and environments I created a dialog of consumption; a reordering of modes of understanding through a mass-media consumer lens to challenge the viewer with seemingly absurd pairings and constructions.”