Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri,he spent his youth in Toledo, Chicago, and New York City. Evans took up photography in 1928around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. His influences included Eugène Atget and August Sander. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. In 1931, he took photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston vicinity sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein. In 1933, he photographed in Cuba on assignment for the publisher of Carleton Beals’ then-forthcoming book, The Crime of Cuba, photographing the revolt against the dictator Gerardo Machado. In Cuba, Evans briefly knew Ernest Hemingway.
In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States.
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans’s photographs and Agee’s text detailing the duo’s stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Noting a similarity to the Beals’ book, the critic Janet Malcolm, in her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, has pointed out the contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee’s prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans’s photographs of sharecroppers.
The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were “Soviet agents,” although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd’s wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evans’s photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty. In September 2005, Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issue. Charles Burroughs, who was four years old when Evans and Agee visited the family, was “still angry” at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was also reportedly angry because the family was “cast in a light that they couldn’t do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant”.
Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the first exhibition in this museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had befriended in his early days in New York.
In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These would be collected in book form in 1966 under the title Many are Called. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt.
Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only very loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.
Later work
Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art.
In one of his last photographic projects, Evans completed a black and white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.’s offices and partners for publication in “Partners in Banking,” published in 1968 to celebrate the private bank’s 150th anniversary.In 1973 and 1974, he also shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX-70 camera, after age and poor health had made it difficult for him to work with elaborate equipment.
The first definitive retrospective of his photographs, whose works “individually evoke an incontrovertible sense of specific places, and collectively a sense of America,” according to a press release, were on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in early 1971. Selected by John Szarkowski and simply titled Walker Evans.
Death and legacy
Evans died at his home in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1975.[10]
In 1994, The Estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City’s The Metropolitan Museum of Art.[11] The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of approximately 1,000 negatives in collection of the Library of Congress which were produced for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration(FSA). Evans’s RA / FSA works are in the public domain.
In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame
Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.
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1960s and 70s: black and white social landscape
His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.
Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban “social landscape,” with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.
He also experimented with use of his own shadow as an extra element in the image – giving many of them a more haunted eerie feel of an obvious onlooker to the scene.
In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander’s first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski‘s 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored in Rencontres d’Arles festival (France) with the screening “Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander” présentée par Jean-Claude Lemagny.
1980s – present
Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his “limbs” reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.
Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie’s Art House auction.
In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship.
He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander’s career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present. In the same year he received a Hasselblad International Award. The retrospective exhibition was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
All the images in the series are taken from the driver’s point of view, incorporating into the viewfinder all of the familiar architecture of the cockpit (dashboard, rear-view mirror, views from side windows and wing mirrors and so on). This claustrophobia presents an American landscape at odds with the car and its driver; the windscreen forms a barrier between the individual and the landscape beyond. The car can only take you so far into the wilderness. The vast majority of the images in Friedlander’s book were made after 2001, and several images hint towards the international concerns of the past decade and beyond. The road – or, rather, whatever passing motorists will notice – is where political voices are articulated in loud, upper case letters: “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”, declares Little Millers diner in Alaska (p. 89). A campaign vehicle covered with pro-Obama stickers (p.104) is a prime example of using a vehicle as a legitimate extension of ideology and identity. [See Martin Parr’s From A to B (1994)].
Endless gas stations, a ubiquitous motif of the road trip narrative, inevitably contribute to the collection.
Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from SFMOMA. “America By Car” was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in late 2010.
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Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.
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1960s and 70s: black and white social landscape
His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.
Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban “social landscape,” with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.
He also experimented with use of his own shadow as an extra element in the image – giving many of them a more haunted eerie feel of an obvious onlooker to the scene.
In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander’s first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski‘s 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored in Rencontres d’Arles festival (France) with the screening “Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander” présentée par Jean-Claude Lemagny.
1980s – present
Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his “limbs” reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.
Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie’s Art House auction.
In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship.
He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander’s career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present. In the same year he received a Hasselblad International Award. The retrospective exhibition was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
All the images in the series are taken from the driver’s point of view, incorporating into the viewfinder all of the familiar architecture of the cockpit (dashboard, rear-view mirror, views from side windows and wing mirrors and so on). This claustrophobia presents an American landscape at odds with the car and its driver; the windscreen forms a barrier between the individual and the landscape beyond. The car can only take you so far into the wilderness. The vast majority of the images in Friedlander’s book were made after 2001, and several images hint towards the international concerns of the past decade and beyond. The road – or, rather, whatever passing motorists will notice – is where political voices are articulated in loud, upper case letters: “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”, declares Little Millers diner in Alaska (p. 89). A campaign vehicle covered with pro-Obama stickers (p.104) is a prime example of using a vehicle as a legitimate extension of ideology and identity. [See Martin Parr’s From A to B (1994)].
Endless gas stations, a ubiquitous motif of the road trip narrative, inevitably contribute to the collection.
Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from SFMOMA. “America By Car” was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in late 2010.
Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazzmusicians for record covers. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977.
1960s and 70s: black and white social landscape
His early work was influenced by Eugène Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.
Working primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban “social landscape,” with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs.
He also experimented with use of his own shadow as an extra element in the image – giving many of them a more haunted eerie feel of an obvious onlooker to the scene.
In 1963, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House mounted Friedlander’s first solo museum show. Friedlander was then a key figure in curator John Szarkowski‘s 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City along with Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. In 1973, his work was honored in Rencontres d’Arles festival (France) with the screening “Soirée américaine : Judy Dater, Jack Welpott, Jerry Uelsmann, Lee Friedlander” présentée par Jean-Claude Lemagny.
1980s – present
Friedlander now works primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound, he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his “limbs” reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.
Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970s. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set. In 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie’s Art House auction.
In 1990, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Friedlander a MacArthur Fellowship.
He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society’s Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of Friedlander’s career, including nearly 400 photographs from the 1950s to the present. In the same year he received a Hasselblad International Award. The retrospective exhibition was presented again in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).
All the images in the series are taken from the driver’s point of view, incorporating into the viewfinder all of the familiar architecture of the cockpit (dashboard, rear-view mirror, views from side windows and wing mirrors and so on). This claustrophobia presents an American landscape at odds with the car and its driver; the windscreen forms a barrier between the individual and the landscape beyond. The car can only take you so far into the wilderness. The vast majority of the images in Friedlander’s book were made after 2001, and several images hint towards the international concerns of the past decade and beyond. The road – or, rather, whatever passing motorists will notice – is where political voices are articulated in loud, upper case letters: “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”, declares Little Millers diner in Alaska (p. 89). A campaign vehicle covered with pro-Obama stickers (p.104) is a prime example of using a vehicle as a legitimate extension of ideology and identity. [See Martin Parr’s From A to B (1994)].
Endless gas stations, a ubiquitous motif of the road trip narrative, inevitably contribute to the collection.
Concurrent to this retrospective, a more contemporary body of his work, America By Car, was displayed at the Fraenkel Gallery not far from SFMOMA. “America By Car” was on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in late 2010.
O’Sullivan was born in Ireland and came to New York City two years later with his parents. As a teenager, he was employed by Mathew Brady. When the Civil War began in early 1861, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Union Army (Joel Snyder, O’Sullivan’s biographer could find no proof of this claim in Army records) and, over the next year, was present at Beaufort, Port Royal, Fort Walker, and Fort Pulaski. There is no record of him fighting. He most likely did civilian’s work for the army such as surveying, and he took photographs in his spare time.
After being honorably discharged, he rejoined Brady’s team. In July 1862, O’Sullivan followed the campaign of Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Northern Virginia Campaign. By joining Alexander Gardner’s studio, he had his forty-four photographs published in the first Civil War photographs collection, Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War. In July 1863, he created his most famous photograph, “The Harvest of Death,” depicting dead soldiers from the Battle of Gettysburg.
From 1867 to 1869, he was official photographer on the United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel under Clarence King. In so doing, he became one of the pioneers in the field of geophotography. Until the mid 1860s, the army carried out most of the mapping and geological survey work into the country’s uncharted ‘interior’. (That is, it was uncharted and unknown to non-Native Americans.) O’Sullivan was engaged by Clarence King, who successfully argued for geological surveys to be carried out by better-trained professionals. O’Sullivan’s actual job description as the expedition photographer was vague. He was not required to make images for precise references (a team of draftsmen were employed for that task), nor were pictures needed to seduce would-be patrons to fund the expeditions, since enough money had already been secured in advance (Mitchell (ed.), 2002, p.191). King simply required O’Sullivan to take photographs that would “give a sense of the area” (ibid p.1) – supposedly to attract settlers.
O’Sullivan documented the expeditions of King and George Wheeler from 1867 to 1874, primarily around the Great Basin region (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah).The expedition began at Virginia City, Nevada, where he photographed the mines, and worked eastward. O’Sullivan’s pictures were among the first to record the prehistoric ruins,Navajo weavers, and pueblo villages of the Southwest.
O’Sullivan’s work is recognised and celebrated for being distinct from the photography of his contemporaries, for resisting pictorial traditions and for representing the land as alien, inhospitable and unwelcoming. The actual topography of the land that O’Sullivan surveyed aside, it is unsurprising that his photographs of the Great Basin are difficult for the viewer to engage with. Without the focus that a more defined brief might have provided, and more importantly, working in demanding environments for months at a time, perhaps the landscape claimed O’Sullivan’s work as its own. Perhaps some of the trauma of the scenes he witnessed at Gettysburg and elsewhere was projected onto the landscape of the Great Basin, which after all was a kind of blank canvas in terms of its ideological potential. O’Sullivan’s expedition photographs remain, whether intended or not, distinctly expressive documents of the territory, and of contemporaneous attitudes towards them. (Alexander 2013 p55)
In 1870 he joined a survey team in Panama to survey for a canal across the isthmus. From 1871 to 1874 he returned to the southwestern United States to join Lt. George M. Wheeler’s survey west of the 100th meridian west. He faced starvation on the Colorado River when some of the expedition’s boats capsized; few of the 300 negatives he took survived the trip back East.
He spent the last years of his short life in Washington, D.C., as official photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department. O’Sullivan died in Staten Island of tuberculosis at age 42.
Shambroom is conducting a long-term investigation of power. This started with series on nuclear weapons, factories and corporate offices. He then focused on homeland security training and preparation. His images are influenced by painting traditions, including Dutch landscape painting.
These photographs emphasize the theatrical aspects of meetings: There is a “cast”, a “set”, an “audience” (sometimes) and a “program” (the agenda). Seating arrangements, clothing and body language all provide clues to local cultural traits and political dynamics. The subjects play dual roles as private individuals and (sometimes reluctant) public leaders. Power may be relative, but the mayor of a town of 200 has much in common with the President of the United States. We see ourselves reflected (either positively or negatively) in our leaders, exemplifying both the highest ideals and lowest depths of the human spirit. Our reactions to them help define our perceptions of our own place in society, as insiders or outsiders, haves or have-nots
This work examines issues of fear, safety and liberty in post-9/11 America. From 2003 – 2007 I am photographed facilities, equipment and personnel involved in the massive government and private sector efforts to prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks within the nation’s borders. First responders and law enforcement officers train in large-scale simulated environments such as “Disaster City” in Texas and “Terror Town”, an abandoned mining community in New Mexico purchased with funds from the Department of Homeland Security. Training scenarios, by necessity, involve simulated environments and threats. This blurring of fiction and truth mirrors the difficulty we have discerning between legitimate safety concerns and hyped-up fear.
Shambroom photographs the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) – emphasising the way that this is hidden – as ‘critical assets’ public attention is discouraged although access is not illegal. The Department of Energy agreed to let him photograph from outside the sites without hindrance and allowed me to visit inside one site, but only after lengthy negotiations.
How does one photograph something that can’t be seen? My approach was to work from a distance to incorporate the land and water over the storage caverns, and include lots of sky. I took inspiration from 17th century Dutch landscape paintings, whose fluffy clouds and bucolic countryside spoke of that nation’s prosperity. For a while back in the twentieth century the United States enjoyed similar prosperity, with a seemingly limitless supply of petroleum to power industry and automobiles. The oil supply was truly “out of sight, out of mind”.
Today it is very much on our minds. The hundreds of millions of barrels of oil beneath these idyllic landscapes offer a very thin veneer of protection to our economy and way of life. By government estimates, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve could replace foreign oil imports for 59 days. Then the tap would be empty.
“Lost” is a series of photographs derived from missing pet posters placed by owners in public places. These images have been degraded by environmental factors or printer malfunctions, resulting in serendipitous and unexpected color and texture. The additional partial loss (of the image) mirrors the ambiguous loss of a beloved family pet. The incorporation of short selections of text from the posters introduces unintentional humor and beauty in the form of found poetry. The words and images combine to transcend the particular family dramas represented in each image, and address more universal themes of loss and uncertainty.
Mitchell “Mitch” Epstein (born 1952 in Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an American photographer. His best known work on landscape is American Power (2009). From 2004 to 2009, Epstein investigated energy production and consumption in the United States, photographing in and around various energy production sites. This series questions the meaning and make-up of power—electrical and political. Epstein made a monograph of the American Power pictures (Steidl, 2009), in which he wrote that he was often stopped by corporate security guards and once interrogated by the FBI for standing on public streets and pointing his camera at energy infrastructure. The images also reflect the political climate of fear and paranoia across America in the wake of 9/11.
The large-scale prints from this series have been exhibited worldwide, and a selection won the Prix Pixtet Award among others.
Epstein collaborated with his second wife, author Susan Bell, on a public art project and website based on American Power. The What Is American Power?project used billboards, transportation posters, and a website to “inspire and educate people about environmental issues.” The website: http://whatisamericanpower.com (a Flash-based display that I find somewhat annoying)
Wikipedia review quotes:
In his Art in America review, Dave Coggins wrote that Epstein “grounds his images…in the human condition, combining empathy with sharp social observation, politics with sheer beauty.”
In an essay for the catalogueContemporary African Photography from The Walther Collection: Appropriated Landscapes (Steidl, 2011), Brian Wallis wrote, “Epstein has made clear that his intention is neither to illustrate political events nor to create persuasive propaganda. Rather, he raises the more challenging question of how inherently abstract political concepts about the nation and the culture as a whole can be represented photographically…But equally significant is the unique form of documentary storytelling that he has invented in American Power—colorful, sweeping, concerned, intimate, honest.”
In the New York Times, Martha Schwendener wrote: “What is interesting, beyond the haunting, complicated beauty and precision of these images, is Mr. Epstein’s ability to merge what have long been considered opposing terms: photo-conceptualism and so-called documentary photography. He utilizes the supersize scale and saturated color of conceptualism, and his odd, implied narratives strongly recall the work of artists like Jeff Wall.”
His other work
(Wikipedia)
Epstein graduated from Williston Academy, where he studied with artist and bookmaker Barry Moser. In the early 1970s he studied at Union College, New York; Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island, and the Cooper Union, New York, where he was a student of photographer Garry Winogrand.
Epstein’s eight books include:
Berlin (Steidl & The American Academy in Berlin, 2011);
American Power (Steidl, 2009);
Mitch Epstein: Work (Steidl, 2006);
Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988 (Steidl 2005);
Family Business (Steidl 2003), which won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
1970s United States
By the mid-70s, Epstein had abandoned his academic studies and begun to travel, embarking on a photographic exploration of the United States. Ten of the photographs he made during this period were in a 1977 group exhibition at Light Gallery in New York. Ben Lifson wrote in his Village Voice review: “Mitch Epstein’s ten color photographs are the best things at Summer Light…. At 25, Epstein’s apprenticeship is over, as his work shows. He stands between artistic tradition and originality and makes pictures about abandoned rocking-horses and danger, about middle-age dazzled by spring blossoms, about children confused by sex and beasts. He has learned the terms of black-and-white photography, and although he adds color, he hasn’t abandoned them, loving photography’s past while trying to step into its future.”
India
In 1978, he journeyed to India with his future wife, director Mira Nair, where he was a producer, set designer, and cinematographer on several films, including Salaam Bombay! and India Cabaret. His book In Pursuit of India is a compilation of his Indian photographs from this period.
Vietnam
From 1992 to 1995, Epstein photographed in Vietnam, which resulted in an exhibition of this work at Wooster Gardens in New York, along with a book titled Vietnam: A Book of Changes. “I don’t know that Mitch Epstein’s glorious photographs record all of what is salient in end-of-the-twentieth century Vietnam,” wrote Susan Sontag for his book jacket, “for it’s been more than two decades since my two stays there. I can testify that his images confirm what moved and troubled me then…and offer shrewd and poignant glimpses into the costs of imposing a certain modernity. This is beautiful, authoritative work by an extremely intelligent and gifted photographer.” Reviewing an exhibition of the Vietnam pictures for Art in America, Peter Von Ziegesar writes, “In a show full of small pleasures, little prepares one for the stunning epiphany contained in Perfume Pagoda…Few photographers have managed to make an image so loaded and so beautiful at once.”
United States 1990s
Having lived and travelled beyond the United States for over a decade, Epstein began to spend more time in his adopted home of New York City. His 1999 series The City investigated the relationship between public and private life in New York. Reviewing The City exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins in New York, Vince Aletti wrote that the pictures “[are] as assured as they are ambitious.”
In 1999, Epstein returned to his hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, to record the demise of his father’s two businesses—a retail furniture store and a low-rent real estate empire. The resulting project assembled large-format photographs, video, archival materials, interviews and writing by the artist. The book, Family Business (Steidl), which combined all of these elements, won the 2004 Krazna-Kraus Best Photography Book of the Year award. In reviewing the book, Nancy Princenthal wrote in Art in America, “The family business chronicled by Mitch Epstein was a small-town retail furniture with a sideline in real estate, and his patiently plotted bell curve of its history is worthy of Dreiser….” In 2004, his work was exhibited during evening screenings at Rencontres d’Arles festival (at the in Théatre Antique), France.
In 2008, Epstein won the Berlin Prize in Arts and Letters from the American Academy in Berlin.Awarded a 6-month residency, he moved to Berlin with his wife and daughter from January–June 2009. The photographs he made there of significant historical sites were published in the monograph Berlin (Steidl and The American Academy in Berlin, 2011).
Shimon Attie (born Los Angeles in 1957 ) is an American visual artist. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, The Rome Prize in 2001 and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study in 2007. His work spans a variety of media, including photography, site-specific installation, multiple channel immersive video installation, performance, and new media. Much of Attie’s practice explores how a wide range of contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity. Much, though not all, of Attie’s work in the 90s dealt with the history of the second world war. He aims to engage his audience in a direct confrontation with collective memory and the historical narrative of a place.
The Writing on the Wall (1992–94)
The work explores loss and trauma in relation to place. It consisted of a series of site-specific projections in Scheunenviertel, which was Berlin’s Jewish quarter. Through meticulous research, Attie used images from before the 1930s and projected these onto the remains of buildings, which have since been demolished as the area has been redeveloped. These ‘montages’ are very carefully arranged, so that pictorial elements from the projected photographs complement architectural details, such as windows and doorways. The resulting effects are provocative, ghost-like tableaux in a temporal transgression, where fractured narratives converge unnaturally in one space.
More recent projects have involved using a range of media to engage local communities to find new ways of representing their history, memory and potential futures. Attie’s artworks and interventions are site-specific and immersive in nature, and tend to engage subject matter that is both social, political and psychological. In 2013, Shimon Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement in Art.
Born in New York in 1939, John Pfahl was raised in Wanaque, New Jersey. He received a BFA from Syracuse University’s School of Art and his MA from Syracuse University’s School of Communications. Pfahl is known for his innovative landscape photography such as Altered Landscape, his first major series of un-manipulated color photographs on which he worked from 1974 through 1978. In these pictures Pfahl manipulates the optics of the camera and plays tricks with perspective by using cleverly placed manmade objects in the landscape to mislead the eye of the viewer. For the past thirty years, Pfahl has been creating images of nature that transcribe the forces of nature and how humans affect it. His work has been shown in over hundred group and solo exhibitions and is held in many public and private collections throughout the world. From 1968 to 1983 he taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and later at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Pfahl is currently professor of photography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Renske van Leeuwen
Doug Rickard (born in San Jose, California, 1968) studied U.S. history and sociology at UC San Diego. He is the founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, aggregating websites for essays on contemporary photography and historical photographic archives.
Over a period of two years 2009 – 2010 Rickard became immersed in the comprehensive image archive of Google Street View to virtually drive through some of the most economically depressed areas of America – the unseen and overlooked roads, bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned. The virtual eye enables him to go places that would be difficult otherwise. Collectively, these images present a startling photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised, providing deeply affecting evidence of the American Dream inverted.
“I think that I chose pictures that partially represented those biases and media-affected notions of place, and yet I explored immensely these American places, a thousand hours or more, gaining an understanding of the conditions.” Political and social perspective ‘drive-by’ photography.manipulates to heighten sense of isolation – people cordoned off in terms of lacking a voice, from power.
In Google Street View, the absence of an engaged eye through which to interpret its images can lend them an eerie quality. “The height gives a feeling of looking down on the scene, and this affects the emotional read and subtext of the work,” There are different types of google cameras. High resolution tends to be for tourist areas. Some lower resolution for less ‘attractive’ areas. He finds the digital pixellation poetic. Rickard said. “Also, Google’s blurring of the faces and the lo-fi nature of the images changed the individuals into symbols or emblems and representative of larger notions, such as race and class, instead of personal stories that would have wanted to emerge with recognition.” His appropriation of these images, he said, is what makes them a valid form of photography. “I wanted to represent the inverse of the American Dream, and yet the work is also very personal and subjective, colored by my choices and selection,” he said. “The very definition of photography is expanding. Personally, I am ecstatic about it, and I see a massive frontier that is unfolding to feed and fuel my obsessions.”
Issue is cropping and editing from a sea of digital images. He looks for stories and ‘decisive moment’ – the colour of Shore and Egglestone. Composition where things line up. He rephotographs the machine-made images as they appear on his computer screen, framing and freeing them from their technological origins. Experimenting with geometry and distortions.
A limited-edition monograph of A New American Picture was published by White Press/Schaden in 2010. It was named a best book of 2010 by photo-eye magazine and is now out of print. This edition brings Rickard’s provocative series, including more than forty new images, to a wider audience. His images have become part of an international conversation .In 2011, A New American Picture was included in the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A solo exhibition is planned for fall 2012 at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
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Jon Rafman (b. 1981) is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. Rafman’s work focuses on technology and digital media, and explores the impact of technology on contemporary consciousness. In his multidisciplinary practice, Rafman often explores the relationship between the “real” and the “virtual” in contemporary life, urging viewers to reconsider the boundaries between the two.
Jon Rafman celebrates and critiques contemporary culture, while at the same time revealing the origins of modern loneliness and alienation. He offers a way to look at the melancholy in our modern social interactions, communities and virtual realities from an accessible place of humour and irony.Though Rafman rarely takes a moral stance toward the messaging behind his art, it consistently asks us to evaluate what it means to be human in the context of these new and ambiguous digital realms. His films and art are hauntingly evocative and utilize extremely personal moments to reveal how pop-culture ephemera and advertising media shape our desires and threaten to define our being, distancing us from ourselves.
9-Eyes – he finds a spontaneity and authenticity he finds is lost from current street photography. Fact that they are captured by a roving robot by chance makes it more poetic ‘modernist notion of god. God does not care about reality, just observes. Watching but does not take a moral stance. The human gaze then interpretes, finds meaning, beauty and stories. That tension gives power. He just takes screen shots. The Google link to report a concern is meaningless. Faces are blurred. Some stitched together so see people in two places.
An ongoing project of Rafman’s involves a tour around the virtual universe of Second Life, which is hosted by his avatar Kool-Aid Man. The work deals with how users employ creative exploits in order to bring to life an idealized self and entertain sexual fetishes in the virtual world.
Rafman currently lives in Montreal, Canada. His artwork has gained international attention and will be exhibited this year at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal). He has been in various group exhibitions including Les Rencontres d’Arles, new jpegs, at the Johan Berggren Gallery in Malmo, Sweden, Free, at the New Museum in New York, and Speculations onAnonymous Materialsat The Fridericianum‘in Kassel. He has contributed to exhibitions at New Museum (2010), The Saatchi Gallery (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2010), Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (2012), Palais de Tokyo (2012), and The Fridericianum (2013).
He has also been in several solo exhibitions, including, Annals of Time Lost, at Future Gallery, Berlin (April 2013), A Man Digging, at Seventeen Gallery, London (May 2013), and You Are Standing in an Open Field ( Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, Sep 2013).
In September 2013, Rafman collaborated with Brooklyn-based experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never on a film to accompany the release of R Plus Seven(Warp).
Wolf was born in Germany and was raised in the United States, Europe, and Canada.He attended the North Toronto Collegiate Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1976 he obtained a degree in visual communication at the University of Essen, Germany, where he studied with Otto Steinert.
Wolf began his career in 1994 as a photojournalist, spending eight years working in Hong Kong for the German magazine Stern. He won a first prize in Contemporary Issues in the 2004 World Press Photo competition for his photographs for an article in Stern entitled China: Factory of the World. The photographs depicted workers in several types of factories.
Wolf states that a decline in the magazine industry led to photojournalism assignments becoming “stupid and boring.”In 2003 he decided to work only on fine-art photography projects.
Notable artistic projects
Bastard Chairs / Sitting in China
He began non-editorial photography with a series entitled Bastard Chairs, small chairs that Chinese people would repair repeatedly using whatever materials were available. Wolf reports that the police detained him twice during the photographing of the series for “doing something which was harmful to the Chinese state.” Photographs from the series were published a 2002 book entitled Sitting in China. Although Wolf called the bastard chairs a “great symbol of the Chinese people’s thriftiness and resourcefulness,” and the book received positive reviews in the West, some Chinese people felt that the photographs made China appear “backward.”
The Real Toy Story
In follow-up to the China: Factory of the World series, Wolf created an installation entitled The Real Toy Story.It consisted of 20,000 toys made in China and purchased in California attached with magnets to the walls of the gallery, along with photographs of workers making the toys.
Architecture of Density
In this series, Wolf photographed of Hong Kong’s tall buildings in a way that depicted them as “abstractions, never-ending repetitions of architectural patterns.” The photographs excluded the sky and the ground, thereby emphasizing the vertical lines of the buildings.The images have been compared with those of Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer.
The first book containing images from the series, Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door, was published in 2005. One review noted the book’s “representation of an overpopulated city emptied of its human presence” and praised “the visual intelligence of Wolf’s photographs.” The Outside volume of Wolf’s two-volume 2009 book Hong Kong Inside Outside contained a more extensive selection of photographs from this series.
100×100
In 2006, Wolf took photographs of residents in their rooms in a building in Hong Kong’s oldest public housing complex, the Shek Kip Mei Estate, that was going to be demolished. He used a wide-angle lens to show as much of the interiors of the rooms as possible. Each room was approximately 100 square feet (9.3 m2) in size, and he displayed photographs of 100 rooms, leading to the name “100×100.” In an interview, Wolf likened the series to a scientific project, “an investigation into the use of limited space.” The Inside volume of Wolf’s two-volume book Hong Kong Inside Outside of 2009 contained the complete photographs from this series.
Copy Art / Real Fake Art
Between 2005 and 2007, Wolf photographed painters in Shenzhen, China, who reproduced famous works of art such as Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh. Each portrait consisted of a “copy artist” along with an example of a copied work.The settings were described as “dirty alleyways and street corners.” One reviewer wrote that the pictures “document intimate cultural and economic facets of globalization even as they record and complicate critical dilemmas about authenticity and the non-economic values of art.”The series was collected in his book Real Fake Art published in 2011.
Transparent City
A series shot in downtown Chicago beginning in 2006 that “combine[d] impersonal cityscapes shot primarily at dusk or at night with details of the buildings’ inhabitants” became the basis for the 2008 book Transparent City.The photographs were taken from rooftops at dusk with a long lens. As in the Architecture of Density series, the exterior photographs excluded the horizon and the sky, leaving the windows of the buildings as the main subjects. In one interview, Wolf said that he came upon the idea of showing close-ups of people in the windows after he noticed that a man giving him the finger in a photograph. In another interview, Wolf cited the artistic work of Edward Hopper as an inspiration for the series because of its voyeuristic nature and its inclusion of architectural details.
Articles about the book connected the photographs to the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. One reviewer described the book as “frightening,” causing a feeling of “remoteness.”The series was controversial because some people felt that the cropped and enlarged photographs of people in the buildings constituted an invasion of privacy. In 2010, the series was shortlisted for the Prix Pictet.
In the 2010 book Tokyo Compression, Wolf presented portraits of Japanese people inside crowded Tokyo subway trains who had been pressed against a window.The commuters’ expressions were characterized in one review as “traumatised” and “woeful.” Wolf stated that some people closed their eyes or hid their faces with their hands upon realizing that they were being photographed.
One reviewer concluded that Wolf’s Architecture of Density, Transparent City, and Tokyo Compression series represented a progression from long shot to close-up.[14] Wolf won a first prize in Daily Life in the 2009 World Press Photo competition for his Tokyo Compression work. Martin Parr selected the 2010 book as one of the 30 most influential photobooks published between 2001 and 2010.
Tokyo Compression was part of Metropolis, City Life in the Urban Age, the 2011 Noorderlicht Photofestival. One of Wolf’s pictures was used for the poster, the cover of the catalogue and all media material of the exhibition.
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Series using Google Street View
In several series, such as Paris Street View, Manhattan Street View, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, Wolf took photographs of Google Street View scenes on his computer screen. Wolf compared his method of finding interesting scenes online to those of a street photographer walking around in a city. He has called his Street View series “a statement about art.”
The Street View photographs were characterized by pixelation and image noise which were compared with techniques used by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol in their art.The work led to discussion of how the automatically-taken Google Street View images affected the “decisive moment” concept of Henri Cartier-Bresson; nevertheless, the photographs were said to contain “some mystery” in that they were “hard to interpret.”Some of Wolf’s photographs resemble recognized classics of photography such as Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (The Kiss) by Robert Doisneau.
Wolf won an honorable mention in Daily Life in the 2011 World Press Photo competition for his A Series of Unfortunate Events work. The award was controversial because some people were of the opinion that theappropriation of Google Street View screens did not constitute photojournalism.
