Joel Sternfeld
Joel Sternfeld is one of the all-time American greats. He’s been featured in the news frequently recently due to the release of his newest book First Pictures, published through Steidl and the on-going exhibitions showcasing the work. Sternfeld is perhaps best known for his terrific and long-term series American Prospects, made over a decade. It announced Sternfeld as a true talent in the photographic world when released in 1987 and ultimately proved a hugely important body of work. First Pictures takes us back to what came before.
Sternfeld, along with the likes of Eggleston and Shore, has had a profound influence on photography. Their work reshaped the status-quo of the period and forever altered the art industry’s perception of colour photography as an art object. First Pictures offers a great insight into a Sternfeld in his early career, demonstrating his seemingly innate understanding of the photographic image and it’s visual complexities, as he deploys it to address and convey his concerns.
Despite this new work being unveiled to the public, I’ve decided to show a small selection from the series that first drew me toward Sternfeld’s work and quickly positioned him as an important and inspirational photographer to me personally - Stranger Passing. Too read more about Sternfeld’s First Pictures exhibition at Foam Amsterdam, which runs until March 14th, go here. For more info on the book, go here. I also recommend viewing this video with Foam curator Colette Olof, on Sternfeld’s work.
Kyle Ford
As I sat perusing the internet as I so often find myself doing, I came across a series of work titled Forever Wild from photographer Kyle Ford.
The series is an on-going and evolving project which explores the largest constitutionally protected park in the continental US. Ford explains that in ”the 1890’s a boundary of 6.1 million acres in northern New York, known as the ‘blue line’, was placed under constitutional protection forming the largest park in the continental US”. Since its establishment the land within has been sanctioned as “forever wild” by the government.
Ford turns his camera on this vast protected land capturing both the beauty of nature undisturbed and the unsightly scars caused by human interaction and development. Ford also focuses his attention on the inhabitants and visitors of this vast place. Keep an eye on his website for updates of this interesting series..
Birthe Piontek
Good news - I had my university this weekend but now I’m rather unwell - so forgive me for this slightly lazy post. Today I present Birthe Piontek’s beautiful series The Idea of North. Piontek, a Canadian photographer based in Vancouver, examines the idealization of the American North - something which has been observed and nourished over the years by stories from writers such as Jack London and Robert Service; by countless movies about the area’s “wild and pristine tapestry; and even by images of the Northern lights, which to this day, although certainly explicable by science, have lost none of their spiritual fascination or magical appeal”.
“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.”
In 2008, Piontek spent three months in the small community of Dawson City located in Canada’s Yukon (the westernmost and smallest of Canada’s three federal regions) and this is where she sets the stage for her intriguing observations. Piontek photographs the smaller details - purposely avoiding showing the viewer a larger picture of this immense place - and presents portraits of some of the individuals who inhabit the area. Piontek refuses to give any information about who we are confronting in her portraits, again preferring to allow the smaller details to speak. It is through this method which creates such mystery within the work for me. These non-descript, beautiful and fascinating elements intrigue and capture my imagination as they weave a fragmentary portrait of this environment and the individuals who exist within it.
Wolfram Hahn
Wolfram Hahn’s series A Disenchanted Playroom captures the moment in which children disconnect from reality, becoming passive - without impulse or emotion - while watching television.
Hahn’s portraits record the moment in which the children, aged between 3 and 12 years old, become fully engrossed - or perhaps fully removed from reality - and effectively become passive beings, fully abandoned from themselves into the child-oriented programme playing on the television. The children appear entranced and become emotionless statues through the act of photography.
I find these images hugely intriguing and makes me think about the amount of times I’ve “switched-off” while watching television, usually to non-stimulating dross. Eyes unfocused, mind silent. One of the things that I find most disturbing about these images is the great contrast of the “every-day child” image I have in my mind - one of an often overly active, noisy and playful individual - full of life and movement. To see these children with such lifeless eyes and drab non-expressions is concerning. I particularly enjoy the contrast of the lifeless, emotionless aspects alongside the classic child-like rosy red cheeks which epitomize life-fullness and coupled with Hahn’s aesthetic brilliance and execution - he brings me back to these photographs again and again.
Steve Schofield
I’ve had quite the busy week - curating, editing and designing - the highlight however has to be the surreal book launch event I attended. Set inside Derby Cathedral, it featured an attempted robbery, nice priests and a pretty imposing and semi-terrifying soundtrack provided by the organist. It was an unusual but enjoyable evening. The book - which I designed as part of my internship - was made as part of a commission by QUAD and Derby Cathedral (I think..) and featured the photography of Steve Schofield. He was commissioned to document the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to the region. I met him at the event and he was kind enough to give me a signed copy of his book Land of the Free as thanks (which I am chuffed about!). I’ve always enjoyed the series and thought I’d share it.
Land of the Free is an exploration into a peculiar, sub-cultural land of fandom in excess. Schofield describes his practice as “concerned with the hyper-real. I reflect the desire of my sitters to create a utopian existence based on their obsessions and hobbies, each influenced by popular culture. By photographing science-fiction costumers in their own homes in Britain, I have sought to show how, through this strange sub-cultural world of fandom, like-minded people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday.”
Schofield’s portraits provide an intriguing look into popular culture’s influence on the individual while also exposing his sitters semi-obsessive hobbies which, perhaps, would usually remain private, behind closed doors. In a way Schofield offers these people another opportunity of escape - through fantasy and performance - allowing them to briefly realize their unfulfillable desires. For me the images form surreal depictions of pop-culture, artifice and fantasy spilling over into reality.
Mark Power
Dobrzyn Nad Wisla, 2006
Today I popped into work - to re-arrange some shifts and organize my life - when I came across a fantastic book by photographer Mark Power, titled The Sound of Two Songs.
The series, made in Poland, began in September 2004 when Magnum instigated a project which commissioned Power and nine other photographers to spend a month in one of the countries which had joined the European Union that year. The result of this commission was exhibited in 2005 as part of a touring exhibition under the title of Eurovisions.
For Power however, these initial investigations merely scratched the surface of a country which is approximately the same physical size, and with virtually the same population, as the other nine new members combined. Subsequently, over the next five years, Power revisited the country a further twenty times, often accompanied by the Polish photographer Konrad Pustola, “who generously shared his knowledge of his native land with me. Together we travelled the length and breadth of Poland”.
This poetic, autographical and subjective nature of the work (something that Power is keen to stress; his intentions are not to present a factual account of what contemporary ”Poland is, or indeed what it looks like”) was something I immediately picked up on and responded to when viewing the series. Power has managed to create a body of work that forms a poignant and absorbing portrait of Poland in a time of transition and one which the photographer hopes will serve as an important historical document of an intriguing period in Poland’s history.
Maureen Drennan
Garden, 2009
As I was researching and considering the purchase of the Humble Arts Foundation’ survey book, The Collectors Guide to New Art Photography - Vol. 2, I stumbled across the name of Maureen Drennan and soon ventured further on to discover her fantastic series Meet Me in the Green Glen.
The series centre’s on Ben - a marijuana grower - as he goes about life and work on his farm in California. Marijuana is legal to grow and use within the state of California under strict guidelines (although there are occasions in which it remains illegal) yet continues to carry with it a sense of cultural and social stigma. Ben is part of a small community of growers within the region who make up a large part of the local economy - yet due to the stigma’s attached to ‘pot’ growing have become isolated socially. It is this isolation - and with it a degree of loneliness - that Drennan brilliantly and subtly communicates within the work.
New Year with Burtynsky..
I’d like to begin the new year (albeit a day late) by wishing you all the best in the coming year; may it be successful and enjoyable! I would have posted this yesterday but you know how it is when attempting to recover from all the festivities, not a lot get’s done.
I spent my New Year’s Day in bed watching Jennifer Baichwal’s award-winning documentary ‘Manufactured Landscapes’. It provided me with an intriguing insight into the work and mind of Edward Burtynsky. It follows Burtynsky as he attempts to document nature transformed by industry, concentrating on China and it’s massive industrial revolution that is shaping the country’s economic and environmental landscape. On top of being genuinely interesting and thought-provoking it is beautifully shot by cinematographer Peter Mettler - well worth a look. See some of Burtynsky’s brilliant photographs below.
Merry Christmas!
I hope you all have a wonderful day. Eat plenty, drink plenty and enjoy yourselves!
M.
Jason Larkin
Photographer Jason Larkin’s series Cario Divided, along with the beautifully produced free newspaper featuring a long form article from writer Jack Shenker, examines Cairo’s rapid urban expansion and the emergence of satellite cities, complete with exclusive gated off communities, universities and lavish, water-hungry golf courses amongst the sand dunes.
“For centuries, Cairo’s growth has been checked by geography, bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond.”
Egypt’s capital city is one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas on the planet. Despite urban expansion being limited until relatively recently, it’s population has boomed. At the beginning of the 20th Century Cairo’s inhabitants totalled just over one million but today that figure is beyond the 20 million mark. “Now, faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape.”
“Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments – Utopia, Dreamland, Palm Hills, Belle Ville and The Egypt of My Desires. Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert, where it can be built from scratch.”
Venturing to these vast spaces Larkin, mesmerised by the exposed layers of these new urban centers, documented the surreal reality of what is a lavish fantasy of the wealthy. The ‘new’ Cairo which will inevitably leave many behind as the city turns itself inside-out and colonises what was once a barrier to expansion. Larkin brings attention to the fact that 40% of Egyptians live off less than $2 a day, which accentuates the sheer extravagance of these developments.
“From the decisions of a few, Cairo is morphing its periphery into its core whilst condemning the previous centre to a life on the margins. I felt witness to a mass exit strategy taking shape, and with the camera, recorded the foundations of abandonment in pursuit of self-interest and exclusive isolation”.
