January 2012
7 posts
4 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
5 tags
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,...
5 tags
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...
7 tags
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...
3 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
December 2011
4 posts
Merry Christmas!
I hope you all have a wonderful day. Eat plenty, drink plenty and enjoy yourselves!
M.
6 tags
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,...
10 tags
Dave Wyatt
Artificiality is something I have always found unsettling. Whether it involves people, the landscape or objects there is something about artifice and replication which stirs my senses and evokes a sense of the Uncanny. Dave Wyatt’s series Thames Town proves no different. Wyatt’s imagery reveals what appears to be a recognizable sight for a British resident living in a small town or...
4 tags
Martin Parr
Martin Parr’s body of work, Small World (1987-1994), spans seven years and the vastness of the globe. Parr examines - in his signature satirical and witty manner - the expanding and increasingly accessible tourist industry of the period. Parr began the project by exploring tourism and tourist locations across Europe, but quickly ventured outside of the continent believing that...
November 2011
6 posts
6 tags
Massimo Vitali
Following the previous post on Inka Lindergård & Niclas Holmström, I wanted to continue examine the nature of humans. Massimo Vitali’s large-format colour photographs of crowded beaches, swimming pools, tourist hotspots and disco’s form an intriguing and illustrative study into human-beings at leisure.
It has always interested me how we human’s descend upon the same...
7 tags
Inka Lindergård & Niclas Holmström
Watching Humans Watching is an on-going project from the Stockholm-based duo Inka Lindergård & Niclas Holmström.
Inka and Niclas’ project is an intriguing study into the human act of viewing nature and our relationship to it. Throughout history the natural landscape has been one of the key subject matters of all art forms and has always been a subject of human interest and...
5 tags
Gavin Oliver Devine
Gavin Oliver Devine’s series I am another is a photographic investigation into “what it is to be a gay man in Ireland today”. Taking inspiration from his personal experiences while discovering his own sexuality, Devine explores the coming out experiences of other men who identify themselves as gay.
Employing interviews, letters and portraiture, Devine creates an emotive and...
5 tags
Hannah Modigh
Hillbilly Heroin, Honey is the award-winning monograph from swedish photographer Hannah Modigh. In 2010 it picked up The Swedish Photo Book Award with the jury describing the work as a “..strong, courageous and at the same time humble depiction of a for many of us unknown world. With help of a sensitive graphic design the photographer takes us beyond exotism and transform the coal dust...
4 tags
Lucas Foglia
Alex Running Home, Wyoming
Lucas Foglia’s series entitled Frontcountry explores the ranching, farming and mining boom communities in the western United States. Drawing on personal experience, Foglia examines the commercialisation, property expansion and economic struggles which continually put pressure on these small-town communities and their way of life.
“The people who owned...
6 tags
Damien Peyret
Damien Peyret is a french filmmaker and photographer based in Paris. Peyret uses photography as an extension of his film work, recognizing the continuous dialogue between the two art forms. Swim & Steam is a project that came to being during the production of his award-winning Un taxi pour Reykjavik, a film which presents an unusual image of social life within the Icelandic capital through a...
October 2011
6 posts
4 tags
Eti Wade
Just stumbled across the work of Eti Wade in the sixth issue of Uncertain States. Pretty awe struck by these two images, they are amazing. Visit her website and read her artistic statement, it’s very interesting, and hit the link to see the other image.
w: www.etiwade.com
7 tags
Andy Sewell
Andy Sewell captures the in-between the wild and the created in his series The Heath.
“Hampstead Heath was once part of the countryside surrounding London and is now a green fragment deep within the urban landscape. It is a place of ancient trees, tall grass and thickets dense enough to get lost in – if only briefly. I go to the Heath to be somewhere that feels natural, yet I know this is...
7 tags
Donovan Wylie
Last night while exploring the Ways of Looking website, Bradford’s photography festival which is debuting as we speak, I came across Donovan Wylie’s new series Outposts. The work, which was jointly commissioned by the National Media Museum, Bradford College and the University of Bradford, was made by the Magnum photographer over a two-month period while embedded with...
5 tags
Bryan Schutmaat
Bryan Schutmaat is a photographer I’ve admired for quite a long time now and his new series, Grey the Mountain Sends, continues his high standards of work.
In this series Schutmaat examines the lives of people residing in small mountain towns and mining communities in the American West. Schutmaat, inspired by the work of American poet Richard Hugo, documents the surroundings and the...
7 tags
East Meets West Open Call
QUAD, in partnership with Light House and in association with FORMAT International Photography Festival, ID Fest and Beyond present East Meets West Open Call.
I am currently helping out on the project which is cool. We are looking for emerging photographers and filmmakers who are based in the East or West Midlands, or who have recently graduated (in the last 2 years) from a Midlands...
9 tags
Paddy Kelly
Paddy Kelly’s on-going series, Bogland, examines the traces and fragments of political and emotional unrest in Northern Ireland which over time have fused and become hidden within the landscape.
Kelly’s imagery may at first appear to be simple studies of the landscape but on closer inspection they are seen to hold depth and insight into a delicate conflict. The locations captured...
September 2011
7 posts
5 tags
Noel Bowler
Noel Bowler’s series Making Space explores the expansion, development and co-existence of the Islamic faith in contemporary Ireland.
Bowler reveals the calm transformation of domestic spaces into places of prayer, religious dedication and ritual. These spaces are residential, rural and urban; homes, offices and warehouses.
Taken over three years, Bowler documents “the adaptive...
1 tag
Alberto Maserin
Alberto Maserin’s series Et Nunc Sacerdos examines the transformation of the identity and personality of a clergyman through the “dramatic alteration of appearance once dressed in their religious vestments”.
Maserin explains that the root of the project comes from his childhood experiences of priests, perceiving them them as having two identities, one before the donning of the...
Update/Book Project/Other News
I thought it was time for bit of an update on things surrounding this wee blog here, so.. here we go.
For awhile now i’ve been working on a book project from the foundations of the SHOW ME PICTURES blog, and am getting close to finalizing my selection of contributors. My aims for the publication are numerous but the main objectives are to produce a book/magazine which promotes and...
Daniel Shea
Plume and Clouds
Daniel Shea’s series Plume explores Southeast Ohio and its dense concentration of coal-fired power plants. The project acts as a follow-up to work he made in 2007 in Appalachia, titled Removing Mountains.
Shea concentrates his focus on two towns which sit along the Ohio River, Racine and Cheshire, which both lay within close proximity to a such a dense concentration of...
5 tags
Amy Stein
I first came across Amy Stein’s series Stranded at this year’s Format Festival, which took place in and around Derby through-out March and early April. For me it was one the best work’s on offer.
Stein began the work in response to the American government’s terrible failure to support thousands of American’s during the New Orleans flooding in 2005, causing an...
5 tags
Eric Baudelaire
Just a quick post pointing you in the direction of Eric Baudelaire’s diptych piece entitled The Dreadful Details. I recently came across this at QUAD’s series of exhibitions called Aesthetics of Journalism. The show posed some interesting questions relating to ideas of art and journalism, but for me, this piece was probably the most provocative and affecting. Check out more of his...
2 tags
Christopher Colville
Christopher Colville’s project, Instar, explores the Sonoran Desert which straddles the U.S. and Mexico border. Colville transform’s this harsh environment, where life is “both miraculous and tenuous”.
The images take on an otherworldly quality, as does much of Colville’s work, and reminds myself of visuals taken from past lunar and Mars mission’s which truly...
August 2011
7 posts
2 tags
Jeff Whetstone
Jeff Whetstone’s series, Kentucky, examines the formulation of communities in Eastern Kentucky.
“In Eastern Kentucky the terrain is so steep that the only decent place to build a house is right beside the creek. Thousands of streams lace the terrain, and houses cluster shoulder to shoulder along their banks. Generations of families have passed on their sparse plots of flatland to...
1 tag
Maurizio Strippoli
Today I present Maurizio Strippoli’s on-going series of work, Inside.
I have been meaning to blog about this series for a long time ever since I was struck by the sheer aesthetic beauty of the work within, quiet, calm and clean. I personally find the sense of stillness that the work evokes quite therapeutic and the overall aesthetic reminds me of classic European cinema which follow...
3 tags
Gábor Arion Kudász
Dump (Romania), 2007
To complete a hat-trick of Hungarian photographer’s, here is an interesting series by Gábor Arion Kudász, entitled Waste Union.
“Waste Union is the image of ruins grounded in the utopian ideas of past ages.It seems anachronistic and immoral to separate inhabited land from Nature. Cultivated landscapes are not different from lands left intact, for the boundaries...
2 tags
Ember Sári
Ember Sari’s series, Muse, After Lunch, is a collection of photographs made between 2007-2010, of Sari’s grandfather.
Sari writes, “It was my grandfather who used to be my muse. Only through photographing him did I understand what this world means. A persona, however small or silent he is, fills the space arond him. A muse is a character, who, being watched even if for the...
2 tags
Tamas Dezso
Tree and House (West Hungary), 2011
In Here, Anywhere, Tamas Dezso documents today’s Hungary, exploring the areas which have seemingly been left behind since the country’s political transformation some 20 year’s ago, coming after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Dezso describes these areas as “capsules of time”, abandoned to linger in an awkward and,...
2 tags
Alexander Kviria
Alexander Kviria is a film-maker who has also been attracted to the village of Gorelovka. In his documentary, Gorelovka - Episodes from the Life of a Disappearing Community, Kviria unveils the political and economic pressures which are forcing the community apart and with it, the heritage and traditions so well preserved.
2 tags
Olya Ivanova
Olya Ivanova’s series Gorelovka documents the small and remote village of Gorelovka in southern Georgia. The community was founded in the 19th century by a group of Russian religious dissidents avoiding church reform and hoping to maintain its own identity and traditions.
Gorelovka soon attracted others hoping to escape from Soviet rule and today, as Ivanova describes, attracts “new...
July 2011
4 posts
Matthieu Gafsou
In this post I offer a selection of work by the fantastic Matthieu Gafsou, taken from his projects Terres Compromises and Surfaces. Much of Gafsou’s work considers the landscape or urbanized landscape.
In Surfaces Gafsou travels through Tunisia, documenting the strange variations and divides between the countries traditional identity and the new, modern and aspirational cities and...
3 tags
Thomas Albdorf
Red Curtain, 2011
Thomas Albdorf uses his surroundings and a small ‘kit’ of objects to create sculptural installations. Albdorf consciously chooses environments which rarely or never encounter art and his creations only grace them for a small amount of time. At the end of the process, when the sculpture has been documented via the act of photography, Albdorf deconstructs it and the...
3 tags
Misha de Ridder
Misha de Ridder offers us beauty and mystery in his series Dune.
“Somewhere in densely populated Holland exists a twilight zone where it is possible to travel in time: a small strip of dunes separating polder and sea, just a twenty minute drive from the city of Amsterdam. In DUNE, Misha de Ridder unveils natural scenes so estranged and mysterious that they could be described as unreal...
3 tags
Jocelyn Allen
Being Grandad, 2010
Jocelyn Allen’s series One Is Not Like The Other is an interesting exploration into the theme of identity. Allen positions herself as a ‘copy’ of her close relatives in a series of portraits, presented to us as diptychs and triptychs, taking on their stances, clothes and environments.
Allen’s portraits contain clues and hints into the sitter’s...
June 2011
6 posts
5 tags
Jim Cowan
Jim Cowan’s body of work entitled L’Inconnu further explores the portrait and the human trace, continuing on from his previous work in Untitled, 2010 and XX/XY.
Cowan submerges his subjects in water where they become suspended in a dark, ethereal abyss which delicately envelops their bodies and fades form. The subjects appear tranquil yet lifeless within this unknown, this...
3 tags
Laura Horne
Laura Horne’s series Cleethorpes In Bloom documents the impact today’s society has had on the once thriving seaside town of Cleepthorpes, located in North East Lincolnshire, England.
Horne illustrates the drastic decline of the area, once known for its fisheries, piers and amusements and also poignantly describes the struggles the residents and local businesses are enduring.
...
Michael Clenton
Michael Clenton’s body of work, Physical Change, explores the artists intimate and changing relationship with his body, not only over time, but through circumstances out of his control. Clenton suffers from an aggressive form of Rheumatoid Arthritis which requires strong medication to keep under control.
Clenton conducts himself into positions of now non-comfort, positons that were once...
3 tags
Reece Edmonds
Laura 24/5, 2011
Reece Edmonds’ video piece titled 24/5 is a study into the effects of sleep deprivation on a subject. The video’s are comprised of still images taken over 24 hours at 5 minute intervals creating a fascinating and hypnotic watch which is amplified even more so when seen in its installation form, comprising of twelve separate videos placed in two grids of six...
Derby University Degree Show
So, after three years of work me and my fellow members of the photography course have exhibited as part of the university’s degree show titled Synthesis. It was a pretty enjoyable evening and I was impressed with a lot of work from the show which ranged from fine art to product design to crafts and textiles. Congratulations to everyone who was part of it and who exhibited!
Over the next few...
Shen Wei
Shen Wei’s series Chinese Sentiment is a personal journey of attempted reconnection to what the photographer describes as “the authentic Chinese life”. The work is an attempt to appreciate and reveal “the real China” free from political or economic influence. There is a real intimacy within the work but also, I feel, a distance between Wei and his subject matter.
...
May 2011
7 posts
Corey Arnold
Corey Arnold’s body of work entitled Fish-Work: Bering Sea was taken over a seven year period whilst working as a deckhand on a fishing vessel for crab, cod and halibut in the waters of the Bering Sea, Alaska.
See more after the jump.
Patrick Hogan
“There was a man, beside a wood, he was digging holes”
Patrick Hogan’s photographic short story entitled Solitary, Half Mad is an intriguing exploration into act of living in solitude and the relationship between reality and fantasy.
Moving from his urban residence to a small cottage in rural Tipperary, Ireland, Hogan spent six months photographing the surrounding areas,...
4 tags
Chrystal Lebas
Abyss 3, 2003
“The forest is a fascinating space; one can feel attracted by its grandeur, or scared by its depth and darkness. This space of immensity echoes our childhood memories, through fairy-tale or play. Walking to the forest of my childhood, after many years, I remembered when we used to build a hut, and slowly the light would disappear, and darkness would surround us. The...