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Sophie Ristelhueber is a photographer interested in the effects a conflict produces and she focus on revealing events and the marks of history both on bodies and on landscapes. She reveals the wounds and scars, veritable memories of the acts of history, that are the physical chronicle of trauma. She hangs large prints in an expansive grid that at first reads as a beautiful abstract field and then a reconstruction of the battlefield is revealing to the viewer. Additionally, she plays with the material and the format of the image, its status, its framework and its installation in space. 

Links: 

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-sophie-ristelhueber

https://vimeo.com/15174257

https://vimeo.com/96589581

http://www.prixpictet.com/portfolios/disorder-shortlist/sophie-ristelhueber/

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Linda Hofvander is an artist who uses the medium of photography to speak about materiality, spatiality and the understanding of shapes. Using mundane objects she makes her own associations and interventions suggesting possible readings with an intuitive and playful process. One of her favorite subjects can be defined as the various alterations of our vision of reality like her work entitled “What we see or What we seem” and her mission is to challenge our perception of things.

Links:

http://www.hiap.fi/artist/linda-hofvander

http://www.tique-art.com/store/product/publications/books/linda-hofvander-ways-to-describe/

http://www.lindahofvander.com/

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Image analysis:

This is an untitled image by JH Engstrom included in the book “CDG/JHE” published in 2008.

An old boarding airplane stair in the middle of the frame is the dominant element in this photograph. The viewer isn’t able to understand where it is situated because the landscape is unclear. It is an open space with a bit of grass on the right side and on the back we can identify few buildings. The colors are unsaturated and dull, the material used is film and in the printing a special process was used that renders the film with an overall cast of grey giving an almost monochrome feel that is also present here.

The viewer is being informed that the initials of the title stands for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, which was the first connection with the rest of the world and with Paris for the photographer in the age of 10. This stair standing alone in the middle of nowhere seems that makes this connection possible but also another one: The earth with nowhere, with death or with heaven.  It is an image that balances between the dream and reality of the mundane, between surreal and the actuality of the object.

We travel back in time when the airports had a different cultural identity and they tended to represent freedom, possibilities, and openness. Nowadays they have become a place where fear is very strong and where armed police officers and safety regulations and restrictions only strengthen our insecurity. It is a melancholy and nostalgia for these days but it is also about these two feelings that the travelers feel when they abandon a place to encounter a new one. Lastly, the viewer feels from the very moment that it is a dark, sober and pessimistic image connected directly to the heart of Engstrom’s work which is about the existential homelessness and displacement.

Links:

http://www.galerievu.com/series.php?id_reportage=66&id_photographe=17

https://www.lensculture.com/articles/jh-engstrom-jh-engstrom-s-photographic-smog-aesthetic

http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=DP948&i=&i2=

[annacharala]

JH Engstrom is a Swedish photographer working on the documentary field. I found out his work very recently and instantly I felt a kind of a connection. His tools are poetry, narrative, his emotions and the different energies he feels. He is interested in rediscovering and exploring what he already knows and not just travelling to a faraway place. Just letting his camera tell stories he doesn’t care about the aesthetics and his images are a survey of time and space with a timeless and often spaceless documentation.  

Links:

http://www.galerievu.com/series.php?id_photographe=17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVoE7c9x0jk

https://vimeo.com/79820029

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Τhis is a coloured image made by Darren Harvey-Regan in 2011 titled “The Halt”. What we see when we decide to analyze it is actually two seperate things: Firstly we see an image of an axe photographed in a black background and on its real dimensions. Secondly embedded and pinned in this image we see the same axe placed on the metal edge of the photographed axe. There aren’t a lot to describe about in this image but they are a lot to analyze and to think about when you look at it. Undoubtebly the artist is negotiating the boundaries of the medium of photography in this image by adding the real axe but also by using this powerful and heavy object as a metaphor to emphasize this struggle. Through the work of Darren Harvey Rigan we are seeing photography treated as object rather than a two dimensional surface. He challenge the viewer to distinguish where representation ends and the object begins. The inherent tensions of representation are highlighted by the presentation of photographs in interaction with objects. The viewer also comes closer to the process and starts to exolore the connotations and the possibilities that the photographer leaves open. A sense of tactility is being created here by the mixing of the medium of sculpture and the actual moment that these two are “touching” each other blending and producing a sense of interest and rhythm. An other element that is being emphasized here is the materiality of the photographed. Question arises: What else can be an image? The artist with the use of this title strengthens the stop of the traditional documentation and representation of photography and launches a new contemporary view upon these open and endless issues.

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A photographer who makes a profound work in the field of social documentary and street photography is Katy Grannan. Her work is focused on marginalized communities in America where she founds something different in them and she brings out their beauty but most importantly their dignity. She does that by having two basic elements in her mind: the light and the narrative. The light can work as a metaphor as it works both ways as something very seductive and comforting and at the same time can be relentless and indiscriminate. The narrative is hidden behind the stories of these people that Grannan is trying to reveal with her own way including the mixture of feelings overflowed during the experience of the shooting.

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Eileen Quilan is an artist that creates abstractions with the use of a large format camera that underlines her interest in the act of looking. Her constructed images made by original objects combined with the use of reflective materials like mirror or other have a connection with painting. Lastly with the way she presents her work she allows the viewer to experience her technical process of degraded and scratched negatives, lighting and lastly to explore depth, texture and color.

Links:

http://www.eileenquinlan.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyZRVSwPlsw

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2016/04/eileen-quinlan-at-miguel-abreu-2/

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Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs are Swiss duo artists who offer with their work a contemporary view interpretation of the photographic tradition content wise but also technical and process wise. Living in America they decided to explore the America road trip as many photographers did before them but they achieved to make images that none of the previous photographers ever did. They constructed and emerged the images with their own way which is characterized by humor and wit. What I really find interesting is that they produce different kind of work from documentary to sculpture and to architecture to abstraction, video or filming. In all their work nevertheless they create a sense of doubt of what we see when we come across with their alterations of reality.  

Links: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiXCXvnv9x8

http://www.phasesmag.com/taiyo-onorato-nico-krebs/the-great-unreal/#s-9

http://tonk.ch/ 

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Another photographer who produces photograms in her work is Lisa Oppenheim. She has a conceptual process where she includes novel ideas related to the subject. For example in her series “Smoke” she used the flame of a match to expose and solarize images of smoke of the World War II and from 2011North London riots that she found online. This process is what fascinates me most in her work: she structures her research and then together with the form of the project they go back and forth and form each other through the making. Her basis is documentary photography and her subjects are related on this field such as women labor, World War II and more.

Links: 

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/newphotography/lisa-oppenheim/

http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artists/lisa-oppenheim/series-selected-works

https://vimeo.com/82223196

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One of the photographers that finds a big interest in the tradition of photography and creates photograms, meaning cameraless photographs is Fallah Karapetian. Her attention is based on photography's relationship to the real as the objects that she portrays reveal something of their true elusive nature and her work has scale built more logically into the prints' physical existense. Her subject is mainly struggle, a subject that I am also exploring and through this physical process with the constructed negatives she finds new ways to scrutinize the medium of photography. 

Link: 

http://www.farrahkarapetian.com/

http://www.vonlintel.com/Farrah-Karapetian.html

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-beautiful-conceptually-ticklish-photograms-by-farrah-karapetian-20150209-story.html

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Leslie Hewitt is international known for sculptural photographs, photographs that function also like as pictorial images but also as objects. They heightening our sense of the visual. She is very interesting in opticality and optics and how photography is really transformed the way that we see, how we see, what we see and her photographs really heightening that awareness. Her photosculptural works not only retrieve memory but question the very basis of our access to it: how it is mediated, reframed, and changed through the contingencies of space and the exigencies of time. Her series “Riffs of Time” is what inspired me most because of her unique collages with different materials that create a mosaic of the history of America.

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Darren Harvey Regan is a photographer interested in producing an interplay between the image and the world. He uses three elements in his work: the subject which is the thing by itself, the photographic representation of the object and the material photograph that’s being displayed. These layers provide the viewer with a kind of tension or interaction. The relationships between an object and its representation is very important and intriguing in his process and in the final art work.  

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Daniel Gordon is a photographer who gives light and form to online found images. His final surreal and grotesque photographs look like collages at the first glance but they reveal to be pictures of sculptures. The physical part in his work is very big as he allows relationships between physical things within a photograph that acquire a meaning. What I find very intriguing in his work is that he brings out different personalities or aspects and different approaches of a portrait. A new way of exploring a portrait as his 3-d constructions are not only placed in the surface but extend further in the content of the image and provide an alternative form for analyzing a portrait. 

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This is a still life photo made by Laura Letinsky in her studio and is included in the series “Hardly More Than Ever”, Untitled #49, 2001. We can see a table parallel to the camera with a creased white table cloth on it. A white stained mug is placed in the edge of the table just a few millimeters before it falls. Next to the mug there is a white plastic cutting board of food with a ball of around eight peaches one up to the other trying to fit inside the ball. The table cloth as well the ball have stains of the peaches and some leftover are placed on the board. On the right side we can see the edge of a window and the natural daylight that harmonically lightens the scene and the greenish wall on the background. Our mind goes back in time when we look at this image, in the Dutch Golden Age where the Dutch painters were achieving masterpieces of art. This is not just a still life that illustrates these objects but way more than that. There is a story behind and an obvious narrative that something real happened there. It takes place in a house and the photographer implying the human presence is trying to understand and to reveal his identity through the materialized scene. Almost all the objects are on the brink of falling while trying to find their balance. There is a big contradiction between the beautiful lighting and the awkward scenery: it is too good to be true. Finally the photographer wants the viewer to participate more and she succeeds in it through the sense of tangibility that the viewer feels like he is standing in front of the table and is able to reach the objects before or while falling apart. 

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What really fascinates me in Sam Falls’s work is that he uses three stages of production in his process: the photographic, the digital and the most important in this case the physical. He doesn’t pay much attention to the final outcome but rather than insisting in the logic of the process and in the mixing of other forms of art or other mediums. More specifically: photography, painting, drawing, sculptures, video, digital transformation, dyed fabric and more elements lead him to a freewheeling rotation that results in a variety of different styles. His images finally expand the capacity of representation and deals with our relationship with time, the aging and melancholy as well with weather conditions.

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Walead Beshty is a photographer, a writer and a professor to several art schools in the U.S. His very conceptual work includes camera-less images specifically coloured photo grams, sculptures and installations. Mainly all the works are related and referring to the process of the production and to the medium of photography especially in its materiality and the relationship between them. His work titled “Fedex Sculptures” stuck out from the first moment. It is a series of shatterproof glass boxes sized to the volume of the Fedex shipping boxes in which they are transported from one exhibition to the other and its inevitable damages. It implies a critical glance at the customary systems of art production and distribution and it is a work that provokes accidents and unexpected surprises that shape the final work of art. 

Research-Links: 

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2009/11/18/walead-beshty-in-new-photography-2009

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walead_Beshty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LO_o7os4Hs

[annacharala]

This is an interview from Brian Sholis to Laura Letinsky, an artist who uses the medium of photography to speak about things like instability, material-mindedness, decay and to make referential work to this medium. Her beautiful still lives are inspired by the Dutch still life paintings and in order to produce them she uses ordinary objects and three dimensional collages. As she analyze her process she admits that not everything can be explained or articulated during the photographic process because it is a non verbal intelligence that combines the mind with the body like when it comes to love and magic. Finally one of the most important parts in her work is to stress out the transformation of photography and how photography changes how we see and how we understand the world. 

Research-links: 

Book: “The photography as contemporary art” by Charlotte Cotton 

http://www.wipnyc.org/blog/laura-letinsky

https://vimeo.com/36814050

https://vimeo.com/39387305

http://lauraletinsky.com/