LA Review
With much excitement, Photo LA and Review LA have arrived! Los Angeles, time to get excited about photography. Expected highlights include the Uta Barth, David Taylor, and Andrew Moore lectures, all on that Saturday or Sunday.
I’m extremely excited to be participating in Review LA; I’ve already perused the list of participating photographers. Other photographers to pay particular attention to include Amy Eckert, Irina Rozovsky (featured in an earlier post), Jessamyn Lovell, Kathleen Laraid McLaughlin, Lisa McCord and Steve Davis.
[Photo by Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin]
Photographer Dan Burn-Forti
Tweeted about him last week, not it’s time to show-off the best holiday photos from Dan Burn-Forti. It’s so modern-day, Americana with a touch of spicy nostalgia and tongue-in-cheek quirkiness.
[See his portfolio, full of commercial and personal projects]
John Divola – Artist Lecture
I was extremely excited to listen to the very influential photographer John Divola lecture on Sunday at the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art. Despite the lack of ventilation in the stuffy Ahmanson Auditorium, Divola plowed through an hour-long lecture on his artwork dating from his humble beginnings as a graduate student at the University of Califorian in Los Angeles to his current work as he continues to teach photography at the University of California in Riverside. He appeared very relaxed speaking in front the intimate crowd, no surprise coming from a professor.
The most interesting part of any artist lecture, is hearing and seeing the artist talk about their work and the evolution of their art as their thought process changes. From Divola’s older work up until his most recent was very consistent in his exploration how humankind interacts with the natural environment and his constant exploration of the abandoned spaces, the spaces around him and man-made elements within the landscape.
Even to this day, I will still recall how my photography professor showed us his Isolated Houses series– we all looked on in silent. Divola has an instinctual eye for light and how it shapes the subject matter, and to this day, I still believe his house series is one of his most beautiful for its play on light and color.
In Artificial Nature, Divola selects and exhibits found photographs of fake natural landscapes created for movies. At first appearing natural and eerie, the movie sets are gorgeous. Once the viewer takes a closer look and notices the movie set signs and the painted background, the whole gig is up.
Marina Abramovic – Pushing the Envelope of Performance
Marina Abramovicis what I would call a radical performance artist. She has shaped performance art in ways that I will not even try to explain. However, I will admit that I used to think performance art was annoying, obnoxious and incomprehendable but now Abramovic has helped me view this medium in a new (more positive) light.
Read more at the Sean Kelly Gallery, learn about her In The Family project or read the New York Press.
Marc Garanger: Documenting Dignity
In 1960, Marc Garanger was the official photographer of the French army that occupied Algeria in 1960. The French military forced the Algerians to build new houses around the military barracks. As part of the occupation. Garanger’s commanding officer ask him to photograph all the villagers for mandatory photo IDs.
In 10 days I took 2000 images. The first days the portraits I took showed the women with their veils on. When I showed the image to the commander, he asked for the veils to be removed.
The village women were photographed against their will without their veils and/or headpieces. Garanger’s Femme Algérienne is a statement of defiance; a strong show of dignity and humanity.
Read more at the British Journal of Photography, NY Times Lens blog, at the NY Photo Festival , watch a video of Garanger, or an interview.
Book Publisher Gottund Verlag
Small, Pennslyvania-based book publisher Gottund Verlag publishes innovative books by emerging and mid-career artists.
Gottund might sound familiar because they also published Coley Brown’s photo book Jam Jelly Honey Wild Rice. Brown was Ryan McGinley’s assistant before he was discovered and is now a photographer and model. Sounds like a sweet deal to me.
The below images are from Kasane Nogawa’s book Above Below and Andreas Banderas‘s and Nicholas Gottund‘s book U Tell Me. Quietly powerful books that leaves me thinking.
Bernard Faucon and the Modern Photograph
Just got back from a wonderful Bernard Faucon lecture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with my wonderfully talented artist-friend Rosemary Winn (check out her work, she is amazing).
Faucon is a French artist who originally started painting before, in his own words, realizing he had no talent and moved on to photography. Faucon’s photographic works have themes of love, beauty and his personal favorite– childhood. Much of his photographic works explore the idyllic time of youth, sublime love and childhood dreams.
Earlier photographs explore these themes using mannequins engaged in some child-like activity, setup, scene or narrative. As he got older, he starting photographing more conceptually like in Winter and Golden Rooms or their antithesis The Rooms of Love.
Faucon moved further away from photography in his series The Scriptures in which he built wooden words, staked them in various landscapes and photographed them with a strong flash; the words take on a ethereal quality, appearing to float above the ground. These photos were less about the photograph and more about the words and thoughts themselves.
Finally, The End of the Image marks his last official project in photography. These are exhibited as small photographs with powerful, poignant phrases painted on youthful skins.
Faucon led the audience from his earlier train of thought using staged photography to finally his disillusionment with staged photography. He raises an interesting idea. Paraphrasing his words, with the ubiquity of photography, everyone is taking photographs of everything. “All the photographs have been taken…” There is no further need to photograph.
Instead, the artist becomes the person who selects the photograph. For Faucon, the voice that makes a difference is the person who selects and who lends his/her perspective to the work. And that, my friend, is why he no longer photographs.
Take a look at some of his stunning work below. His voice is an artist’s voice that has expressed beautiful ideas. As Faucon says, “You cannot get over the fact that it should come to an end…”
See more of Faucon’s works at Gallery Vu.
[Images from The Probable Evolution of Time by Bernard Faucon]
Justin James King: Anything but the land
I am a big fan of landscape photography. Photographer Justin James King gives us a new perspective of how we experience & connect with the land. In his series And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum, he photographs tourists as they experience the landscape– except the landscape is no where to be seen. We’re left looking at our own experience.
All we see when we stand in front of the landscape are archetypes: preconceived notions and pre-experienced views. Landscape is a manifestation of culture. Our perception grows out of how we have seen the landscape represented and how it has been delivered to us historically and in popular culture.
For the love of fast food + clever packaging design
The epitome of high-end fashion would be combining our love of fast food, fashion & clever packaging design. Wait no more, as McFancy was a Fashion Week collaboration that re-brands McDonalds into something more like a 5-star restaurant, at least for a brief moment in time! Playful, aesthetically pleasing, and beautifully executed– this definitely brought a smile to my face.
View more pretty photos by the photographer Marija Ivkovic, see pretty things by the stylist, check out the company that did the cupcake wrapper or the plastic cutlery,
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