Contemporary Photography Online

2007-09-07T06:11:00.000-04:00

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Morgan Konn: Her House, Her Clothes.

2007-09-07T05:56:00.000-04:00

My work is performance-based. It is not highly theatrical, but plays with the space between snapshots and commercial photography of women in their homes. To create the images, I go into other women's homes when they are not there and photograph myself in their clothes and home.
Morgan Konn
Morgan Konn is an artist and instructor living in Los Angeles.

Ashley McDowell

2007-08-29T13:27:00.002-04:00

My work is not about my sister’s addiction to heroin. It is about the way that her addiction creates distance between she and I. I have always felt that my relationship with my sister was the most important in my life, but I was unable to get past my own anger and frustration. I couldn’t understand her life, her addiction, and what I thought were the choices that she was making. She lies, steals, and manipulates everyone around her to get what she needs to survive. I asked my family members who have experienced loss to make a list of the things that Melissa has stolen from them. They are able to show just how much of a reality this has become for our family and literally through writing, display the desperation that exists in an addict’s life.

I began with physical evidence of her addiction, the things that I could see right in front of me. Whether it be the delicate track marks on her arms, or the patterns of burn marks that remain on her bedroom carpet from nodding off with a cigarette in hand. These are the signifiers in the work and in our lives; symbols of the permanent damage that this drug has left on our family. I thought that I would be documenting her life, but I was really experiencing something much more intangible; the change in myself and my relationship with my sister. This has become the most important product. Through photographing her I began to experience things that opened myself up to her world of depression and fear. Since she has allowed me to see all of these things, I’ve come to accept her and recognize her addiction as a disease.

The process of making this work has helped my already complex relationship with my sister by building trust. The core of creating the work, the deepest element, became the fact that I was creating it with her instead of about her. For this reason I now consider this to be a collaborative process. It is through her participation, candidness, and courage that I am able to bring the viewer into our world so that they can relate to the compound of emotions that I have been experiencing with my family for some time.
Ashley McDowell
Ashley McDowell is an artist living in Boston.

Manuel Zauner: Little (Hi)stories

2007-04-07T09:28:00.000-04:00

These photographs are of the people who receive care by mobile nurses in a small Austrian town. Many of them lead isolated lives and rarely leave their homes. What is left to them of the world are the places they inhabit, filled with historical objects that have become their very identity. In creating these diptychs I have given consideration to those superimposed memories and layers of the past.
The diptychs refer to what the French philosopher Francoise Lyotard called little (hi)stories and are part of a sooner or later fading cultural memory. By revealing, or recreating the microscopic narratives these people surround themselves with, I hope to reconsider the original meaning of the postmodern: as an antagonism of narration - a point where both identity and history take place.
Manuel Zauner

Aram Tanis - Deconstruction

2007-02-19T08:51:00.001-05:00

Bijlmer, a neighborhood in the South-East Amsterdam was built as an urban experiment during the 60s & 70s. It consists of identical high-rise buildings separated by the greens and multiple levels for differentiated traffic flow. The experiment failed miserably after the government placed Surinamese immigrants in these low cost houses in the mid 70s, which resulted in a severe social & racial segregation within the city. Over the years, the social decline has added to the urban problems of crime, unemployment & gentrification.
Aram Tanis explores this condition infused with his concerns for isolation, mass-production & anonymity in the urban environments. Here, interspersed with shots of buildings in this area, Aram has used images of an overweight woman occupying the entire frame as a metaphor for the claustrophobia, decadence and stereotypes associated with this part of the city.

Bastien Desfriches Doria - Pensées Mammifère (Mammal Thoughts)

2007-01-25T08:16:00.000-05:00

This series explores the questioning of bodily identity interweaved with philosophical reflection (Cartesian Cogito). It is composed of thirteen large format portraits, involving a collaborative dialogue between author and the subject.
I allowed each individual to re-appropriate his/her own particular understanding of bodily representation through absurdity, absence, humor or eroticism to genuinely transcribe what one felt when asked to pose as a body.
The series evolves along the impossibility of depicting the human figure as a material being, both philosophically and photographically: neither the “objective” witness (the photographer), nor the subjective performer (the portrayed individual who tries to embrace the reality of being just a body in front of the camera) can successfully picture (no)body, that is the experience of looking at person’s body as a living, concrete entity separated from his/her identity. In that specific sense, my series constitutes a direct attempt to photograph the reality of what Merleau-Ponty defined as Body Subjects.
But by doing so, this work essentially questions our traditional discrimination between mind and body inherited from Western Metaphysics, and even more crucially our inherent immaterial relationship with physicality in an age of global communication and omnipotent visualism. In this respect, the raw meat laid out in each portrait symbolically manifests both the intention of the subject’s thoughts and of the photographer’s narrative, while brutally confronting the photographic representation’s failure to grasp one of the most fundamental human evidence.
Bastien Desfriches Doria

Sarah Sorg - Night

2006-12-18T07:30:00.003-05:00

These photographs are all of stars, around everyday towns, as part of the natural world that is all around us whether or not we are paying attention to it. The photographs sometimes include people, who are seen as a fleeting blur, contrasted with the longer life span of the earth and stars around them. Also, I am interested in the combination of the perfect beautiful sky with its light that has taken millions of years to get here and the more transitory world underneath.
Sarah Sorg

David Zamdmer

2006-09-21T12:39:00.002-04:00

Growing up in New York City gave me a heightened sensitivity to and appreciation for people and their quest for self-improvement. New Yorkers come from all walks of life, and from nearly every corner of the globe. Ironically, the same natives who agree that even the craziest things can go unnoticed in New York City are the very people who are especially conscious of an audience every time they walk down the street. It's a place where both nobody and everybody is looking at you, where the sidewalk is a stage, pedestrians its performers. This is the theater that has brought me to explore the intersecting realms of self-awareness and self-improvement. In researching these behaviors as a photographer, I have realized that this interest in keeping up appearances is unaffected by differences of age, race, gender, class, or creed. It is nearly universal and is the impetus behind many habitual activities. I explore these actions by
photographing subjects in the midst of personal fitness routines and hairdressing appointments. In my photographs, I attempt to return my subjects to a time as they were prior to their picture being taken; unaware of me, the camera and themselves. I present these people with an honesty inspired by Rineke Dijkstra and a drama inspired by Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
David Zamdmer

Jiankun Xie - 'SKIN: nowhere in somewhere'

2006-07-06T00:15:00.000-04:00

“In every city, specific individuals are responsible for what has been built, but more generally, the unconscious of the community has developed the culture in these places and it is something that you can see in every city, every day. History is common process. People are thus responsible and add to the environment we live in. however, I am not interested in making an archive of cities around the world. I have a desire to raise questions about responsibility and the effects of the natural and built environment.” Thomas Struth
I keep a respectful distance from the world. I observe the world from an equal stance. My understanding is fragmented. Urbanism is constructed by foundational establishment. People’s work and lives are placed in such environment. Walking on the street, accessing the building, shopping, and traveling, people live in a restricted world. The city is divided into many zones with many kinds of signs – free zone, danger zone and prohibit zone. Thus it divides many different groups of crowds. The relationship between them and the region, their living trail, compose the images of urbanization.
We all walk, act and live on the same skin of the earth. We repeatedly and inadvertently accept scenes that look familiar to us. From the surface or turning inside out, city as the human body “is not like other objects being inside the space. It is not in the space either surrounding the space outside as well. Body and space is like the hand reaching to the tool.” (“Phenomenology of Perception”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty) In this word, body - subject open to the world of each other. There’s no antinomy between subject and object, inside and outside, soul and body.
On the other hand, city, for me is a temporary space. It belongs to no one and each generation adds another layer. Cities are mutable and changeable sites constantly in flux and transition. The desire to freeze them, if even for a moment is hard to resist. Sometimes I stand away, sometime I walk around and sometimes I feel it by being inside. I’m documenting the impersonal life and the shape of the city, as well as the generic roles at play within it.
Jiankun Xie

Groana Melendez

2006-05-20T15:31:00.000-04:00

"Dark, claustrophobic, and cold. My parents immigrated to New York in the late ‘70s in search of opportunity and leaving behind home, security, and family. After more than 10 years of not living in the Dominican Republic, I felt the need to connect to the part of me that was missing, and reconcile with my heritage. My return was a return to light, space, and color. The camera became my way of getting to know the Dominican Republic and my family. Despite it being my first encounter with some family members we still felt connected and at ease with each other.
Photography bears witness to the world and becomes evidence of humanity. Images become permanent unlike the subjects, and a memory is kept. I photograph my family because I have a need to immortalize them from my point of view, that of an insider and outsider. Art is the medium for understanding myself and by depicting my family, I study what defines them, and in turn what defines me. These images become statements of identity."
Groana Melendez

Elliot Black

2006-03-21T17:24:00.000-05:00

Here I am publishing a few images by Elliot Black, who graduated from Syracuse University last spring with a BFA in Art Photography. These night views titled 'So Ships Don't Wreck' not only offer a quick glimpse of a North American suburburban landscape, but also refer to the condition of living in this part of the world. I am also intrigued by the treatment of photographic space in terms of 'reachable' and 'non-reachable'. In Elliot's words: I am sure lots of parents wonder, "Where does my son go at night…by himself?" Sometimes they even ask. But the answer is always sort of evasive because nothing tangible was accomplished except exposed film. Maybe you went to a junkyard or behind the strip mall or to the edge of a frozen man-made pond…but why does anybody have to know? When I was a kid I would spend all my time building forts in the woods. I kept a small red nylon backpack filled with ramen soup and knives and rope and matches in my closet in case I needed to run away. If I was fed up with my homework I would jump out of my ground floor window. There is gypsy in my blood and that may have something to do with it but there is something else. For some reason, the woods aren't as accessible to me now. I drive on highways, I shop, I buy food at the supermarket. The woods seem quaint and when I revisit the old site of the fort I am set in a mood of fondness, not adventure. Now I have to go out in the middle of the night to deathly silent places to search for trouble, a sort a sad, quiet trouble, approaching meditation. All of this seems to speak about me, about boys, about the human condition and American society. We are obviously searching for answers.
Visit www.elliotblack.com to see more of Elliot's work.

2006-02-26T15:10:00.000-05:00

I am creating this photoblog with a desire to provide a much needed platform for young photographers to showcase their work. Here I intend to present a selection of strong work which strengthens and stretches our current notions of the medium and creates a relevant dialogue. In future, I also intend to invite guest curators and writers to select and comment upon the submitted work. If you think that you are creating interesting work, then please submit 6 images as jpegs at 72dpi with 7 inches in the longer dimension at photosquare@gmail.com. The first deadline for submitting work is March 13, 2006. There is no entry fee or category based distinction.
Rishi Singhal