Friday, December 31, 2010

to end this year, gregory halpern and seth lower

this year was a painful but fulfilling year. friends died, friends where born. met new people found old people. in the end i am happy it is over.

amongst the many things learned and explored this year, books were one of those things that really made me want to excitingly continue photographing. the possibilities that a book opens up has let me once more explore my new projects in ways i hadn't thought of. so to end this year of posting i wanted to present two artistas whose works involve very witty editing and picture making. happy new year then. 2011 will be great.

gregory halpern























seth lower










mmm

Sunday, December 12, 2010

the american wall

The FotoVisura Portfolio Review & Consultation

The FotoVisura Portfolio Review & Consultation is a dynamic session in which each photographer presents their work in one-on-one sessions with each of the participating editors. The editorial team includes the Visura Magazine staff as well as a carefully selected group of leading photography editors. Each editor will focus on a specific aspect of the body of work (such as the selection, sequence, or artist's statement) - in addition to giving their overall perspective. Through this process, each photographer will receive a highly productive 3 hour intensive workshop with a variety of perspective and approaches from leading professional editors.

Date: December 18th, 2010
Morning Session: 9:00am-12:00pm
Afternoon Session: 1:00pm-4:00pm
Maximum Capacity: 8-10
Cost: $250.00
Location: Tribeca, New York City
Reviewers: Amber Terranova/Photographer & Photo Editor of PDN Magazine, James Estrin/ Co-Editor of The New York Times Lens Blog and Senior Staff Photographer, Graham Letorney/ Curator of 100 Words on Photography for the NPR's Picture Show Blog, Lauren Schneiderman/ Editor of Visura Spotlight, Adriana Teresa/ Editor of Visura Magazine.
more info here

Saturday, December 11, 2010

eunice adorno/ fraum blaum









además de ser una gran artista eunice es una super amiga que últimamente le han llovido los laureles como el premio benitez de la feria del libro de guadalajara. su super trabajo sobre las mujeres de comunidades aisladas es LA NETA. aqui ponga algo del trabajo y seguro veremos más de ella y sus proyectos en un futuro próximo. orale con el nuevo documentalismo mexicano. su página y trabajo aquí.

una buena rola y un buen video para el fin de semana

El Guincho - Bombay from CANADA on Vimeo.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

a little late news but Aperture Announces 2010 Portfolio Prize Finalists


the five finalists Kathryn Parker Almanas, Pre-Exisiting Condition; David Favrod, Gaijin; Anne Golaz, The Hunting Game / Chasses; Julian Röder, Lagos Transformation; and Jordan Tate, New Work. more info here

twin flames

collective show in nicaragua

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Monday, November 8, 2010

INTERVIEW IN AFTER IMAGE BY LISA UDDIN: ON LOST RIVERS AND OTHER MAN-ALTERED LANDSCAPES: A CONVERSATION WITH ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA


intro for afterimage, journal of media arts and cultural criticism: The problem of imaging ecological harm is not getting any easier. Artists who have taken a documentary approach now seem almost quaint in their investments. Painters from the nineteenth-century Hudson River School, for example, gave audiences composite scenes of a romantic, indigenous wilderness on the cusp of industrial expansion. A hundred years later, in distilled photographs of western mountain ranges, lakes, and dunes, Ansel Adams expunged the human presence altogether, instead sacralizing nature. These ways of seeing are tricky in the face of contemporary environmental problems, largely because they register and reinforce certain binaries—nature/culture, city/country, human/nonhuman—that routinely collapse under the operations of advanced capitalism. How then to picture the damage wreaked by these operations? And how to picture it in ways that are sensitive to the enduring appeal of that which we call natural?

The landscape aesthetics of Alejandro Cartagena offer one possibility. Dominican-born Cartagena spent two years photographing the desiccation of streams and rivers in and around the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Mexico. Entitled “Lost Rivers” (2007–08), the resulting series makes up part of Cartagena’s larger project on Mexican real estate development, which tackles the complexities of tract housing, home ownership, and inner-city decay. “Lost Rivers” is an integrated feature of “Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect” (2006–09), a lush and moving testimony of the toll taken on ecosystems enmeshed in the region’s rapid growth.

Crucially, Cartagena’s art also represents a rediscovery of imagemakers featured in the watershed exhibit “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Curated in 1975 by William Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and re-launched in 2009 for an international tour, the exhibit featured work by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, and six others, and marked a radical turning point in picturing the American landscape. The New Topographers eschewed idealized treatments of nature by showing, with an understated irony, its presence as a constitutive part of the built environment. These sharply focused photographs took familiar elements of the landscape tradition—trees, mountains, deserts, waterways—and placed them in matter-of-fact conversation with the subdivisions, roadsides, industrial parks, and parking lots that stood by and around them. More central to Cartagena’s practice, however, is the extent to which their man-altered landscapes resonate with the current experience and effects of Monterrey’s sprawl and Latin American suburbanization more broadly.

stop motion graffiti

Sunday, October 24, 2010

"Yet other environmental threats — less visible, but potentially more devastating — often go largely unnoticed".


This NASA satellite image captured the extent of red sludge spilled after a waste-retaining wall broke at the Ajkai Timföldgyár alumina plant in southwestern Hungary. Visible on the right side of the image — near the bright blue and orange reservoirs of the plant — is the point where the plant's retaining wall broke. The red-orange streak runs west from the plant for miles where the torrent of sludge flowed into a stream and inundated nearby towns, including Kolontar and Devecser. read the article at yale environment 360

read the whole story on the idea of photogenic disasters. I think this is a very good point being made. if we are to actually say anything about the world we live in (and not just inform, because that's why we have Google maps for -or so it seems-), we somehow need to open up the discourses behind our image-making and somehow make visible the invisible (culturally, politically, etc.)...literally

Saturday, October 23, 2010

mauricio palos: mi perro rano


mauricio has a new book out called mi perro rano. see more details here

weekend favorite Julian Röder




some amazing images that portray the battle of subjectivity that globalization pushes and those who look for alternative views of our world. see the whole series here

"No, these are not battle scenes in the art historical sense. Even if Julian Röder does have a strong understanding of pouring the confrontational situations of crowds - their clustering and the bursting apart – into striking pictures. The old masters Altdorfer and Uccello come easefully to mind. What Röder shows is not the compacting of an historical occurrence; it is the immediate present. However, it is precisely because he helps himself to art - or more generally speaking, historical image - motifs that these photographs possess deeper intensity and permanence than a fifteen second take from the news. Because pictures are always pictures about pictures. We have them in our memory - more or less consciously - and incessantly align them with that which purports to be reality". Matthias Flügge

Monday, October 18, 2010

taylor glenn



you can find some very beautiful portraits by talyor glenn here. he has a great sense of light and composition.

Monday, October 11, 2010

intense pizza

Sunday, October 3, 2010

more on faith-beliefs; natan dvir and john faier

john faier





natan divir


christopher churchill and jose luis cuevas

i really enjoyed looking at christopher churchill´s series american faith.






the documentation of faith seems something a bit off in a "less faith seeking world" but maybe it is the strangeness of people sticking to their beliefs what seems interesting to photographers. a mexican counterpart of the idea of faith as subject is jose luis cuevas and his exploration of the expressions of faith.



Sunday, September 26, 2010

the greatest photography is vernacular...


Alec Soth and daughter Carmen show at Brighton Biennial

opening of interrupted landscapes at Champion Gallery






champion gallery opened its space in austin this month with a excellent exhibition: interrupted landscapes, of which i am a part of with many other international artists. if you are in town, do stop by.