what remains: the life and work of sally mann

i guess my interest in sally mann has waned over the years. i've bypassed this documentary on the shelves at the rental store many many times. the other night i couldn't find any movies that i was interested in seeing, and somehow i found myself at home with three different art documentaries. what remains was among them and it was by far the best of the three films i rented (including the meandering eggleston in the real world). in this film, steven cantor was able to both shed new light on her pictures for me and also transcend the work by presenting a fascinating portrait of the creative process and an artist's life.

one of the my favorite moments of the film: sally mann learns that pace macgill has cancelled her upcoming exhibition of "what remains." she had been exceedingly excited about the show, and when she hears of the cancellation she spends the entire day sobbing. so here she is, this artist of international acclaim, essentially as famous as any photographer can hope to be, and upon learning that pace macgill has cancelled her show, she is totally paralyzed. we watch her second guess the body of work she has painstakingly built over the course of 4 years. the scene struck me as such a clear illustration of how universal the plague of self doubt is, and that doubt will wash over all of us in vicious waves over the course of our lives.

sally mann is helplessly articulate. just one quote of many that grabbed me, in this case in reference to her landscape series:

"there is magic in the landscape. the question is whether i can get at it."

(p.s. all i wanted to do when this movie was over was grab my camera and shoot something.)

kristin capp

a few years ago i came across a book of photographs called americana by kristin capp. i was mesmerized by the simple beauty of the subject matter reflected formally and admiringly in kristin's images. when i stopped into a local bookstore this weekend, spoonbill & sugartown, i chanced upon her earlier book hutterite in which kristin explores a secluded community of anabaptists in the northwest region of the united states.

i have an ongoing fascination with religious groups such as the hutterites. more specifically, i am intrigued by the idea that ritual can be a powerful mechanism in confronting life's milestones. i've been lucky to have had the opportunity to photograph three hasidic weddings that i found to be amazing displays of such rituals, but those experiences were at most mere glimpses into the secrets of that community. kristin delves much deeper.

these are simple photographs in both theme and execution, that is, simple in the best understanding of the word. kristin enters a community clear of the clutter of the modern world and focuses her camera on the most basic human themes of family and faith. most striking to me is how these photographs very much concern the strength of women and the roles women play in the home. women are not afforded equal status with men in the hutterite community, yet the women in her photographs exert a strength and confidence that implies equality can be achieved through alternate paths.

despite having published two books, kristin capp is not a widely known photographer. but, for me, both in mood and theme, kristin's images go directly to the root of why photography inspires me. her photographs are a pleasure that i return to again and again.

malia james

photographs from malia james

above: i like the birds on his teacup and saucer. i like his just barely visible wedding band, the hair in his eyes and the mirror behind his head.

below: i lke the way the flash vingettes the text on the wall and how it illuminates just a few of the letters effectively turning them from black to white. and of course i love the little creature peeping its head into the bottom of the frame.

malia's blog is here.

joan cuenco, take 2

my friend joan sent me this new picture she took recently. i can't stop looking at it.

maximilian haidacher

i can't get over the color palate of maximilian haidacher images. they look just like painting, yet they are they still very much photographs.

part of me feels like i already posted these images. but i can't find them in the archives. maybe they were flickrs? but even if i have, i sort of feel like they deserve a second look.

christina maria oswald

i've fallen out of the habit of looking at photographs. well. to some extent that is. i'm always looking at photographs in some sense or another, but of late i haven't intentionally sought them out. although i have been cruising the sites of many commercial and wedding photographers to get a better sense of that side of the industry, but the intent of those pictures are so so different from fine art. i'm still not sure how i feel about them yet. it's a whole new world to me.

i went to yale this weekend to support a friend of mine who graduated from the photo program, and i saw so much good photography. it was so exciting.

so i wanted badly to post some straightforward images. i spent a few hours trolling the internet this evening looking for stong photographs, something i haven't done in quite some time. christina maria oswald's pictures stood out.

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maggie manzer

intellectually, i understand the urge to romanticize the life of the starving artist, to dream of living care-free with no responsibility but to your art. i myself posted about a group of crusty kids who rode a homemade raft down the mississippi; huckleberry finn minus the racial undertones. peter-pans wistfully avoiding growing up. make believe at its best.

but i prefer maggie manzer's simple explanation of photography's role in her life: "i've woken up everyday since i was 15 thinking about taking pictures. i like the idea of creating a really beautiful record of my world, of my experiences."

maggie photographs artists in a manner that somehow recalls the formalism of modern photography and the romanticism of pictorialism, sort of photo-sesstionist era alfred stieglitz (doesn't that image above look like one of his portraits of georgia o'keefe?). sure, her approach is equally idealistic, representing an image of the artist just as fictitious as the former. but somehow it resonates with me more. just beautiful documents of the things she finds beautiful. i like that.

you can read an interview with her here.

cabinet de fumisterie appliquée

in the past my pictures have often relied on the use of soft depth of field to help me establish a particular sense of mood and place. recently i've been admiring a lot of work that manages to do something similar while still maintaining sharp focus. not that i think i'll ever shoot f22 or anything crazy like that, but i have been experimenting with f8 and f11 as opposed to my standard f4.5 or f5.6. to tell the truth, i have found it refreshing to work again with a camera that has f-stops at all (please don't tell my holga). i get the sense that the aesthetic of my work may be headed in a more formal direction altogether, primarily as a result of shooting in a square format, but i'll have to wait to see what the negatives look like to know for sure. i certainly seem interested in finding more subtle ways to direct the mood, especially through the use of composition and gesture.

these images work for me in that regard. i also really like these pictures for their sense of humor. many may find this an odd comparison, but this work kind of reminds me of joel peter witkin's gang of misfits, but in a much sweeter, sunnier way (while i am a huge fan of witkin, i'm not going to link to him because of the graphic and controversial nature of his images, you are obviously welcome google him if you like).

cabinet de fumisterie appliquée; a flickr set:
above: siamese twins/ below: drying women

julia blaukopf

while dropping off my 5 rolls of color film to be processed at philly photographic this morning (yay!), i picked up a flyer for a julia blaukopf show at photo612. i featured some of the images from her mt. kenya reforestation project, specifically ones where she depicts the landscape as an ominous almost life-like creature.

my red self

i bought this book, violence, by helena kvarnstrom on a lark late last night. it was only $10 plus a mere $1 for shipping and it looks beautiful and creepy and fraught with psychological tension just like i like so i'm excited for it to come. the cover design grabbed me at once. her work reminds me of robert frank and francesca woodman, maybe also nan goldin, there is one image in particular of a shed that reminds me of michal rovner, and the picture of the bird on her menu page brings to my mind an image by susan paulson from a little known book called tomatoes on the back porch. i couldn't tell you if the work is entirely diary based or not, but the book combines her images with her writings, which appeals to my love of both memoir and photography. the tender pairing of text and image creates this blended visual and literary poeticism that i find irresistible.

the excerpt that directly led to my purchase:

"and i'll bury myself so deep inside you and i'll be your tragedy and you won't have to find it anywhere else, pay for it on movie screens and play it in your songs, i can be all the tragedy you need and i'll tell you all my stories and you'll look so serious and maybe you'll cry and you'll say you're so sorry you're so sorry and i'll write myself onto your palms onto your lips you'll swallow me hard you'll wonder if you're one of my stories too and one day the back of your hand will run into my cheekbone.

your hand will run into my cheekbone and i'll become sand.

the times you fell in love me with were: when i ran out of the store and you found me on the floor in the bathroom and i would not stop shaking. when i could not breathe on the bench. when i borrowed scissors from your mother to cut up my pills and did not brush my hair. i am running out of reasons for you to love me even before the piss yellow snow melts and you know it is up to you now. you love me best with a wet face and swollen lips and i don't mind much.

sometime in december i run out of the house with no shoes and it is the first time i have left for a week. i cross ashland and stare at the ground and there is no one to see me, past the laundromat where you buy me gum and rubber bouncy balls while we wait for the bleach to take away that week's accidents. the laundromat is owned by a very nice hispanic man and it is called soapy's. that's where we tell people to turn left to come visit us but no one comes anymore. it's so quiet at night here and then the freight train goes by and i regret not getting to the tracks sooner just to be close to the sound. you watch tv and imagine my body crushed by boxes carrying lumber, cars, and children's cold medicine."

this is the route that brought violence to me (or me to violence depending on how you look at it): emiliebjork's flickr page (yesterday's flickr selection) brought me to paper-doll where i browsed a wide range of good and bad photos until i got to helena's which took me to her site, my red self, which brought me to lazyline from whom i bought the book.

aren't you jealous alissa? maybe if you're really nice i'll bring it next weekend to show you at some romantically quiet moment.

some 'traditional' self portraits

in this the age of the "myspace" self portrait, i was charmed to find these three traditional "mirror and 'old-fashioned' camera" self portraits on flickr.

top left: ...chourmo, top right: allygurl1016, below: emma wears an anorak

jaime alvarez

lt. sent me a link to her friend jaime's site today that i thought i should pass along. his work is both really smart and really enjoyable, and i'm going to let him explain it:

"within a critical moment in some one's life, time is always described as irrelevant. sometimes people don't notice it pass, other times, it passes too quickly. this series of 12 photographs alludes to those certain moments when time deceives us. for 13 months my father was fighting a battle with cancer, and through that period of documentation, i chose to redisplay these moments as if time were passing by, but only the details remained behind."

i hope the next time i imply that i don't like highly conceptual photography someone calls me a liar to my face. see also: uta barth; read fascinating interview with her here.

karin bubas

with her beautiful melancholy imagery, lit mainly with natural light, and comprised mainly of soft fields of color, karin bubas creates a very painterly set of images with her daytime work reminding me at times of vermeer and her exterior studies at night (example below) recalling the work of edward hopper.

the above images come from my personal favorite of her series', ivy house, in which she photographed a victorian era home in london. the pictures exalt the feminine details associated with that era like the floral wall paper and lace and also the many ornate details of the house that gave it character. her subject matter from series to series varies quite a bit, but all her work seems to revolve around the idea of lonliness and the relationship between individuals and their environment, whether those individuals appear in the photographs or not. she explains "pictures of one’s home and private life seem far removed from pictures of well-dressed women standing alone in picturesque landscapes. however both approaches play on photography’s ability to tell a story through a single image or series of images. the story is never completely clear but the pieces are presented for the viewer to fill in the gaps."

karin sites inlfunces like jeff wall and justine kurland but i also see eggelston in her images, but maybe that's because these images are such a nod to formal photography that they naturally enter into a dialogue with the great color photographers. i can see any lover of the medium finding something they like in her images.

you can find a brief interview with karin at poppy talk and i highly reccommend reading the bio on her site.

hansi linderoth

hansilinderoth takes some of the best polaroids i've seen in a really long time. hands down. most of my time looking through flickr to find images for my "a flickr a day" is spent sifting through the over-abundance of really, really bad polaroid imagery (and also toy camera photos, but i'll save that for another post). the inherent washed out colors seduce people into thinking everything looks cool as a polaroid. this is not the case. hansi linderoth understands that polaroids can look like pure magic, like tiny precious jewels to be cherished, and his do. i never really gave polaroids much thought until jessica started working on them for her thesis. she looked at william christenberry for inspiration who shot with a brownie camera that overexposed his negatives to give him a similar effect. i wish more people's images were as inpsired.

heather culp

i love that the woman's feet in the top left photo have dirt on them and i love that it's difficult to pin down just what the light source is. heather culp's images are full of these little mysteries. she skillfully controls her color palette and lighting to craft this gritty beautiful world with run down cars and empty parking lots. i want to invade these images and slip into the lives of the characters she creates. it makes sense that whispertown2000 would employ this talented lady.

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