┐ roots & fruits #13 – Ricardo Baltazar └

© Ricardo Baltazer, all Untitled, from the series Touching from a Distance, 2012

Ricardo’s project Touching from a Distance was shot in Essen, Germany, in 2012. All images are blow-ups of snapshots he took while paving the streets. Inevitably, they refer to the distance between the author and the subject portrayed, as they speak about the desire to get closer. These blow-ups are attempted gazes, attempts at assuring the account of oneself while trying to look at his surroundings. They are as much voyeuristic as they are introspective, in the sense that what one does while looking desperately out, is trying for a way in.

The camera, as an automaton one can trigger to mediate the space between the self and the other, is always a transparent and potentially authentic way of speaking about the way the author is trying to connect. To view the world through a camera is not to connect with it. Either you are in an impulsive rational process of trying to see beyond reality or you choose to try to be in the present. So this is about the process less than it is about the result. The framing, the composition, the colors, are singular points amidst an abstract composition where the lines are created between people’s gazes.

We know what blow-ups looks like, how they all resemble surveillance stills and evoke the invasion of privacy. I’d like to reference Michael Haneke’s Caché about the contemporary obsession with security which comes to be a way of spreading the false notion of power and control over one’s life. What Ricardo exposes here is the opposite, the notion of fragility, as he lets us know of his state of exception, as a foreigner, behaving as an alien who is forced to document his life through the looks of others, in order to prove his existence.

┐ Mark Peckmezian’s youth on “youth” └

© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled,

© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, chromogenic print

>© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, fiber gelatin silver print

>© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, @ G20, fiber gelatin silver print

© Mark Peckmezian, Untitled, fiber gelatin silver print

“I was thinking that the “straight” or naive approach to the theme would be to just play to popular conceptions or idealizations of youth — and I certainly have photos that do that. I used to make a lot of work like this. But in the past few years, I don’t know….I don’t really buy it anymore, I guess. I think a lot of what we see in such photos, by myself or others, is to some degree performance: all these kids, my peers, are hyper self-conscious and incredibly media-savvy. All too often I’ll be out shooting snapshots and hear someone whisper that the photo just taken of them would make a good Facebook profile pic, or some such comment. Once I heard someone, who was running around with some friends on an golf course at night, shout out “why isn’t this being photographed?!”

I think that I now try to approach this subject in a more clear-eyed and honest way — showing the good and bad, wonderful and absurd. I have started an informal project to document this culture more critically (I think there is so much vanity and superficiality among this generation) but also, if I am to actually transcend that at all, with more empathy as well (not pretending that the vanity undermines all the good that also exists, and also understanding that vanity as something woefully, and sort of beautifully, human). The photo of the “kids in the grass” plays to this (Heather says: come to the show to see what image he’s referring to…) – I love that you said “kids,” that’s exactly what I was going for, I wanted to render them (these over-the-top hipster friends of mine, these peacocks, so highly decorated) as children playing in grass, stripped of their affect, innocent.

Finding a good balance is hard though, because I still want to document it relatively straight. I think I’m still working out the kinks, refining my understanding and expression. It’s been a big undercurrent in my work these past few years, I’m sort of on a mission to do this right.” via HMAb

More of Mark’s work here

┐ Five Year Photo Project └

1982

1992

2007

Long before digital cameras and posing memes like planking existed, they were just five guys on a lake with their entire lives stretched out before them.

A photo capturing these five friends — John Wardlaw, Mark Rumer, Dallas Burney, John Molony and John Dickson — went on to spawn a 30-year-long photo tradition the friends plan to continue doing until they die.

Every five years since the original photo was taken in July 1982, the men gather at Copco Lake (near the California and Oregon border) to recreate the odd photo. Each man as a stern expression; Rumer has a hat on his right knee; and Molony holds out a jar with a pet cockroach, kept company by a picture of actor Robert Young and a butterscotch candy to snack on. While the props may change every five years, the five men remain.

The friends have a website to share the photos taken over the years. “Watch us lose hair and gain forehead, gain and lose and gain and lose weight,” a note on the site says. “There are reasons we all decided it was better to take the photo with our shirts on.”

their site here

┐ Julie Hascoët └

@ Julie Hascoët, Untitled, from the project Tenir/Rester

@ Julie Hascoët, Untitled, from the project Tenir/Rester

@ Julie Hascoët, Hug, from the series 4 Months

@ Julie Hascoët, Emilie, from the series 4 Months

More of her work here

┐ Leigh Ledare └

© Leigh Ledare, Me and mom in photobooth, 2008

© Leigh Ledare, Mom and me in mirror, 2002

“Indeed, Ledare’s work reveals signs that the relationship between mother and son is also one of professional complicity. In an interview printed on the book’s cover, Peterson defines herself as the ‘model’ who is ‘working her butt off’. At the same time, photo-booth strips of Ledare and his mother mugging for the camera and making out like teenagers provide glimpses of the pair as willing co-conspirators. Such insertions create a layer of artifice that unsettles the raw, confessional mode that Ledare seems to be emulating. His predecessors in the field, like Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, have also confronted sexual taboos and flirted with pornography, or, as with Richard Billingham’s documentary images of his family, raised the stakes of familial intimacy and revelation. Despite their explicitness, Ledare’s photographs are neither bluntly documentary nor achingly sincere, but are knowingly mediated through the languages and tropes of contemporary art. His idiom is that of an artist who has already absorbed the romanticization of these previous projects and is looking for way to further complicate the relationship of artist and muse.

In this way, Ledare’s work might signal a shift in this kind of expressionist, confessional tradition of photography. In a culture where candid personal photographs litter the Internet and people willingly use reality TV shows to expose their personal baggage, Ledare is aware that any attempt at authenticity will already be polluted. Maybe the confessional can no longer be confronted head-on, but rather with a sidelong glance, or with a knowing look out the corner of one’s eye. But Ledare’s gazes are no less poignant or penetrating because of it.”

excerpt from Christy Lange’s article

More of Leigh’s work here , here and here

┐ Nigel Grimmer └

© Nigel Grimmer, Julie, Golders Green,, from the series Roadkill Family Album, 2001

© Nigel Grimmer, Eric, Big Bend, from the series Roadkill Family Album, 2010

“Nigel Grimmer takes the conventions of family album snap photography and gives them a weird twist that is at times amusing and at others faintly unnerving. Here the self-conscious poses, the banal compositions, the suburban settings are infiltrated with the kinds of surrealistic incongruities that one might experience in particularly bizarre or embarrassing dreams. His Roadkill Family Album is a collection of prone portraits of family members dolled up in joke shop animal masks and seemingly abandoned as roadside victims. Grimmer’s mother is an owl, his father a frog. His use of plastic masks and dolls imbues the images with a particularly kitsch and almost perverse form of nostalgia. It’s as if childhood memories have been inextricably confused with some kind of metamorphic and macabre fairytale.”

quote from Harley Gallery

Nigel’s home here