┐ Vilma Pimenoff └

Posted on November 5, 2012 by N

“Pierce called indexical the process of signification (semiosis) in which the signifier is bound to the referent not by a social convention ( = “symbol”), not necessarily by some similarity ( = “icon”), but by an actual contiguity or connection in the world: the lightning is the index of the storm. In this sense, film and photography are close to each other, both are prints of real objects, prints left on a special surface by a combination of light and chemical action. This indexicality, of course, leaves room for iconic aspects, as the chemical image often looks like the object (Pierce considered photography as an index and an icon). It leaves much room for symbolic aspects as well, such as the more or less codified patterns of treatment of the image (framing, lighting, and so forth) and of choice or organization of its contents. What is indexical is the mode of production itself, the principle of the taking. And at this point, after all, a film is only a series of photographs. But it is more precisely a series with supplementary components as well, so that the unfolding as such tends to become more important than the link of each image with its referent.

(…)
Photography has a third character in common with death: the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time-unlike cinema which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life. The photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later. Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return. Dubois remarks that with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against its own loss. I will add that in life, and to some extent in film, one piece of time is indefinitely pushed backwards by the next: this is what we call “forgetting.” The fetish, too, means both loss (symbolic castration) and protection against loss. Peter Wollen states this in an apt simile: photography preserves fragments of the past “like flies in amber.”6 Not by chance, the photographic act (or acting, who knows?) has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun.”

excerpt from the article Photography and Fetish, by Christian Metz, published in October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90

more of Vilma‘s work here

┐ roots & fruits #2 – Jorge Miguel └

Posted on October 12, 2012 by N

“Mó is a village in the central region of Portugal with only 13 inhabitants, in one of the most desertified areas of the country. These few remaining habitants are now a last glimpse of traditions and habits of rural life in harmony with nature. The youngest went to the big cities in search of better living conditions, leaving their old villages to die slowly. The average population age here is around seventy years old, so it is expected that within fifteen or twenty years many of these places will be left for oblivion.”

Jorge’s statement

Jorge Miguel’s photos are driven by an edgy approach to light (maybe life itself?) and grounded on a documentary style that relies on careful compositions. Whether shooting landscapes, animals or people, he tends to frame reality in a very crude way. Objects, in particular, tend to give away some tension as if they wanted to break away from the picture.

The nostalgia for the rural life, the obsession with the human condition in its anthropological context, the tendency to animate objects do not only describe his work as well as that of many other Portuguese authors. These similarities denote the esteem we have for our culture and an urge to document and thus immortalize these chunks of our life; on the other hand, these contained, dark and direct approaches can also stand for the fear we have of losing the symbols that identify us.

by Sofia Silva

More of Jorge’s work here

┐ Rachel Bee Porter └

Posted on October 11, 2012 by N

“Having grown up reading a multitude of home and lifestyle magazines, my work confronts the expectations that developed from buying into the alluring photographic fantasies of the pristine and perfect domestic life. I devoured every issue of Martha Stewart Living that I could find. Drawn in by the beautiful eye-catching photographs, I absorbed all of the tips, tricks and how-tos in those pages because I was convinced that I would need them someday.

Using the skills that I learned from years of reading these magazines, I bake elaborate cakes which I then throw into carefully constructed scenes and photograph the aftermath. By appropriating the lush, brightly colored imagery of magazines and perverting it, I explore the aftermath of unfulfilled expectations.

This disillusionment manifests itself in a playful, yet irreverent defiance. I subvert the delicately crafted trompe l’oeils found in commercial and editorial photography by corrupting domestic strategies. Through the intermingling of creation and destruction, I explore the reality beyond the glossy varnish and the destructive consequences of disappointment.

Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines aspects of performance, sculpture, and painting, I create colorful domestic scenarios that serve as the stage for my actions. I photograph these scenes using a 4×5 camera. Afterwards, I scan the film and create large-scale digital c-prints. My work is an ironic commentary on the picture-perfect world created in the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines and the frustration that ensues from trying to attain it.”

more of Rachel’s work here

┐ Rachel de Joode └

Posted on October 9, 2012 by N

More of Rachel’s here

┐ Edmund Clark └

Posted on October 7, 2012 by N

“Edmund Clark’s Still Life: Killing Time is a quiet meditation on the slowness, the fabric and the accoutrements of prison life for elderly inmates. It was two years in the making.(…)

The only statement I can find directly from Clark, the photographer, is worth meditation.

What you can see in the pictures is to what extent they are engaged with their routine, and on top of their regime and what sort of engagement they have with time. One man, who wore a long grey beard, coped with the passage of time, as far as I could see, by disengaging with it completely. He spent most of his time sitting in his chair … He just sat and disappeared within himself. After about a year I could go and talk to him, and this man was clever, he’d been a captain in the merchant navy and had sailed around the world. I asked him once what was the best place he’d been to and he lifted his head and said, ‘Sao Paulo, I loved Brazil …’ And then suddenly this life came out, his life was all there, hidden away. The bulldog clock on the book cover belonged to him, it was one of his prized possessions.

Apparently, Clark created this body of work spurred by reports from the USA about mandatory sentencing under “Three Strikes Laws” and the consequent swelling of America’s prison population. Clark engaged with Britain’s aging prison population in direct response to demographic disasters in American penal policy.(…)”

excerpt of article by Pete Brook, in Prison Photography. continue reading here

More of Edmund’s work here

┐ Moyra Davey └

Posted on October 1, 2012 by N

I’d say that these pictures are about the life of objects. I had a funny revelation recently–and in a way this takes me back to my art school days as a nascent photographer–that my Fridge picture is very similar to Edward Weston’s toilet. In his diaries and notebooks, which I read in my early 20’s, and loved, he talks about photographing his toilet over and over, each time refining the composition until he attained a formalist perfection. And he writes about his exaltation at finally getting it right. Perhaps it’s odd to be identifying with Weston at this point in my life, but I have to admit that my process with the fridge was strangely similar. It involved a slow, methodical deliberation, a stalking of light, of waiting for the precise moment of solar illumination in an otherwise dim room. To get back to your question about the concepts in my work, maybe this comparison to Weston speaks to the idea of ‘slow time’, “the cyclical and durational” that Miwon Kwon mentions in relation to my photographs.

(…)
JTD: Can you speak about your interest in everyday objects, including objects that are often overlooked or regarded as a nuisance, such as dust and empty bottles, and how these objects influence your photographs?

MD: Bottles, especially the clear glass ones, refract light in beautiful and surprising ways. I began the bottle series because of an accident, a blurred Johnny Walker bottle that turned up at the tail end of a B&W contact sheet. I loved the look of it and began to take intentional pictures of empty whiskey bottles consumed in my household, and did this for a period of five years, realizing at the end of this term that the totality of the images constituted a kind of calendar, a finite block of time denoted by the consumption of a particular type of spirits. I followed the B&W series with a color series, also documenting five years of consumption.

JTD: What is your attraction to dust, and what do you believe it conveys to the viewer about human nature?

MD: I’m kind of obsessed with dust as this nuisance substance, and just the whole Sisyphean nature of it that Simone de Beauvoir talks about in relation to the futility of housework, the housewife’s ‘endless, hopeless battle against dust and dirt’. Beauvoir says that the only way out of this trap is to embrace the “life in death” in decay. Dust is made up of dead matter, but it’s also totally alive in its entropic, inescapable fashion. If you can find a way to make your peace with it then you won’t be doomed to “the general and the inessential.(…)

excerpt of an interview by Jess T. Dugan, in Big Red & Shiny. continue reading here

more of Moyra’s work here

┐ Daniel Evans & Brendan Baker └

Posted on September 11, 2012 by N

More of this work here

┐ Seo-Yeoung Won └

Posted on September 8, 2012 by N

“My work starts with sublimating from a mere common object in dairy life to an entity having a particular denotative meaning. For this, I have paid attention to existing expression methods of painting and installation art that take a dairy life object as a target of expression, and have continued experimentations to realise the methods in a particular space of a photographic studio. The illusion of space created by the painting, and the relationship between an object and space, all these are compressed into a photography taken in a photo studio, for the sake of expression. Also, it presents in a photo the process of representing an object by different media and the differences between them. As the result of this, a common object perceived objectively becomes an entity of expression shared in media such as installation art, painting, and photography, and at the same time an entity of symbolic expression containing the artist’s subjective view.”

Artist statement

More of Seo-Yeoung’s work here

┐ Erwan Frotin └

Posted on August 8, 2012 by N

More of Erwan’s weird “species” here work here

┐ Jean-Noël Pazzi └

Posted on July 26, 2012 by N

“Ménager les site frappés de croyance comme indispensable territoire d’errement de l’esprit. Gilles Clément Manifeste du tiers paysage

Cela aurait pu être une belle histoire, un doux romantisme entre l’homme et la nature. Mais il n’en est rien. Je trafique, reconstruis et extrais. Je recherche des formes à construire ou à mettre en lumière. La nature a toujours été mon terrain de jeu; je la transforme.
Michel Foucault disait à propos des hétérotopies qu’ils sont des lieux précis, que l’on peut définir sur une carte, mais investis par des mondes utopiques. Un théâtre ou un musée, par exemple, sont des hétérotopies, définissables géographiquement mais investis par des mondes imaginaires; des mondes dans un monde. La nature a, pour moi, aussi cette faculté. C’est un lieu magique, un lieu imaginaire.
Mon travail est fortement lié à cet imaginaire, qui est vu au travers d’un prisme intermédiaire, celui d’un appareil photographique. Composée de deux séries (Les cadavres exquis et Paysages), In(ter)vention est une recherche de formes et de textures, où la nature est détournée au profit d’une interprétation personnelle de ses éléments constitutifs.
D’un côté, c’est une nature décontextualisée et arrangée par mes soins; des compositions traitées en studio. De l’autre, c’est le studio qui s’invite dans la nature et dévoile par la lumière des formes et des ambiances. Dans les deux cas, il y a de cette inquiétante étrangeté. La présence de la mort dans Les cadavres exquis ou l’ambiance nocturne des Paysages confère à cette série une dimension surréaliste.
Mon univers est la nuit, le monde des rêves, celui des chimères qui sortent de leur caverne. Des bruits nous guettent, ils nous survolent, nous effleurent. Un craquement à droite, puis des ailes se déploient, elles ululent, tourbillon: silence. Le vent soulève les feuilles. Il caresse nos cheveux et chante entre les pieds de géants feuillus. Un éclair! L’appareil à tout vu. Pour moi, encore une fois, c’est une figure étrange qui s’est dessinée dans l’ombre des branches. Une interprétation innocente, mue par la curiosité: une aventure.
C’est à cette étrangeté nocturne et sylvestre que je veux convier le spectateur.”

Jean-Noël Pazzi

More of Jean-Noël’s work here

┐ Iiu Susiraja └

Posted on July 3, 2012 by N

@ Iiu Susiraja, Näytös, from the series Älä nyt suutu, 2008/09

@ Iiu Susiraja, Kannel, from the series Syömään, pöytä on katettu, 2010

“In Susiraja’s esthetics, an image does not remain an image; rather, it requires an entire life. Although Susiraja has focused on photography, her art genre is more comprehensive: to shape a work of art from life. Usually, the salesmen of this genre rely on the American smile, non-sense polished with first-class product phraseology, but Susiraja doesn’t work that way. She scavenges ultimate experiences and the most dismal version of reality, although sometimes the imaginative possibilities for light-hearted gliding on the surface. However, without the history of long-term exclusion and bullying, the pictures would be something entirely different.

The history of exclusion and feigned betterment repeats itself from one society and community to another. There is supposed to be a mold, into which everyone should fit and get stuck. There is still space for one more, ridiculed and excluded, who helps those feigning betterment to recognize their excellence. Susiraja becomes a sacrifice on the cross, saying: “Spit more”; except Susiraja doesn’t climb all the way to the cross, because there is bench closer, and a handy hostess can make a cross from the handle of the broom faster.

Susiraja shows how the crappiest experiences can mold an artistic counter-weapon: cripplingly mundane and fatally ridiculous all at once.”

More of Iiu’s work here

┐ Bridget Collins └

Posted on June 5, 2012 by N

@ Bridget Collins, Untitled, from Olly Olly Oxen Free

Jonathan Baron, editor-in-chief of Baron Magazine:

We are visually saying that emotions are not progressive, that instead of being emotional with others, let’s do it through entertainment. So for the debut issue – Baron has commissioned artists and photographers known for creating staged situations, who have reinstructed sex and the female nude for a viewer seeking emotions through entertainment not others.

(…)

We just came from a rather sexually repressed decade, where we seemed to travel back to the late fifties and early sixties when sex was presented as a big embarrassment or joke, we saw photographers such as Terry Richardson practically reproducing the Carry On films and Barbara Windsor being replaced by Jordan.This decade has so far been a crescendo of emotions, from riots to Lady GAGA hanging herself on stage, I think at the moment art and photography is almost slightly YBA in immediacy, we are seeing a real explosion of provocative work that isn’t confessional but staged, for a society concerned with being emotionless. This issue is about the future, edited as though the publication is some sort of time line – from a society concerned with being emotional to a society unconcerned.

More of Bridget’s work here

┐ Kayung Lai └

Posted on April 6, 2012 by N

More of Kayung’s work here

┐ Jane O’Neal └

Posted on February 27, 2012 by N

“Jane O’Neal acquits her flatbed scanned portraits of flora and root systems with whiffs of the semi-clinical, sexualized near-abstractions of Edward Weston—an obvious comparison if for no other reason than subject matter. Due to advances in technology, the feats of the flatbed scanner, and her eye for fleshy, saturated palettes, her images are undeniably literal and escape all sentimentalism. There remains a bit of a lepidopterological feeling due to the march across the wall of mostly same-size/scaled, identically-framed specimens. There is also a definite anthropomorphism to her images of roots, flowers, and vegetables, which is hardly a scarcity in art’s big book of thematic tactics, yet never gets old.
(…)
O’Neal’s subjects (aside from the fact that her real subject is photography itself,) in any case her “sitters” or pretexts are, so to speak, natural models, photogenic at every instant and from any angle. But eerily, it is also clear that nothing on display is still alive. It’s all been plucked, pulled from the earth, harvested in some way; it may be ripe and even edible, but it is all already dead and dying. That’s where some of the most humanity in the work reveals itself—not on the explicitly formal level of a Weston, but on the spiritual, existential level of an organic life.”

excerpt from an article by Shana Nys Dambrot, taken from Whitehot Magazine. Continue reading here

More of Jane’s work here

┐ Véronique Pêcheux └

Posted on February 23, 2012 by N

More of Véronique’s work here

Nihilsentimentalgia

Tag Archives: still life