I am now on vacation in Spain, so access to the internet and updates of this photoblog will be scattered. I appreciate your understanding.
This month, Flak Photo is featuring a selection of images from "EXPOSURE: The 12th Annual PRC Juried Exhibition". Great photography by up-and-coming artists. Today I highlight the work one of them, Paige Largal. I love the simplicity of her images and the play of shapes, colors and light.
The emotional potency of spaces from my past and how I am able to explore and record them with my camera interests me. The interiors of this house, fondly called "The Little House" where I spent my childhood summers, captures my attention with its belongings that have a history which extends beyond my own. Personified through the lens of my camera, these worn objects act as replacements for the individuals that once inhabited this now empty space. As I explore the feelings that surround this place for me, what it feels like to reenter it, see objects and colors, hear familiar sounds and smell scents that have been dormant in my mind for years, I find myself longing for a time that feels very distant. It evokes a loneliness as well as an enchantment which I attempt to convey through my choice of images. The results are photographs oscillating between the fine line of reality and abstraction. With the use of light, the juxtaposition of found objects, and the illumination of textured surfaces, I look to transform space into something fantastic or abstract. This is a way for me to recontextualixe a time and place that resonates with powerful emotion that has yet to be fully understood. - Paige Largay
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.
Fyodor Nabokov
A mix between photography a digital art. Some images are well beyond my taste limit, but the self-portrait heading this post caught my attention. I always find very interesting how photographers picture themselves. It is clear that Asya Scheween has a message to convey, even if it is difficult to relate to. Interview at Blending light Magazine. Gallery at Deviant Art. Gallery looking within. Gallery at photo.net.
I’m now 25. I have two master degrees and a PhD, I live thousands of miles away from home and speak a foreign tongue. I no longer compete. I do enjoy photography, though I reluctantly share it and prefer not to sell my prints. I mostly hear praises and accolades and, understandably, enjoy them.- Asya Schween
Bill Durgin has some interesting photography as long as you are not offended by some nudity. Worth to mention that his nudes are everything but ordinary. Body shapes wrapped in ways that loose the sense of humanity and covey a sense of artificiality to the human body.
Often inspired by dance and performance, my work presents the figure in a discernible yet unfamiliar manner. I work with actors, dancers, and myself to choreograph a gesture within domestic architectural spaces. These uncanny bodies create almost sculptural shapes, and their postures are enhanced by physical distortion and erasure of superfluous appendages. We are never able to grasp the entire architectural surround only a fragment revealing the contorted figures in a silent relationship. - Bill Durgin
I am traveling so limited access to internet. Few minutes to squeeze in and refer to a photoblog with quite special work. Very unique style of photography, dark, creative, mysterious and always surprising. This is the photoblog journal, the work by Edmund Leveckis. When you look at his images, you can't fail but to wonder about the subjects. That sense of enigma is magnetic.
Take a look to his three series, subway I and II and memory drift.
Very diverse and creative work by Belgian photographer Koen Demuynck. Technically the images are flawless. Clearly, commercial photography can push the creartivity in directions that are quite intriguing.
I found the work of Gundega Dege at photo.net and I was impressed. Very dramatic images, intense and captivating, both in color and black and white. She has also a nice website and also posts pictures at deviantart.com
Gundega Dege, 34 years old photo artist from Latvia. Her first steps in art were made during her childhood and school time when she attended drawing school and took part in several drawing competitions and exhibitions. After studies in the Secondary school she started to learn foreign languages and entered the University where for 5 years was studding foreign languages, meanwhile she was continuing to do drawings and write poetry.After her studies, she started to work as the translator, later as the public relations specialist and photojournalist in local newspaper. So she discovered the world of photography. Of course she was taking pictures during school time, but it was just casual. In 2004. she started to do it seriously when she bought her firs digital photo camera. Her first experience was to take photos of children. She studied photography at home, read books, photo magazines, learn in workshops.
In the spring of year 2005 her first personal photo exhibition was opened in her native town Ogre (together with her husband Andreij Vahrushew who also is photographer). In autumn the same year her second exhibition in the local Ogre art gallery and at the end of 2005. She has participated and won prizes in several local and international web site photo contests.
My heroes are people around me, I very often photograph my 2 children, I got inspiration from my everyday, from events around, from music I listen, just sometimes from my emotions how I feel or how other people feel around me, that’s why some of my photos may look depressive or black, because I try to show the saddest side of our life, there are so many unhappy people around us nowadays - many poor and homeless. Once I took photos about what I saw; now I take photos about what I feel- Gundega Dege
Via the blog "Apple Tee" by Jim Korpi, comes a referral to an interview published recently in LA Weekly with master photographer Sebastião Salgado (interview page 1, page 2). This is a man that fascinates me. Photography is his voice to communicate his connection with the planet, his connection with humanity. Most of all, he is a humanist in search of social justice, and photography is his way to speak.
####
I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It’s very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it’s there and it’s not there. But in this fraction of a second [he snaps his fingers] comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love — all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there. -Sebastião Salgado
#####
His latest project, Genesis, is an 8 year journey well into his 4th year of work, is a call to save the planet. He is seeking out locations that are as pristine as they were in primeval times, places that provide hope for the future (interview published at The Guardian).
This is the point for me, that there is a hope. So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence. And then we can understand what we must preserve.
I had a show of Migrations in Berkeley, and afterward I spoke with the students there about exactly this: the loss of hope in the possibility of survival for our species. Because I was coming from such a hard moment, seeing so much degradation. I lived for about seven years in real desperation — something very difficult, very difficult. And from all that I had seen, I was sure it would be very difficult to go on in another direction. But many things changed after that. For me now, it looks much more hopeful, much more interesting than 10 years before.
But. There is something happening now. We went so deep in these last 30 years, as far as human relations are concerned, as far as concentration of wealth on this planet, as far as environmental destruction, that finally reactions have started to appear, no? We have a big concern today about many things that we didn’t have 10 years before. I see some hope. We know that we are in danger, but we’ve started to react, and many people have started to get together — really get together. There is a wake-up, and this is very important. Now, I am not so sure that we will be destroyed. -Sebastião Salgado
Prints from Sebastião Salgado are exhibited until September 8th 2007 at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California.
I hope that the person who visits my exhibitions, and the person who comes out, are not quite the same," says Mr. Salgado. "I believe that the average person can help a lot, not by giving material goods but by participating, by being part of the discussion, by being truly concerned about what is going on in the world. -Sebastião Salgado
The following are links to some of his images online: Genesis, Migrations, Other Americas, Workers. There is also a nice gallery at PDN 20 most Influential Photographers and Kodak-PDN online. Mr. Salgado lives in Paris, France, with his family. His wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, directs their company, Amazonas Images, and has designed his major books and exhibitions
and a short video with his own voice describing his work with UNICEF documenting the eradication of polio.
July 21, 2007
Posted in Photographers, Photography 
No Comments »
####
content rss
