Massachusetts-based photographer Bruce Myren is a man with a camera, on a mission to capture the many faces of North America’s 40th parallel. Stretching East to West from New Jersey to California and crossing 11 states in between, the 40th degree of latitude bisects the United States and is…
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Three nations exemplify a “Common Ground” at the Biennale Architettura 2012 in Venice
“Common Ground”—the theme this year for Venice’s Biennale Architettura 2012—covers all exhibition spaces from Giardini to Arsenale, as well as the vast range of venues spread out all over town. Fitting into this larger concept while presenting their own respective themes were a number of national participants. Here are…
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Focus sur Luca Zanier, un photographe suisse qui aime immortaliser l’architecture des lieux qui symbolisent le pouvoir. En effet, ce dernier parvient à accéder à des salles vides telles que le conseil de l’ONU ou des lieux difficiles d’accès pour les prendre en photo. Un rendu à découvrir dans la suite.
Focus sur le travail du photographe français Aurélien Villette, qui propose des clichés magnifiques d’exploration autour de l’architecture oubliée sous le nom de l’artiste Adonis. Visuellement impressionnantes, les photographies de ce dernier provenant de plusieurs séries se dévoilent dans la suite de l’article.
Our interview with the self-taught tintype photographer on the process, struggle and journey behind making the largest wet plate print ever
The 2012 Palm Springs Photo Festival Portfolio Review is the nation’s largest photography review program for both commercial and fine art photographers, and it offers the rare opportunity for photographers to get their work in front of some of the world’s most important curators, publishers, agents and art dealers. It also offers the opportunity for photographers to connect with one another and discuss their work. I was excited to participate in this year’s Festival, and when I arrived on the very first day, I was stopped in my tracks by one of the most spectacular photographs I had seen in a long time. What I was looking at was the largest tintype I had ever seen—in fact, the largest tintype anyone had ever seen—taken by Ian Ruhter.
On the third day of the Festival, Ian posted a video onto his Facebook page called “Silver and Light” documenting the challenging process of making these pictures, which included building what’s essentially a custom camera that fills the entire bed of a small truck. The revelatory video immediately began to speed across the Internet, even making it onto the web pages of celebrities like Justin Timberlake. I spent a lot of the week talking to Ian about his work, and witnessing this humble guy’s reaction to the mounting interest in his journey as a photographer.
As my photography started to become more and more digitized, I began to miss the feeling of being in the darkroom. And then one day, I went to buy film, and I discovered that they weren’t even making the type of film I used to use. I felt I was beginning to lose touch with what it really meant to make a photograph. So I decided to take a step into a time-machine and make pictures the way they were made in the 1800s. I started doing my own research, and basically just ordered everything off the internet and started making plates in my loft in LA. Then I took a class with Will Dunniway, and that helped push me further.
Once I had started to make some nice smaller plates, I began showing them to people. I started scanning them and sharing them as digital files. It was then that I realized I had lost the integrity of the photo again—I had just ended up returning to digital. I realized that if I was going to make pictures in a way I wanted, that I would have to take the process in an entirely different direction.
About a year and a half.
Even though everyone was telling me that it was impossible, I believed I could do it. Besides once I had bought the lens and the truck I needed to make the pictures, I was so heavily invested, that I felt I just couldn’t back out.
I checked around and people were telling me that the lens I was looking for was close to impossible to find. They were coming up for auction every few years or something. I started looking on Ebay and within the first month of searching, I had found and bought the lens. I took it as a sign that this was something I was just meant to do.
One of the most frustrating things about doing something that no one has ever done, is that there was no one to call and ask for help. This really became a process of trial and error. I mean, I barely even graduated high school, and here I was forced to be a scientist. I had to create design and build models and do experiments. I had to build a camera big enough to stand in. I had to figure out how to get these chemicals onto such a huge plate of metal. And to make it even more difficult, I decided that I was going to go out on location and shoot landscapes, so I couldn’t even control the environment. I had to start everything from scratch.
I started with landscapes, and I want to continue to tell the story of the American landscape, but I also want to tell the story of the people who are shaped by the land. Like Richard Avedon‘s pictures taken in the West. I want to drive my truck out into America. Now that I have the camera and figured out the process, it’s time to create.
It’s completely overwhelming to have so many people understand and be inspired by my story. Even if it’s not the actual photo that is inspiring people, even if they’re becoming emotional about the process—connecting with people is still the most exciting part of being an artist.
Magical situations dominate the Dutch photographer’s unlikely landscapes
Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland chooses to produce work in remote locations where the inhabitants have been forced to adapt to the natural conditions rather than the other way around. For her it is not about being where only very few people have been before, but about discovering authenticity in a space, which often means that beauty and wonder simply drop into her lap.
It is all about magic: the magic of the location, the inhabitants and the living conditions. In her extensive travels, she creates site-specific installations inspired by local traditions and materials.
“I am filled with nostalgia for places where people are very close to nature,” says Graafland. “Places where people have barely interfered with nature. The wonder of nostalgia for places you have never been to. The wonder of creating situations that have never existed before and will probably never exist again. Situations that are possible but very unlikely to occur again. Magic realism.”
Hooft Graafland sometimes spends months on the edges of the world waiting for “it” to happen. That “it” is a moment when dreams and fantasies mix with reality: Bolivian women wave sticks of candyfloss on salt pans, the entrails of polar bears trace out a palm tree at the North Pole, dromedaries with pigment-tinted humps shuffle across the desert, a stuffed blue reindeer stands out amidst thousands of its living fellows.
Once an exceptional location has demonstrated its magical capabilities, and has been captured in a photographic image, it is time to leave. The magic found in the final image could never have been conceived beforehand.
Voici cette vidéo splendide “Finding Oregon” par Uncage the Soul Productions. Compilant 6 mois de photographie en timelapse à travers l’état d’Oregon aux USA, cette vidéo propose des paysages magnifiques, avec des séquences nocturnes impressionnantes. Plus dans la suite.
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A Brazilian artist’s solo exhibition re-imagines the urban landscape
Daniel Escobar will ring in 2012 with “Fictitious Topographies,” his first solo exhibition in the United States. Inspired by the ubiquitous influence of the urban landscape, the Brazilian artist has decided to remake aspects of real cities into creative works of art born from maps and printed promotional materials. By destroying and resurrecting the physical world, Escobar finds new possibilities in the everyday.
The exhibition features several series by the artist united by common themes. “Permeable (Up Close)” takes billboard ads and perforates them to create a single, layered collage reflecting the artist’s interest in the human form and commercial media. “Atlas of the Urban Anatomy” is another series inspired by Escobar’s hometown Belo Horizonte and creates 3D fictional maps from actual maps sourced from guidebooks of the town. “The World” is a photographic series of details from pop-up books that the artist constructed from tourism material.
Escobar’s dedication to constructing something entirely new out of pre-existing forms results in a fascinating collaboration between the artist and his materials. On the one hand, Escobar acts as a modern version of the 19th century flâneur, exploring and imposing his imagination on the landscape. On the other hand is the landscape itself, rigidly constructed and resistant to change while constantly undergoing an evolution of its own. In the end, Escobar is both documenting and creating the landscape, merging his artistic endeavors with his passion for everyday topography.
“Fictitious Topographies” opens at the RH Gallery 17 January 2012.
Images courtesy of the artist and RH Gallery
Perception shifts as art and nature intersect at the Nevada Museum of Art
Promising “unexpected access to the invisible,” what exactly the Nevada Museum of Art’s current show Landscape Futures proposes isn’t immediately clear. On first blush, the work looks like the usual collection of forward-thinking designs. But here there’s a catch.
The exhibit’s range of large-scale installations, experiments and devices all concern themselves less with the design itself than with the viewer’s reaction to it. Two years in the making, Bldgblog editor Geoff Manaugh worked with the NMA to develop an exhibition that would reflect the intersection of art and landscape architecture contextualized by the ever-evolving scope of design communication. The resulting project surveys methods for architecturally inventing and exploring the human perception of and interaction with their environments.
This flip-flopped point of view comes from Manaugh’s desire “to look at the devices, mechanisms, instruments, and pieces of equipment—the technology—through which humans can learn to see the landscape around them differently.” Revising the concept of “landscape futures” he posits that maybe we don’t need to devise new landscapes, “but simply little devices through which to see the world in new and unexpected ways.”
Artists Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada’s interactive installation “Animal Superpowers” anthropomorphizes human sensory capabilities. Furthering the theme of human impact on environment, design firm Smout Allen’s Rube-Goldberg-inspired system visualizes a technological landscape that can adapt to our water needs.
An architectural commentary on the Arctic landscape, “The Active Layer” by experimental design group The Lateral Office consists of thousands of wooden dowels arranged to point out the tenuous geography in the North. “Embracing speculative scenarios in order to provoke new ways of thinking about the future” is at the heart of the exhibition, explains Manaugh.
Furthering the cause is the recently-launched Landscape Futures Night School, a series of event-styled lectures sponsored by Studio X in conjunction with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture under Manaugh’s current direction (along with Nicola Twilley). On hand at the debut installment was lecturer Liam Young, founder of the futuristic think-tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and fellow featured exhibition artist. Creating “living maps of moss,” Young’s “Specimens of Unnatural History” ecologically replicate the Galapagos islands as populated with robotic and taxidermy entities that simultaneously reflect a “cautionary tale” of the future and a throwback to the naturalistic height of the Victorian era.
Supporting the contemplative narrative of his work, Young presented a metaphysical tour-de-force of his expeditions, ranging from Chernobyl dreamscapes to invasive species in the Galapagos conducted under the nomadic studio group, Unknown Fields Division—a group devoted to “unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies.”
Landscape Futures runs until 12 February 2012 at the Nevada Museum of Art.
“Specimens of Unnatural History” images by Liam Young. All other images by Jamie Kingman.
Découverte du travail de Andrew Brooks, un photographe et réalisateur vivant actuellement à Manchester. Avec ses clichés travaillés de villes et de paysages, il parvient avec talent à donner une cohérence et à attirer l’oeil du spectateur. Plus d’images dans la suite de l’article.
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