Week 017: a b & c

These are images of my living space. I don't particularly like these pictures, so I'm having a hard time describing why I've posted them. Essentially, I must like that the pictures show clutter and chaos with a lack of attention to composition, which is not what or how I usually shoot.

A:

This 1st image seems quiet, and I like that. I also like how the mirror features rectangles within a rectangle.

B:

I like the bike in this picture. It's somewhat hidden, but the reflectors on the spokes draw my attention.

C:

I keep trying to identify objects on the two tables, and, because this is my mess, I like thinking about why and how these things have been strewn about.

Week 017: one two & three

ONE*
Julie Blackmon - Domestic Vacations
January 22, 2009 - March 7, 2009
Fahey / Klein Gallery


"Her photographs blend autobiography and fiction to create surreal yet plausible scenarios that reflect contemporary everyday family life with acumen, humor, and insight."

"'As an artist and as a mother, I believe life’s most poignant moments come from the ability to fuse fantasy and reality: to see the mythic amidst the chaos.'"

*Many of the images in Blackmon's Domestic Vacations exhibition show signs of extreme alteration in Photoshop, but I kind of like them anyway. Even though the scenes couldn't have possibly existed in reality, I still try to work out the scenarios in my mind. Photography, as a rule, is believable.

TWO**
United in Nima: Bay Area and Ghanaian Youth Share Lives Through the Lens
January 8, 2009 - March 25, 2009
SF Camerawork


"...a new exhibition featuring photographs by low-income youth from SF Camerawork’s First Exposures photography mentoring program and teens living in the notoriously poor Nima slum of Accra, Ghana who spent three weeks together last summer in Africa sharing their lives, culture and art."

“'They made photographs that explore what it means to be misrepresented and misunderstood,” says [Erik] Auerbach, [Program Director of First Exposures]. “They brought these concepts to Ghana to explore the same issues with the African youth.'"

**As a future K-12 art teacher, I was immediately interested in this exhibition featuring the work of youth from the US and Ghana. It will be interesting to see if any of the youth, featured in this exhibition, go on to become professional photographers.

THREE***
Jeremy Kidd - Fictional Realities
January 22, 2009 - March 7, 2009
Fahey / Klein Gallery


"Fictional Realities combines a series of digital, time-lapse photographs that have been stitched and blended together to create a panoramic view that transcends time and space. Assembled from the hundreds of frames taken of each site, each construction creates a unique vision of a familiar place, one that is wholly recognizable and utterly alien at the same time."

"As with the Futurists, Kidd’s images defy imagination on many levels simultaneously, yet retain a close approximation of reality that both confounds and amazes.'"

***I like the intense color of this composite image as well as its surreal believability.

*&***The Fahey / Klein Gallery is featuring these two bodies of work within the same exhibition and rightly so. They both address the believable-unreality so common to photographic work.

Week 016: one two & three

ONE*
Michael Wolf: The Transparent City
November 14, 2008 - January 31, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Photography


"While it has been common for photographers to glorify Chicago’s distinctive architecture and environmental context, Wolf depicts the city more abstractly, focusing less on individual well-known structures and more on the contradictions and conflicts between architectural styles when visually flattened together in a photograph. His pictures look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the social constructs of living and working in an urban environment, focusing specifically on voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. Wolf explores the complex, sometimes blurred distinctions between private and public life in a city made transparent by his intense observation."

*

TWO**
WORK/PLACE
November 14, 2008 - January 31, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Photography


Work by:
Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom
Thomas Demand
Lars Tunbjörk
Karen Yama

"...Work / Place looks at the idiosyncratic personal routines that individuals perform inside their offices. The photographs and video in this exhibition use as their raw material the highly ordered but often banal and absurd activities of office life. "

"In each of the works on view, the artist strikes a balance between the personal attributes brought into an office and the homogeneity of office etiquette and behavior. As the popular television show The Office so cleverly depicts, the great challenge of the workplace is the implausibility of drastically distinctive personalities having to function toward the same goals—under the same roof."

**

THREE***
Gabrielle Basilico: Intercity
January 7, 2009 - March 6, 2009
Cohen Amador Gallery


"Pooled from his most recent bodies of work, the exhibition articulates Basilico’s lifelong fascination with the city as a densely collaged environment."

"This character of spatial isolation and urban indifference persists throughout the work and speaks to the state of the post-industrial—post-modern—city. In their indifference, architecture and industry are shown to aggressively reject human access."

***

Week 015: one two & three

ONE*
Katharina Bosse: a Portrait of the artist as a Young Mother
January 10, 2009 - March 7, 2009
galerie anne barrault


"This new series by Katharina Bosse, disquieting and daring, reveals, with humour and boldness, this multi-faceted, extremely complex, underestimated process : the birth of a mother."

*

TWO**
Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography
November 4, 2008 - March 22, 2009
The Metropolitan Museum of Art


"This installation of works from the permanent collection—the third in the Museum’s new gallery for contemporary photographs—surveys the ways in which artists exploit photography’s fundamental illusionism to create a sense of ambiguity about what is real and what is not. Among the works featured are photographs of staged scenarios or constructed environments that appear to be real, as well as real scenes or landscapes that appear strangely artificial. Artists include James Casebere, Gregory Crewdson, Robert Gober, David Levinthal, Vik Muniz, Stephen Shore, and Taryn Simon, among others."

**

THREE***

***

Week 015: a b & c

A:

B:

C:

I don't typically take snapshots like this, but I like these. Even though the subjects are clearly posing, they still appear natural to me. These photos serve as memory prompts for a work holiday party and may eventually be reminders of other things entirely. I like that aspect of snapshot photography.

Week 014: a b & c

Week 013: a b & c

A:

B:

C:

If it isn't obviously, these are pictures of a Wii bowler. I think that these image are fantastic. I like the motion blur, the bright tv, and the interior evidence that suggests that we may be in a suburban home.