August 20, 2015, 2:03 pm
Markus BrunettiMarkus Brunetti spends weeks photographing churches in great detail — and even longer digitally assembling his pictures. More…
The photographer Delphine Diaw Diallo’s “Highness” series originated a few years ago as a collaboration with the hairstylist Joanne Petit Frere, who creates
fantastical, sculptural styles with real hair. Frere asked Diallo, a graduate of the Academie Charpentier of Visual Arts in Paris, to photograph her work, and the two started working together on a series of increasingly
revealing portraits. Diallo, who was born to a Senegalese father and a French mother in Paris, was attracted to the idea of women recreating themselves — and wanted to challenge traditional notions of femininity
and eminence. “What kind of queen can I create?” she says. “How can I redefine what highness means to a woman’s experience?” To her, the true “highnesses” are warriors.
Works from “Highness” are on view in “ReSignifications: Imagining the Black Body and Re-Staging Histories” May 29- Aug. 29 at NYU Florence, Via Bolognese 120, and Museo Stefano Bardini, Via Delle Belle Donne, 39, Florence.
July 30, 2015, 5:47 pm
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
“As a fine artist, I only work in analog,” the New York-based photographer Joanne Dugan says. “To me, photography is film, and the alchemy of silver and
light and chemicals is still really important.” And like analog photographs themselves, her “Turning Point” series was born in the dark. Dugan began the project in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy,
while she was sitting in her apartment at the edge of the blackout grid — the view out front was lit, but out to the sides it was dark. “There was an odd peacefulness that that came over me as I roamed around
the city in a state of wonder,” she says. “I had this epiphany that it is okay to turn my lens only to the light itself, rather than the subjects.” The fragility of light became her focus as she traveled
the city, often by bike, layering her images with up to 20 multiple exposures. “The work is an homage to the traditional process,” she says, “but brings a modern viewpoint.”
“Turning Point” is on view Aug. 7–26 at the Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial Street, Provincetown, Mass., galleryschoolhouse.com.
July 23, 2015, 11:31 am
If any single location can perfectly epitomize the nostalgic lazy, hazy days of summer — complete with the Mr. Softee jingle in the background — it might just be the Wildwoods, the three kitschy southern New Jersey
shore towns that are home to the largest concentration of mid-century motels in the nation. In the Wildwoods’ 1950s and ’60s heyday, over 300 “Doo Wop motels” were built there in that unmistakable
style: flashy neon lights, kidney-shaped pools, asymmetrical design elements and a plethora of plastic palm trees (now designated the official tree of Wildwood). “The hotels were the backdrop of my summer,”
recalls Mark Havens, a Philadelphia-based photographer and assistant professor of industrial design at Philadelphia University. “We would always pile in the car and drive around
and look at all the hotels in the same way families drive around and look at Christmas lights at holiday season,” Havens says of his family’s yearly sojourn to Wildwood, which the artist has visited without
fail for 44 years running. “Once they started to disappear, I realized just how much I took them for granted.”
While in graduate school, Havens set out to document the motels. Initially, he hired a professional photographer; when he was dissatisfied with the results, he set out to teach himself photography and take on the assignment
himself. “It became the catalyst for me embarking as an artist,” he says. After 10 years of shooting the Wildwoods, he has amassed over 13,000 images in an archive that, as he says, “brings out the
interplay of an idealized past and its inexorable disappearance.” Shot at the outset and closing of summer, his series “Out of Season” documents the eerie emptiness of the motels before the tourists
arrive — and after they’ve departed.
July 16, 2015, 5:26 pm
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
Schohaja, a photographer and T contributor, first met the original members of the design collective As Four — Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser, Gabriel Asfour and Kai Kühne — in the ’90s, at the start of
their careers in New York City. With dreams of being a travel photographer, she leapt at the chance to travel with them through Europe in 2002 and 2003, documenting the brand’s exhibitions and shows — and
the designers’ camaraderie and misadventures on the road. Over a decade later, the portraits, which remained unpublished to this day (until now), still move the photographer. “I loved (and still love) their
generosity, their creativity, their free minds and openness to spontaneity and new adventures,” she says. “It was great to see how they functioned so well together, being so connected and so individual at
the same time.” As Four parted ways in 2005; three of the members now design under the name Three As Four, and Kai Kühne has formed an auction house with John Mollett. But not much has changed for Schohaja, who continues to snap intimate, revealing shots of movers and shakers in the fashion industry, capturing unguarded moments of calm backstage at the New York and
European shows. “I love beauty, I love craziness! And I love to capture atmosphere,” she says. Here, Schohaja shares with T a peek at her treasure trove of images of her earliest subjects.
July 9, 2015, 3:00 pm
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
The images in Katherine Wolkoff’s new body of work, “Vita Nova,” are strange and intense, marked by the interplay between beauty, tension and absence. Wolkoff asks her viewer to peer through mysterious curtains of light and dark to discover recognizable, everyday natural forms and textures twisted almost into abstraction. She manipulates and obscures her subjects — a closeup
of tree bark transformed in a burned landscape; monochromatic weeds that dance like ghosts in the wind; a twisting tree caught in eerie sepia tones; a delicate spider web dangling from a single stalk of wheat — until
they begin to feel like slowly disappearing memories we can’t quite touch.
Katherine Wolkoff’s work will be on view later this year at Sasha Wolf Gallery, 70 Orchard Street, New York, sashawolf.com.
June 18, 2015, 11:45 am
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
Heeeeere’s Claudia Ficca and Davide Luciano! The full-time couple and part-time collaborative team — Ficca is a food
stylist and Luciano is a photographer — have recently embarked on a witty series together: a sequence of photographs created in homage to “The Shining” (and its most iconic scenes), just in time for
the 35th anniversary of the film. But the timid and horror-film-averse needn’t fret. The cinematic scenes won’t challenge those with weak stomachs — although they might tempt those with empty ones.
The images in the project, aptly named “All Food No Play,” are composed entirely of comestibles. The results — from “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” cherry pies, to a meticulous
frozen-pea recreation of the Overlook Hotel hedge maze, to eerily perfect cupcake versions of the Grady twins — are clever and spirited.
June 11, 2015, 5:09 pm
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
Now that summer has finally arrived, the meditative floral still-lifes of the New Orleans-born art photographer Sharon Core are a welcome treat for those of us stuck in offices. Consciously copying historical paintings of flowers,
Core pays attention to every detail, creating an almost exact doppelgänger — in the studio and, more recently, in her garden. In addition to painting, Core has worked as a pastry chef and food stylist, honing
the kind of patience and precision that is also demanded by the construction of her photos. While some depict arrangements in full bloom, others take a more literal approach to the nature morte aesthetic: They
capture the meticulously arranged flowers just after they’ve started to wilt, imbuing the photos with a sweet melancholy not unlike returning home after a week of vacation.
Sharon Core’s work is currently on display in three group shows. “In the Garden” is on view through Sept. 6 at the George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, N.Y., eastmanhouse.org; “Super Natural” is on view through Sept. 13 at the Museum of the Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., nmwa.org; “Arts and Foods” is on view through Nov. 1 as part of the Milan Triennale, triennale.org.
June 4, 2015, 5:15 pm
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
The storefront photo studio, once the natural destination to commemorate rites of passage like births, graduations and weddings, has long given way to the preservation of those moments on Facebook and Instagram. Lately, however,
one-stop portrait shops and personal family snapshots have taken on new significance as collectors’ interest in “found,” “vernacular” or “outsider” photographs has increased.
Decades ago, the Armenian photographer Maryam Sahinyan (1911-1996) joined her father at Foto Galatasaray, one such portrait shop in Istanbul, Turkey, churning out portraits after dropping out of school. Photography was
an unusual occupation for a woman in Turkey, and Sahinyan’s distinct and interesting eye cast a window into the layered and complicated spectrum of cultures that lived in Istanbul — from the everyday to the
taboo. Tayfun Serttas, an artist in Istanbul, went through thousands of Sahinyan’s negatives to assemble her first, posthumous exhibition in 2011 at SALT Galata. Highlights from
the show — of subjects ranging from transgendered people and members of disenfranchised religious and ethnic groups to wealthy women, identical twins, babies and long-haired beauties — are in the above
slideshow.
May 28, 2015, 4:05 pm
In this weekly series, T’s photo editors share the most compelling visual projects they’ve discovered.
Alison Rossiter creates painterly, abstract expressionist prints in her photographic series “Paper Wait.” Using the fundamentals of analog photography, the artist forges a dialogue between technology, process,
the history of the medium and simple, raw materials. She dips found, vintage photographic papers into developing solution to coax out their past and the memory of former owners. With the onset of digital photography,
the aspects of chance and happy accident have virtually disappeared from the medium; Rossiter aims to rediscover them. Her titles are purely descriptive — “Eastman Kodak Velox, expired 1922, processed 2013,”
for example, or “Defender Argo, expired September 1911, processed 2014″ — and, taken in sum, provide a photographic history lesson. Each photo carries the imprint of its first owner, brought to life
by Rossiter. The works emerge from her hand with glowing tones and beautiful grain: pure, seductive standalone images that eliminate the photographed subject.