Never Enough Brassai

By Brassai, Excerpts from Brassai: Letters to My Parents, 1978

I was delighted to notice in the letters that from the start I saw photography as a way to uncover and record the world that surrounded me, the city in which I lived, as comprehensively as possible. There were a good number of critics, by the way, who reinforced me in my belief and my expectations about photography. http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/02/brassai-letters-to-my-parents-1978.html

William Gedney's Journal Entry

Review of Beyond Caring by Paul Graham via Conscientious

At the time of this writing, the official unemployment rate in the US is 9%. This number excludes a large variety of people, incl., for example, those who gave up looking for work or those who’d prefer a full-time job over a part-time one. It’s a bit harder to come by the actual unemployment rate, in part because it depends on how you define it. If we take the US government’s U-6 rate, we get 16%. Very much related to this, the number of photographers, graphic designers and writers I have talked to recently who told me about severe problems getting jobs is mind-blowing. I am not active in the field of commercial or editorial photography, but from what I hear there is some severe howling and gnashing of the teeth going on. So even though it might just be a coincidence, it still seems entirely appropriate that Paul Graham’s Beyond Caring was just re-published by Errata Editions. (more)

Some days I just miss Helen Levitt

For those who have never seen her short films, from 1948 here is In the Street :

Roger Eberhard's "Wilted Country"

Swiss born Roger Eberhard first came to our attention when he released his debut published work, So Long, Cockaigne in 2008, which portrayed destitute farmers in Russia's vicious winter.

Eberhard has taken his search for desolation a step further and trekked across the USA, scouring cities from Reno, Nevada, all the way through to Nebraska and the picturesque North Dakota. When we first came across Eberhard's new work Wilted Country it looked more like a dusty memoir from a forgotten age.

Format: The International Photography Festival

Wow, somewhat overwhelming, but lots of great photography, this year's theme was street photography:

FORMAT was established in 2004, by Louise Clements and Mike Brown, and is now one of the UK's leading non-profit international contemporary festivals of photography and related media. The biennale programme celebrates the wealth of contemporary practice in international photography. FORMAT is the place to see an incredible range of new work alongside some of the best-known practitioners in the world. FORMAT is focused on developing opportunities for audiences to see, debate, develop and engage in the best of what photography is and can be. The festival is a unique opportunity to see and engage in contemporary photography and to hear what is happening 'right here, right now'.

Victoria Jenkins via Seesaw Magazine

Images from the Institute of Esoteric Research                                  

The photographs presented here are rooted in the language of rational investigation, employing quasi-scientific laboratory style conditions in to which a series of still lives, fictional archival images, are constructed. A commingling of varied sources occurs: vernacular imagery of magic tricks, home science experiments, divination practice, superstitious belief and forensic investigation. The intent is to play on the conflicts in the languages that are being appropriated: logic and absurdity, revelation and trickery, illustration and illusion, but also that which seems concurrent despite the apparent polarities: the image whose authority is asserted through a shrouding in secret language and gesture.

Jesse Reid

Ideas surrounding transformation are recurrent themes throughout my work. I am fascinated in how temporal materials, including lighting, makeup, and decoration can transform bodies, hallways and nightclub into something strange or uncanny. Through my work I create a visual image or object in disjunction with quotidian representations of my subject: nightclubs are brightly light, rather than dark and sexy; soap is wet and dirty, rather than fresh and clean; unremarkable male bodies are superficially transformed into hyper-masculine models. There is an implication of queerness that plays an important role in the reading of my work, not only as a suggestion of strangeness or difference, but also in the work's relationship to sexual orientation.

For my friends in the Los Angeles area, Jesse's show opens this weekend:

Kaycee Olsen Gallery is pleased to announce Olly olly oxen free, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jesse Finley Reed, from February 19th - March 26th, 2011.

At 5:30pm, Saturday, February 19th, the evening will commence with a 20-minute Artist Talk with Jesse Finley Reed and Kaycee Olsen, as part of the ongoing series "In Conversation with Kaycee Olsen". The Talk will focus on the details of Reed's work, particularly the intersection of photography and queer aesthetic.

Julie Cockburn: Filling the Cracks with Ceiling Wax

Entering the world of Julie Cockburn’s images – a labyrinthine space crosshatched by ‘the archived corridors’ of the artist’s imagination – we are met by a coterie of misfits: cut-outs, collages and aggregate creatures, they are the cast in a vignette where visual seduction is saturated by a sense of the familiar made strange. Cockburn’s characters are engendered from of a heady concoction of appropriation, artistry and artifice. Central to their creation is the cache of found images – neglected photographs co-opted from car boots, studio shots of 1950s movie stars, pages torn from American high school year books – that become playthings for the artist to ‘embellish, manipulate, torture and caress’. The portraits that Cockburn selects for her maverick mark-making are united in their status as images once dazzling but now defunct. She explains the allure of these outcasts and faded icons as their potential for redemption through a re-possession and re-visioning: ‘I feel I have a right to them, that they are mine for the taking, or rescuing even’.

Tobias Kruse

Today, I came across the work os Tobias Kruse. Currently living in Berlin and having been exhibited all over the world, Kruse’s photos are hard to forget. Make sure to check out a few of his projects, the most recent portfolios (2010) are my favorites.

The Laughter and Forgetting Project

I'm excited to be part of this project, if you know anyone who has photographed in the Republic of Georgia in the past few years, please send this link on.

Mission Statement and Goals:

• To create a photoblog that documents life in Georgia from the photographers’ point of view.
• To host an annual competition among the projects submitted to the photoblog to be judged by acclaimed LAF participants. The prize will be grant money to put on group exhibits in Georgia.
• To bring together the past LAF photographers with the featured ones from post-totalitarian Georgia for a joint exhibit at the Forum 2000 Human Rights Conference in Prague.

A Conversation with John Gossage

Photographer John Gossage finds moments of grace and elegance in even the most mundane places. Join the artist and curator of photography Toby Jurovics for a conversation about The Pond and its role in the history of American landscape photography

Sarah Palmer

I really enjoy the playfulness of these images: http://sarahpalmerphotography.com/works/as-a-real-house/

Donald Weber via Tony Fouhse

Canadian fotografer Don Weber works hard and works smart.  He’s a
photojournalist who’s main areas of interest are Russia and Eastern
Europe. He’s a proponent of slow journalism…..not the kind of fellow
to drop in to some flash-point or other, spend a few hours (or days)
gathering spectacular clichés to feed a hungry public, then jet out
again.

http://tonyfoto.com/drool/2011/01/16/photojournalism/

Sue de Beer: The Ghost

Sue de Beer’s latest installation The Ghost is being presented in association with Art Production Fund at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The work features a two-channel video projection concerning an occult hypnotist who utilizes “material recollection” to attain lost time. The Ghost is on view February 3–6.


http://artforum.com/words/#entry27498

New Crush: Katharina Grosse

The Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse is known for her immense installations that examine how painting functions in an expanded field.

http://www.katharinagrosse.com/work.php?id=1484&cat=2010