"Pine Beetle" by Nina Berman

Across British Columbia, 36 million acres of pine forests are dead and dying.  The killer is a small beetle the size of a rice kernel.

Indigenous to the forests of North America, the mountain pine beetle’s population was kept in check by cold winters.  But global warming in the last two decades has allowed the beetles to thrive.
The path of destruction caused by this infestation can be seen in a cataclysmic shift in the color and shape of the landscape. 

To the untrained eye, the attack appears beautiful at first.   Swaths of green trees turn red, like autumn leaves changing.  But these pines are evergreens and a color shift is a sign of inevitable mortality. From red, the leaves turn purple, brown, and finally grey. At this point, they can no longer stand and whither to the ground, their pinecones dried out and scattered across the forest floor, their branches, ready fuel for fires.

Florian Van Roekel: How Terry Likes His Coffee

The ingenuity of Florian van Roekel’s How Terry Likes His Coffee begins with the cover. With any photobook of these dimensions, you’d expect the pictures to be laid out in landscape orientation, and this is true of van Roekel’s photos. But the cover label is set in portrait orientation. Looked at his way, the plain black cover looks like a premium legal-sized notebook, which is exactly what you get when you open the book in portrait: a series of lined pages reproduced from such a notebook, with a variety of doodles both ornate and simple. Van Roekel’s subject is the office, and these are the very kinds of doodles you’d make in the middle of a boring meeting where you can’t be bothered to take actual notes.

Uncharted Territory: Julie L. Sims

One in four adults will suffer from depression or other psychological disorders in their lifetime, yet these illnesses remain among our most misunderstood health issues. I have struggled with anxiety and depression, and am aware of how they have at times limited my accomplishments—not because I lack skills or talent, but because I am rendered unable to use the tools at my disposal. It is frustrating to be essentially crippled by your own brain, and it's difficult not to subscribe to the common misconception that I should be able to control this by sheer willpower or more positive thinking, and not to feel like a failure when I am unable to do so.

In Uncharted Territory I draw a parallel between these events and the experience of a natural disaster, when the environment becomes inhospitable beyond our control.

Amirali Ghasemi

In the series Tehran Remixed Amirali Ghasemi shows young urban Iranians socializing, their faces and other areas of exposed skin blanked out to protect their identities. The social activities depicted seem as though they could be happening in any city around the world. Yet the fact that the identities of the participants in these seemingly ordinary acts must be so starkly concealed underscores how specific the situation is to Iran.

Well, hello again! Krakow Photomonth: Alias

I've been on a blogging hiatus, but now that I am back in the teaching mode, it's easy for me to research and share. My favorite photography duo is at it again:

The incandescent female nudes featured in today's slideshow are currently on view at Krakow's Stained Glass Museum as part of new exhibition Alias. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are this year's curators for Krakow's Photomonth, Poland's largest visual arts event, and their theme is the artistic alter-ego. 

Thinking about Billy again today

I pretty much think about William Eggleston every time I go home to Knoxville for the summer and try to take photos. I came across this introduction to his series, Ancient and Modern and thought I would repost:

"Eggleston was born and raised in the South. He has lived all his life between Mississippi and Memphis. His reputation is built on the small portion of his work that has been published or exhibited over the last fifteen years. Much of that work would suggest that he could be described as a Southern artist, an identity he is anxious to avoid. The South is the central axis of his life, the sense of locality is a vital component of his work, but it is not defined by a Southern domain. He travels frequently and explores a wider world. If one were to construct a portrait of him, he would be sitting on a porch polishing a gun or fingering a Leica - and he is explicit on the association between the two - or else he would be behind the wheel of a car, though driving seems to have little to do with transportation and much more to do with the rhythm and pattern of his observation. He is an explorer and a resident of the South."

Ricardo Cases' Pigeons

I saw a posting for Ricardo Cases' project Paloma Al Aire on Jorg Coleberg's blog, these images are definitely worth checking out, as are his other works!

Harrison Haynes LRLL RLRR, 2011

The process of creating and consuming art often gravitates towards neatly defined roles for those making work and their audience. Each decision and action, directly made by the artist, is intended for a work that lives on in a presumed immortal stasis. How does this contract change when the role of the audience is altered? Would the audience still enjoy their passive role after they are activated to join in the production process?

 How does a work change when it relies on the performance of an ever-changing cast? Non-static in nature, each work presented in this feature by Roland Tiangco,Clement Valla, Harrison Haynes, and Caleb Larsen relies upon a state that exists between inception and fulfillment. Methods and intentions differ but the realization of each piece requires the release of work into a space no longer controlled by its creator.

Kevin Everson's Films at the Whitney

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) works in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. His filmic fables, the focus of this exhibition, articulate the profound within the ordinariness of everyday life. Everson, who was born in the working-class community of Mansfield, Ohio, depicts details in the lives of people living and working in similar American communities: a mechanic repairing an old car in a backyard, a black beauty queen in a segregated pageant, men boxing, snowplow operators in winter, young men walking into a courtroom, the aftermath of a murder.

 Some of Everson’s films are constructed from appropriated news and film footage, uncovering forgotten details of African-American life in the 1960s and 70s. In other films, the artist explores the waxing and waning of a community’s sense of itself and the migration of black people from the South to the North in order to find work. Everson, whose work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, approaches race, sexuality, and economic circumstances with a poetic yet unflinching eye. Adopting the stance of an observer, his interest in labor has both a political and a formal aspect, exploring the relationship between the human body and the materiality of the labor it performs as both an expression of class and identity, and as a performative gesture. More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson is curated by Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator Chrissie Iles.

Tribe of Ukranian Fighting Women by Guillaume Herbaut

French photojournalist Guillaume Herbaut spent some time with an unusual and tough group of 150 Ukrainian women who call themselves “Asgarda.” These women live in the Carpathian Mountains and follow a rigorous routine of fighting and boxing, often with medieval weaponry.

The women idolize  Yulia Tymoshenko, the icon of the  Orange Revolution and leader of the Ukrainian Fatherland party. The portraits are inspiring, bizarre, and strangely beautiful. Source: Oeilpublic.com

Destroy All Monsters Magazine 1976-1979

Formed in 1973, the Detroit band Destroy All Monsters was a wild and reckless synthesis of psychedelia, proto-punk, heavy metal, noise and performance art. The collective hailed from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and consisted of Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Niagara and Jim Shaw (with later members including Ron Asheton of the Stooges and Michael Davis of the MC5).

Later emerging as extremely distinctive individual artists, collectively the group forged new terrain in art, music, performance, theater and video. Destroy All Monsters released very little recorded music until Thurston Moore issued a three-CD compilation in 1994, but they published six issues of a now legendary and much sought-after zine, also titled Destroy All Monsters. This publication collects those six zines, released between 1976 and 1979, and also includes parts of a lost seventh issue that never saw publication. The Destroy All Monsters zines comprise a vibrant array of collage, writing, photography and other miscellanea by Kelley, Loren, Niagara and Shaw, and together provide insight into the collective's kaleidoscopic vision of the dystopian values of their time.

Kenneth Price's "The Wonder Year"

This week, I am highlighting fellow artists and friends here in North Carolina. I am currently writing a piece about Kenneth Price's documentary, "The Wonder Year" which is an inside look at CEO, NAACP Ambassador, Duke University professor, and Grammy award winning producer 9th Wonder. The film follows one of soul music’s most dynamic figures from his childhood home to late nights in the studio and everywhere in between. Until the interview is complete for Modern Ink Magazine, check out more on Kenneth's website!

Natalie Nazee Abbassi

This project is a series of self portraits exploring who I am, both as an American and as an Iranian, through photographs. It has always been a struggle for me to explain myself, who I truly am, and how I should or shouldn’t act in given situations. I feel that maybe these photographs will answer some questions. Questions people might have, or even questions I have for myself as a person who has lived with two cultures her whole life. Sometimes I feel confused, proud, and sometimes even awkward about how to simply deal with the differences of the two parts that make me.

In each image I’ve incorporated myself twice, once as the Iranian and once as the American. In some of my images I see conflict and in some I see peace and calm with my two selves. This exploration is a growing one and much more work will follow this blog post.

Andy McMillan: PTL (Praise The Lord)

McMillan, a Charlotte, NC based photographer, spent time in 2006 photographing the former evangelists, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Christian theme park, that closed in 1989.

In the early 1980s, the Bakkers had built Heritage USA in Fort Mill, South Carolina, (south of Charlotte), then the third most successful theme park in the US, and a satellite system to distribute their network 24 hours a day across the country. Contributions requested from viewers were estimated to exceed $1 million a week, with proceeds to go to expanding the theme park and mission of PTL. In justifying his use of the mass media, Bakker responded to inquiries by likening his use of television to Jesus's use of the amphitheater of the time. "I believe that if Jesus were alive today he would be on TV", Bakker said. Well, we all know what happened next...

George and Patricia Beacher

George Beacher, b. 1930, Achnasheen, Scottish Highlands, and Patricia Beacher, née Dixon-Foster, b. 1930, Shrewsbury, England; active as artists on the South Coast of England, 1968– ?1975. After meeting at Nottingham University in 1965 (married 1966), the Beachers began to develop their body arrangements as a series of tableaux performed annually at various locations in the South of England. Documented in photographs, these works were bound into a number of albums, each taking its title from the town where the actions took place.

Viviane Sassen

I saw this work several months ago and forgot to bookmark the website. I went crazy trying to google phrases that would summon the work of Viviane Sassen. Finally, I ran across the images from what I think is her strongest series, Ultra Violet.

Nikita Pirogov

For me photography is an exploration of tangible things, which I take from their place in nature and make into images with their own associations, just as functional speech lies adjacent to lyrical music in the palette of sound. This process is a manifestation of all the factors of practical experience that affect our perception: climate, race, temperament, education, and many others. This process is aided by structure and composition, as well as by formal elements rooted in our biological experience.

 The world exists in harmony. It is structured and therefore logical. I try to examine the causal principles of my own view of the world and all the information pouring out of it. I try to peer into it, and listen carefully to everything I do, be it in photography or video, or in the other things I have been doing since childhood - drama, music, painting. I am interested in looking for parallels in separate elements of various art forms. In effect, by doing this I am trying to feel my way towards some kind of visual 'poetry'. I select details (metaphors) from the immense volume of information in the outside world, that might be able to create a cohesive narrative and explore some concept , where every image is self-sufficient and harmonious in itself. For me a visual sequence is a finished poetic expression.

The L.A.F. Project

Commissioned by The LAF project for the Tsbili photo festival in Georgia to recreate the Russian invasion of Georgia through photography. These striking images tell the story of the Russian occupation and the destruction of war from primary sources gathered throughout the conflict. The LAF project tells the story of Internally Displaced People, and works to bring justice to those individuals effected by such tragic circumstances.

http://www.vimeo.com/23184112

Edited by Vic Reznik

We Are the Youth by Laurel Golio and Diana Scholl

I came across this project via LPV magazine, a good introduction to the work: http://lpvmagazine.com/2011/01/we-are-the-youth-by-laurel-golio-and-diana-scholl/

 We Are the Youth is a photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth in the United States. Through photographic portraits and written interviews highlighting the participants’ voices, We Are the Youth captures the incredible diversity and uniqueness among the LGBT youth population.

Little Brown Mushroom Books

Yesterday, two books arrived at my doorstep from Alec Soth's book company, Little Brown Mushroom.
The first book/magazine Lonely Boy Mag, Alec Soth's Midwestern Exotica, was much more engaging than I expected, especially the series of photos from a dating website called Goth Scene. The second book,  Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar, include 60 c-prints, each book a bit different from the next. This book has an edition of only 500 with all proceeds going to Tsunami relief in Japan. If you haven't checked out the LBM website, now is the time.