Kenyan Women Photo Project — visible from outer space

The hip, young French photographer, JR, likes to make his photographs larger than life and visible from afar. His most recent project in the slums of Kenya are designed to be visible from Google Earth satellites as well as from the elevated train tracks that pass by the village twice a day. The intention is to draw attention to the persistent strength of women in these struggling, poverty-stricken areas.

2000 square meters of rusty corrugated metal rooftops are now covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, which is one of the largest slums of Africa. Most of the women have their own photos on their own rooftop, and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season.

The train that passes on the line through Kibera at least twice a day is covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces are pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.

JR is what I would call a 21st century concerned photographer. He wants to call attention to important social problems, and he uses unusual materials and extravagant means to get his message out into the world. He has completed other audacious projects with people in Brazil, India, Cambodia, and other parts of Africa. And he's pasted smiling portraits of Palestinians and Israelis on both sides of the wall that divides them — showing how similar and human those on the other side look in reality.

For more information, check out JR's website. http://28millimetres.com/women/?ke

by jimcasper

The Transparent City

Big cities can sometimes seem like immense visual abstractions. The jam-packed juxtapositions of diverse styles of architecture — all compressed into dense overlapping vertical spaces — can be seen as things of rare man-made beauty.

These soaring glass-walled environments also invite a sometimes perverse delight in voyeurism. Michael Wolf’s new photobook, The Transparent City, captures both of these aspects nearly perfectly in his recent photographic study of downtown Chicago.

Someone described this work as “Hopper meets Blade Runner,” and I might add a third reference: Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Wolf positions himself on rooftops or in the windows of opposing buildings to get the most amazing vantage points for each scene. He waits for perfect light at the time of day when twilight and interior light render the building walls nearly invisible. An incredible large format camera with a 112-megapixel digital back captures and reveals exquisite details. It's a stunning combination.

Midway through the project, which started with its focus on the architecture of Chicago, Wolf discovered that when he enlarged his photos he could actually see what was going on in nearly every window of every building. Indeed, one office worker in a huge building opposite Wolf’s camera was giving him the finger in a gesture of contempt for his supposed spying!

This after-the-fact discovery added a new dimension to the project for Wolf. He started to look inside as well as outside, and to play one aspect against the other. These sparkling, huge photos became complexly rich statements about daily urban life in the 21st century.

Natasha Egan writes in her introduction to the book:

While it has been more common for photographers to glorify Chicago’s unique architecture and environmental context, Wolf depicts the city more abstractly, focusing less on individual well-known structures and more on the contradictions of architectural styles when visually flattened in a photograph. Unlike the impermeable windows in his Hong Kong pictures, his photographs of Chicago look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the social constructs of living and working in an urban environment.

But far from titillation, Wolf discovers a rather mundane loneliness in his windows — people staring into computers or gazing at television sets or napping alone in armchairs. Many residents seem numbly isolated in sterile, generic boxes of rooms suspended in the sky away from any kind of grounded reality.

Writer and blogger Geoff Manaugh sees a direct correlation between these photographs and the psychological effect depicted in the 1975 novel by J. G. Ballard, High-Rise. Ballard suggested that the nature of these buildings produces a "new social type." Manaugh continues:

These people have "minimal needs for privacy," living more "like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere" of the building. Like an architectural mood stabilizer — or spatial Prozac — the building itself gives rise to an "unemotional personality," someone who spends time "waiting for something to happen" while doing nothing themselves.

Wolf accentuates this feeling of alienation and "no exit" with tight cropping of each photograph, so it is difficult to find any reassuring context even in a vast panorama. “You can never go off the building surface and find the sky,” Wolf says. “I make these images so that the only escape is to peer into one of the windows.”

It is especially disturbing to realize that these are the kind of views that urban dwellers experience every day.

The book is beautifully printed in a large, luxurious format on beautiful paper. Three insightful essays accompany the photographs helping to make the entire experience very rich and rewarding. Recommended.

— Jim Casper

The Transparent City

by Michael Wolf

Heavy Light

Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan provides a subjective and lively glimpse into contemporary Japanese lens-based art. In this book, Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku showcase the work of thirteen Japanese artists who participated in the 2008 ICP exhibit of the same name.

Heavy Light unites different generations of photographers working with different techniques, such as cityscapes, kitschy portraiture, video installations and fantastically-staged scenes. In their introduction, Phillips and Fuku explain that their focus is on three themes: urbanism and nature, individual versus collective identity, and the relation of the adult to the child. While these ideas seem relevant to almost every culture, in the pages that follow, the reader learns how the Japanese, specifically, address these conflicts.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa, for example, turns to vegetables. In Ozawa's series "Vegetable Weapon," female models pose with guns constructed from ears of corn, carrots, heads of lettuce, peppers and leeks. Ozawa combined his personal interests in eating, cooking, and women, with an external eye on the world's violence, creating a juxtaposition that provokes laughter along with pensiveness.

Perhaps better-known and slightly more conventional are the portraits by Hiroh Kikai. For decades, Kikai has taken street photographs of people passing by a temple in Asakusa. Kikai provides brief character sketches in his captions, such as, "A maintenance man for industrial dishwashers" or "A man who said he'd just had a drunken quarrel." His raw, honest images convey the personal preoccupations of the quotidian Japanese passers-by.

On the other end of the spectrum is the imaginative and unsettling photography of Miwa Yanagi. Yanagi stages intricate, black-and-white reenactments of traditional fairy tales. In "Gretel," a dazed young girl chews the finger of a veiny, spindly arm. Yanagi explores the antagonistic and ambiguous relationship between the characters.

One of the great things about this compendium is the revealing interview with each photographer. In addition to being able to see an overview of their work, we get to know the personality and ambition of each photographer through this conversational exchange.

Asako Narahashi, for one, explains how she went from creating B-movies to shooting photography with her "eyes deliberately out of focus." She made her ethereal urban landscape series "half awake and half asleep in the water" without once looking into the camera's viewfinder. In her interview with Fuku, she remarks, "I choose a spot, go into the water, snap the shutter, and leave the rest to the camera. It's like I say, 'Okay Mr. Camera, treat me well!' I also pray that the camera doesn't break." Narahashi's humility underlines her creative genius.

The book also includes the work of Makoto Aida, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Kajitani, Midori Komatsubara, Yukio Nakagawa, Tomoko Sawada, Risaku Suzuki, Kenji Yanobe and Masayuki Yoshinaga. Heavy Light makes for a great introduction to the recent and contemporary photography scene in Japan -- from quirky to serious images, all rooted somehow to the history of Japanese art.

— Hilary Moss

Heavy Light:

Recent Photography and Video from Japan

by Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku

Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986

Thousands of contemporary photographers and photography-lovers know Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss as the high-energy couple who curate, organize and host FotoFest, the world’s best international photo festival and portfolio review that takes place every two years in Houston, Texas.

Fred and Wendy are also happy globe-trotters, constantly traveling around the world to participate in photography festivals, conferences and portfolio reviews — looking at new work, encouraging promising photographers, and helping to introduce like-minded people to each other wherever they go. They are highly-respected and well-loved by many, many people in the world of photography.

What comes as a pleasant surprise, however, is to discover the tremendous photographic output that the two have generated themselves, over the past 40 years, working individually and together as photographers, journalists and activists for human rights and social justice. A retrospective of several photographic series that they made in the United States is being shown for the first time at the large and wonderful new wing of Le Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium.

Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986 is an extended look at cultural and political life in the United States over nearly three decades of change and stability. A book of the same title has been published to coincide with the exhibition.

The work on display touches on some of the most important historic events of the last half century in the U.S. — the Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan, Vietnam War, American drug culture, Feminism, and local and national politics, to name a few. They traveled with and photographed well-known figures from that era, including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

Beyond the big stories, they immersed themselves in local issues in various parts of the South. They documented rural life, poverty, and the struggles for survival and dignity in small communities throughout Texas over an extended period of 13 years of self-initiated investigations.

The photos are rich in humanity, and very quiet in drama. They are not typical news photographs. Instead, they reveal complex stories in a matter-of-fact way that is quite refreshing. Xavier Canonne, director of the museum in Charleroi who spear-headed this retrospective, writes in his introduction: "The subjects photographed in each area were not predefined by the photographers. Instead, they worked in concentric circles, discovering and recording moments of daily life, the evidences of social class, and the ceremonies – religious, scholarly,social and sportive – that shape collective existence and reflect its origins. Everything in this work has informative value: people’s dress, their hair, their food, their way of standing in front of the lens or ignoring it...”

In an excellent interview, Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss talk about lots of issues, and they speak articulately and passionately about their personal beliefs. When asked what lessons they learned from their long journey in Texas, Wendy replied:

In all these works, there is an understanding of the importance of history and the record of that history. We have a deep understanding of the depth of human struggle and the need to continually document, expand the memory of this struggle and move forward with it.

What is depicted in these works is still relevant to U.S. contemporary history. With the Civil Rights Movement, one of the young African American men who assisted Fred in working with the Civil Rights Movement in Savannah was the first black student to integrate Armstrong Junior College in Savannah. This man is now Mayor of Savannah. This story is very relevant to the current U.S. presidential election and what Barack Obama says he stands for.

The realities and results of the Vietnam War interconnect with much of what is happening to U.S. soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – and certainly the official treatment of veterans’ health and psychological problems related to these wars and the first Gulf War. Once the visible combat wounds are treated, and hopefully, healed, current treatment of U.S. veterans is not dissimilar to what happened to U.S. veterans during and after the Vietnam War. This is especially true with post-traumatic stress syndrome problems, brain injuries, and immune system problems associated with the use of depleted uranium weaponry.

Certainly, the histories and ways of life we photographed in Texas 20-30 years ago continue to be relevant to contemporary political and social developments in Texas and the United States.

This exhibition, and the book, are important reminders of the power of photography (and personal activism) and how it can affect positive change, directly or indirectly. Anyone who is interested in the history of the United States, human rights, and documentary photography will find value in this work.

— Jim Casper
Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986January 24 to May 24, 2009

Photographs by

Wendy Watriss & Frederick C. Baldwin

Portraits @ Cooper

The Body as Billboard: Your Ad Here

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: February 17, 2009

TERRY GARDNER, a legal secretary in California, returned home from work recently to find two police officers waiting. They said her brother had told them he thought she might be having a breakdown because she had shaved her head.

Ms. Gardner, 50, said in a telephone interview that she had told the officers that she was fine and had shaved her head for an advertising campaign by Air New Zealand, which had hired her to display a temporary tattoo. She turned around and showed them the message, written in henna on the back of her head: “Need A Change? Head Down to New Zealand. http://www.airnewzealand.com/.”
Ms. Gardner was among 30 of what the airline calls “cranial billboards.” For shaving their noggins and displaying the ad copy for two weeks in November, they received either a round-trip ticket to New Zealand (worth about $1,200) or $777 in cash (an allusion to the Boeing 777, a model in the airline’s fleet).
Jodi Williams, director of marketing for Air New Zealand, said half the participants selected the flight, because many were either New Zealand expatriates or, like Ms. Gardner, had visited and wanted to return. The participants were, in marketing parlance, ideal brand ambassadors: when co-workers or strangers behind them in the grocery store line asked about New Zealand, they could speak enthusiastically right off the top of their heads — so to speak.
Peter Shankman, author of “Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work — and Why Your Company Needs Them,” applauds the airline for the “Tom Sawyer handing out paintbrushes” approach.

6 Painters and Photographers....

P A U L S T R A N D

"I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time."

~ Paul Strand

D A V I D L E V I N E

I liked the way this artist makes portrait. It really draws attention of the viewers. It also shows the personality as a whole which viewers will remember for years..

I tried some .....

A D O L F W O L F L I

The way he put pictures in the middle of his art draw my attention and i think its really cool. I agree it will distract viewers from the picture when we look at this picture first but as a whole it will draw attention of viewers as an artistic frame or matting.

A N D Y G R I F F I N

I found this photographer in Internet. I liked his portraits very much so i am including him over here. I liked his way of blending portraits with background very much.

W R I G H T M O R R I S

I always like dynamic shape and lines in photographs. I think it also draws attention from the viewers. Angle from which he takes photograph makes really solid objects with dynamic shape which i liked about this photographer.

P H I L I P P E H A L S M A N

This photographer uses different techniques to portrait different people. Some of his portrait is very straight forward portrait but some we can find with lots of movement in it. I liked the light settings and simplicity of his portraits.