Behold

Playing With Food

Jordan G. Teicher — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:23:20 GMT

Emmanuel Pierrot describes himself as a "domesticated hen tamer, ladybird breeder, occasional gardener, gourmet, and chef." Oh, and a photographer, of course.

Pierrot's work for the French newspaper Libération combines those disparate interests into playful photos of food and animals. For years, he's been making the images to accompany a special column in the newspaper. Every week is an opportunity to exercise his imagination using images from "the world of the dream."

Though his images are surreal, they aren't altered in any way. He wants viewers to be surprised and delighted by the real, fantastic situations he sets up.

When it comes to finding his materials, Pierrot is resourceful. He uses food from his fridge, which he purchases at the local market, and animals and insects from his garden. Sometimes his neighbors lend him their pets. One day recently, a bee flew in his window, and he immediately set about trying to incorporate the insect into his work.

Though photographing food and animals is his specialty, Pierrot says that he doesn't always use these elements in his work.

"When it can serve the story, I do it. I always try to serve the story I have in my mind," he said.

Pierrot said his goal is to use a few basic elements to make a simple but powerful impact. Often, it's a satirical comment on current events. His photo of a disembodied cow's head references a mad cow disease epidemic. One, featuring a pigeon's carcass on top of a car, is a comment on suburban life. Another, featuring a pig, intends to tackle the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal.

Pierrot says that he sees his work as being in conversation with traditional still life in art. But while the still life often incorporates creatures that are dead, Pierrot says he wants his photos to feel alive.

Watching the Neighbors, New York City–Style

David Rosenberg — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

There is a long history of photographers blurring the lines between voyeur and documentarian, specifically when it comes to city living, both on the street and inside living spaces. Arne Svenson’s latest work, “The Neighbors” adds to the canon of blurring the lines of photographic voyeurism.

Walker Evans’ turned his lens on Depression-era New York City subway riders in a series of photographs. Gail Albert Halaban’s “Out My Window” embraced voyeurism in New York City looking inside apartment windows from a number of different buildings, while Merry Alpern’s “Dirty Windows” took a peek into the doings inside a sex club near Wall Street in the mid-1990s. Shizuka Yokomizo’s “Dear Stranger” series asked strangers in London to stand by their windows at a specific time so she could take their pictures. Michael Wolf’s “Tokyo Compression” series looked at commuters in Tokyo, while Kohei Yoskiyuki snapped pictures of 1970s couples fooling around and the people who watched them in his series “Park.”

Svenson’s work, on view at Julie Saul Gallery through June 29, in many ways continues in the tradition of voyeuristic photography, this time focusing on one building directly across from Svenson’s home in Tribeca.

“I focused on only one building—namely because it was the one directly across from me,” Svenson wrote via email about the series. “This allowed me the opportunity for visual consistency of structure, building surface, and glass reflective quality. Oddly enough, the dirt on the surface of the glass became a crucial determinant of the color and style of the photographs—the diffusion and color distortion of the city grit give the photos an almost painterly quality.”

Svenson began the project after he inherited a bird-watching telephoto lens from a friend. The lens provided him with the technology; the rest was the result of living and working as an artist in New York City. He explains:

“New Yorkers are masters of being both the observer and the observed. We live so densely packed together that contact is inevitable—even our homes are stacked facing each other. I have found this symbiotic relationship between the looker and the observed only here—we understand that privacy is fluid and that glass truly is transparent.

It shouldn’t be surprising that street photography was born here, and that the most iconic works are of those who didn’t know they were being observed. Think of the nurse and soldier kissing in Times Square. That’s iconic New York.”

Since the opening of the show, there has been an element of controversy, mostly from neighbors in the building who feel their privacy was invaded. Svenson wrote that he has fully protected their privacy:

“The people I photographed were not aware at the time. That said, I have been committed to protecting their privacy—and stringent about not revealing their identities. I was not photographing them as specific, identifiable personages, but more as representations of humankind, of us. And specifically the ‘us’ who live in New York. Therefore, I only reveal the turn of the head, the back against a window, the legs under a table.”

The Glory Days of Old-Fashioned Color Photography

Alyssa Coppelman — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:14:00 GMT

A beautiful new book from Aperture, Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman, examines the history of color photography from its origins in 1907 and the unveiling of autochrome, the first commercially available color process, through 1981 and that year’s landmark exhibition and book The New Color Photography.

During the space of those 74 years, the list of renowned photographers whose careers were marked by their use of color is seemingly endless, including Alfred Stieglitz, Irving Penn, Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman, among many others whose work is featured in the book.

Making for a well-rounded depiction of the prevalence of color photography, the pages of Color Rush are also full of film stills, advertisements, newspaper clippings, fashion magazine shoots, spreads from National Geographic, and other mediums providing enough material to make any photography aficionado happy.

News about photographic film in the past several years has been grim, with previously popular film stocks discontinued, the death and resurrection of Polaroid film, the bankruptcy of Kodak, and various other threats to what was a cutting-edge art form as well as a ubiquitous way for people to capture moments from their daily lives. Color Rush makes a compelling visual case for preserving the tools of the past as photography moves strongly toward digital technologies.

This book’s release also coincides with the color-photography pioneer William Eggleston’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, on view now through July 28.

Going Digital: The Fourth Triennial Exhibition at the International Center of Photography

David Rosenberg — Sun, 19 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

For their fourth triennial, titled “A Different Kind of Order” the International Center of Photography focused on the sweeping influence of digital photography on established and emerging artists.

The exhibition, featuring 28 video artists and photographers from 14 countries, will be on view through Sept. 8 and touches not only on the ever-changing landscape of the world but also the evolving ways in which artists express themselves.

Speaking to the media on May 16, ICP executive director Mark Robbins said about the show, “It throws us into the wonderful tense ambiguity that I think all good art does, where we question the assumptions about ourselves and our world.”

Artists in the triennial have lived through natural and nuclear disasters, social upheavals, and shifts in political and cultural landscapes.

ICP has brought to light themes in which the artists express these worldwide changes, such as the resurgence of collage through mixed mediums, the influence of the Internet and the use of both analog and digital photography.

That range is evident when viewing the work of Sohei Nishino, who spends weeks exploring cities, shooting up to 10,000 images that he then incorporates into sweeping collages that touch on both fiction and nonfiction. Or Shimpei Takeda, who placed radioactive soil from Fukushima, Japan, where the nuclear disaster took place in March 2011, in contact with photosensitive sheets of film. Or when viewing Lucas Foglia’s “A Natural Order,” featured in Behold last December, which studies people who chose to live off the grid.

“The digital revolution that began in the early 1990s seemed to us to have swept everything in front of it away and completely changed the context in which all photographic works, whether analog or digital, are seen and experienced today,” said Christopher Phillips, one of four ICP curators who worked on the show.

That experience includes a new generation of artists who have been raised entirely in a digital environment, something ICP made note to acknowledge.

“A whole generation of artists who have grown up entirely in the digital era and for whom the idea of mixing digital forms and analog forms, media from all kinds of sources, that was just part of the heritage that they grew up with and continue to explore,” Phillips said.

Phillips added that the curators “finally came to feel that a very different kind of image order is evolving at the same time very different types of social orders are also becoming more and more visible, so that’s what shaped our selections for the show.”

Along with Phillips, Kristen Lubben, Carol Squiers, and Joanna Lehan curated the exhibition. To learn more about the triennial, and the 28 featured artists, visit the ICP website.

Thailand’s Magical Tattoos

Jordan G. Teicher — Fri, 17 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Cedric Arnold was on assignment in Thailand when he first saw a shipyard worker covered head-to-toe in tattoos. This was Arnold's entry point into the yantra tattoo tradition, one that goes back hundreds of years and spans several countries in Southeast Asia.

Arnold's project, “Sacred Ink,” consumed four and a half years of his life and took him all over Thailand to cover this tradition in its entirety, from the giant ceremonies for devotees to the rare tattoos that are only found in certain parts of the country.

Incorporating elements of Buddhism, Animism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism, the tradition is believed to go back as far as the ninth century, and there’s even historical evidence of soldiers wearing the tattoos for protection in battle during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Yantra tattoos are still believed to have mystical powers and can be worn on the skin or drawn on other surfaces. Once seen as the mark of gangsters or even assassins, the tradition has become increasingly popular—and expensive. Yantra attracted international attention when Angelina Jolie got two of the tattoos on a trip to Bangkok. Now tourists travel there specifically to get inked, and the subculture has drawn lots of media interest.

“I wanted to do something a lot more personal,” Arnold said. “I chose 25 people that I found really interesting, and I narrowed it down to 15 for the final series. I wanted to know a lot about them.”

Throughout the course of the project, he came across a wide variety of people for whom yantra is a way of life, including a boxer, a monk, a construction worker, a policeman, and a taxi driver. He also got friendly with the tattoo masters, who let him behind the scenes of the complex ceremonies that are part of the tattooing process.

He saw men go into trances during the ceremonies—leaping around and clawing at the air when receiving a tattoo of a tiger, or hunching over and laughing wildly when getting a tattoo of a Hindu wise man. Arnold also learned about the ink involved.

“The ink is traditional Chinese ink but there's ash, snake venom, all sorts of things,” Arnold said. “It's very much a voodoo mix, sort of a witches’ brew in a way. There are some really wild rumors about certain tattoo masters who have all sorts of crazy things in there. One liquid people describe as corps oil, harvested from dead bodies.”

Getting access to this world involved overcoming one special hurdle.

“If you're not tattooed yourself in certain tattoo worlds, people will be very suspicious and not let you in. I explained this was a personal project, and I wanted to understand things. When they asked me why I didn’t have tattoos, I said, ‘I don't belong to this belief system, so I think it would be disrespectful for me to get one.’ ”

There were also technical hurdles. At one point, Arnold decided to try taking a photo of one of his subjects with his last sheet of Polaroid 55 film. It was 17 years out of date, so when Arnold looked at the print, it was damaged with lots of smears and marks. He loved how it looked, however, and then worked tirelessly to re-create the effect with chemicals.

Arnold also described the project as an intellectual journey. He had always been curious about superstition, and delving into this subculture helped him understand a lot about its role in Thai society, even as yantra changes and becomes more commercial.

“Yantra tattoos are going more mainstream, along the lines of Western tattooing. But the spiritual aspect of the practice in a modern, yet superstitious society like Thailand will no doubt keep it from becoming a mere fashion statement, at least for now,” Arnold wrote.

Discovering the Fascinating Story of a Mother’s Life in 1960s Nigeria

David Rosenberg — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:22:55 GMT

One of the voids left behind in the digital age of photography is the excitement and mystery of picking up developed prints from a roll of film.

Imagine the thrill Senongo Akpem felt when he and his family discovered a trove of slide film taken by their mother, Emily, during her work as a missionary and nurse in Nigeria during the 1960s and ’70s.

“I had no idea most of this stuff was there,” Akpem said about the images. “We knew this stuff was around, but I had no idea of the depth of it.”

A family friend in Nigeria collected the film and had it developed in the United States. Since then, Akpem has started to edit the film, scanning images and uploading them to a website he started called Lost Nigeria.

The images tell the story of his mother’s journey to Nigeria in the early 1960s, when she left her home in California to work as a missionary nurse at the Benue Leprosy Settlement. While there, she fell in love with a Nigerian reverend doctor and had three children—two daughters and a son, Senongo, the youngest born in 1979. The family moved back to the United States soon thereafter and lived between Michigan, California and Nigeria over the next decade.

Many of the images document Emily’s early years in Nigeria, “when she was very much in love with Nigeria and Africa and my dad and with the idea of documenting her experience,” Akpem said.

Initially, Akpem wanted to edit the images in chronological order, but because few dates were given, he decided to group them thematically. The site has a personal, cultural, and historical feel to it.

“For a white woman, an American, it must have been very new,” Akpem said of his mother’s initial experience in Nigeria. “She was born a few years before World War II ended, and the way California was in those days, I would assume there were no black people where she was from, so for her to pick up everything and go to Africa, I think she found it amazing to document.”

Although Akpem said he sees and remembers his mother (she passed away in 2000) differently from many of the snapshots, they have also opened up a new window into her life.

“I can see through her eyes what it’s like to live in a new country and experience Africa as a non-African,” he said.

The images cover a period of 20 years from 1960 to 1980 and focus on personal, political, social, and cultural moments in both Nigeria and the United States, from Emily’s work at The Benue Leprosy Settlement to 1970s life in California to imagery of air travel and signage in Nigeria.

“Lost Nigeria” is also a melding of old technology with modern social networking. Many of Akpem’s relatives have been happy to share the images included on the website, but there has been another, surprising element to the project.

“I still get emails from biracial Nigerians who were raised around the same time and they want to reach out and say ‘thank you’ for posting this because ‘your family’s experience was also my family’s experience,’ ” Akpem said. “People are sending me their pictures almost because they have to share this with me. I might take a few and get in touch with people and see if I can put them up on the site as a way of sharing experiences.”

Celebrating Life With Children Struggling With Illness

David Rosenberg — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:00:15 GMT

Lynette Johnson had taken many photographs of children during her photography career when she received a call from her sister-in-law in 1996 asking if she would photograph her baby who was stillborn.

“The first child I photographed (who had passed away) was my niece,” Johnson said. “The idea popped into my head that if I could do it for my niece, I could do it for anyone.”

Johnson put that idea into motion after meeting a woman who worked in palliative care at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center. Inspired by the palliative care work, Johnson told the woman she would be open to providing photography services for the patients and that she would do it free of charge.

After nearly a decade photographing children and their families in the Seattle area, Johnson formed Soulumination in 2005. The foundation provides photographs to families who have children ages 18 and under facing life-threatening conditions. They also provide images for children 18 and under who have parents who are terminally ill and nearing the end of their lives.

Soulumination began as a small project for Johnson that spread mostly through word of mouth but quickly grew after People magazine published a story about Johnson in 2005.

“People magazine, no one reads that,” Johnson recalled with a laugh about the story that would help launch Soulumination. “I had no idea! I’m not really a pop culture person. Years later someone came with their sick daughter and had a copy of the issue with her and told me she had read about me before she had a sick child and asked me to sign the copy.”

Johnson teared up a couple of times while speaking about Soulumination, clearly still moved by the philosophy of the foundation.

“For a while I think people would worry about [portrait sessions] because a lot of local media would paint what we did a little more toward death than what it needs to be. We promote it as celebrating life. We promote ourselves as loving and accepting of the kids.”

“People, when they hear about what I do, no one says anymore ‘I don’t know how you do what you do—I couldn’t do it.’ It’s way more accepted because we have presented ourselves in a positive way in the community. … It’s the most amazing and rewarding thing, and it helps more when there is a community around and everyone understands and accepts; things are starting to change about death and dying (in Seattle).”

That isn’t to say things have always been easy, especially when Johnson first started taking pictures.

“I did it all the first couple of years. We had 24 kids the first year, then 74 kids, and you just can’t take on endless grief,” Johnson said.

Johnson also stressed that their services aren’t always a final portrait. “Quite a few of the children we photograph end up surviving. Not a large number, but for sure a significant number; some miracles in life and others had a better prognosis from the start.” The captions featured here were provided by Soulumination with the most up-to-date information they have.

As demand grew, Johnson started working with other photographers in order to help more families. Today, she and a team of approximately 40 volunteer photographers do portraits for about 200 families a year. The families not only receive images on a disc but also prints, an album with 12 images, copies for relatives, and a bracelet with the child’s picture in it.

Johnson said that while she is sensitive to every family’s unique situation, she approaches the shoots straightforwardly.

“I always try to do [the shoot] exactly like a healthy kid shoot. I would do the same things I would do for a parent with any child; I try to make the shoots feel as if it was just really normal for the family. You try to overlook whatever affliction it is, get them in great positions and shoot.”

That isn’t to say it’s always easy, especially for end-of-life shoots. “You can also do your work quietly, and amazingly enough I bond with them [clients]. I’ve had good mentoring from the palliative care unit. They explained to me that it’s OK if tears go down your face, but don’t ever go in that room owning that grief: It’s not your child; it’s not your loss.”

Part of that quiet is making sure not to add anything to the shoot, so Johnson and her team rarely use any styling (unless someone wants to wear makeup) or bring in big studio lights.

“We pride ourselves on being good at capturing the beauty in people exactly as they are,” said Johnson.

Although Johnson began the foundation in response to the need from a family member, her services have provided a welcome possession for many families.

“I haven’t heard of any family wishing they hadn’t done it,” Johnson explained. “Mostly they write in later saying that even if they had to put them away for a while because they were hard to look at, the pictures are now special possessions.”

“I consider my clients to be my friends, and I’m starting to realize that feeling is mutual; in life you can’t always assume that.”

To connect with Soulumination, visit their Facebook page.

Making Airports Gorgeous

David Rosenberg — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:36:40 GMT

As a kid, photographer Jeffrey Milstein enjoyed playing with airplanes and eventually got his pilot’s license when he was 17. After a career as both an architect and graphic designer, Milstein decided to focus on photography and is currently concentrating on his childhood passion.

“When I was in high school, I had an 8mm movie camera and I would film movies flying over Los Angeles,” Milstein said. “I loved that whole viewpoint, the flying viewpoint.”

Milstein’s current project, “Flying,” looks at airports from the flying viewpoint, taken from relatively low altitudes.

“I have a friend who has a plane and loves to fly, so he has been flying while I take the pictures since I can’t do both,” Milstein said.

According to Milstein, it can be easier for a pilot to get clearance to fly above 7,500 feet, “but it’s high up there and it’s not as good for the photography I want to do. Sometimes we get lucky and get a good clearance; other times they can be really busy and they will let me go once across and I hope for the best.”

“It’s kind of like a living organism,” Milstein explained about how he sees all of the moving parts of an airport. “There are lines of airplanes and then the cars that move have their lanes and the trains taking people around are moving on another level, so there are all of these things, and it’s interesting how it happens.”

Capturing all of that motion from the air is a highly complicated process. Milstein and his friend go up about six or seven times a week to try to get some good images.

“Initially I liked the patterns of the runways and planes, and then we started shooting in the evening and it became a different type of picture,” Milstein said.

To compensate for changes in light and perspective, Milstein brings along multiple cameras that alternate between having high ISO capability for low-light situations and camera bodies with higher resolution and lower ISO when he has more light to work with. Shooting with a stabilizer to try to compensate for turbulence doesn’t necessarily help. “It’s still really hard to get really good shots,” Milstein emphasized. “It’s a little more complicated than your average photograph because you have to hire a plane and time it with lighting plus carrying a bunch of equipment and getting permission if you want to get down to good altitudes.”

“Flying” isn’t the first project in which Milstein has focused on aeronautics. In 2007, he published a book on commercial airlines in flight (seen from below) titled AirCraft: The Jet As Art. The images are currently on view at Reagan National Airport in D.C. until Dec. 8.

A lot of the images for “Flying” that Milstein has taken have been at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports, but he has a wish list of others he would like to add to the series.

“I like the big ones,” Milstein said. “In the United States it would be Chicago, L.A., maybe San Francisco. I think probably London Heathrow would be amazing because the place is huge … in some ways there is a similarity (between airports), but there are certain things that are different. The bigger airports get the really big jets.”

From Plastic Surgery to Gender Reassignment: Searching for the Perfect Body

Jordan G. Teicher — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Michelle Sank is interested in young people and the issues they face.

One of her early projects, called "Bye Bye-Baby," explores the way boys and girls interpret their understanding of masculinity and femininity. Following suit, her more recent series, “In My Skin,” deals with the pressure young people feel from media and pop culture to achieve a specific physical standard.

“Social consensus in Western society today is particularly focused on physical beauty and achieving and maintaining the 'perfect' face and body,” Sank writes on her website.

Sank said this has been a problem in previous generations, but that today’s young people are exposed to more images than ever before on the Internet. She said she hopes her series makes viewers “question the pressure that is created around this ideal for perfection at such a young age.”

That pressure manifests itself in different ways. Some of the young people Sank photographed for the series have had or are considering having cosmetic surgery. Others are recovering from eating disorders or suffering from body dysmorphic disorder.

A few are transgender and have had sex reassignment surgery. Sank said she hopes to show that transition as “a positive experience for young people who have struggled to conform to a gender that is alien to them all their lives.”

A handful of her subjects don’t fit into any of those categories, like Roland, a young man who dresses like Lady Gaga and occasionally assumes her identity when he leaves the house.

Sank shot almost all of her subjects in their bedrooms. “I wanted the rooms and the objects within to express the individuality of the subject and to become metaphors for a way of life,” she said.

Sank said she looked for people to photograph by advertising her project on forums. Finding her subjects was initially difficult, but often photographing one person would lead her to others. Once they understood her subject, Sank said, they would agree to pose.

Though her subjects look different from one another and face unique issues, Sank said they all share something in common.

“For me, it is all about acceptance and changing one's body to achieve that,“ Sank said.

A Shocking Look at America’s Altered Landscapes

Alyssa Coppelman — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

There is an overwhelming sense of disbelief when looking at David Maisel’s aerial photographs of open-pit mines, toxic waste sites, logging, freeways and other scenes that mark the toll humans have left on earth.

But the images found in Maisel’s recent book Black Maps—American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime, published by Steidl, are all unaltered photographs of landscapes and the endless array of colors and strange patterns are abstracted visions of environmental devastation of land.

Maisel first went up in a plane in 1983 over Mount St. Helens with one of his teachers, photographer Emmet Gowin. Because he had initially studied architecture, Maisel felt comfortable looking at the land from a similar spatial perspective.

Via email Maisel wrote about that first trip:

“It was a thrilling way to work, to see, and to make pictures. In a little Cessna, set against such a vast landscape, I felt like I became a disembodied eye. It was an act of pure seeing, or seeing with one’s entire body, if that makes sense. And that is what captivated me, more than the fact that I was in an airplane per se.”

As soon as Maisel returned from that trip, he began working from the air. He prefers to work in-depth at a given site, spending years with repeat visits and flights. Maisel wrote via email that he works “at many different elevations, since that becomes a compositional device, and as time unfolds over the course of months or years I can chart the changes to an existing environment.”

He continued:

"In a sense, that first flight at Mount St. Helens introduced me to the experience of the sublime, to a degree even greater than when working on the ground there. The level of destruction, transformation, and transmutation of the entirety of that vast landscape was profoundly disturbing, but also deeply captivating, seductive, and compelling.

“Over the years, as I’ve worked at different sites, those same feelings arise again and again. There is a kind of horror that gets twinned with fascination as I work above zones that have undergone radical environmental transformation. I don’t think that those feelings and responses decrease over time; every flight and every site is a new set of conditions. Indeed, I often don’t know exactly what it is that I am looking at, and that adds another level of unease. Why is this pond acid green? Why is this water blood red?”

Maisel foregoes prior visual knowledge of a site before choosing it, instead utilizing a combination of available research and instinct:

“In the current era of Google Earth and other mapping technologies, I’ve adapted my research methods to a certain degree. But I don’t want my research to be too predictive. I’d rather discover the site through my experience of it bodily than to feel like it has been divulged to me from a screen shot. For similar reasons, I’m not mining images off the Internet to create my work, nor am I particularly interested in drones that could make pictures remotely, at my command."

In terms of future projects, Maisel, who has only thus far photographed sites in the United States, wrote:

“I want to expand the geographical boundaries to include sites around the globe. This summer, I’ll be working in Europe. And, of course, when the call comes to photograph on Mars, my bags will be packed.”

The touring exhibition of Maisel’s work, Black Maps, will be on view through May 11 at CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder, and then from June 1 through Sept. 1 at the Scottsdale Museum of Art, in Arizona.