1) First off, What got you started in photography? And who are among your biggest influences?

Well I initially began photographing at age 12 when my father lent me his 35mm Nikomat camera. I took classes at school and helped start a photo magazine there, and became consumed with photography, spending my lunchtimes in the darkroom. The obsession never went away. My influences change all the time, but there are few standards that I always come back to: Sally Mann, Rineke Dijkstra, Hellen van Meene, John Singer Sargent, Gerhard Richter, Alex Soth, and Tina Barney. And lately I’ve been really into Katy Grannan’s and Jocelyn Lee’s portraits.  

2) Your project, 35 Years, seems like a very personal and intimate portrayal of your parents’ relationship. What were your intentions coming into this project? What did you expect to get out of it?

That project came out of a tumultuous time in my family.  At the time I think I expected to make a photo essay that would help me to deal with what was going on around me in a controlled way. Today, 5 years later, I see it in a much different light. I think I must have been wanting to piece things back together, yet also show the truth of the matter and was struggling with that duality.  As far of what I wanted to get out of it I really didn’t have any expectations.  I suppose in the simplest terms I wanted to complete a project since I was in school at the time and seeing photography in a new way, in project form. This project was helpful for me to process my emotions around my parents relationship, and I’m very grateful to my parents for being so open and willing with me. 

3) I see another of your projects, a(part)/together, as a counter-point to 35 Years. The methodology of your process is similar, yet it seems more of a generalized survey of a different aspect of relationships; it focuses on attachment, rather than detachment. Is this something you were conscious of during the making of these photos? What is your relationship to those you portray? 

It’s interesting that you mention attachment and detachment, nicely seen, and no I wasn’t totally conscious of that. I see that project as a reflection of my own relationship at the time, and the relationship I am still in. I was experiencing a very healthy and loving relationship with my boyfriend, and wanted to express this concept of the relationship as a subject. The project is indeed about attachment and about the point where people come together and overlap, like in a Venn diagram.  So yes, in a way it is quite opposite of 35 Years, but the subject of relationships is still at the heart of it.  

4) What do you have in store for 2011, photographically or otherwise?

I want to continue with my unfinished projects and hope to bring some of them to a place of completion, or at least close to that, projects never feel totally done. 35 Years is going to be published in Esquire Russia in March and I am very excited to have that work be seen by people in another country.  I will have work in some group shows, and who knows what else.

5) Last but not least, what’s your favorite color?

Hmmm, I love coral.

Text by Gregory E. Jones

© All copyright remains with photographer Katie Shapiro

In January we started the new format of More With Less Issue. Each time 3 images commented by the photographer. «I studied microbiology and psychology at the University of Central Florida, but spent more time in the library looking at photography books. A lot of people suggest that I must have a strong connection with my subjects due to my degree in psychology. (A lot of people also forget that you dont learn any useful information in school.)» 

«This is one of the first photographs I captured in the alligator project and it gave me a bit of confidence to continue. In the photo Desiree feeds the alligators from the “breeding pond” and tourists pay to watch.  From the podium she’ll throw chickens and rats into the swamp- killing two birds with one stone- the alligators are getting their food ration and the farm is getting paid to do its daily chores. Desiree was two months pregnant when I took this photograph, she is holding a stick to defend her from alligators in case they jump up at her.»

«Louie prepares the alligator hide for both taxidermy and leather treatment at the alligator processing plant. Louie is deaf with a very gentle voice which was such a juxtaposition to the empty carcasses surrounding him. The workers at these plants were surrounded by death every day which I felt desensitized them when dealing with these empty bodies, they became just another part of the job.»

«In this modern time there is a disconnect between the things we kill to consume as food and clothing. Once all meat and skeletal structure is removed from a 10 foot alligator, its hide can be rolled up and put into a medium size bucket for easier storage. While alive this 10 foot alligator can easily take the life of a human. I wish I could say that I find this final process humbling in relationship to the greater cycle of life, but while doing this project and being around such raw power and life, I also witnessed a lot of death. I see this final stage as just another step that goes into the processing of a living thing into a commodity.»

© All copyright remains with photographer Adam Krause

1) Tell us how it originated and how you developed the project on the American Musuem of Natural History. Nature seems increasingly quaint and fading, while at the center, someway in contrast, we found the human spectator. Disturbing and dark shapes depict us as a sort of executioner in front of exotic preys. Or behind all of this a desire for reconciliation is masked?

All of my photo projects begin in the most non-intellectual way. That is, one day I’ll discover that I’m intensely drawn to something I want to capture, and I stop the analysis right there. I experiment. I shoot to work out how to capture the thing in a way that satisfies my fascination, experimenting with every technical and visual variable. I try to keep myself from overthinking my motivation for as long as I can — at times it’s an almost mystical process. Eventually, of course, I start to see the images the way others will see them, with all the implicit meaning and references and influences.

The amnh project was the first project I ever pursued, and it followed that pattern. It started with one photo I brought home and kept returning to. I ended up buying a membership to the museum and visiting as often as I could during the fall and winter of 2005, shooting thousands of frames to end up with about 15 final images in the series. Of course the images were always about observation — me observing those visitors, those visitors observing the dioramas, the stuffed animals observing us all — but the fact that these people are shot against famously artificial nature was a bonus, a layer of meaning that I enjoyed even though it was not the reason I was there. So while I’m pleased that there’s a lot to think about — the natural versus the artificial, our relationship to the exotic, observing and being observed — those questions are not why I shot the series. 

2) The theme is also reflected in the LCD series. To put it bluntly nature appears smaller, fake, brittle, and in the alien hands of the beholder. Can we ever fill this anthropological gap?

The LCD series came about by accident. I went back to the American Museum of Natural History in 2008, three years after my first project, intending to shoot a new series of silhouettes. But in those intervening years, museum visitors had begun to act differently. They no longer stopped to stare at the dioramas. Instead, almost everyone was now pausing to photograph them with little digital cameras. Some even passed through the diorama rooms shooting video without stopping at all. And I found it incredibly frustrating. It was much harder to find someone standing still for a moment, contemplating the dioramas. And so I decided to kill time by trying to see if I could capture this new thing in some interesting way. Again, I experimented with a lot of different approaches, over many days. 

Ultimately I decided to take my cue from the visitors and make the LCD screens, and not the people or the animals, the subject. That meant that each image was shot so that everything — focus, exposure, etc. — was all about the little screens. Most important, the final images were color-corrected for the LCD screens, throwing the color of the rest of the room completely out of whack. That’s the biggest clue that the captured image has now become the important thing, not the room in which we’re standing, nor, to take it to a whole other level, the actual plain in Africa.

3) Workspace look at the workstations as many microcosms. Intimate and colourful visions that seem to reveal different personalities better than a portrait. Almost as if the things that we leave behind on the desk, and the many signs that we hang on the walls (as psychological borders) could tell our identikit…

Almost from the start I was thinking of the Workspace images as portraits of people without the people. But the more workspaces I shot, the harder it was for me to keep to that narrow concept. I kept shooting and rejecting workspaces that were simply dull to the eye, revealing in their details but visually flat and uninteresting, images that dragged down the whole series. And there was the flip side as well: beautiful workspaces sometimes didn’t offer a portrait of a person at all. And then I finally realized that I was less interested in workspaces as oblique portraits than as these gorgeous sculptural conglomerations. I was drawn to the light and detail and symmetry of something created intentionally, but not designed. And that was enough for me. 

4) Also in NYS Xmas Tree Vendors images lead us to imagine different stories, to make poetic distinctions between people, to focus on their details. At the same time the eyes fall on the background, where a decorated nature is ready to return to the homes with the distant call of the wild. The smell of what was once a forest, and now an orphanage. Yet, in hindsight, we still feel some peaceful missing…

I think the Xmas Tree Vendors images offer one kind of experience to New Yorkers and a completely different kind to everyone else. I grew up in a tiny town where my dad would grab a saw and we’d head up to the Christmas tree farm at the top of the hill. A tree might cost five dollars, but he’d have to lay down on the ground and saw the thing down. So when I moved to New York City as an adult and saw these vendors on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan every year, with the trees sitting on the sidewalks for weeks waiting to be carried home, I had a very strong feeling about what it all meant. It was a very urban sight, almost completely unrelated to my own Christmas memories.

At the same time I romanticized the vendors, as if they were something from Miracle on 34th Street. I imagined them tending trees all year on Canadian tree farms and then driving them to New York on trucks to sell on the corners. Only when I started talking to the vendors, introducing myself and asking to shoot them, did I discover that it’s actually an extremely competitive business, dominated mostly by a few companies who claim certain corners around the city year after year. Probably half the vendors I shot were simply hired hands, taking a break from some other job to stand in the cold for a month and sell. On the other hand, some of the vendors fairly closely fit my fantasy fairly closely . A guy named Tom drives down from Alaska every December in a pickup truck with his wife and little boy. And he looks and acts the part. 

5) Many of your works speak of the city, maybe your city, and of its less tens aspects as in The Urban Wilderness. How is it living in a city «having grown up in a tiny factory town in rural Pennsylvania». What do you carry of your past in your present and how you express it through photography?

I have a vivid memory of a time my family visited Philadelphia when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. We were walking down the street and suddenly my parents walked me to a stairway that led down a hole in the sidewalk, that went underground. I had never heard of subways before, so when I discovered that day that there were trains running in tunnels under the streets, my mind was completely blown. I was stunned and delighted, as if I’d discovered Santa’s secret workshop, or Superman’s hideaway. And there’s a part of me that still feels that way about cities. People walking and riding underground! Highways in the air! Elevators to the sky! Moving to a city for the first time was like getting off a bus and stepping into the distant future — a crowded, dirty, expensive future, but amazing nonetheless. I’ve made an effort not to erase that feeling of awe and wonder. Someone recently asked me if I would have as much success as a photographer if my subject weren’t New York City. I have no idea. I do know that New York is such a rich and strange place that I look forward to walking out with my camera every day to try to capture it. Not every artist is as lucky finding a muse.

Text by Steve Bisson

© All copyright remains with photographer Joseph O. Holmes

Dear readers,

I rarely show my photos and even less I take part in photographic competitions. Shutterblues’s Copycat Contest, however, struck me. The idea behind it is unique and suggests a time of reflection that should be of interest to all photographers. Well sure I did not imagine even to be rewarded for that…  

Steve Bisson

Copycat contest: #1 is Steve Bisson

Here’s what Steve says about his photo: “It is part of a project I did on a place called the Island of Deaths. A place where many people died during WWI. Now it’s a memorial…”

This is exactly what I was looking for with this little assignment. Steve’s photo changes and deepens the meaning of my photo: it’s still an island but also can be seen as a tomb, I was very moved when I received this.

Thank you Steve, my photobook is being printed by Blurb right now and will be shipping to Italy very soon I hope.

For whoever is interested in photography, Steve is executive editor of Urbanautica, a great place for “landscape photography and the human interface with the natural world”. A great source of inspiration.

In January we started the new format of More With Less Issue. Each time 3 images commented by the photographer. When we first met Anna V. Shelton she told us «I’m still trying to find my voice with photography, but am realizing more and more that I’m drawn to nature and subjects that seem to have stood the test of time, or are barely hanging on! My idea of a vacation is to simply wander around forgotten places with my camera. It’s definitely a form of escapism. I have a rather unhealthy obsession with old stuff. It’s comforting to think I can recreate this personal aesthetic through my photos».

We are glad to feature once again her quiet and picturesque depictions of nature.

«It’s interesting seeing these three images together because they were taken years apart and in contrasting environments. The first was taken in a neighborhood close to where I live in Portland, Oregon. It’s an older neighborhood and everyone has very manicured lawns. This yard was, by far, the most unusual and visually interesting to me. I remember trying to maneuver the shot so as not to get any extraneous elements.» 

«The tropical foliage Polaroid was taken in Maui. I was drawn to the rings around the trunk of the tree. This particular garden was straight out of a Rousseau painting.» 

«The last image is fun for me to see, because it was taken in a state park here in Oregon. There were people all around and I saw this building. I walked all around it, trying to find a way to incorporate it into a shot, without giving away the fact that it was a restroom facility. Finally I noticed that if I peeked over the brush, and isolated the top just so, it appeared to be some sort of abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere, or at least that’s what I imagined in my head. I guess you could say I really enjoy creating illusions in some of my photographs.»

© All copyright remains with photographer Anna V. Shelton

1) You are a street photographer with a very personal and intuitive sense of human substance. Could you talk a bit about what you do?

«Streetphotography is the genre of genres (Leica / Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum…). This kind of photography is intuitive. If you stop for a second to think about what are you shooting it is gone. I shoot things that have an impression on me, but can’t tell why, I just shoot, the click machine is like a beat of my heart. I cannot have in mind a 35 mm. square registered in a 1/250 part of a second (humankind limitations). Once I develop the images I find myself surprised by the frames I took. The photographer getting unexpected results from his own work! Like magic! Like alchemy! 

The beauty of the camera machine is that allows you to register a capsule of reality hundred times faster than a second. One person imagination has got limits, expected limits. If  I shoot what I planned the results will be those I planned, nothing new will come. If I shoot a still life, I am not pushing the camera qualities as far as they can reach. Reality is like a theatre where different realities get crossed and you do not have control on them. If you pay attention on what surrounds you, the stimulation of continuous inputs will keep you excited and awake. Face expressions, body language, compositions, details… that come from reality, you can tell there is human substance, you can say that it is real, smell it, you can feel identified.» 

2) As a young photographer what is your perspective towards the world, and how do you approach your subject matter?

«We cannot forget that these pictures are documents too, they talk about this time, this season, these real people that were there that day… In new trends photography (planned portraits) you can smell they are planned, the expressions are fake. You can tell that for the perfect set, the tightness in the body, the serious look. Contemporary artistic photography has left aside reality, I don’t know why. But if we take a look to many photography galleries around the world we’ll see the lack of it. In the newspapers they want narratives (beginning-middle-end stories) but not single frame stories. I understand photography as a celebration of life. Every picture I publish is an homage of the moment.»

3) What is your attitude with people? How do you generally move in the city and choose locations? Do you return to places that interest you? Is it also random walking and travelling?

«My aim is not to be noticed. I am interested in what surrounds me without being involved. Most of the times people do not realise I took a picture of them. If they do, I am already in my way to talk about it or if I stay, I must admit I just took an homage to the moment. When I say I am taking an homage of the moment some people keep walking, some smile, some think (by their look) I am crazy or that I am lying, and with very few people I have an argument. Usually I do not wait, I shoot as I walk. I carry the camera in my daily life. My work is my diary.»

4) Living to capture, to breath the moment. Is there any difference when you are photographing in a new place? Tell us of your recent trip and street photo shooting experience in New York. 

«There is a big difference when you are in a new place! I found NYC a very hostile place to shoot. Everybody agreed to look suspiciously at my camera and me, I had more arguments in three weeks in NY than in one year shooting in Barcelona. I only spend 25 days in NY. It was probably me being too aware of myself shooting. My conclusion is that shooting in a new place is naturally hostile. It takes some time to feel comfortable to shoot in a new place. In three weeks I enjoyed a gradual change. More time you spend anywhere better pictures you take. »

© All copyright remains with photographer Enrique Muda

In January we started the new format of More With Less Issue. Each time 3 images commented by the photographer. In September we introduced the work of Francesco Celada. We are glad to suggest him again, with few images from the series A lady on the bridge told me hallo. 

«I was particularly tired that day, but I’ve decided to do a really last walk around the block; and there he was…. on a corner behind Liverpool station. I have suddenly pictured in my mind the idea of the weight that modern society may exert on ourselves.» 

«It is not necessary to look for an isolated spot to find intimacy with your lover; it looks like the columns of this building offered to this couple the “natural” environment for their private moment.»

«Islington has a density of over 10.000 people per squared kilometer; it is inevitable to share spaces of darkness and spotlight.»

© All copyright remains with photographer Pierfrancesco Celada

1) Your work is a clear recognition of photography as an artistic medium or a form of exploration of space as a conceptual laboratory. How did you get to photography, tell us about the obstacles and the visions that accompany you in the continuous testing of sight?

«It soon became clear that I would never become a photographer of advertising, or fashion, and I’d never in my life done reportage, while admiring and loving a lot of authors who have dedicated their lives to these areas. Photography has always been the means by which I tried to discover what is around me, is the tool that helped me, and helps me, to solve questions or change perspective on things. I’m always interested in people, or rather the observation of people, often from far away, almost hidden, and from there acting as scientists do with their microscopes. I like to focus my artistic research on characters met by chance on the street, and to invent stories about them, and to ask questions about their lives. Often I think my interpretation of reality will always be different from that of another, in this sense we are unique, as everyone looks at something in a subjective manner, and therefore different from someone else. This aspect of photography fascinates me more than anything; the fact that what is visible to us may be read, seen or written in a wide variety of ways. With a camera in hand I feel the need to define my vision, try to compare it with that of others, understand the differences of perception between what I see and what another person sees. Many of my works develop the theme of the “same time same place” seen from different perspectives and points. Reality can be read in many different ways by each other, and the environment changes through the perception of people. Photography so helped me to search this way, which keeps changing. That’s what fascinates me, inspires me and pushes me to continue to use the camera.»

2) You recently participated alongside artists from very different disciplines to the group exhibition Meli Melo: It’s a Mess! at Redchurch Street Gallery. Tell us how photography can live and evolve in a contemporary world that enhances contaminations and suggests rapid evolutions of thought?

«It was my first group exhibition in which different mediums – from painting to the installation – were involved together with photography. I don’t think that nowadays we can talk about photography, without seeing in it important contemporary influences. Photography, especially that called “artistic”, needs to consider outside influences intrinsic to the world we live in: advertising, press, fashion, design on one side and the classical arts, painting, sculpture and literature on the other side. I think the concept of photography has expanded, enlarged and moved away somewhat from the “Bressonian” assumption of formal perfection that existed at the beginning of the century. Looking at a picture, together with a painting or a sculpture, becomes extremely interesting. Our mind almost automatically recognizes the photograph as a child of all the other arts, and at the same time recognizes the great importance within the contemporary world that, in recent years, with the introduction of digital photography and its subsequent processing has generated invasions of field and exciting contamination.»

3) The series Untitled awakens attention to the fragility of the glance and the diversity of the moment, but also to photography as an endless possibility. The presences become extras before the lens that slowly tames them. The moment is a succession of fractions, bursts of light, situations in the making…

«When I first approached photography what struck me most was the fact that the camera, contrary to what one might think, always fires different images. One of the most important topics for “distorting” photography that places it outside the canonical definition of art is its reproducibility, the fact that an image can be copied and reproduced through the media forever. If we think more carefully about the photographic medium, however, we realize that equal images will never exist and that every time a camera snaps it impresses a single reproduction. Untitled is based in part on this. Thinking of the Heraclitean representation of time – that Man as subjected to the inexorable passage of time cannot have the same experience twice – photography is the appropriate way to lessen this idea. From this point of view a moving background, or a slightly different light, completely changes the meaning of the image. It is interesting the contrast that the environment generates in these images; it appears that the buildings, roads and buildings remain the same and seem immune to this logic. The opposite is presented as the characters become real actors who change, move, grow old and “perform” in a scene.»

4) 12 Years Old leads us to reflect upon our relations with the urban landscape, sometimes too idyllic even in its form of representation. A project that calls for a less binding dialogue with space. How did you develop this work?

«I wondered how someone else sees the same place that I see, what are the differences of vision of one man to the other of the same landscape, or the same stretch of the city. I toured the city with a little boy, gave him a camera and asked him to shoot whatever and whenever he wanted. I tried to set him free in his observations. I was interested in catching him when he was shooting. Thus was born a work that is based on multiple points of view of a single image. A major limitation of photography is that it can capture only a small part of reality and that alone, excluding in this way countless other shots. In this work the same moment splits into two images contemporaneous in time and space, succeeding in showing us two views of the same identical moment.»

5) Re-Tales again addresses the issue of the truth or illusion of reality often portrayed in an absolute way. Far from a serious documentary tradition this project also invites us to a confrontation with the world around us.

«Re-Tales somehow links up conceptually to what I later developed in 12 Years Old. It is central to my photographic research to find ways and techniques to scrub the physical limits of the camera. The fact that the photographer can choose only a tiny portion of reality in many cases has led me to find gimmicks to be able to insert the same image in different ways. Within  Re-Tales the mirror becomes the means by which we can see something behind the photographer. The mirror can be thought of as a place of reflection and of doubling reality. Mirrors and photography are very similar in that both are limited areas of interaction of light and signs produced by it. As in a mirror, in a photograph we don’t see anything but an image, a reflection, and so an interpretation filtered by the photographer’s eye.»

6) Voyeur deals with the distance. The one that separates us from others, and that sometimes fails when respect is missing.  When does voyeurism start? 

«In Voyeur, the images are those of people being spied upon or watched without being aware.  A contemporary voyeurism that becomes institutionalized in a society where behind the pretext of security any place can be photographed filmed and archived. In this way the distinction between public and private becomes increasingly blurred and everyone becomes the actor in a global big brother. The photos were taken in Vancouver. I felt like one of those reporters who lurk in the bush for hours, immovable, watching strange animals, and trying to capture the perfect moment. The apartments in my eyes became like so many theater stages in which different stories were held. I was collecting those plays as film stills and in doing so I was questioning that unknown life and time. Investigating somehow. I am extremely interested in the voyeuristic aspect of photography, the camera designed as an extension of the human eye and as a possibility to create stories. Spy stories.»

Text by Steve Bisson

© All copyright remains with photographer Alessandro Teoldi

In January we started the new format of More With Less Issue. Each time 3 images commented by the photographer. Jess T. Dugan is a large-format portrait photographer currently living in Cambridge, MA.  Jess earned a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an ALM in Museum Studies from Harvard University. 

Dad after work

«I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where my dad still lives, but moved with my mom to Boston, MA at the age of 13.  Every time I go home, I make an effort to photograph my dad.  I had been waiting all afternoon for him to come home from work so I could make a portrait of him in his uniform, but he got home much later than expected, by which point it was dark outside.  My only option was to photograph him outside on the back porch, a floodlight illuminating his face, with the night sky behind him.  This photograph could be perceived as being about the military or the war, but to me it is primarily an intimate photograph of my father.»  

Marc and Nicholas

«This photograph is of my uncle and cousin in Goldsboro, North Carolina.  Because I was raised in the south but spent my teen years in Boston, I have a dual sense of where I’m from or where “home” is.  This image was made during a trip back to the south where I was exploring my own sense of home and examining the experience of feeling like I belonged there but no longer fit in.  When I visit Arkansas or North Carolina, everything looks simultaneously familiar and foreign to me.  Riding on Marc’s knee while he mows the lawn is a coveted position among his three kids, and Nicholas often falls asleep in Marc’s lap while he’s going around and around on his tractor.»

Peepaw in his pine trees

«Peepaw is my grandfather.  He spends a lot of time in the woods and finds peace by sitting beneath his trees with his hands rubbing his dog Moose’s fur. In this photograph, he is standing in the middle of his plot of land of pine trees, a place he goes often and holds sacred.  When we were there, he pointed out the details of every tree and his concerns about the trees being wiped out by pine beetles. It is a wondrous thing to see someone so intimately connected to the landscape around them. I left him small within the frame to try to capture the magnitude of the effect that nature has on him.»  

© All copyright remains with photographer Jess T. Dugan

SHORTCUT OF THE DAY: MICHAEL TEN PAS

© All copyright remains with photographer Michael Ten Pas

In January we started the new format of More With Less Issue. Each time 3 images commented by the photographer. Zheng Yaohua studied Chinese language and literature at Shanghai Normal University where he received his Bachelor’s degree in 1985. He has been a video editor, motion graphic designer and a writer for more than a decade before starting to treat photography as a serious tool for his art creation. Zheng currently lives and works in New York City. «At the end of 2006, after reading for the second time Joel Sternfeld’s On This Site, a book juxtaposing landscape photographs with texts about a series of tragic events in American collective memory, I decided to make a book for another type of memories. I started photographing the sites where people’s private memories were attached, recording memories that might be meaningful only to their owners.»

Little Neck Parkway at Northern Boulevard, Little Neck, Queens, New York, 2007 (Lat. 40°46’13.90”N, Long. 73°44’9.04”W)

«Tony Brandon scraped his left knee on July 7, 1967, in a semi-serious fight with his classmate George Tenet, later a CIA director, on the sidewalk near the eatery that the Tenet’s used to own (“Scobee,” or the former “20th Century”). He remembers how badly it hurt and how George worried about his new shorts being torn, which were a gift for his birthday that day.»

George J. Tenet served as the Deputy Director and the Director of the CIA from June 1995 to July 2004. He was born on January 5, 1953. It is likely that Tony Brandon’s memory of the date that had three 7’s is related to another event.

Alley Pond Park, Douglaston, Queens, New York, 2008 (40°45’12.55”N, 73°44’32.28”W)

«Dario Nardella, a 46-year-old sanitation worker, insists that Norah Jones sat on the long couch on February 20, 2003, just a few days before she received eight Grammy Awards. Nardella has his reasons when arguing with his coworkers: 1, he can recall what he ate for his brunch and whom he chatted with afterwards on that day; 2, he even talked with Miss Jones when she previously walked by down to the lawn, telling her no black ducks yet in the mere; 3, three days later, he watched the Grammys for the first time and learned the girl’s name. Surely he wouldn’t forget a face in just three days.»

Dario Nardella has been watching the Grammy’s every year since 2003.

73 Sealey Avenue, Hempstead, Nassau, New York, 2008 (40°42’55.68”N, 73°37’56.29”W)

«Dexter Evanson reshipped a tennis cap in the right color with a ring included on October 18, 2007, and emailed a notice to a Keene, one of his eBay customers, with the note that he found the ring in Keene’s return package when he opened it. Keene responded four days later to say thanks and that the ring could belong to anyone but him/her. Mr. Evanson soon replied that neither did he think the ring belonged to anybody he knew since he had never had a helper and he opened and sealed every package with his own hands; “thank you, though truly no need to send it back”. Keene asked in the next mail that whether Mr. Evanson knew of an H.L. as the letters engraved on the ring were possibly initials for a name. Evanson didn’t.»

© All copyright remains with photographer Zheng Yaohua

SHORTCUT OF THE DAY: MICHAEL PAESSLER

 All copyright remains with photographer Michael Paessler

In January we started the new format of More With Less Issue. Each time 3 images commented by the photographer. The work of the Danish photographer Martin Petersen primarily deals with the emptiness in spaces. We are glad to have looked at his portfolio and to introduce to our readers the series Byggeplads. «There used to be a small field here, and a forrest and even some small houses. But the trees and houses have been torn down, and the field torn up to make way for a new road. I had been there the day before, but the construction workers were still at the construction site, so I just took a photo of a bulldozer and went home. Two days later the weekend had started and the construction site was empty so I went back.» 

Byggeplads #6

«In this picture you get a sense of what have been done to the place and what it felt like to walk around alone on the construction site. No sign of trees, houses or construction workers, just this haunting sense of isolation and destruction.»

Byggeplads #7

«On a foggy day you get the sense that the colours get drained out of everything. This blue cable didn’t seem to know. It was visible from far away and from its place leaning against the rubble it seemed like the only thing containing colour present on the construction site.»

Byggeplads #9

«At the outskirts of the construction site the power cables had been drawn. When visiting they seemed more like a guideline to where the construcion site ended, and where the sorry remains of the field startet.»

© All copyright remains with photographer Martin Petersen

This new chapter of Urbanautica editorial “The Sense of Nature” introduces for Manfrotto School of Xcellence some terrific shots of the Belgian artist Karin Borghouts. Her gaze becomes itself a “builder” of places that tell the relationship between reality and the viewer rather than some kind of staged nature, subjected to a mere tool of composition. References to art history, to painting, and to set design, help to fuel this kind of unsolvable riddle, between indisputable truths and illusions, between the pure perception and the certainty of being part of a well-known world.

Skeleton © Karin Borghouts, 2009, series ‘Study items’

«Every photograph represents history. It points back to what ever existed somewhere in space and time. As an extra layer of meaning I have photographed the relicts of life which is a metaphor for photography itself. Photography is for me the art of playing with memory. It triggers an associative reaction between the photograph and the images which we already have in mind from before. Skeletons are the most perfect sculptures. Nature needed thousands of years to perfect them. Nature as our tutor of art. What remains of these bones is the photograph, a new item in my archive of the mind.»

Flower © Karin Borghouts, 2009, series ‘Study items’

«Nothing more meaningfull and cliché as a flower. I photographed a series of flowers made in the early twenties for educational and scientific purposes. The photo, which is the flattened frame of these sculptures, looks like a drawing or a painting. By using a pink background colour, they reveal their erotic and sensible character, more than they do in real. It is a transformation into a field far from its instructional goal. Can photography connect this flower back to what the sense is of nature?»

Demonstration room © Karin Borghouts, 2009, series ‘The Show’

It seems as if we live to learn. We have to teach others what we learned. Knowledge streams through us and gets coloured. It happens in a classroom. A demonstration room. In closed séances the knowledge is presented. In the arena. On an altar in front of dissecting glances.

 All copyright remains with photographer Karin Borghouts

1) First off, talk to us briefly about your approach to working. Is there any type of philosophy you follow photographically?

«I was actually involved with doing lung cancer research before I became a photographer, and my boss told me that our research needed to be like digging a mile deep and an inch wide, not a mile wide and an inch deep. I’ve adopted that approach to how I approach photography, and it’s led me to photograph several long-term projects. Dedicating a fair amount of time to a particular subject requires both curiosity and direction, which often feel like they contradict each other, but when they work together, hopefully they’ll lead me through a process of discovery. Also, I think that the ability to return to a subject repeatedly allows me notice different aspects of a place or person each time I come back.»  

2) A great sense of community shines through in your work. In some of your projects such as Lathrop Homes and Youth Boxing, you shed light on communities that might otherwise go unnoticed or even ignored by those on the outside. What role do you see yourself in as a photographer, and what do you hope to achieve through your work?

«My role as a photographer has evolved while photographing Lathrop Homes in particular. I started photographing here because of my ongoing interest in planned communities. Lathrop Homes, has indeed gone unnoticed and ignored for a long time, until recently and is currently undergoing a preservation battle because it’s on some very desirable real estate in Chicago. Many people drive by and think it’s abandoned, so my objective was to evoke the complexity of the community that resides there, but also show a landscape and built environment that defied many expectations of public housing. I had my own aesthetic concerns that I wanted to achieve which are related to people in transition and public space, and these concerns coincided with a hope that the powers that be would reconsider demolishing a place that has historic and architectural value and replace them with generic condos.

The photographs of the youth boxers also deal with a community in transition, but instead residents dealing with displacement, it’s young boxers photographed as they go through adolescence and then adulthood. Actually it was through many of these boxers that I became familiar and interested in what was happening with housing issues in Chicago, as a fair amount of them went to boxing rings at field houses that were connected to public housing developments. However, with these photos I hope that viewers can engage with these contemplative moments that occur between rounds and reconsider the perception that boxing is all raw physicality. I like these moments when the boxers are thinking about what they just did and thinking about what they need to adjust and fix for the next round.»

3) My favorite project of yours is Lathrop Homes. There are several beautiful and memorable photographs in this series,  and I think that’s largely because you photographed this community with such a great sense of respect and compassion. Could you talk a bit about how you got involved in this project? Did you find it difficult as an outsider to gain access into these lives and homes that you photographed?

«Of course. Before I started photographing Lathrop Homes, I was photographing a public housing high-rise named Stateway Gardens on the South Side of Chicago, and where I spent lots of time making boxing photographs. As that complex was being demolished, I found out about Lathrop Homes, which I heard was an atypical public housing development located on the North Side of Chicago. As I mentioned before, it was very different than the high-rises that are often described as “notorious” and “vertical ghettoes.” Instead, it was a very verdant and open development on the Chicago River that was located near lots of popular shopping complexes. The incorporation of the natural landscape with the elements of the city were very striking and I knew immediately that it was unique amongst public housing stock. I knew the names of a couple of community leaders through a freelance job I had there, and told them that I’d like to do a photo project on Lathrop. They were originally pretty wary of my presence but I kept going back, and I provided my subjects with copies of the photos I would make each time. Most everyone I met was very generous with their time, and sometimes would even have me over for dinner. I was going there at least once a week for a couple of years, and it was a pretty small development, maybe three or four blocks, so I became a pretty familiar presence pretty fast. I was familiar with what was going on with their tenuous housing situation, so I wanted to be pretty sensitive to their needs. I never wanted to overstay my welcome. Whenever I returned, residents would often greet me with, “Hey, Picture Man! Where’s my picture?!”» 

4) What’s coming up next for you, photographically or otherwise?

«Continuing to dig and dig into my next project. I was doing some research about the history and architecture of Lathrop Homes and found out that it was built as a result of New Deal policies in the ’30s. As I read more, I learned about three planned communities, conceived and constructed by the government called “Greenbelt Towns.” They’re in Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin, and located outside of Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, respectively. I’ve been shuttling back and forth between the three towns, and it’s been a really nice breath of fresh air, both conceptually and geographically. I’m becoming interested in utopian ideals and if and how they affect how communities are planned and experienced. Stateway Gardens, Lathrop Homes, and the Greenbelt Towns all started out with the best utopian intentions, but the experiences ranged from lasting success to dystopic failure.»

5) Last but not least, what’s your favorite color?

«While most of what I own are various shades of black and grey, I have to say my latest project leads me to say “green.” Most certainly green.»

Text by Gregory E. Jones

 All copyright remains with photographer Jason Reblando

More With Less Issue means 3 images commented by the photographer. Tania Feghali left home at 18, travelled through different geografies, worked in film, escaped alive from film industry, started photographing. First portfolio will be published next april on Zoom Magazine.

Yeye Omo Eja

«That day had been a very cloudy and stormy day. It  was the celebration of Yemanja, queen of all Orishas and mother of the sea.  Hundreds of people came to build altars in her honor. Then suddenly the sun appeared surrounding everybody with this unexpected goldish material.  As to response to their prayer a kind of miraculous light enlightened everybody. This woman was standing in the water holding the goddess’ statue with a touching poetry. She made me think about all the expectations that we have from the sea and how people interact with it as a holy substance and a source of fulfillment of their dreams.»

The waiting

«The matter of the waiting has always fascinated  me . How thoughts follow one another into a limbo, in a compressed atmosphere , a parallel universe, a crystallized fragment of time, as when the storm  is about to come across town: leaves start to make rounds, air becomes thick and wet, dogs start to bark and people are into a dramatic  waiting for something to happen. Everything around seems to be expecting: the road is attending as  men or trees. And how we  stand stills, waiting for something or someone, following  in space and time this nameless substance.»

El oriental

«El oriental is an Uruguayan gaucho. He has big strong hands and he wears a beautiful handmade knife at his belt. When i met him he reminded  me some of  Garcia Lorca ‘s characters. I immediately thought that he was - some how- out of this world. I met him while he was waiting to perform in a big rodeo in a small town in Uruguay under a big storm. The rodeo never took place. He used to ride from Uruguay to Brazil by horse to honor the memory of a great  gaucho martyr.»

 ©  All copyright remains with photographer Tania Feghali

This new chapter of Urbanautica editorial “The Sense of Nature” introduces for Manfrotto some terrific shots of the Belgian artist Karin Borghouts. Her gaze becomes itself a “builder” of places that tell the relationship between reality and the viewer rather than some kind of staged nature, subjected to a mere tool of composition. References to art history, to painting, and to set design, help to fuel this kind of unsolvable riddle, between indisputable truths and illusions, between the pure perception and the certainty of being part of a well-known world.

“Skeleton” © Karin Borghouts, 2009, series ‘Study items’

«Every photograph represents history. It points back to what ever existed somewhere in space and time. As an extra layer of meaning I have photographed the relicts of life which is a metaphor for photography itself. Photography is for me the art of playing with memory. It triggers an associative reaction between the photograph and the images which we already have in mind from before. Skeletons are the most perfect sculptures. Nature needed thousands of years to perfect them. Nature as our tutor of art. What remains of these bones is the photograph, a new item in my archive of the mind.»

“Flower” © Karin Borghouts, 2009, series ‘Study items’

«Nothing more meaningfull and cliché as a flower. I photographed a series of flowers made in the early twenties for educational and scientific purposes. The photo, which is the flattened frame of these sculptures, looks like a drawing or a painting. By using a pink background colour, they reveal their erotic and sensible character, more than they do in real. It is a transformation into a field far from its instructional goal. Can photography connect this flower back to what the sense is of nature?»

Demonstration room © Karin Borghouts, 2009, series ‘The Show’

It seems as if we live to learn. We have to teach others what we learned. Knowledge streams through us and gets coloured. It happens in a classroom. A demonstration room. In closed séances the knowledge is presented. In the arena. On an altar in front of dissecting glances.

MATILDE SOLIGNO: ARCHIALOGIA

«In these deserted spaces the presence of past events, even when long-time passed, is very strong. We can look at the different environments as at excavation sites, in which the viewer is pushed to build a possible narrative by observing «what is left.»

The whole project is shot on medium-format negative film and then scanned. The different images are intended to retain and merge together the subtle imprecisions specifical to the negative and the digital, in order to enhance their nature of surfaces and their oniric/time-suspension feel.»

1. When looking at your projects, we understand how photography as video, are useful tools for a better understanding of geographic transformations. There is a scientific pragmatism. We get the impression that we should not necessarily be photographers to use photography. The goal is more important than the medium?

«I certainly agree with that. As an artist, I always question my art-making process. One of the most important questions for me is: “Am I using the right medium to convey my ideas?” My firm belief is that form should function in balance with the concept. Concept without a proper form is an incomplete idea, an unfinished thought. In turn, an aesthetic form without a concept can be visually pleasing, however empty and tiresome. 

I am attracted to photography on an intellectual level, precisely because of it’s inherent democratic form. Anyone can take a good photograph. Perhaps not great, but good never the less. And - nowadays, everyone makes images, daily. I am intrigued by how photography becomes art, based on photographer’s intention. This form, or medium, in a way, is readily available through the use of a quality camera - so, for an artist to develop it into art it requires a strong concept, or a specific goal. 

I am often attracted to photography that is used as an art medium by artists from other fields. They are usually free from the rules of the photographic medium, yet they apply their own sense of aesthetic form to their images. Often, the results are very intriguing. I also believe that artists should not live in their own creative bubble. I look to other disciplines for inspiration- Geography, Sociology, Biology, Environmental sciences, to name a few. In this way, my art remains relevant and appreciated by wider audiences.» 

2. In 2010 you curated the exhibition Hyperreal World which brings together a number of photographers (Dana Fritz, Justin James Reed to name a few) who had examined the relationship between human activity and the environment. One way to broaden the dialogue and debate on the changes induced by our species on the landscape and habitats. What have you learned from this experience?

«Curating the Hyperreal World was one of the most enjoyable experiences in my career. This was my first true curatorial experience. Over a couple of years, I met a great number of photographers who shared similar ideas about the world that surrounds us. 

I learned a lot through this process. I started, in a fairly naïve way, with an idea of building an exhibition I would enjoy seeing. At the same time, I was working on my photographic project in foreclosed real estate properties in Florida’s subdivisions. So, I simply started looking for artwork by other artists that would inform my own work. At first, I was calling this project The Environment of Politics of Environment, but the closer I got to the date of the exhibition, certain artist’s works began to dominate my ideas, and I switched my direction, based on a couple of artists I knew I really wanted in the exhibition. I learned to keep an open mind and let the work I found and admired shape the exhibition. I will definitely use this approach in future exhibitions. Starting with a fairly open idea and allowing the work to shape the theme. I really enjoyed the gradual process of exhibition building.»  

3. Your Speculation World project continues the previous theme, targeting the concept of limit. After many years the development in Florida has had an interruption, as if it had entered a state of limbo, well described by your aerial photos. Yet we perceive a degree of uncertainty in all this: who will win? How long will this picture last without the bulldozers? Nature and man are necessarily in conflict?

«This series came out of the larger collaborative project with John Raulerson, sculptor, and my colleague from Florida State University. In 2007 we set out to record the loss of family-owned farms in Florida. And pretty soon we discovered many facets of this story- I was attracted to it because of the idea of land-loss, something I already investigated in Louisiana, and my native Yugoslavia. The story was that farmers were selling the land to real estate developers, because at that time about 1,000 people moved to Florida every day. Suddenly, the economic downturn forced a lot of foreclosures in central Florida, so we started photographing in these abandoned subdivisions, and from the air, to illustrate what was originally agricultural land, now rendered useless. 

This became a story of how politics, and often greed, shapes the landscape we inhabit. The economy is slowly getting better, but there are places in Florida and other states that will not recover that easily. The homes were built speculatively, based on the projections that the American upper middle class wants to move to Florida to retire. Now, these modern ghost towns litter the landscape instead of being used for food production, or as wildlife habitats. With this project I wanted to illustrate the unsustainable direction of the progress our lifestyle dictates.»  

4. Tell us about your experience as a teacher of photography. The relationship with the students and the Internet. The contemporary photographic scenario is rapidly changing, and expanding due to the digital technology, the 3D and georeferencing. How do you interpret all this from your personal observation?

«I feel really lucky to have a chance to teach photography as fine art in today’s arena, precisely because of the constant change in the medium. Technology is something that is inherent in photography, and it shaped the history of our medium. And so it continues today. As a teacher I have ability, to a degree, through my students, to influence the direction this medium will take in the future. This daily problem solving makes my job and my career really exciting and fulfilling. 

Art education drastically changed in the past 10 years, through generational shift of instructors, and application of new technologies in the classroom. With Internet, my students and I have a real-time resource and a connection to the world outside our little North Carolina town. During every class we exchange new finds and discoveries that will further develop our art projects and help develop our careers.  

Good example is my Professional Practices course during which our senior undergraduate students prepare for their thesis exhibition, and at the same time receive instruction on professional development. Large component of this course is building a list of websites with valuable professional resources, ranging from exhibition opportunities and grants to legal services for artists. All of the students contribute to this list, and at the end of the semester, they have a wealth of information at their fingertips. 

In addition to the professional development I push my students to explore the digital toolset in their art making, while maintaining the idea that, like any other form, it should be balanced with the concept.» 

Text by Steve Bisson

© All copyright remains with photographer Daniel Kariko