Jonas Bendiksen

Pictures have a way of bringing you directly to a place.  The distillation of immediacy is best exploited through photography, and though the term, "documentary" is some what vexed, it still serves its purpose when an artist chooses to examine a social or political context. The main problem posed by the notion of documentary is that an image must service reality and justify itself with the truth.  What is true, is an objective ideal, and when set against the parameters of a frame which are always inescapably subjective,  definitions become ambiguous terrain.  I think overall the best way to define something as documentary, is if the photographer is working from life, without manipulating the scene, a kind of - take it as it is - mentality, made visual.  

Jonas Bendiksen brings us directly to the outskirts of Russia.  His body of work entitled Satellites is probably my favorite collection of images that I've seen in recent years.  It is admittedly my taste: out of the way locales, saturated colors, a mixture of interiors and exteriors, wayward people, gritty ambience, and shifting moods.  As a whole, he draws together a cohesive picture of the former USSR, in parts.  Nation states still unrecognized, towns all together abandoned, defunct factories and buildings deteriorating in between sunny beaches and dark winters.  He's getting at the feeling of something that once was, now lost, and in transition towards reformulating itself - a new national identity cultivated from the bits left over, post cold war. National pride is still intact with statues and flags but they seem like anachronisms now, amidst a new cultural landscape.  

Here documentary merges poetry and fact, lilting between the notion of institutions and the people that continue to service them with little money or direction.  Bendiksen also uses the refrain of satellites pictured in the countryside, or captured off the television, in order to address all these outposts (Transdniester, Abkhazia, The Ferghana Valley, and the jewish autonomous region near Birobidzhan) that surround the dominant Russia - but the implication is that these areas don't get covered, or can't communicate effectively with other states politically or economically, rendering them isolated, with grave repercussions on the citizens that inhabit these regions.  Cut out of the global marketplace in any viable way, Bendiksen manages to show how people survive in a climate that doesn't cater to their needs, and that is always, endlessly linked, to an imagined past.  

(Note to the reader, my apologies for any inconsistencies in reproduction.  I had to scan the images from a book with dual page layouts.)

Katie Kline

What demarcates Katie from most photographers that I know, is that she has a real sense of humor.  Her pictures are like divine little jokes cultivated from the juxtaposition of the natural and the fabricated.  She's like a sweet rendition of Martin Parr, and an oddball version of Elliot Erwitt.  What Katie predominantly exploits is scale.  The duck meeting its brethren unaware of its adjoining falsehood is exemplar.  She's drawn to the unusual evidence of simulation like the carved hedges, monuments erected, or wallpaper constructed.  Taking a tour through her world feels like pouring over postcards in which something always pops surreal.  We are so used to reality being manipulated into shapes and form that verge on the absurd that we almost take it for granted, and Katie's pictures give light to much that is overlooked in passing.  

Ryan Spencer

Obsession is the fundamental basis of all good creativity.  There has to be a desire, a push, something to strive for, and sometimes even a perceived resolution in mind.  But obsession as the subject matter of a body of work, can be even better.  Ryan's latest piece is a series of polaroids taken from movies that feature Naomi Watts.  Here the B-list actress is both defied and lust worthy, a casual companion, and a close friend.  Her treatment is vaguely blurred, reminiscent of Elizabeth Peyton's portraits of celebrities, and her representation is cheap and reminiscent of a production technique that Warhol would exploit.  The collection of images as a whole makes her into a pop art icon, and a pseudo-pornographic fantasy.  In different instances she looks both glamorous, fantastical, vulnerable and casual.  The bits and pieces of context look both natural and fabricated, as if Ryan was alongside her on a road trip, there in the instances when she wakes up, or more intimately as she is getting ready and not wanting to be examined.  

Within the larger context of media and the ever collapsing boundary between public and private, this work feeds into the notion that anyone can, and should, be viewed.  Though I think Ryan's intent is somewhat innocent, and more of an examination of how representation shapes our perception of celebrity, I do think his desire to fixate on one actress also illuminates how easy our access to the personal has become.  It's as if he has created a relationship with Naomi that is just as viable as one that we would shape in our daily lives.  Now that everything is online and up front, I like the fact that Ryan is using more traditional modes of voyeurism - the television set and the polaroid, soon to be obsolete as the computer and the digital camera trump them.  

  

For as long as I've known Ryan he has been making films and then shooting stills from his own self created narratives.  And then progressing from this, he has begun to pin-point subject matter in mainstream films that has a cultural or political cache (in his last series he examined the representation of the twin towers in an exhaustive anthology of films).  And then here, with Naomi, he has created something that merges his own personal fascination with an actress that most people would overlook, with a wider dialogue about who we are supposed to look at and how much we should look at them.  It's as if he is a very amicable stalker, nothing dangerous, but something awkward is revealed in the distance between artist and muse, or film and camera.  The end result is always moving away from the original creation (the hollywood film) and excerpting moments that can be synthesized back into regular life, as if these polaroids were found in the bottom of a crate, in someone's attic, giving us a casual glance at stardom, drawn close.   

Rona Yefman - Part II

Photographers are collectors.  Rona is a collector of all kinds.  She fuses reality and fantasy in a large part of her work, while also cultivating a variety of portraits found in between and along the periphery of our sight.  She finds her subjects on the streets and sometimes enters their home, but the one thing that connects them all, is her attraction to elements of beauty that reflect oddity.   And it's not to say that Rona views these people as "other", rather, I think she feels them as a part of herself.  Sometimes humorous, sometimes fascinating, but always unfettered by the veneer of social class and social grace that most scramble to formulate when faced with their own depiction. Reminiscent of both Richard Billingham, and Boris Mikhalov, Rona's portraits bespeak of an aesthetic that isn't uniform, but rather seeks something that hints at the human condition as imperfect, or unsettling.  She calls this series, Strange Fruits and I can see why.  They are selected because they are unique, she is drawn to them because they exhibit something raw, and it is not a concrete explanation.  They are like unknown elements grouped together which begin to formulate a survey of the strange, thus turning them into something familiar.  

Nick Zinner

There is a certain amount of sex and polish to Nick's photos.  His book I Hope You Are All Happy Now gives us an inside look at life on tour with all the requisite players from band members to fans and tour managers, and then there's Nick, quietly snapping pictures of life, just life, and it is filled with color, modernism, simplicity, ecstasy, danger and solitude.  His shots of crowds are exuberant, you can feel the pulse and excitement of all the fans and just how dedicated they are to this one moment in time.  And of course, these images are a beautiful inversion of what Nick must experience all the time. Everyone photographing him while on stage, backstage, traveling the world and being recognized in places near and far, and then he steps on stage and takes his own image.  It is reciprocal objectification with a mutual respect.  

I think the strength of the work is that it has all the components of a good story with lots of tangents.  So much of being in a band is travel, and so much of travel is interstitial, capturing a real moment to oneself before heading to the bus, or doing a sound check, or getting dressed, is a luxury, and images seem to be Nick's antidote to this.  It seems as if he is looking around and asking, what is this comprised of?  What variety can be found in the habitual?  The answer is changing landscapes, self mutilation, tattoos, debauchery, travel, planes, empty hotel beds, languid people and idiosyncratic objects littered along the way.  Taken together these observations create a sonorous diary in their own right, without the music.  

Tim Barber

I love the way Tim Barber looks at women because his pictures show lust, youth, seduction and sweetness all at the same time.  He objectifies without desiring possession which I think is a strength that exhibits admiration, rather than exploitation.  And there is a sense of freedom in his work, where not only the women are pictured in moments of casual beauty but men as well, and that not everything has to be a direct examination, but rather, an implication - even with portraiture which traditionally attempts to reveal the nuance of a personality.   His portraits don't give me the sense that I can know the people in his images, because they are evasive in a way, but yet they exhibit the emotional with a casual grace that brings me close, without giving me too much.  He doesn't hit extremes, but works with just enough information, which I think is another delicate balance struck.  

Looking at his oeuvre one gets the distinct sense of life as lived, through the compilation of fragments of observation.  I think this is a very popular mode right now.  Something that stems from a long line of personal documentary work and then has grown to include the elevation of everyday objects as examples of form that take on sculptural or painterly associations. Eggleston was a master of the mundane and using color to illuminate the over-looked, and Tillmans took this a step further to show that all of life is a work of art that isn't necessarily attached to a personal/diaristic reading even though he was most oftentimes working with the intimate, and I view Barber's work as resting somewhere in between these predecessors.  A lot of people are doing this right now, but I think that Barber is invested in articulating this movement on many different levels.  He has worked extensively as a photo editor and has created a new way of curating through promoting artist's books and showcasing their work on his site (tiny vices) and all of this looking has lent itself to developing his own aesthetic which promotes the freedom to explore all subject matter regardless of whether it be "high" or "low" - landscape or portraiture - glossy or raw.  This is the new movement which has been formulating itself for many years, and has converged with the democratization of image making where the availability of technology has allowed for rapid production and dissemination of pictures as the most prominent means of communication.  It is a new vanguard and I think that Barber has carved out a particular niche that welcomes multiplicity as a means of grasping at the expansive nature of life, without discrimination.  

Alex Morel

It's this enormous influence that is almost unavoidable.  The intersection of film and still photography that continually inform one another, pushing each medium forward into wider possibilities.  In Alex's pictures there is a feeling of something staged versus that of happenstance, like the snapshot versus the "decisive moment."  Using the drama of available light he presents us with anonymous figures.  Though they may be members of his family, or his friends, this bears little weight upon the viewer's interpretation because each of his images keeps us at a distance by using the veil of cloth, rain, reflection or shadow to create a mood rather than a concrete description.

Black and white film is somewhat quicker at cutting to the point with shadows and provides for an enormous amount of drama here.  Without the distraction of color and it's feeling of contemporaneity, these images look as if they could be drawn from today, or the days of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, or the film stills of Hollywood's heyday era in which elaborate sets provided the backdrop for actions timed and sequenced. The only clues that hint at modernity are the skyscrapers, the cars, and the shell station sign that seem anachronistic when pictured alongside the picket fence, the mosquito net and the rocking chair.  

Alex's work may be dramatic, but it is unthreatening.  He isolates moments of solitude that then reflect back into the environment that is sharply defined by geometric forms.  It is particularly the reflection caught in the window pane of a hotel room that gives me the feeling of being disembodied when juxtaposed against the multiplicity of lights in the cityscape - a feeling not so foreign to a lot of us who have resided in major cities and find ourselves inescapably alone even amongst the noise of stimulus.  Here Alex manages to reduce the figure, as with all his portraits to another element of the environment, rather than a personality unto itself.  

Having studied under Allen Frame at ICP, I'm pretty sure that Alex was influenced by Frame's exquisite sensitivity when it comes to gesture, silhouettes and the narrative sensibility of motion pictures.  Yet Alex's work diverges for it is sharper and less ambiguous, I feel less connected to his subjects and more entranced by the formal nature of his compositions.    This is the beauty of photography though, for it has a long standing tradition of teachers and students that work off of one another, are informed and inspired by each other, and whom cultivate strong bonds that are most oftentimes found in the dialectic of visual codes rather than the rhetoric of common speech.  Each of us as photographers are indebted to our ancestry in a sense, and in this world of images it is an exchange, an homage and almost an inevitability that references arise.  You can track schools of thought and philosophies through tutelage that stems down from Lisette Model, Minor White, Ansel Adams and others into the teachers of today.