Written by Brian Ulrich

When I first started graduate school in Chicago, Matt Siber was one of the people I met who was pleasant enough to not only school me on the inner workings of the MFA program (he was one year ahead of me) but generous enough to lend one of his medium format cameras for several months. This began a friendship that took us photographing on road trips, traveling to lectures and exhibits together and sharing ideas and strategies. This summer I was honored to be in Matt's wedding and returned the favor by some super slick moves on the dance floor. read more »

Party Time

Written by Brian Ulrich

Some time ago friend and photographer, Bill Sullivan and I were brainstorming about the blog and what it could and could not do. It occurred to us that far too often many were trying to impose older (non internet) forms upon the photography blogs rather than focus on what they are indeed good at. It also became clear that the blog was a wonderful way to get insight into ones artistic character. With this in mind we approached a few museums with the idea of creating a blog residency. read more »

Doriam Morales, From the series 'Violencia en Guatemala', 2007-2008

Written by Emiliano Valdes

In a country where the sole possession a camera can jeopardise the bearer's integrity, being a photojournalist is not only an act of resistance but also one of faith. Faith in that the acknowledgement of such a situation by a wider audience will somehow improve it. In that by showing it to the world, capturing it in a still frame, it might become less real, less dangerous. As in a place far away from the witness. read more »

Luciana Lamothe
from the series "Clandestinas"

Written by Chris Wiley

Luciana Lamothe is a criminal. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she stalks the streets of her home city, making mischief and sowing mayhem at all hours of the day and night: overturned potted plants; the doorbells of whole apartment blocks rung incessantly; padlocks added onto chains, necessitating bolt cutters; chairs deconstructed in swanky lobbies; cans of paint spilled. What (perhaps) makes Lamothe different then your run-of-the-mill petty criminal is that she positions her acts of vandalism as urban interventions, designed to rearrange, reimagine, and generally shake up urban space. Also, she takes pictures. read more »

Written by Emiliano Valdes

A hundred years after the invention of the Lippman plate, whose colours and textures are suggested by the work of Jose Manuel Castrellón, it seems like photography has never been as free as it is today. Similar to the process that painting went through about a century ago, photography has been left behind by video and other forms of reality-recording; thus it is dismissed from any obligation to be objective. With this, it has acquired the intentional hue that it rarely possessed before. Now it is much less about the decisive instant (although its shadow shall linger for its entire existence) and much more about the narrative, expressive, exclaiming gesture. About the intention of that gesture, which rises from the need to express oneself. read more »

Arja Hyytiäinen - Notes

Written by Inga Schneider

Arja's photographs tell emotional stories combining her life with her art. In one example intimate human relations lead us to the floor boards of Swedish country houses and in rough casted private rooms in eastern European apartments, where the emotional world of the protagonist is created by a mattress on the floor and a sheet soaked through with the smell of the previous night. read more »

From Wheeeeels No. 2
1959
Photomontage on Board

Written by Chris Wiley

Stan VanDerBeek was once a major figure of the New York avant-guard. He associated with luminaries like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Morris, Allan Kaprow, and Yvonne Rainer, showed at major museums, participated in international art events, and worked as an artist-in-residence at NASA and M.I.T. In 1977, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives. But, since his death in 1984 at the age of 57, he has been largely forgotten. read more »

Yousuf Karsh
Giacometti
1965
Silver Gelatin Print

Written by Daylight

Obit Magazine has published an article by Phyllis Tuchman on the famed portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002), who is now the subject of a centenary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. read more »

Mother with Catch 22
2002
C-Print

Written by Chris Wiley

Leigh Ledare's solo show at Rivington Arms (which was at Andrew Roth Gallery in a different permutation earlier this year) is comprised of photographs, video and mixed media works that are mostly related to his unusual family life. Taken from the accompanying monograph Pretend You’re Actually Alive, the Oedipally-charged work in You Are Nothing to Me. You Are Like Air. largely focuses on depictions of the artist’s mother, a ballerina turned stripper. She often appears before Ledare's lens in various states of undress, sometimes even in bed or in flagrante delicto with one of her significantly younger lovers (though never, it should be noted, with Ledare himself). Also included is a selection of somewhat less prurient self-portraits that the Ledare has produced in collaboration with older women that he has found through their personal ads. read more »

Barack Obama, by Martin Schoeller, 2004
11"x14" archival pigment print, edition of 500

Written by Daylight

Hasted Hunt Gallery, NYC offers a Martin Schoeller limited edition portrait of Barack Obama, 11"x14" archival pigment print, edition of 500, signed and numbered by the artist for $250 (plus $18 shipping and handling). All proceeds support the Obama for President campaign. Phone: +1 212 627 0006 or E-mail: info@hastedhunt.com

Beach Scene (Louis Féraud)
2008
C-Print

Written by Chris Wiley

In Rockaway Redux Roe Ethridge continues to carve out his position as a kind of Paul Outerbridge for the post-modern era, creating pleasingly off-kilter photographs in a wild array of styles that refract the banal world of commercial photography to disquieting effect. None of these images go so far into the realm of the perverse as, say, Outerbridge’s Women with Claws (1937), but there is a feeling in Ethridge's images of too-pretty sunsets and his awkward nude posed in an art-historically confused studio setup that something just beneath the surface is amiss. read more »

Christian Marclay
Untitled (Madonna, Thy Word and Sonic Youth)
2008
Cyanotype
22 3/4 x 30 1/8 in.

Written by Chris Wiley

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY - Cyanotypes (Paula Cooper, thru Oct.11)

ROB PRUITT - iPhotos (Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, thru Oct. 11)

ABELARDO MORELL - PICTURESinPICTURES (Bonni Benrubi, thru Dec. 6)

ALLESSANDRA SANGUINETTI - The Life That Came (Yossi Milo, thru Oct. 18)

JEFF WHETSTONE - Post-Pleistocene (Julie Saul, thru Oct. 25)

MATTHEW DAY JACKSON - Drawings From Tlön (Nicole Klagsbrun, thru Oct. 18)

LORRAINE O'GRADY - Miscegenated Family Album (Alexander Gray Associates, thru Oct.11)

Invasion
2008
Photomontage

Written by Chris Wiley

On entering Rosler’s new show, visitors are asked to make a symbolic choice. You can pay a dollar and fritter away your time playing Dance Dance Revolution, the Japanese arcade game that’s basically the dance equivalent of karaoke, or for a quarter (a change machine is provided), go through a turnstile and see the show. The choice is congruent with the concerns of the work behind the turnstile, which is an update and an expansion of her Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful for an era with an eerily similar pugilistic quagmire. read more »

Hieronymus Bosch Shit
2007
C-print

Written by Chris Wiley

Attn: Department of Ironically Apt Titles.

Joel Sternfeld
February 28, 2007
The East Meadows, Northampton, MA
Negative: 2007; Digital c-print: 2008
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

Written by Chris Wiley

Joel Sternfeld’s Oxbow Archive, which is on view at Luhring Augustine Gallery through October 4 and accompanied by a catalog published by Steidl, is comprised of large-scale (5’ x 7’) prints of a single field in Massachusetts that Sternfeld has lovingly followed through the vicissitudes of the seasons and variegations of atmosphere and light. The show is suffused with a quietly elegiac grace that departs in aesthetic tone from the journalistic feel of much of his work after the landmark American Prospects. Thematically, however, the work is of a piece with Sternfeld’s most recent work in Sweet Earth: Experimental American Utopias and When It Changed, and while it is possible to approach this new body of work by itself, it is most interesting to begin by looking at it in the context of these predecessors. read more »