28-NOV-2013
Graciela Iturbide
I'm always looking for the accident of the surreal. The world around, as it is, creates these accidents. It's called unpredictability. So many surrealists create the accident whether through staged lighting or actors. Iturbide embraces the unpredictable.
This unpredictability is what draws me to Iturbide. She has worked all over the world but is best known for the photographic projects she has undertaken in her native Mexico since the 1970s. Like most convincingly surreal photographs, Iturbide’s are often ostensibly about something else: the lives of Zapotec people in the matriarchal communities of Juchitán, for instance, or the customs of Seri people in the Sonoran Desert. But out of these quasi-anthropological engagements, she arrives at images that seem to contain other forms of knowing. Her photographs are firmly of this world — birds in flight, children dressed up as angels, animals at the moment of sacrifice — but they have an expectant and otherworldly air.
Vivienne Flescher
Vivienne Flesher is an illustrator and photographer. Her photos are exceptional. She works in a collage sort of style.
Inspiring...
Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark is part of a group of photographers interviewed by Cheryl Dunn for a project she funded through Kickstarter called
EVERYBODY STREET. I have to confess that I'm not a fan of the cult of street photography. I like photographing in public, but the notion that somehow a "street" photographer is showing an image more charged or meaningful or "real" is absurd to me.
I like some of Mark's work... and find the interview presented here interesting.
1965
Vivian Maier
I was searching for art galleries in Florida (a state bereft of the arts, for the most part) and came upon a new-ish photo museum(?) in Tampa that has
AN UPCOMING exhibit by
VIVIAN MAIER someone I've never heard of, but apparently the whole world has. It seems she made a body of work beginning in the 40s and into the late 80s and rarely showed her work to anyone. When she couldn't pay her storage fees any longer, her boxes of negatives and prints were sold at auction. Someone who was doing research for a local history book in Chicago bought some of her negatives, didn't find what he wanted, and put the boxes aside. When he finally looked at them he was overwhelmed by the work, didn't know what to do with it so he took his question to the group
HARD CORE STREET PHOTOGRAPHY on Flickr (which as a "heavily curated group" would have rejected Maier's work). The upshot is that fast forward just 4 years, and there have been numerous exhibitions and two books published of her work. I bought one by
JEFF GOLDSTEIN.
After reading it i can say that I know Vivian Maier. Intimately. Her work is personal and her eye is a woman's eye. She makes me want to buy a Rolleiflex and some 120 film.. Vivian Maier died and her obituary was posted just a day or so before the original buyer of her legacy finally got around to trying to locate her.
01-Sep-2009
Vanessa Winship
Mistakes in photography are accidental images that create distinctive opportunities for expression.
How will these mistakes happen with the purity of digital?
