April 2010

Christopher Schreck is a 27-year-old photographer living and working in Chicago. Of his work and process he says, ‘When I encounter my surroundings with photography in mind, I pay far more attention to my environment, appreciate details I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, and get to record the things that make me stop and think or feel something. It boils down to being as present as possible at a given moment.’ Christopher has work in a group show, Neon and Worried, opening May 1 at The Seneca Hotel in Chicago.

Via Lost At E Minor

Louis Porter was born in the north of England in 1977 and has been based in Melbourne, Australia since 2001. His work has been exhibited in Australia, England, Canada, Austria and China. He regularly undertakes editorial commissions and has been featured in Monocle, ADbusters, GEO, Trace, The Age, The Monthly and The Big Issue amongst others.

English born, Mark Mawson had a camera in his hand from the age of 8. After leaving school he studied photojournalism at Richmond College in Sheffield as his dream was to become a Fleet Street photographer. Following this he worked for several national daily newspapers in London including The Times, The Daily Mail and The Sunday Times until 1995 when he decided he wanted to have more creative freedom and direction over his subjects. He then moved into shooting for magazines and advertising agencies becoming well known for his celebrity portraits. In 2001 he moved to Sydney where he specializes in shooting people and fashion underwater. He has exhibited at the Roal College of Art in London and The Blender Gallery in Sydney. This work is from his series, Aqueous.

Via The Colour

When you live in a crowded house, extreme emotions and day-dreams are often interrupted by the chaos/order of the everyday life and family members force you to see the ‘real’ extreme in the ‘full house’. Springfield based photographer Julie Blackmon, who is the oldest of nine sister and mother of three children, creates new stories and memories based on her family life and also, the Dutch painter Jan Steen. In her photography series Domestic Vacations, the space – which is from time to time, her own house – is actually a non-existent room of the mind, full of memories from the past and also from the present, which is the reason that it doesn’t feel that much nostalgic, because there’s no longing for the past. It rather feels like listening to some old beloved grunge-bands. And all this is happening in this very moment. Joy switches quickly to boredom. Children are captured as though they’re subjects of a ‘still life’ painting. Pets and mothers too are not different from the objects that fill the house.

In Blackmon’s photography, subjects become timeless spaces, and spaces become memories, or reflections of the memories. Time has stopped, but still it passes so quickly that children of the past became mothers now; and sometimes acting like their mothers too. There’s something very sad, odd, familiar and funny about that. Blackmon says in her statement that her photography is both fictional and auto-biographical: ‘We live in a culture where we are both ‘child centered’ and ‘self-obsessed.’ The struggle between living in the moment versus escaping to another reality is intense since these two opposites strive to dominate. Caught in the swirl of soccer practices, play dates, work, and trying to find our way in our “make-over” culture, we must still create the space to find ourselves.’ she says. There’s a pool in the backyard. There’ll be always a pool in the backyard of our minds, because scenes from the past often repeat themselves, and if we’re lucky, they’ll do it in a very artistic way. Family life hasn’t changed since Steen painted it decades ago. And Julie Blackmon shows that the everyday life is still poetry, though there’s nothing poetic about it.

Ying Ang is a photographer of stories, journeys and contemporary quirks. Her work is centrally focused on varying themes of the human condition. Currently based in New York, Ying is a member of the Brooklyn-based photographer collective MJR. This work is from her series, ‘Boys Girls Boys’, a glimpse into the life of a ladyboy, Sri Vet, in Cambodia. Of this work she says, ‘Sri Vet is a Khmer ladyboy. She has not considered herself male since she was 14 years old. Tolerated by the local community, her only real avenues of income are hairdressing, bar work at the now defunct local ladyboy bar and prostitution. She shares a single room and one double bed with 3 other ladyboys-they take turns on the floor on a rotational basis. Ostracized as a woman as well as a man, therefore unable to work in either capacity, Sri Vet considers her role as sex worker inescapable. She is also an incurable romantic’.

SV-’I always knew it would be hard. I want to find love but here it is always the same story. I will find a Khmer boyfriend and after he spends whatever money I have and has his fun, he will leave and marry a woman who can give him children. I still fall in love sometimes though. It’s hard to put that part of yourself aside, no matter how impossible it might seem…except it’s bad for business. I don’t charge the ones I like. The one-night Khmer customers pay US$1.50. If I am lucky enough to find a foreigner for the night, he might pay me US$10. If I get a customer tonight, I will eat lunch the next day. If not, I will try again tomorrow night. It’s a difficult life to wake up to sometimes, but this is who I am. I cannot be any other way and would rather live like this than pretend to be what I’m not.’

Wandering the deserted backroads of the American Southwest, Troy Paiva has explored the abandoned underbelly of America since the 1970s. Since 1989 he’s been taking pictures of it at night, by the light of the full moon. The colored lighting is done with a flashlight or strobe flash masked with theatrical lighting gels. Many of these subjects are already gone; bulldozed, burned down, subdivided, melted for scrap or simply vanished beneath the shifting desert sand. While there are minor digital adjustments to some of the photographs, the lighting effects are all done “in-camera” during the exposure. These images are not Photoshop creations. Troy’s surrealist night photography has been published in two monographs: “Lost America” in 2003 and the award winning “Night Vision” published by Chronicle books in 2008. Both books examine the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during 20th century America’s western expansion, and the modern Urban Exploration culture that finds strange comfort in dancing through its ruins.

Lots of prints for sale in the Feature Shoot online store!

Lukasz Wierzbowski is a 27-year-old freelance photographer currently living and working in Wroclaw, Poland. Of his work, he says, ‘I like to concentrate on the relationship between me, my model and environment and try to capture something unnamed, uncontrolled and fragile’.

Mark Peckmezian is part of this years graduating class from Ryerson. He has developed an exquisite photographic style focused on the intricacies of human character. His portfolio of snapshots developed over his student period, are remarkably complex character studies. His photographs have been published in Prefix Photo and have been selected for inclusion in Magenta’s Flash Forward exhibit touring internationally. He is presently working as a research-assistant on the historic Black Star photography collection. Mark is represented for commercial and editorial work by Stash. This summer will see the release of his first book by new German publisher Pogobooks.

Lots of prints for sale in the Feature Shoot online store!

Documentary photographer, Ralf Grossek was born in 1968 in Kamp-Lintfort, Germany. He studied communication design at the University of Duisburg-Essen and his work is currently a part of the ‘Sugary Photographs with Tricks, Poses and Effects‘ photography festival in Antwerp, Belgium. Self-published books of his work are available for purchase through his website.