September 2011

Christopher Jonassen is an internationally recognized fine-art photographer based in Norway. This work is from his series, Devour, an investigation of worn-out frying pans.

John Kilar is a Los Angeles-based photographer. This is his statement:

These images represent the juxtaposition of the timeless and majestic elegance of nature’s sensory-surpassing miracles with the entangled and growing tensions of our time in culturally reconnecting with the shift away from the human condition of love.

In developing my visual perspective, I’ve discerned the fleeting significance from the invariable through emphasizing the growing collective disdain for the socially underdeveloped that has come to define our generation and crystallized over the last decade.

Through highlighting this generational discontent in honing its cultural responsibility of deconstructing traditional understanding of social roles against the unrefined purity of the emotionally captivating cycles of nature, my work serves as a middle ground to visually level and gauge the social progress of man by means of extremities occurring in class stratification.

In giving careful attention to the mediating filters that propagates socially-constructed irreverence, I aim to address the necessity of breaking down the symbolic paradigms of understanding to revisit the overlooked empathy for humanity and its greater accountability to each other.

Two years in the making, on May 23rd and 24th, 2011, Photographer Sarah Small and collaborators brought to life 120 models and musicians, at Skylight One Hanson. Chosen as one of Time Out New York’s Top Critic’s Picks, and listed in the New York Times, Flavorpill and more, the 120 model Tableau had the attention of many, long before the cast took the stage.

Maintaining it’s roots in her still photography series, The Delirium Constructions, and already the most ambitious project of her career, in 2011, for the first time, Small explored, within the Tableau Vivant, a specific social phenomenon: the ritual of marriage. With its airs of pageantry and religious rectitude, wedding ceremonies celebrate the most intimate joining of two individuals in the most public sphere, providing rich fodder for examination within the project’s framework. On the evenings of May 23rd and 24th, Small acted as the legal officiant for three couples (two weddings and a vow renewal ceremony), as she simultaneously directed the attendant Tableau Vivant cast in their own explorations of the theme, mingling performance art with reality in a compelling cocktail.

Tatsuki Masaru was born in 1974, Toyama, Japan. He published Decotora, a collection of photographs of decorated trucks and their drivers, taken between 1998 and 2007. In 2006, he started photographing in Tohoku region in Japan and has recently published his second photo collection, Tohoku, with Little More Books. This photo collection is about the culture and rituals of the people from the Tohoku area in northern Japan. Of this region he writes, ‘It is becoming urbanized, but the manners and landscapes remain. I find that this is a representative state of Japan today’. After the earthquake some of these landscapes captured by Masaru have been lost forever, and part of the profits of this book will be donated to relief efforts.

Ryan Pfluger was born and raised in Queens, New York and now resides in Brooklyn. After finishing his BFA, Ryan received his MFA in Photo, Video and Related Media from New York’s School of Visual Arts. For the last two years his personal work has concentrated on ideas surrounding the representation of man, and more specifically of young gay men. His images deal with the sublety of body posture, the gaze, body types and pushing the role of self-portraiture.

Of this work, he writes: ‘I started Portraits in the Park because I’m always thinking of ways to challenge myself and my craft. I loved the idea of creating an event in a public place where people gather, solely to make portraits. Whether they be of strangers, friends or acquaintances, that information becomes irrelevant in this situation.

‘So far I’ve photographed over 150 people for this project, with at least one more session coming up. The project isn’t just about the process and the reason for the creation of these images, but also the final outcome. I’ve always been a collector through and through. I’ve been captivated by collections and the psychological dysfunction that is now labeled as hoarding. This project is very much about the enormity and scope of the amount of people I’ve photographed. As I’ve done each session I’ve become more and more conscious of photographing more people than I did in the previous…. the need for quantity is overwhelming. While certain images have real weight and power on their own, the culmination of them all is really quite grand.

‘I’ve been making zines of each session of just a selection of 11 images. In the end I am planning on making a self-published book in a limited run of about 500 copies’.

Maja Daniels is a Swedish independent photographer currently based in London, UK. Daniels studied journalism, photography and sociology, and her work focuses on social documentary and portraiture with an emphasis on human relations in a western, contemporary environment. Some of her clients include The Guardian Weekend Magazine, The Independent, Monocle Magazine as well as humanitarian organizations and cultural institutions such as UNICEF and the European Commission. This work is from her series, Christiania.

Founded in 1971 by a group of hippies, Christiania is the Western world’s longest existing alternative society. An autonomous community in the centre of Copenhagen, Denmark with a population of around 900 people, Christiania is ruled according to codes outside of conventional law and order.

The initial hippie commune has been reinforced by a hard working mixed population of “alternativists” who are busy developing local businesses and giving hordes of tourists guided tours. “The Freetown” attracts around one million visiting tourists every year since Christiania has become a pertinent and rare example of an alternative domestic organization.

Tim Doak is a Northern Ireland based photographer whose work explores the relationship between photography, faith, and modern day life. Having recently completed an MFA in Photography from the University of Ulster, his final body of work, Beautiful Dawn , has earned him numerous exhibitions, awards, and inclusion in photography festivals throughout the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

You recently completed a series entitled Beautiful Dawn. Can you tell us a little about how the project originated and developed over the year?

‘The Beautiful Dawn work was created during my studies at the University of Ulster, under the tutelage of Paul Seawright, while I studied for a Master of Fine Art Degree in Photography. The project started to take shape back in December 2009. I got together with a couple of photographer friends in Belfast and took part in Help-Portrait, a global movement set up by Nashville based photographer Jeremy Cowart, to encourage photographers to use their skills and give back to those in need. The venue we used to host the event was Calvary Christian Centre, a small church located in the Cathedral Quarter of the city.

I went back to the church the following month at the start of the new year, beginning what turned out to be just over a year spent connected with the church, helping out with their work with the homeless and the poor, allowing time and space for relationships among its members and those it helped to take shape and develop. After a short period I began to be drawn to one individual in particular, Jason Smyth, who had a pigeon loft on the roof of the church’.

Shooting in such an intimate capacity, how do you think the development of the relationship between you and Jason affected the work?

‘As the relationship with Jason developed, we began to spend more time together and began to trust each other more – we both became more open and vulnerable with each other. It’s interesting, it was definitely a two way process. He began to share his life with me and I began to do the same with him. Often we would spend hours talking. Talking about the weather, pigeons, life, faith, death…

‘I often wrestled with the internal dilemma while with Jason of whether I should keep talking or stop and interrupt and make a photograph. At times I missed what seemed would make a good image in favour of maintaining conversation. As time moved on both he and I got more relaxed with the presence of the camera, perhaps him more than me’.