Travel Fashion Documentary Editorial & Portrait Photographers: Feature Shoot'

For Mauren Brodbeck’s series “Urbanscape and Cityscape”, she photographed buildings in both Los Angeles (where she was living) and Geneva (where she grew up). Brodbeck looks at buildings as if they are sitting for a portrait. “The idea is to photograph building as though they are people. That way, they become portraits of the cities where they are located. In this series, I am looking for subjects that have a real structural geometry. Buildings are a kind of mirror of society. I find the repetition and rhythm of architecture is associated with human rhythms such as habits and rituals. We are all really such creatures of habit.”

To determine the colors for the buildings, she uses the colors of the location or the colors of the season. “I am inspired by the colors of the place and the seasonal colors which can really change the feel of the pictures. I start by using the color palette of the area or the persona. Then I create my own color palette based on the original color. That maintains the authenticity at the base of the work.”

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.

I made eight photographs of different men in my neighborhood. I gave each man a hand-gun and asked him to make an action pose. In our contemporary state of affairs every action is a performance. We are inundated with an endless repetition of imagery. We find ourselves re-watching what we have already seen, whether it be another episode of CSI or the endless 24-hour news cycle of conflict around the globe. We are constantly looking at the same picture: a guy with a gun.

The images of incidents we witness reveal nothing about what is actually happening. There are multiple truths attached to every image we see. Actions are interpreted and each interpretation is different because in the telling and re-telling we don’t reveal the action itself, but rather an assortment of reductions and emphases.—Steven Brahms

Violent Material, a project by New York-based Steven Brahms, explores more than the violent gun culture that exists today, but also how our vernacular imagery is generated and undermined through process and interpretation—a topic that questions the role photography plays in how we understand our world, accurately or not.

This post was contributed by photographer Mark Hartman.

One of the amazing things I have found is that you can create depth, and create perception with color alone. It seems obvious, but as I dig deeper it becomes more and more profound, and strange in ways. I think that painters deal with this issue all the time, but as a photographer, it isn’t always as obvious. I suppose part of my thinking is that if you can perceive millions of shades of color with just the red, green and blue receptors we have, you can create a possibly endless body of work by just using basic combinations of colors.—Justin Fantl

For 5 years now, Los Angeles-based photographer Justin Fantl has experimented with color strictly by using paper to play and expand on ways of seeing and constructing. The result? Beautiful and abstract images that create graphic optical illusions.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Julia Sabot is the Associate Photo Editor at Dwell.

Photo: Robin Cracknell

Photo: Alla Mirovskaya

Photo: Tony Fouhse

Photo: Seb Tec

Photo: Sarah Jackson

Photo: Stuart Cripps

Photo: Olivia Martin McGuire

Photo: Nicky Fordyce

Photo: Natalia Engelhardt

Photo: Michael Bach

Photo: Meera Margaret Singh

Photo: Malin Fezehai

Photo: Jennifer Long

Photo: Jeff Singer

Photo: Ian Addison Hall

Photo: Saul Robbins

Photo: Emmanuelle Bosse

Photo: Dick Simon

Photo: Clare Hewitt

Photo: Catherine Abegg

Photo: Carolina Lamberti

Photo: Carol Dass

Photo: Andrew Esiebo

This show was curated from reader submissions.

Los Angeles-based photographer Nicholas Alan Cope shoots architectural subjects as abstract still lifes. For the buildings he shot in Los Angeles (made into a book called Whitewash, published by PowerHouse Books), he strips all detail from the structures, leaving portraits consisting only of lines, planes and shapes. The intense, black-and-white images provide a fresh and simplified view of everyday structures in a sprawling, complex metropolitan city.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.

Austrailian-based photographer Graham Miller combines constructed portraits, documentary street portraits, landscapes and still lifes in a series named after the 1992 Leonard Cohen song, Waiting for the Miracle. Miller explores narratives created through the interplay of these images and the connections made between them. While this results in an open ended and ambiguous experience, the images seem to hold compelling stories within the fictional coastal town Miller has constructed. Miller echoes the words of photographer Robert Adams in his statement, speaking of the young protagonists that “cling precariously but tenaciously to a sense of possibility, hope, and resolve.”

For his series Crumpled Paper, Brooklyn-based photographer Ofer Wolberger took images from the pages of fashion magazines. He folded, crumpled, taped and lit them from behind, allowing the photographs to morph both sides of the page. The project was used to re-conceive and re-explore the idealized images of beauty found in women’s magazines. In some cases, the models’ faces become distorted and even grotesque, causing us to consider a different perspective on beauty.

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.

Behind the Edge showcases hotel facades in Jesolo Beach, Venice. Shot by Italian born, New York-based photographer Luigi Bonaventura, his intention is to show each structure as its Platonic ideal—as the architect imagined it. The repetitive forms and pops of color combine to create a graphic, eye-pleasing series.

When I saw Winona Barton-Ballentine’s Home Studies prominently displayed in the ICP-Bard MFA group show, currently on view at ICP’s midtown educational center, I immediately felt drawn to their obvious sincerity and consideration. In a climate where combining random objects for no particular reason on a brightly colored background seems de rigueur, Barton-Ballentine’s domestic still-life photographs offer a warmly personal alternative. I recently asked her a couple of questions about the series.

The ICP-Bard MFA group show is on view through May 9th, 2013. Barton-Ballentine’s work can also be viewed in the group show Secession Secession, curated by Colby Bird at Fitzroy Gallery in NYC.

How did you begin working on Home Studies?
“I was living in Arles, France for two months while doing a residency/exchange, and stayed at home making still-lifes all day, listening to music, looking at maps, and experimenting with French recipes. That’s when food, fabric, and domestic items came into the pictures.

“I was thinking about objects that I choose to surround myself with in America versus what I was attracted to in France where I bought things to satisfy that anxiety of being away; to try to create a sense of home. This often included things from the market and/or things that reminded me of my Lebanese and French Canadian grandmothers—both amazing cooks.

“Back in Brooklyn, part of my system for making these images was to only use objects that already existed in my home as a way to challenge the desire to consume, and to ween myself away from the mindset that to buy something meant that I would make a better photo. Instead I wanted to make the things in the images.

“This felt important to me after years of working in fashion photography. I’m also considering the tradition of domestic craft, which both intrigues and terrifies me. I knit, cooked, chopped, sewed, strung, and constructed the images in a way that embraced the imperfection of the hand-made versus mass-produced. I often found this part to be slow and frustrating compared to the immediacy of photography. It was, however, satisfying in a physical, primary way.”

What do these photos mean to you?
“They represent this time in my life and in history, as a woman, a wife, an American, and an artist. With the abundance of new technologies, image-making styles, and production resources, I chose to re-visit the foundational tools of photography—framing, timing, and focus. This seemed a fitting framework for examining the history of domestic [still] life.

“I’m interested in the place where personal questions reflect the feelings of other people in my generation and cultural circumstance. There’s no better space for this than the home. Three questions arise: how does treatment of domestic space reflect circumstance? And beyond that: what conscious or unconscious decisions determine how I create my space, and why?”

Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Matthew Leifheit is an independent writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City.