Travel Fashion Documentary Editorial & Portrait Photographers: Feature Shoot'

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.

This series was inspired by an assignment in which we were asked to cut a burrito in half for a client. Normally for a job, we photograph the surface of food, occasionally taking a bite or a piece out, but rarely the cross section of a finished dish. By cutting these items in half we move past the simple appetite appeal we normally try to achieve and explore the interior worlds of these products.
—Beth Galton

Cut Food, a series by New York-based still life and food photographer Beth Galton, delivers an eye-pleasing, intriguing new look at what we eat. A collaboration with food stylist Charlotte Omnès, the duo worked meticulously to showcase the dynamic cross sections, each one differing in level of difficulty to achieve. Some items looked great being cut in half without any manipulation—the donuts and ice cream, for example—while others proved to require some of Omnès’ handy styling tricks—like using gelatin to solidify liquid in the soup cans.

Brooklyn-based photographer Doug Adesko started his series Family Meal to capture an insight into American family life by documenting families eating together. To date, he’s made roughly 75 portraits over the past decade. His interest arose from early childhood memories, and grew as he watched his own daughter at the family table. The portraits seem simple at first glance, but a second, deeper look presents a subtle range of detail—dynamics among family members, hierarchy within the family group, and glimpses into how personality traits affect the behavior of adults and children when together.

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

Throughout the trip, the only consistent form of structure was the company of one another. Time became elastic and weeks departed from what our knowledge of what a “week” meant. As a result, we have collected an array of photographs which emote our sense of constant displacement yet express a deep love of travel and discovery.—Yael Malka and Cait Oppermann

After their recent graduation from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn-based photographers Yael Malka and Cait Oppermann backpacked for 70 days through Turkey, Morocco and several countries in Europe. The photos they took during that time are now collected in their self-published book Sea Blues.

Filled with idiosyncratic extractions from the artists’ journey as well as portraits of one another, Sea Blues is a collaboration between friends. These are notes from the road, a traveler’s handbook that allows the viewer to share in the amazing freedom of summery vagabonding in strange lands.

A book launch will take place at Molasses Books in Brooklyn on May 17, 2013.

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

New York-based photographer Carolyn Marks Blackwood has a knack for capturing the natural world and the beauty that lies therein. Shot from her home in the Hudson Valley where light and big sky are at their best, Clouds is a collection of color and texture, endless abstractions that stretch far beyond the capture. Gallerist Alan Klotz says of the work:

The clouds are all about the colors present in the moment, dynamic and ephemeral. It’s hard to photograph clouds, not just because they are moving, nor because of the proprietary hold on them by Stieglitz and Constable, but because in order to be successful with clouds you almost have to get away from their identity…the pictures can be nebulous, but not cloud-like…they can be recognizable, but not common. These are not common, and like their Stieglitzian forebears they are non metaphorical equivalents, aspiring to the condition of music.

During her work as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chile’s Astronomical Observatory, Los Angeles-based photographer Aspen Mays conceived the unique project, Sun Ruins. She found an abandoned darkroom at the Observatory containing discarded astronomical prints and negatives, some more than a half-century-old. For the series Sun 1957, she used a collection of mid-century silver gelatin prints of sunspots. Contact prints of the negatives were made into prints arranged to simulate a sun calendar. The series Punched Out Stars was created from old silver gelatin prints, using a simple hole punch to remove star images from the photos—a technique that yielded some beautifully abstract forms.

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