Posts tagged: fine art photography

Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most prolific artists worldwide, having published over 350 photobooks in Japan and internationally. For the Japanese artist, “photography is, above all, a way to exist”, and this is evidenced in his work; equal attention is given to a nondescript street scene as to a rope-bound woman. To view his photographs is to feel oneself immersed in his world, one which is by turns hilarious, banal, disturbing and tender.

Untitled (Shot Girl), from the Good Night London series 2011

Untitled (American), from the Good Night London series 2011

For his related series, Goodnight London and Dopo Roma (ongoing), Spanish photographer Jesús Madriñán looks at the nocturnal scene in cities London and Rome. Embracing spontaneity and experimenting with studio techniques, Madriñán assembles his camera in the middle of the dancefloor to create his portraits. The result sees nightclub scenes transformed into almost fictional settings, where subjects appear frozen and static amid the chaos and the noise of their surroundings. Exploring similar ideas in his ongoing series Dopo Roma, Madriñán captures subjects outside the clubs in the cold light of dawn as parties begin to slowly wind down. We speak with the photographer to find out more about these two bodies of work.

There’s an old episode of The Twilight Zone, one of the very first, about a middle-aged couple on a free trip to Las Vegas. The husband, Franklin, becomes obsessed with a slot machine, so much so that the machine takes on a life of its own, at least in his mind. It chants his name. It follows him. The episode is called The Fever.

Rod Serling created the episode after he himself visited Vegas, and it aired during The Recession of 1960–1961, when people were particularly desperate to hit the jackpot. Similarly, Swiss photographer Christian Lutz found himself in the city at the height of our most recent financial crisis. He spent three consecutive summers documenting the streets beneath the neon lights.

William Eggleston, American master of contemporary colour photography, is not known for his portraits. Hailed for his ability to find ‘beauty in the everyday’, ordering the chaos of the banal into compositionally appetising colour prints, his most famous works focus on the bells and whistles of Deep South Americana: gas stations, cigarette machines, Pepsi bottles. In this new exhibition William Eggleston Portraits, at London’s National Portrait Gallery until 23 October, his attention to people is given its most comprehensive airing yet.

Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn. 1961 © The Estate of Diane Arbus, LLC. All Rights Reserved

In 1971, a photographer died, leaving in her basement dozens of DuPont photographic paper boxes, filled with some 709 rolls of film shot over a span of about seven years. It would take about ten years for the collection to be officially inventoried; 43 for much of it to be shown publicly. The address of that house, home to a series of glassine sleeves of negatives and the resulting silver gelatin prints, was 29 Charles Street, New York. The photographer, of course, was Diane Arbus.

Multi-Looks in Corporal Ascension © Gerardo Nigenda

Untitled, India, 2011 © Satvir Jogi

“Photography must belong to the blind,” philosopher Evgen Bavcar writes in The Blind Photographer, a new book featuring 150 images created by artists without eyesight, “who in their daily existence have learned to become the masters of camera obscura.”

Opie No. 1

Lily No. 1

Most of Kevin Horan’s goats and sheep have stories. There’s Sydney, who was “a star,” and Poppy, who was beautiful but “so not into it” with the camera. The photographer worked with with local farm, rescues, and sanctuaries near his studio in Washington, where he has been since 2007, to make classic, stirring portraits of the animals in their care.

Waif, 2012

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you into my theatre…’ – Roger Ballen

In a career spanning over forty years, Johannesburg-based photographer Roger Ballen has garnered a reputation for surprising viewers, pushing the boundaries of the photographic practice through experimentation and exhibiting an interest in venturing into the deeper recesses of the human mind. His latest series The Theatre of Apparitions marks a departure from his previous work, yet continues in the same tradition of his unique aesthetic, combining different mediums and incorporating theatrical performance.

“Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly,” New York photographer Maureen Drennan recites a line from Romanesque arches, the 1989 poem by Swedish psychologist Tomas Tranströmer. It’s a poem she’s returned to time and again, including several years ago, when her husband Paul fell into a depression. Although we can never truly pry open the vaults that lie hidden inside another person, she was able to connect with Paul, one day at a time, by making pictures.