The current shows at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, the winners of their annual Contemporary Photography Competition, despite their formal differences, are strangely alike—and entirely by accident.
Christine Elfman’s Even Amaranth, an eerie selection of nature scenes and images of Classical sculpture plays off Mark Jayson Quines’ companion exhibition NOBODY, which comprises snapshots of people and objects in everyday settings, interwoven with actual examples of these valuable artifacts of daily life: smartphones and Air Jordans sneakers. Despite the vastly different nature, style, and subject matter of Elfman’s and Quines’ practices, Even Amaranth and NOBODY cannily come together to form the two halves of the answer to the question what lasts? What is eternal? What will outlive us after we are gone?
Exhibition review by Deborah Krieger
“Not now.”
That was the reply to photographer David Maisel’s 2004 request to document Dugway Proving Ground. Rather than interpret the response as a dodge or definitive “no,” Maisel was was heartened, and began a decade of carefully-phrased communication with contacts in and outside of the Department of Defense, intensive vetting and, finally, permission to photograph a military installation so closely guarded that all but a few both in and outside the state of Utah know what goes on there.
Proving Ground, Maisel’s latest installment in a career-long photographic examination of the landscape, up through Feb 24th, 2018 at Haines Gallery in San Francisco reaffirms that the answers we seek through access are often incomplete.
Exhibition review by Roula Seikaly
Photographing disaster is complicated. In her pivotal work, On Photography, Susan Sontag described it as ridden with shock value, numbing and almost touristic. Later in her career, in her final book Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag revisited these ideas, arguing that war photography, despite its problems, provided a necessary documentation for the world to see. Contemporary photography of natural disasters can be colored by similar problems, often with skepticism around the photographer’s gaze and intents. New York City based photographer Ruben Natal-San Miguel confronted these issues when he flew to Puerto Rico in early December to make pictures of the destruction of his hometown paradise at the hands of Hurricane Maria. He transcends the clichés of disaster photography with his direct connection to those impacted, and his unconventional approach to visualizing it all.
A perfect snow day cliché: sitting by the fireplace with a nice cup of cocoa. Maybe a whiskey. Pajamas all day. Quality family time. Hygge AF. For artist and photographer John Pilson, however, being homebound during the northeast "bomb cyclone" storm meant a different kind of cabin fever. Pilson began finding hilarious and terrifyingly spot-on similarities between stills from The Shinning and photos from Donald Trump's life first year in office and created quick and dirty low-res mashups of them, which he's been posting on Instagram.
"These resemblances snowballed during a fit of snow day/cabin CNN fever," says Pilson. "My son and I had actually just watched John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is probably even MORE of a trenchant snowbound political allegory, but The Shining is the gift that keeps giving. I don’t know what to say about Instagram but it’s a good place for a bad case of pattern recognition.”
We are longtime fans of vernacular photography: the often strange and sometimes hilarious snapshot gems once intended to commemorate personal mementos, that are now often repurposed or collected for their unintentional artistry.
Humble's first online exhibition of 2018 will take this fascination a step further, with an appropriation-loving nod to DADA and the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s. Group Show #56: Source Material will look to artists who reimagine vernacular snapshot photography -- not just as something to collect or recontextualize, but as source material for new creations.
Cut, folded, torn, sewn, digitally altered or something else: whether it's one of your own family photos or something you've found with author unknown, we want to see your hand in the transformation process.
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