group show 39 : The Artists
Part 1/2

Clarissa Bonet 
Statement: The urban space is striking. Its tall and mysterious buildings, crowds of anonymous people, an endless sea of concrete constantly intrigue me. City Space is a ongoing photographic exploration of the urban environment and my perception of it. I am interested in the physical space of the city and its emotional and psychological impact on the body. These photographs reconstruct mundane events in the city that I have personally experienced or witnessed in public. I use the city as a stage and transform the physical space into a psychological one. The images I create provide a personal interpretation of the urban landscape.

Bio: (b. 1986) Lives and works in Chicago. She received her M.F.A. in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2012 and her B.S. in Photography from the University of Central Florida. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and is in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The South East Museum of Photography, The Haggerty Museum, and Calumet Photographic. In 2012 she was in the top 50 of Critical Mass, and won PDN’s the Curator; search for undiscovered fine art photography. Most recently she has been chosen as a winner in Magenta Foundation’s 2013 Emerging Photographer exchange.

Natan Dvir
Statement: Coming Soon is an exploration of our visual relationship with the branded city centers and the commercial environment we live in. In recent years, a kaleidoscopic net of huge billboards has enveloped the commercial hubs of New York. Giant billboards both dominate the urban landscape and blend into the background.  Always in the peripheral vision, these ads turn people moving through into passive spectators. The ephemeral nature, massive size and saturated colors create a fluid cinematic experience. People inhabiting the space underneath are pulled, unaware, into a staged set merging the reality of the street with the commercial fantasy.

Bio: Natan Dvir is an Israeli photographer who focuses on the human aspects of political, social and cultural issues. He received his MBA from Tel Aviv University and his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts (NY), after which he became a faculty member at the International Center for Photography (ICP). Based in New York he photographs around the world represented by Polaris Images agency and Anastasia Photo gallery. Natan's main projects were exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, South America and Israel including the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Southeast Museum of Photography (Daytona), Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR), and Anastasia Photo Gallery (New York). His work has been published by dozens of leading international magazines and has received recognition wining prizes around the world including the Picture of the Year (POYi), PDN Photo Annual, American Photography, and International Photography Award (IPA).

Bruno Quinquet
Statement: The ongoing Salaryman Project depicts the world of Tokyo's male office workers and the Japanese sense of the season through a mix of street photography and conceptual documentary. To avoid potential problems with portrait rights upon publication, faces are obscured. Simultaneously, this approach lets mystery and poetry blossom around the corporate world. The work comes as a Japanese professional agenda, connecting office work and the seasons, concept and functionality. This forces me to work on deadlines but at the same time, to happily accept obsolescence as the fate of publication and photography.

Bio: Born in France in 1964 and worked as a recording engineer in Paris for 20 years before starting photography in Japan. He graduated from Tokyo Visual Arts photography department (2009), and was granted an artist visa (2010). He now lives in Tokyo where he established the Bureau d’Etudes Japonaises.

Amani Willett
Statement: These composites were created to uncover an aspect of street life not usually seen in the single-frame “decisive moment” photograph. By combining numerous images and eliminating extraneous information, another view of the street materializes. The “characters” in these images “act out” their routines and gestures, allowing the viewer to trace their actions.

While these images were created by combining numerous photographs, none of subjects have been altered, moved or changed in appearance or location from the original image. This fact allows for a new vision of the street photograph to emerge while maintaining a direct dialogue with the genre’s traditional practice.

Bio: Amani Willett is a Brooklyn based photographer. In the spring of 2013, his first monograph, Disquiet, was published by Damiani. He was recently featured in the books Street Photography Now (Thames and Hudson) and New York: In Color (Abrams). Willett’s pictures have been exhibited widely, including at the Howard Greenberg gallery. His work has been featured in such publications as American Photography, Photo District News, Newsweek and The New York Times. His lectures include the International Center of Photography and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. Willett received his MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts.

Ulrik Pedersen
Statement: Iran is according to the West a dark place, according to us traveling there a place of immense beauty and amazing people. But with the government it’s kind of difficult to do street photography so I had to hide behind trees after finding a proper background.  The frame frames the people who don't know I'm there.  All pictures taken in Shiraz, Iran.

Bio: Former UN worker turned photographer with a focus on documentary photography: showing social problems with the objective of changing people views on other people and policies. As a personal project Pedersen makes street photography with a specific attention to shadows and people.

Patrick Gookin
Statement: Selections from La By Car. By design and momentum, the City of Los Angeles has been built for travel by car.  Its size, its geography, and its rigid social boundaries displace and marginalize pedestrians, while isolating and alienating the drivers who navigate its expanses, physically sealed off from the flattened world across which they travel. Through the windshield, we experience others and the LA landscape in short, transient moments.

These photographs attempt to hold in balance these two seemingly dichotomous positions by capturing unmoored pedestrians from the fixed perspective of a car, creating a connection between observer and observed where none can reasonably exist.

Bio: Patrick Gookin is a 29 year old photographer from Salem, NH currently living and working as a Photo Editor in Los Angeles, CA. He achieved his BA in New Media from Emerson College in Boston in 2006 and has spent the seven years since split between Los Angeles and Tokyo

Gus Powell
Statement: I embrace moments that are a bit messy and seemingly insignificant, and use photography to organize them into something that can be clearly read.  The locations and the players are not of specific interest to me . . . it has more to do with the rhythm and the light at a given place.  Some of these pictures create questions, others just make a sound, many are the fragments of stories that will not be completed. They are all made with a great feeling of gratitude.

Bio: Gus Powell's photographs have been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, FOAM, and The Museum of The City of New York.  Powell is the author of the monograph The Company of Strangers (J&L Books).  He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, a member of the street photography collective iN PUBLiC, and on the faculty at School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Dept.

Giovanni Savino
Statement: It is reasonable to say that a photographer’s style and choice of subjects also depend on the emotional stimuli he or she was subjected to while growing up. I realize that human suffering, is, and has always been, the strongest conceptual magnet attracting my camera lens. I decided to embark on the difficult task of unobtrusively capturing the existential pain I perceive, as an external observer, in the streets of New York City. My eye senses and my camera repeatedly focuses on their brief emotions of disconnect and discomfort, as I walk the streets of this metropolis.

Bio: Giovanni Savino first discovered photography through an old shoebox of yellowing pictures on his grandparents’ kitchen table in Italy. They were born in poverty at the beginning of the 20th century in the swamps of southern Tuscany. Those photos became a visual corroboration of the oral histories he heard over and over during the long winter evenings of his childhood. The main subjects of his personal work have been unsung heroes of everyday life: everyday people. For many years he worked for CBS News, traveling around the world telling visual stories.  Now, based between New York and the Caribbean, he continues to find stories worth documenting and people worth giving a voice.

Karl Baden
Statement: These photographs are from the series Rising. They are made in one location; the exit of an urban public transportation system. I am interested in how people look, alone in thought or in conversation, forced together by lack of space, transitioning from underground darkness, at the moment they come in contact with sunlight.

Bio: Karl Baden's photographs have been exhibited at the Robert Mann Gallery, Zabriskie Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and The Photographers Gallery in London. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. His photographs and visual books are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum Library. He is represented by the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts.

Blake Andrews
Statement: Street photography is commonly presumed to document reality and comment on the world. I think there enough people doing that, and it doesn't hold much interest for me. Instead I want my photographs to depict reality in an ambiguous or misleading way. I want them to lie. Yes, I use reality as the basic building blocks for my photographs. But my images have little relationship to the original scene. To create lies out of truth is a joy and a challenge.

Bio: Blake Andrews lives with his wife and three sons on the outskirts of Eugene, OR. A self taught photographer, he has spent part of each day for the past 10 years shooting new images, and a sizable portion of that time trying to figure out what to do with them all. 

Darren Hall
Statement: Darren's work is a study of people and light, although it is often difficult to determine which is more important to him.  Here he explores narratives of spontaneity and anonymity, using the urban environment as a set.  Natural light illuminates his subjects and shadows are almost a physical presence, to be negotiated and navigated.  The sun's light within the city is fleeting– sometimes it illuminates a space for 30 minutes, sometimes as little as three– and it is ever changing, just like the city itself.  Constant construction and renovation channels, redirects and blocks the light, and it is this that constantly piques his interest: stumbling upon the elusive "decisive" moment where truth meets beauty.

Bio: Originally from Huddersfield, in the north of England, Darren Hall is now based in Brooklyn, New York.  A contributor to i-D and The Last Magazine, he has exhibited in a number of UK and European shows, including twice at Les Rencontres d'Arles.  Darren has been published in the PDN Photo Annual and exhibited in the New York Photo Festival Audio/Visual show and the annual Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in London.  He is currently an exhibitor in Another New York which is showing at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.  Darren has a number of images appearing in 100 Fashion Designers, 10 Curators, 50 Contemporary Fashion Designers You Should Know and the documentary From Nothing, Something.  His work also features in The Fashion Resource Book.

Jin Kay Lee
Statement: My photographs come from the simple process of wandering around with my camera. The people I am drawn to photograph often remind me of characters in a film or a story. I am interested in the connection between these subjects and their settings and the potential for these two elements to create a narrative. None of my images are staged. I prefer to capture people's expressions and gestures that occur naturally.

Bio: Jin Kay Lee was born in 1991 and raised in Asbury Park, NJ. She currently lives in New York City and has studied photography at The School of Visual Arts. Her work often revolves around people and capturing them in candid moments. All of her photographs are shot on 35mm film.