group show 39 : The Artists
Part 2/2

Elizabeth Bick
Statement: Informed by a past as a rigorously trained dancer, I see the street as neutral ground where improvisational collaborative performance happens every moment of the day.  I am not the only one.  Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, describes what she calls a "Street Ballet", pedestrians in large urban sprawls in a constant  state of dance with one another, by simply negotiating the space between passersby and attempting to share the space to their own advantage. 

Bio: Elizabeth Bick was born in Houston Texas, and received a BFA in Photography from Loyola University New Orleans, and a MFA in Photography from Yale University.  She has participated in residencies at LMCC Workspace, Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Chateau La Napoule, and received grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Arts Houston, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.  Her work has been exhibited at Aperture Foundation, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and Bergdorf Goodman New York.  She currently lives in New York and is an assistant to Shirin Neshat.

Haley Morris-Cafiero
Statement: For Wait Watchers, I attempt to capture a diverse group of strangers by photographing in a camera in a heavy-traffic, public area. I set up the camera on a tripod or with an assistant, in full view of the by-passing gazer, and take hundreds of photographs of myself doing everyday tasks. The images capture the gazer in a microsecond moment where they have a critical or questioning look on their face or in their body language. While I do not know what they are thinking, the gazer appears to be visually troubled that I am in front of them.

Bio: Haley Morris-Cafiero holds a BA in Photography and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of North Florida and a MFA in Art from University of Arizona. She is an Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at Memphis College of Art. Her series of photographs, Wait Watchers, has been featured in over 40 sites all over the world including CBS This Morning, Huffington Post and Salon.com. She has been nominated for the 2014 Prix Pictet and the series will be exhibited in the Chicago Photography Center and the Newspace Center of Photography in 2014.

Pelle Cass
Statement: I want to fit more life, more people, more time, and more information into my photographs. To do this, I put my camera on a tripod, and take hundreds of pictures over about an hour as people pass by. Later, I choose what to leave in but make no other alterations. My process mirrors the way the mind focuses attention on one thing but not another. Objective facts—the faces and bodies of people on the street—are compiled into something new and more subjective. Above all, I want to show a surprising world that is visible only with a camera.

Bio: Pelle Cass has had solo shows at the Houston Center for Photography; Gallery Kayafas, Boston; Stux Gallery, Boston; Frank Marino Gallery, NYC; and the Griffin Museum of Photography His work is in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Polaroid Collection, the DeCordova Museum, the Danforth Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was a twice winner: Top 50, Critical Mass, Photolucida, and was awarded grants from the Corporation of Yaddo and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation’s ART fund.

Felix R. Cid
Statement: My work is based on spontaneous gestures. It is made from hundreds of photographs I take in the events. When I am the photographer on the streets, intuition is the most important value. Back in the studio, and in front of the computer, instinct becomes also the most dominant aspect. Black Photographs are born through my fascination for that noisy choreography of human forms found in the crowds. I intend to orchestrate the exponential acceleration that our specie is currently experiencing.

Bio: Felix R. Cid is a visual artist born in 1976 in Madrid, Spain. He graduated from a GS Program at ICP in 2005 and he holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art since 2012. He lives in Brooklyn.

Stijn Van Der Linden
Statement: Inspired by the blurring of people in Google Street View, in 人 (the Japanese symbol that describes the word ‘people’), I have taken street photographs of random people and blurred their image in post-processing. Blurring people does not make the photograph loose meaning, the people keep being recognizable as people. I transcend the purely functional way of blurring used in street view images for privacy reasons and change it into something more interesting and appealing.

 Bio: Stijn Van der Linden is a remote sensing engineer currently studying photography at SLAC, Leuven, Belgium. His work has been featured in Unless You Will and f-stop magazine.

Timothy Briner
Bio: Timothy Briner is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn. Briner has exhibited work in the US and internationally, and is a member of Piece of Cake (POC), a European and North American photography collective. 

Rebecca Smeyne
Rebecca Smeyne has been covering the music, nightlife, fashion, and art scenes in NYC since 2007. Her images and writing have appeared together in features for New York Magazine, Paper Magazine, MTV Hive, Vice, and the Village Voice. Other editorial photo clients include the New York Times, Spin Magazine, and the London Times Magazine. Commercial clients include Adidas, Red Bull, Monster Headphones, the Pitchfork Festival, and Jack White's Third Man Records.

Ruben Natal-San Miguel
Statement: These images are part of a ten year ongoing photography project called NYC: Concrete Jungle. The project extends to the five Boroughs of NYC, highlighting the best elements of everyday life and street culture that struggles with the prevailing violence and crime, and the imminent gentrification that continues to force them out of their communities.

Bio: Ruben Natal–San Miguel is an American photographer and curator. He was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico and lives and works in New York, New York.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Finch & Ada, New York; Kris Graves Projects, Hous Projects, New York and Los Angeles, University of Washington, Seattle; Art in FLUX Harlem, Picture Black Friday 2009 and 2011, A Decade of Photographs 2000-2011 and The New York Public Library 2010 -2012. His photography has been published in The Atlantic, Aperture, Daily News, Wink Magazine and Urban Italy Magazine, and is a winner of PDN’s Portrait competition. He holds a Bachelor and Masters Degree in Architecture from Boston Architectural College and Finance and Business Administration from Boston University. After 20 years he continues to live “La Vida Loca.”

 John Goldsmith
Statement
ACT II. PRESENT DAY

“Lights! Take your places. Cue the music.”

CURTAINS OPEN

Nerves awry. Exposed. She appears. If her agitated state of mind were not

enough, this scene was set in motion long before.

HE: Think big!

SHE: I tried. I do! But is there even a script to follow?

HE: I can’t say, darling, but the show must go on. We are all in this production.

CURTAINS CLOSE

THE END

 Bio: John Goldsmith is a widely published Vancouver-based professional photographer. John’s personal work follows a long tradition of straight photography but in a contemporary and often theatrical mode. His photographs are featured at prestigious exhibitions including the Format Festival (UK), Third Floor Gallery (Wales), and the Head On Photo Festival (Australia). Publishers regularly feature his artwork and include 01 Magazine, LPV Magazine, and SHUTR Fotomagazine. John is an author, founding member of the Strange.rs Collective, and his artwork is held museums and in numerous private collections.

Polly Braden
Statement: Stumbling into London’s Square Mile–the heart of the powerful financial district – you could lose your way within minutes. Public streets blur into private forecourts. Seductive passages become corporate cul-de-sacs of soaring glass, steel and stone. Much of the new City architecture has a preening bravado. These are offices built to look great in photographs. Each new London landmark is launched on a wave of computer generated anticipation, reducing the public city to publicity. But in the end a city is not its buildings, it is its people and there is something salutary in the way Londoners fail to live up, or down, to the cosmetic gloss of their surroundings. Whether or not we wish to, we just don’t mirror these facades.

Bio: Polly Braden’s photography has appeared in The Guardian, The Saturday Telegraph magazine, Ei8ht magazine, Portfolio, ICON, Photoworks, Frieze.

Braden is a winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize, 2003 and The Guardian Newspaper Young Photographer of the Year, 2002. She has exhibited at venues internationally including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (USA), Format International Photography Festival 2011, the Museum of London, 2011, London festival of Photography 2011 and the Hua Gallary, London, 2012. Her book China Between is published by Dewi Lewis, 2010, a selection of her work from China is included in the book Street Photography Now published by Thames and Hudson 2010.

Olya Ivanova
Statement: The Village Day.vI shot disco during the village day in the small village Kichuga in the north of Russia.

Bio: Olya Brevis was born in 1981, received BA in literature and spends most of her photographic time shooting for magazines.

Verena Brandt
Statement: I understand street photography as a possibility to collect moments. Daily life, and the terms of "normality“ and "absurdity“ play decisive roles in this collection and selection process. But it is at the same time very intuitive. Situations which appear so staged to me that they could not be true, could never have happened like this, interest me most. These photos, which are not staged but found, are part of my ongoing series 'Muss ja. Und selbst?' ('I'm okay. How are you?'), and were taken between 2009 and 2011.

Bio: Verena Brandt (b. 1978 in Hamburg, Germany) studied communication design with focus on photography at the University of Applied Sciences Hamburg. Since 2006 she is working as a freelance documentary and portrait photographer based in Berlin. Her work has been published by magazines like Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and SZ Magazin, shown at international photo and art festivals (Lumix Festival for International Photojournalism Hanover 2008, Arte Laguna Art Prize Venice 2012) and awarded with renowned prizes and scholarships (Hansel-Mieth-Prize 2010, Aenne Biermann Prize for German Contemporary Photography, Honorable Mention 2013).

Sujung Heo
Statement: Taking a walk alone at night with my camera always puts me into scary but curious moments. These series of photographs are taken at night when secretive and odd things are happening on ordinary streets. Behind the camera in the dark, I exist as a voyeur waiting to capture the strange moments that we wouldn’t normally see during the day.  Although digital technology made photographic process so fast and easy, I believe the engagement and the curiosity of a photographer looking for the decisive moment have never changed.

Bio: Sujung Heo was born in Daegu, Korea in 1975 and raised in Pennsylvania. She is currently enrolled in BFA Photography program at Parsons the New School For Design. Sujung lives and works in New York.

Irina Rozovsky
Statement: My ongoing series In Plain Air depicts the park as a peopled landscape of the mind. Each visitor, escaping the city streets, projects his own geography onto Olmstead’s nineteenth century idyll. And part of the park’s magic is its malleability, the way it responds to individual hopes and collective reverie—its trees and pastures creating a protean backdrop to a complex social reality.

These photographs seek to capture the interplay between city and nature, between human and landscape, and portray the urban oasis in which Brooklynites, hoping for peaceful release, inadvertently play a role in the story of the American melting pot.

Bio: Irina Rozovsky was born in Moscow and grew up in the Boston area. She received a BA in French and Spanish Literature from Tufts University and an MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art. Her work has been published and exhibited in the United States and abroad. Irina lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the International Center of Photography.