Photographer Andrew Fladeboe Gives Dignity to Working Dogs

“Dogs are a universal part of human culture and have been by our side for 30,000 years evolving to help us in a number of working roles. However, dogs are distinctly non-human and evoke qualities of the savage beast. They straddle the line between man and nature, and are a perfect conduit to illustrate the greater power of nature in contrast to our usual human-centric point of view.” - Andrew Fladeboe

In May, 2013, as part of a Fullbright Fellowship, photographer Andrew Fladeboe began a seven month adventure traveling throughout Norway and New Zealand to photograph various breeds of working dogs in their natural environments. During this time, he fully immersed himself in the culture of working dogs, traveling and photographing extensively, and essentially living a shepherd’s life.

Fladeboe’s dog portraits, often shot before sweeping, monumental landscapes extend beyond straightforward documentary and reportage, with a range of influences drawing from Victorian painting to natural history dioramas. Fladeboe specifically cites nineteenth century painter Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, who pioneered the practice of elevating dogs in hunting scenes, positioning them as highly noble creatures. For Fladeboe, this is central to his love for animals and his quest to depict their uniquely bestial and regal qualities.     

While his pictures are in hardly typological, Fladeboe’s process for photographing the working dogs sticks to a formula that produces specific emotional responses and give insights into each dog's psychology. For each picture, he works closely with the dogs’ owners in order to get the right shot. This requires careful maneuvering, and anywhere from three to fifteen attempts before a dog looses focus. When editing, Fladeboe sets specific parameters for giving the dogs a certain aura of dignity.

“I have general rules I've set for myself when choosing the edit. Never have the dog lying down, always with its head up, finding the highest point in the area to shoot from. It was an interesting task getting some of the farmers to work with me, but ultimately they enjoyed the process and were much more interested in the project after they saw the way I approached my subjects” 

Fladeboe also credits the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History in New York City as the first and foremost influence to his photographic seeing and as a foundation for how he sets up and constructs his real world photographs.

“I'd wander around the ones at the Natural History Museum in New York and photograph them as many photographers do. I realized that I should try creating my own scenes with real animals, using the dioramas as compositional frameworks.”

The images shot over the past year are a continuation of Fladeboe’s ongoing multi-volume body of work The Shepherd’s Realm. The project began in 2011 during an artists’ residency in the Netherlands followed by three weeks in Scotland.  Many of the initial images were digitally manipulated composites of different species of animals, but evolved into the straight, dog specific photographs that Fladeboe made during his Fullbright. While these initial images might stand out from the group on technical grounds, they add a fundamental layer to Fladeboe’s unique relationship with animals. 

“ I see this project as a kind of box set of the wonderful animals I've met on my adventures. I will continue working on new volumes for many years (I have an evolving list of future locations), but I think my next project may be separate from the series with more deliberate, constructed, and larger scale works that still use animals as my narrative muse. Dogs may continue to be a focus but I'm open to branching out to different animals again. “

BIO: Born in California in 1984, Andrew Fladeboe grew up in Japan, Russia, and Austria before obtaining his BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. He has spent time photographing animals for The Shepherd's Realm series in the Netherlands, the Highlands of Scotland, Southern France, and Norway. In 2014, Andrew was awarded a Fulbright Grant to photograph and study working dogs in New Zealand. He is represented by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art in New York City, where he'll have a solo exhibition in fall, 2015. Follow him on Instagram @Fladeboe

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AuthorJon Feinstein
TagsAndrew Fladeboe, dog photography, documentary photography, working dogs

Faith Holland is Obsessed with the Internet

What do ejaculatory champagne bottles, feline emoticons, literal "birds and bees," and a shrine to an imaginary online "church of cat" have in common? They are all part of Faith Holland's wild obsession with the Internet in all of its virtual, continuously consumable glory. Over the past few years she's made a range of work that tackles the web with sharp, comical critique. While naysayers may feel that there is no new Internet Art to be made, and the same folks are likely skeptical of anything GIF (including its pronunciation), Holland adds new layers to the conversation in an attempt to surface the interconnectedness of it all. 

Holland uses images from various films and the Internet as her source material, mashing them up to draw larger inferences on how digital media represents, constructs and visualizes beauty, sexuality, and how we experience the world. She is particularly drawn to the relationship between visual spectacles in Hollywood and online. These include big budget special effects, low fi animated GIFs, and a focused attention on technological absurdities in online pornography. With many of her pieces, she pays particular attention to early, and now dated, Internet innovations such as self-published homepages in the mid 1990's, to the newfound appreciation for the GIF in art an pop cultural circles over the past five years. 

While these ideas are a common thread throughout all of her work, they are most obvious in Holland's series Visual Orgasms, which comments on what she sees as Hollywood's historical pressure on sex to be visually consumable. The series exaggerates this idea with various collages of sexual metaphors (waterfalls, trains leaving tunnels, fireworks, etc) that intentionally exclude actual sexual acts.

And somehow, cats seamlessly make their way into Holland's increasingly evolving fascination with online mania. For Holland, they are closely tied to her ideas of how the Internet is structured, and to other visual symbols and that appear throughout all of her work. She sees early Internet cat obsession as potentially being influential on the widespread development of memes and other forms of viral imagery. 

"Cats got on to the Internet on the ground level. When I look back at Geocities archives or my own personal collection of images downloaded from the Internet, they were always present—and they’ve been more enduring than other early Internet obsessions, like the Grateful Dead."

Bio: Faith Holland is an artist and curator whose practice focuses on gender and sexuality’s relationship to the Internet. She received her BA in Media Studies at Vassar College and her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Xpo Gallery (Paris), Art in Odd Places festival (New York), Elga Wimmer (New York), Axiom Gallery (Boston), the Philips Collection (Washington, D.C.), and File Festival (São Paulo). Her work has been written about in The Sunday Times UK, Art F City, Hyperallergic, Animal New York, and Dazed Digital. 

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AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagsinternet art, Faith Holland, animated gifs, conceptual art, cat photography

Delaney Allen's Images of Profound Loss

In his series, Getting Lost, currently on view at Nationale gallery in Portland, Oregon, Delaney Allen's still lifes, studio portraiture, and landscapes communicate his experience of profound grief.  While diaristic work of this nature can often risk being overly inward, Allen effectively employs untraditional editing methods to build a narrative of his personal struggles that is both aesthetically mysterious and heartbreakingly real.

Allen began making this work in response to a brief yet massive wave of personal loss. Over the course of four months both of his grandparents passed away,  a romantic relationship dissolved and his cat died in his arms. Searching for a means of coping, he looked to Rebecca Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost which helped inspire him to make photographs as one of the most effective forms of therapy.  "In exploring those thoughts, as well as needing to reset myself mentally, I found going on long drives exploring new areas I’d never visited and also opening up my mind to see where it could go to be therapeutic."

On the surface the work might appear to be a pastiche of various popular movements in photography: wind swept photographs of national parks paired with jarring,sculptural, harshly lit studio shots. With a closer look, however, it's apparent that each of these seemingly disparate images are actually intense personal cues to Allen's methods of coping. In his studio still lifes, fabric, flowers, and other ephemeral details serve as what he describes as memorials, or "chaotic alters to bygone loves."  In his photos of the atmosphere and American landscape, there is a sense of longing that is strangely both distant and nostalgic. 

For Allen, this style of combining outwardly unrelated imagery on the same plane is essential to communicating his story. "With this method," says Allen, "the important aspect is to build the series from a sense of story or mood I want to portray. In doing so, it gives me the ability to expand to use all these different ways in which I shoot."

Born in Fort Worth, TX, Delaney Allen received his MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2010. His photographs have been shown nationally and internationally. He was listed in Magenta’s Flash Forward emerging photographers list of 2013 and attended photographer Alec Soth’s Camp For Socially Awkward Storytellers that same year. His first publication, Between Here And There, was listed on PhotoEye Magazine’s “Best Of” list for 2010. Allen currently lives and works in Portland, OR, where he is represented by Nationale. Follow him on Instagram @delaney_allen

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AuthorJon Feinstein
TagsDelaney Allen, Portland photographers, new formalism, new color photography, Rebecca Solnit

The Web and the Wall: A Conversation with Andy Adams

An early pioneer of the online photo community, Andy Adams, founder of FlakPhoto, holds fast that the internet is not only an ideal venue for experiencing contemporary photography, but also one of the best tools for photographers to gain exposure and advance their careers. A serial optimist, from his tweets to Facebook posts, to talks about the future of photography, it would appear that Adams' every breath moves to support new image makers. This past month, Andy curated The FlakPhoto Midwest Print Show, his first brick and mortar exhibitions at the Madison Public Library in Madison Wisconsin, with a focus on photographers of the American Midwest. We "sat down" (virtually of course) with Andy to get his insights on photography on and offline, and have interspersed some of our favorite images from the show, which despite closing tomorrow, will live on, online.  

How did the Midwest photography exhibition come about?

A while ago I learned that the Society for Photographic Education Midwest Conference was going to be hosted in Madison, Wisconsin — where I live. The Wisconsin Book Festival landed on the same weekend in October 2014 — this annual event is very popular and it brings lots of people downtown every year. Last fall, the Madison Public Library unveiled a $30 million architectural renovation that included a sparkling new gallery space — and an invitation to organize a FlakPhoto show there. The Wisconsin Book Festival’s headquarters are inside the Central Library adjacent to the Diane Endres Ballweg Gallery and just a few blocks from the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus where the SPE conference would be held. There’s never been a huge photography scene here and I knew that the conference/festival weekend would be an occasion for lots of Midwest creatives to gather in that space and look at pictures together. I’ve often lamented that there aren’t more independently produced photo/arts exhibitions here — so needed to do this.

What sparked your interest in specifically showing Midwest photographers?

For the past few years my projects have emphasized digital exhibitions designed for global, web-based audiences but I’ve never produced anything locally and I’m interested in growing the photo community where I live. Like a lot of people, I’ve been inspired by the way social media connects the international photography community — digital technologies make it easy to know about what everyone is doing, everywhere, all the time. At some point I realized that I knew more about what was happening photographically in London and New York and Paris than I did in Iowa or Kansas City or Milwaukee. That motivated me to use the Web to learn more about the creative people making pictures in this part of the world. The SPE Conference is a regional event — one designed to connect image makers from around the American Midwest — so a show that highlighted talent from this place made a lot of sense.

You're largely recognized as an online curator but you've actually curated several brick and mortar exhibitions in the past. How is this exhibition unique?

Well, it’s a very personal project. I’ve juried a number of print exhibitions in partnership with traditional photography organizations but this is my first independently produced show and the first time I’ve staged a photography event in Wisconsin. From the beginning my goal has been to highlight the diversity of work being produced in this part of the world and I’ve done my best to highlight a cross-section of photographers from around the region. This isn’t a definitive survey — it’s a personal selection of photographers I admire. 

You're launching an exhibition website as the physical show comes down. Why is this important?

 My previous museum exhibitions have been web-based projects that emphasize the image as the primary photographic experience. The Midwest Print Show website complements a physical exhibition that stands on its own by expanding on the experience — gallery spectators were able to access the site on their mobile devices to read photographer biographies and learn more about the artists by linking to their websites while in the presence of the prints. Now that the show is closing the website functions as a record of the past and a resource for the future. This project is/was a true hybrid exhibition — it lives simultaneously on and offline. 

You have a background in online marketing. Does this impact your work with FlakPhoto and the photography community?

 I suppose so. I’m as fascinated with digital communications as I am with photographic culture — understanding how those forms come together is at the heart of my creative work.

Tell us more about the BUBBLER — who are they and how did the collaboration come about?

 The BUBBLER is a wonderful community arts & maker space that’s powered by the Madison Public Library. Trent Miller, who runs the program, directs the library’s Diane Endres Ballweg Gallery exhibition program. He and I became friends and he invited me to collaborate on a FlakPhoto show. The BUBBLER’s mission is focused on producing art out of anything and we worked together to stage a show that aligned with that vision. The Midwest Print Show is very much an extension of the BUBBLER’s DIY philosophy: we kept things simple by showing unframed prints. I decided early on that I wanted our photographers to produce their own prints — that the show should feature the uniqueness of each of their particular printing styles and paper preferences. In the end, that added an exciting element that emphasized the magical thingness of photography — which is more vital today than ever before. 

Flak used to be one of a few online venues for showing photography. Now there are hundreds. Does this impact the work you do?

Probably. It’s taken traditional photography institutions a decade to understand how to use the Internet to do their work. I saw the Web’s potential early on but it’s taken me 10 years to stage a FlakPhoto print show. I’m always going to be interested in building a better website but I’ve got the bug for producing IRL exhibitions now. The hybrid territory between analog/digital is still uncharted territory I plan to explore.

What is most exciting about photography for you right now?

Hands down, it’s Instagram! Mobile photography is fascinating and fun — it’s gotten me excited about making my own pictures again and there’s something wonderful about looking at all of these little illuminated images in the palm of my hand. I’d like to do a mobile photography show at some point — or a small print exhibition. Or both. Someday...

Bio: Andy Adams (b. 1978) is an independent producer + publisher whose work blends aspects of digital communication, online audience engagement, and web-based creative collaboration to explore current ideas in photography and visual media. He is the editor of FlakPhoto, a website that promotes the discovery of photographic image-makers from around the world. In his spare time he hosts the FlakPhotoNetwork, an online community focused on conversations about photo/arts culture.

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
TagsAndy Adams, Flak Photo, midwest photographers, fine art photography