William Eggleston Playing Piano, Mapplethorpe in Color and other Instagram Jams

Beware the click bait, it's our semi-monthly Instagram update. Last time we got you, our lovely Humble friends, when we announced the 5 photographers you should never ever follow on Instagram, only to reveal that they're actually some of our favorites. Shortly thereafter, we received numerous emails and Facebook comments arguing that Instagram is still "just another social channel," and that even some of our photographic heroes using IG are doing nothing more than tweeting photos.

Is Instagram, or mobile photography in general, incapable of presenting an interesting shift in the way images are made? The arguments will go on, and in turn, we'll continue to host Instagram residencies from some of our favorite photographers using IG today. Like Tommy Kha who took some quiet time to hang out with William Eggleston in Memhpis,  Matthew Schenning, who's been making off-moment pictures while working Art Basel in Miami Beach this week, and other favorite photographers like Tribble and Mancenido, Laura Glabman, Bahar Yurukoglu, and Bill Miller whose photographs regularly make our heads turn. Please have a look, follow them, and support their work.

@tribblemancenido (after Robert Mapplethorpe)

@tribblemancenido

@_iambahar

@_iambahar

@billmiller718

@billmiller718

@my2bobs

@my2bobs

@tommykha

@tommykha

@photographysux

@photographysux

Birthe Piontek Gives New Identity to Found Photographs

Vancouver-based photographer Birthe Piontek is most widely recognized for her intimate, narrative-driven portraits. While much of her work takes a fairly straightforward approach, her recent series “Mimesis” uses re-photographed vernacular images to create collages and still lifes that expand on her personal portraits with an investigation into the broader complexity of human identity.

Untitled #11, 2014

Piontek begins by searching for found images on Ebay, in thrift stores and flea markets. She primarily looks for images like studio portraits and other non-candid scenarios in which the subject gazes directly into the camera without distraction. Piontek writes: “The moment where it is all about the person and not so much about capturing a situation or event, so that the image becomes a representation of that person.”  

Untitled #10, 2013

Knowing little about the people in the photographs, she uses them as source material to create her own fictions about their identities. “I usually spend quite a bit of time with the image, looking at it and familiarizing myself with it," Says, Piontek. "In a way I try to get to know the person that is shown in it, and figure out the essence and uniqueness of that particular image.”

Untitled #7, 2013

Once she determines a photograph to be suitable, Piontek scans it, and reproduces the image, in many cases working from its copy. She begins manipulating the copy, often cutting into it and incorporating other materials like glass, paint, foil and fabric to create unique still lifes that give the image an entirely new form. While the final piece is still a one-dimensional image, it often looks like an installation shot of a diorama, a three-dimensional collage or still life.  “It’s a very physical, almost sculptural process, something that is new and very exciting to me.”

Untitled #14, 2014

The title of her series, “Mimesis,” comes from the ancient Greek philosophical term related to imitation, representation and the presentation of the self. For Piontek, its most resonating meaning is a reference to the relationship between an image and its “real” original source. This idea was at the heart of her shift from from shooting portraits to creating new images from found photos.

Untitled #16, 2014

“I questioned the power of an image and what it can actually reveal of a person’s identity,” says Piontek “I felt I had come to a bit of a dead end in my practice, a point where I thought I would just repeat myself if I continued taking pictures the way I did. There was also the feeling of ‘hitting a wall,’ of staying on the surface when my desire was to go deeper, underneath that surface, and explore the internal landscape of a human being.”

Untitled #15, 2014

While the people in her found images likely have their own narratives, their identities are obscured by the physical object-ness of their photographs left behind. Ultimately, Piontek’s creations are a means to better understand her own process of representing people, and the limits of photography to accurately represent their actual identity.

Untitled #5, 2013

“In this project I am not only investigating the relationship between the image of a person and the original but also the question to what degree the complexity of human identity can be visualized in an image. As with any form of art, this project is fictional - it’s a mythical world I created that illustrates what I think human identity might look like.....Mimesis is a somewhat broader look at the complexity of human identity and in a way also a meditation on portrait photography and the power of an image.”

Untitled #13, 2014

Untitled #6, 2013

Untitled #1, 2013

Bio: Birthe Piontek is a fine art photographer based in Vancouver BC, Canada. Originally from Germany, she moved to Canada in 2005 after receiving her MFA from the University of Essen in Communication Design and Photography. Her project The Idea of North won the Critical Mass Book Award 2009, and was published as a monograph in 2011. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in both solo and group shows, and has appeared in a number of international publications like The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, Wired and The New Yorker among others.

Open Call: Radical Color At Newspace Center for Photography

UPDATE: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MONDAY DEC 22! 

We're pleased to announce that Humble Arts Foundation's co-founder Jon Feinstein will be jurying New Space Center for Photography's annual themed exhibition: Radical Color opening in Portland, Oregon this February.  

Nearly 50 years ago photographers such as William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, William Christenberry, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld helped encourage a conservative art world to accept color photography within the greater dialogue of fine art. Since then, a tremendous number of photographers have produced inspiring, thoughtful bodies of color work. Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Ruff and many others working in the late 1980’s onward, introduced a new level of excitement for color images, encouraged a “bigger is better” mentality, and helped further transform the dialogue with the fine art world.

With the recent history of color photography as a reference point, this open call seeks to exhibit work from a current generation of color photographers. While color pioneers like Shore may have used it as a means of achieving a purely descriptive truth, how does today’s digital and internet-raised generation push its boundaries and use color with new intents? How are photographers using color-specific, digital tools to innovate, go beyond and reassess the idea of description? With this open call, we’re looking for work that grips, excites, and makes us want to understand color with new eyes.

DEADLINE: Submissions are due by 6pm PDT on Friday, December 19, 2014. 

ENTRY DETAILS
Each entry costs $40 (free for Newspace Members at the Spy Camera Level and above) and may contain up to five images. You may submit as many entries as you like. All entries must be submitted using the online entry system at this link. CD entries will not be accepted.

Please size your images as 72 dpi jpg files that are 10 inches in their longest dimension. Each jpg file must be titled with your last name, first initial, ‘underscore’ and the entry number. For instance the first image uploaded by Mike Smith would be SmithM_1.jpg

EXHIBITION DETAILS
Selected artists will be notified by early January and posted on our website. Selected images will be on display in the Newspace gallery February 6, 2015 through March 1, 2015, with an opening reception Friday, February 6, 2015 from 6-9pm. The exhibition will also be featured on the Humble Arts Foundation Website.

Kirsten Kay Thoen's Sculptural Landscapes

Kirsten Kay Thoen challenges conventions of landscape photography by making dynamic three-dimensional photographic sculptures. These range from geometric lightboxes to magical, multi-paneled, trophy-like structures that give viewers a new and strangely elevated means of experiencing the natural world.  

Arborea Prism

Her overarching practice began in 2006 when she journeyed to the redwood forest to make large format landscape photographs of various awe-inspiring sites. At the time, Kirsten Kay Thoen felt that something was lacking in their one-dimensionality and craved an experience that expanded beyond simply viewing the final images digitally or on the wall.  With this new idea in mind, she entered graduate school in 2007 and began to evolve her methods. 

Fog Field Prism

Her multidimensional process begins by photographing various landscapes around the world in sites including the California Redwood Forest, the volcanic terrain of Kauai, and geothermic Iceland. She selects these sites for their “profound energetic qualities.” In her own words:

“For me they are guttural-earth. I’m becoming consistently drawn to volcanic terrain for this reason. There is a metaphysical component to the work and what I am trying to convey within the process of transforming nature into image and back into form, like a talisman…I’m compelled by the idea of bringing these phenomenal sites to an audience that may not have the opportunity to experience them first hand, and I’m intrigued with the desire and questions of how to achieve that.” 

Geothermic Strata

After photographing these sites extensively, she returns to her studio to transform her one-dimensional images into tactile 3D structures. This involves drawing, prototyping, and combining masks of her original source images with templates for the final geometrical forms. Her process continually evolves to push the boundaries of each new photo sculpture, and she often works with a variety of material fabricators to help actualize her designs. Most recently this has expanded to include the use of 3D printing technology as well as casting/molding custom hardware to assemble image panels. The final pieces, comprised of materials that include plexiglass, wood, and metal, are often internally lit giving them a life-like illusion. 

Crystalline Key

Two of her most recent pieces, currently on view in the exhibition Plasmatik, curated by Natalie Kates Projects, work together to create what Kirsten Kay Thoen describes as a “personal cosmology via objects that inhabit concepts of space, time and matter.” The first, Crystalline Pendulum & Pyramid, pictured below, is a two-part hourglass-shaped sculpture that depicts ice crystals from a receding glacier in Iceland which Kirsten captured in their final moments before being absorbed into the ocean. The second piece, Volcanic Nonagon transforms straightforward images of a volcanic boulder into multiple geometric planes that protrude from the surface of the wall as if floating in space. 

Crystalline Pendulum and Pyramid

Volcanic Nonagon

“The photographic images are no longer mere depictions of nature, but vital forms of their own, calling forth the sites they derived from.” – Kirsten Kay Thoen

Volcanic Water Triad

Bio: Kirsten Kay Thoen was born in 1977 in Holladay, Utah, and is based in Brooklyn, NY.  She received a BA in Arts in Context from the New School’s Eugene Lang College, continued her studies internationally at The Royal Academy of Art in Den Hague, NL, and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Thoen’s artwork has exhibited in New York by Humble Arts Foundation at the Chelsea Art Museum and Affirmation Arts, by Capricious Presents at Smack Mellon Gallery, and at Field Projects Gallery.  Among art fairs, her work has been curated into NEXT Chicago’s Special Projects and presented at SCOPE Basel, NADA Miami, and SCOPE NY 2014 with Natalie Kates Projects.  Humble Arts Foundation awarded Thoen with the New Photography Grant, Spring 2010, and included her work in 31 Women in Art Photography 2010 and The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, Vol. 2, published in 2011.  Thoen’s works are in private collections in New York and France.