David Brandon Geeting’s Crazy Commercial Outtakes

David  Brandon Geeting never expected to be a successful commercial photographer. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as a photo major with little interest in studio lighting, or the slightest notion that he might one day be commissioned to travel the country to photograph the entire 85th Anniversary Issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. But he did, and over a few short years, has quickly become one of today’s most inspiring photographers to watch. His jarring flash, off-kilter methods of arranging still life, and unconventional style of shooting celebrities have radical ties to, and little visual distinction from his personal work. Without consequence, many of his unpublished outtakes have found their way into his own projects. 

Shortly after graduating from SVA, Geeting assisted Peter Sutherland, who gave him his first digital SLR. Building on his undergrad tendency to wander the city making photographs of garbage, he began making what he calls ‘Frustrated Art.’ Geeting writes: “It’s the kind of art you make when you have all kinds of pent up creative energy and no ideas on how to release it. I would start to go through cabinets of junk in my house and throw still lifes together out of really boring materials and blast it with a flash and post these on my blog.”

Eventually, Bloomberg Businessweek photo editor Emily Keegin got wind of his work and hired him to photograph the inside of a 3D printer factory in South Carolina. "David came into the office to show me his work a few months after he had graduated from SVA," Keegin tells us.  "He carried his portfolio in a plastic shopping bag, and it was the best book I had ever seen--- I think primarily because it was just a bunch of art work. He wasn't trying to be someone he wasn't. I liked the way he saw the world & felt like the magazine was in need of his kind of quirk."

Since then, Geeting has shot countless jobs, applying his slicked-up trash aesthetic to everything from product shots to tech innovators. Some of Geeting’s most surprisingly discordant and personally rewarding images have come out of spontaneous collaborative moments on shoots. His adventurous, experimental approach gives them multiple readings in and outside of their commercial intent.

“One of my favorite images,” says Geeting “is a photo of my friend Corey wearing all black looking real goth, holding a state-of-the-art blender and standing in front of a wide array of fruits and vegetables. We were shooting stills of a fake Vitamix infomercial and Corey was assisting me that day. In the photo he was just a stand-in for me to test the light, but when I look at that photo out of context it conjures all kinds of ‘WTF's. "

Geeting’s philosophy towards his personal, editorial and commercial work, and everything in between is honest and straightforward. It finds strength in pushing comfort levels, taking ongoing creative risks and being unafraid to openly play with the most absurd of ideas.

 “I think they are about open-mindedness and not being afraid to make connections between things, no matter how disparate they may seem. I also think they are pictures about making pictures, referencing both technical issues and concepts gone awry. My favorite images are always the wrong ones.”

Bio: David Brandon Geeting (b. 1989) is an American artist born in Bethlehem, PA and currently residing in Brooklyn, NY.

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
TagsDavid Brandon Geeting, Commercial Photography, Dick Cheney Photograph, new photography

Is it possible to make a beautiful photograph of a war-torn landscape?

Matthew Arnold’s monograph Topography is Fate, recently published by Kehrer Verlag, is a series of photographs of various North African battlefield sites from World War II, made over the course of three years beginning in 2011. His work follows on the formal traditions of 1970’s New Topographics’ photographers like Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz, and later photographers like An-My Le and Irina Rozovsky in its method of rethinking how we see landscapes loaded with histories of human impact.

Arnold uses a seemingly objective lens to examine the strangeness of the territory and highlight the soldiers’ experience of alienation in a foreign land. Despite the traces of the war that still exist – unexploded shells, mines, and barbed wire that litter the landscape -- he captures the landscapes in neutral daylight, detaching viewers from their violent past.

“Some photographers, working in a similar vein,” writes Arnold, “shoot at dusk or through the cold mist of an overcast or rainy day in order to cast a somber mood upon historical places in a way of honoring what has taken place. I support that work, some of which is fantastically beautiful. However, I chose not to do that here. I did not want the viewer to be influenced by an editorial notion or opinion, beyond the defined framing that I chose as the photographer.” Like An-My Le, who photographed Vietnam battle reenactments in beautiful light, Arnold’s work attempts to remove theatrics from the battle experience – one that, despite their grave circumstance, did not always occur in apocalyptic lighting conditions. 

While the images might initially appear cold or detached, they come from a sincere combination of Arnold’s attraction to the physicality of the land and his own fascination with the World War II’s complex history. Arnold was first inspired to begin the project in 2011 after a trip to photograph a friend’s wedding in Alexandria, Egypt. “I drove to Siwa, an oasis town near the border with Libya" writes Arnold, "and spent time just driving around the desert in a Land Rover and walking around the dunes and rocky outcrops with some water and my camera. The time spent in that unbelievably quiet place with only myself, the sand, and wind was certainly something significant and profound for me.” When he returned from this trip Arnold read Rick Atkinson’s 2002 book An Army at Dawn focusing on the early stages and battlefield struggles of the Allied invasion of North Africa during World War II, and was driven to embark on this three-year project. 

Like many war-tinged territories, photographing in this terrain posed heavy environmental and political challenges. In one instance, the frequent sandstorms nearly halted the project entirely, almost damaging his camera and equipment beyond repair. “Everything was covered and there was no way to get completely out of the storm. Even everything in the 4x4 was covered. We did the best we could. In the end the camera just stopped functioning.”

Ultimately Arnold’s camera started working again and he was able to continue the project, but not without the continuous obstacles of intense political turmoil. He began shooting in Tunisia towards the and of its revolution, and had to be cautious of protests, riots and other facets of civil war. “A couple times we had to change hotels at the last minute because the hotel we were to be staying had been burned down by protestors the night before…. In Libya it was much worse…. There were many checkpoints throughout the country and each was manned by jittery unskilled young men with AK-47s.”

Instead of presenting brash, heavy-handed visualizations of the magnitude of war, Arnold’s resulting images give viewers a quiet insight into how a landscape can retain its beauty despite the severity of its human impact. For Arnold, this is summed up in a quote from Rick Atkinson’s book, from which the title of the project was borrowed

“For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.”   

Bio: Matthew Arnold is a photographer living in New York City. He graduated from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he studied photography and offset lithography. He also studied photography at The West Surrey College of Art and Design outside London. Immediately after college he taught offset lithography and digital imaging as an adjunct professor at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  His most recent honors include being named a Top 50 Emerging Photographer of 2014 by LensCulture Magazine and a Photolucida, Critical Mass 2014, Top 50 Photographer as well as winning the 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Traveling Fellowship. 
 

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagslandscape photography, war photography, matthew arnold, An-My Le, Irina Rozovsky, New Topographics, matthew arnold photography

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.

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagsinstagram, mobile photography, William Eggleston, appropriation, Art Basel, Miami, Instagram Photographers

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.

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.”  

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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

Posted
AuthorJon Feinstein
Tagscollage, identity, diorama, still life, vernacular photography, portraiture, found photography

The 17 Best Photobooks of 2014 According to Humble Arts Foundation

It's that time of year -- nearly every photography blog and their respective grandparents compile highly curated yet potentially arbitrary lists of the best of the best, leaving victors with feelings of wild champion, and others heartbroken on the sidelines. In the past few years, narrowing a definitive list like this has become even harder than ever before. Despite claims of the "death of print," we've seen a renewed interest in the photobook. 

Read more …
Posted
AuthorEditors
Tagsphotobooks, photography