Carson Davis Brown’s “Mass” is an ongoing series of visual disruptions to big box department stores and supermarkets across the United States. Combining elements of sculpture, performance art, and “straight” photography, Brown builds guerrilla structures out of un-purchased materials, quickly assembles them without permission into meticulous, colorful, totem-like sculptures, and photographs them before abandoning them for the public to perplexingly discover.
Ben Alper has been collecting vernacular photographs for nearly a decade, trolling eBay auctions, thrift stores, and junk sales to decontextualize strangers’ forgotten photographic gems, occasionally posting them in phantasmic sequence on his ongoing blog The Archival Impulse. Unlike many of today’s most widely known collectors whose practices focus largely on curating, editing and archiving, Alper often threads his collecting into his work by manipulating the images to give them unexpected meaning. His most recent collection “Adrift” takes this into new territory with its alteration and publication of a fully intact cruise-ship vacation photo album that Ben discovered in a junk store in 2011.
Artist Erin O’Keefe uses elements of painting, sculpture and architecture to create studio-based photographs that confuse the senses, and reconfigure how we see photography as truth. Using multiple means of visual trickery, she leverages the digital manipulation we often take for granted by creating images that appear altered, but are shot straight on, without any form of retouching or “post processing.” In less than a decade, O’Keefe has created more than five distinct projects of studio based work that address these ideas in wavering forms. With a background in sculpture and architecture, she brings new and unexpected energy to the medium, encouraging viewers to rethink how they view photographs and interpret vision itself. We asked Erin about her practice and thoughts on photography's continuously shifting moment.
Is your Instagram feed littered with kittens, selfies and "regrams" from jokers like snoopdogg, thefatjewish, and f*ckjerry? Well, you should continue to follow them because kittens are adorable, selfies can be intellectualized, and @thefatjewish is still hilarious. But you can broaden your scope with great work from these 5 photographers who have recently done residencies on Humble Arts Foundation's Instagram feed. From Sean Ellingson's Hong Kong field trips, to Serrah Russell's captivating collage work, we continue to be floored and awed by the work we see on our phones. Click on their images below to go straight to their IG handles.
The past five years have demonstrated an increased attention to process-based photography. Often-coined “The New Formalism,” this work has received both salivating acclaim and hate-heavy criticism for its test of photographic material, asking a nearly recycled question: “What is a photograph?” New York-based artist Charlie Rubin’s constantly evolving work unapologetically removes this from the conversation and age-old photography ghetto with thoughtful photo-based images that speak to a more open and inclusive approach of making and looking at art.
