Self Portrait as Barron, 2017 © Jayson Bimber — *Self Portrait as Barron*, 2017 © Jayson Bimber

In his ongoing series The Aristocrats, photo-based artist Jayson Bimber combines crude digital retouching with references to art-historical tableaus as a means to critique systems of wealth in the United States and abroad. He scans found images from fashion magazines and advertisements, creating montages that are as equally unsettling as they are seductive. Bimber's techniques highlight an umbrella of contemporary concerns ranging from political corruption to sinister puppeteering in the upper echelons of the commercial fine art market. Like the famous joke "The Aristocrats" from which this series' title is derived, it intentionally lacks a punchline or true narrative structure, bringing to light the absurdity of its content, in essence, a "joke about jokes."

I spoke with Bimber to learn more about his process and ideas.

Interview by Jon Feinstein

PostedDecember 5, 2017

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesPortfolio, Artists

TagsJayson Bimber, photography and wealth, new photography, social commentary photography

Beginning in the 1980s, theorists including Allan Sekula and Jon Tagg initiated critical work that analyzed the organization, purpose, and consumption of photographic archives. In doing so, they implicated the medium as a tool of state surveillance and control deployed against often vulnerable populations.

The points asserted by Sekula and Tagg about photographs within an archival setting encouraged numerous artists to utilize archives as the source or focus of substantive work. Those now-familiar lines of inquiry are widened, and the interpretation of archival material in photographic form expanded in Recollected: Photography and the Archive, a group installation that was on view at the Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University through November 16.

Exhibition Review by Roula Seikaly

PostedNovember 30, 2017

AuthorRoula Seikaly

TagsAllan Sekula, Jon Tagg, Recollected: Photography and the Archive, Tina Takemoto, Nigel Poor, Ian Everard, Jiro Onuma, Kija Lucas, Pamela WIlsonn-Ryckman, Hung Liu, appropriation, Chris Dorosz

He may not tell you this directly, but Nathaniel Ward's photographs are about the subtlety of defeat. They are brimming with quiet, often painful metaphors, buried as footnotes in photos of people and the land. From the ghostly large format color photographs of hallways, classrooms and bathrooms in American schools Ward made a decade ago, to To Turn the Mountains into Glass, politically agnostic black and white pictures made while traversing Israel's charged landscape, his work is riddled with introspective pause. And it's consistently quite beautiful. Ward's latest exhibition, A Nationless Place, on view through March, 2018 at the Ford Foundation Gallery at New York Live Arts adds a new layer to his methodologies by integrating sweeping swatches of text beside his photos of sometimes-confusing slices of landscape and human experience. Unlike explanatory "exhibition text" you might expect in a themed group-show retrospective, it functions as a piece of the art unto itself. I spoke with Ward to learn more.

Interview by Jon Feinstein

PostedNovember 23, 2017

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesExhibitions, Artists, Portfolio

TagsNathaniel Ward, New Photography, Ford Foundation Gallery, A Nationless Place

Piazza San Pietro Rome, 1950-65 © Georgina Masson Print from negative — *Piazza San Pietro* *Rome, 1950-65 ©* Georgina Masson Print from negative

A View of One’s Own, on view through December 10th at the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania, presents a curious story told threefold: three women photographers: Esther Boise Van Deman, Georgina Masson and Jeannette Montgomery Barron each visit Rome for three different purposes in three different eras, produce three wholly different interpretations of the Eternal City in three different photographic media. The curation offers competing impulses of record-keeping, seduction, and stream-of-consciousness insights, which, at first glance, would seem to provide rich fodder for the exhibition. However, the execution of the show is fundamentally flawed in that for the most part, each artist is kept within her own view, so to speak: the photographs are presented in discrete chronological collections in the gallery space, which ultimately robs the viewer of the opportunity to evaluate just how each woman’s unique version of the same city responds to the others.

Exhibition Review by Deborah Krieger

PostedNovember 16, 2017

AuthorDeborah Krieger

TagsPhotography of Rome, Arthur Ross Gallery, UPENN, Georgina Masson, Jeannette Montgomery Barron, Esther Boise Van Deman, women in photography

Clinton with selfie-ing women. Photo by Barbara Kinney / Hillary for America. Tweeted by Victor Ng

Alicia Eler knows a lot about selfies.

Named a “selfie semiotician” in the November 2017 issue of Wired, Eler started writing about the cultural phenomenon in “The Selfie Column” for the arts publication Hyperallergic in 2013. Rather than join the deafening critical chorus condemning selfies and those who snap them as vapid or narcissistic, Eler asked contributors to include a sentence or two that contextualizes the images within the framework of personal experience.

The drive to understand #selfies and why people make them lead to Eler’s critique of the topic as a measure of overlapping issues including data mining and brokerage, online privacy, identity formation, and contemporary art practices. The product of that analysis is her new book, The Selfie Generation which was officially released on November 7th through Skyhorse Publishing. I spoke with Eler about selfies and the publication of her first book.

Interview by Roula Seikaly

PostedNovember 9, 2017

AuthorRoula Seikaly

TagsAlicia Eler, Selfie Generation, Selfie, visual literacy, new media, self portraiture, instagram, memes, Roula Seikaly

Recollected: Photography and the Archive

Nathaniel Ward and the Desert that (Metaphorically) Tried to Kill Him

A View of One's Own: Three Eras of Women Photograph Rome

Understanding the Selfie: An Interview with Alicia Eler

Jayson Bimber Visualizes Alternative Facts

Recollected: Photography and the Archive

Nathaniel Ward and the Desert that (Metaphorically) Tried to Kill Him

A View of One's Own: Three Eras of Women Photograph Rome

Understanding the Selfie: An Interview with Alicia Eler