Paris-based Swedish photographer Emma Hartvig has a way behind the camera that makes every shot seem right out of a glamorous Hollywood film. Her staging capabilities are impeccable, as are the narratives she strives to capture within each project.
Amusement parks and carnivals are two of my favorite things – the energy, the smells, and the people-watching all combine for the perfect summer adventure! Roger Vail started photographing their thrill rides with his 8 x 10-inch view camera back in 1970, his pictures made in the evening hours with long exposure times. The result of these extended moments, which track the momentum of the ride, offer up the childlike sense of wonderment that keeps me going back year after year for more.
Jill Bliss has committed her days to studying and creating in the Salish Sea islands of Canada and Washington. She’s bought a parcel of land and plans to build a homestead on it to use as home base as she explores the Cascadia bioregion. And while Bliss explores it all, I’m partial to her Nature Medleys series – the temporary arrangement of mushrooms and plants that she then photographs.
Laura Plageman is an Oakland, California-based artist and educator whose distorted photos explore the relationships between the process of image making, photographic truth, and the representation of landscape. Her artwork examines the natural world as a scene of mystery, beauty, and constant change that’s transformed both by humans as well as its own design.
I think we could all use the opportunity to step out of our own reality and step into someone else’s for a bit, don’t you? Brooke DiDonato is a New York-based visual artist who creates what some might consider tense situations before capturing them as photos. I, however, am not opposed to a toilet overflowing with flowers!
I’ve written about Zsolt Hlinka‘s Urban Symmetry project, and now he’s gone a step further with his latest series – Corner Symmetry. In it Hlinka has created imaginary buildings with real architecture that’s been removed from all external environments. It’s only after a few moments of staring that you realize what you’re viewing is actually a mirror image set at extreme angles to give a fisheye photography effect.
Aleksey Kondratyev‘s document-style photographs in Ice Fishers shines a light on what can be a brutal career. These Kazakh fishermen find shelter from temperatures as low as minus forty degrees in small tents of reused plastic packaging.
I was interested in examining the aesthetic forms of these improvised protective coverings and the way in which they function as inadvertent sculptures. I chose to focus on the materials and their surfaces as signifiers of underlying global influence and the improvisation that occurs from economic necessity.