Untitled. (M/V MSC Napoli, English Channel, January 2007). 2009

DestructConstruct

The series DestructConstruct is based on found photographs of shipping container accidents downloaded from the Internet. Each found image is used as a model for a sculpture that is constructed for the production of the photograph. Individual shipping containers are folded by hand out templates of colored cardstock, and placed according to the found image. The sculpture then exists as a photographic work, which directly relates to the original photograph, including the ship name, place, and date the accident happened. I abstract the scenes of the catastrophes, removing the original context and placing the damaged containers, rendered simply out of colored paper, onto a seamless white background. This process transforms the containers into pristine patterns of color and shape, thereby confusing scale and altering the perception of the shipping container as an object. The paper is now seen as fragile, crushed or torn due to an unknown circumstance.

Untitled. (M/V Maersk Catalina, Halifax, Canada, January 2003). 2008

Untitled. (Osprey Lines Barge, Mississippi River gulf canal, January 2002). 2009

Untitled. (M/V Ital Florida, Italy, July 2007). 2008

Untitled. (M/V Ital Florida, Italy, July 2007). 2008

Untitled. (M/V Maersk Catalina, Halifax, Canada, January 2003). 2009

Untitled. (M/V Excelsior, Koln, Germany, March 2007). 2008

Untitled. (M/V OCCL America, Pacific Ocean, February 2000).2008

Untitled. (M/V OCCL America, Pacific Ocean, February 2000).2008

Untitled. (M/V Saga Spray, Vancouver, Canada, February 2006). 2009

Untitled. (M/V Hanjin Pennsylvania, Indian Ocean, November 11, 2002). 2009

Untitled. (M/V Hanjin Pennsylvania, Indian Ocean, November 11, 2002). 2009

Untitled. (M/V CMA CGM Dahlia, Manzillino, Mexico, February 21, 2008). 2009

Untitled. (P&O Nedlloyd Barcelona, Pacific Ocean, June 2005). 2009

Untitled. (M/V Republica di Genoa, Antwerp, March 11, 2007). 2009

Bio

Heather Rasmussen was born in Santa Ana, California and lives and works in Los Angeles. In September 2009, Heather had her second solo exhibition in the Sandroni Rey Container, Los Angeles, a shipping container turned gallery space. In March 2009, Rasmussen had her first solo exhibition, ship happens, with Light & Wire Gallery in Los Angeles. Her work was recently published in the book Unfolded, Paper in Design, Art, Architecture and Industry, alongside artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Demand and Frank Gehry. Throughout her MFA degree program at California Institute of the Arts, Rasmussen developed ideas with trips to a familiar southern California location: the Port of Los Angeles, where colorful containers became items that were constantly rearranged and choreographed within her lens. She is continuing her work with archiving collections on the WWII Ship, The Lane Victory; making her own shipping container line, HITO; and seeking out disasters in vast seas and forests.  www.heatherrasmussen.com.

Remnants From the Pocono Garden's Kitchen, Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania

Places Like Home

In exploring the places we come from, we are offered the opportunity to reconnect with the past, to try to understand its complexity, and to recognize its significance in shaping who we’ve become. This ongoing series of images is a collection of landscapes from suburban and rural towns scattered across America. I began by photographing areas in northeastern Pennsylvania, where I was raised; it was my effort to reconnect with a place I was once eager to escape. During this process, my emotions were in constant conflict as I wavered between nostalgia and criticism, between gratitude and shame, between hope and sadness. As I sought out the specific sites that I believed would elicit deeper feelings required for self-understanding, I found myself drawn to places I had no prior relationship with. Places that evoked the same emotional and tangible familiarity of home but in some cases were 3,000 miles away. Somehow the distance and the realization that the landscape of my youth was not unique provided me the space to explore something simultaneously more personal and more general about the past and its complex influence on how we perceive ourselves in adulthood and who we eventually become.

Regardless of where these images have been taken, they are all reflections of my past—they are all portraits of home. My hope is that they convey something universal about perception, remembrance, and the understanding that some things are healed by time and some are not. This body of work has been created by using color negative film and a 6×7 rangefinder camera. I print each of my image s traditionally in the darkroom. The prints are then drum-scanned and outputted as archival ink jet prints. Exhibition prints in either sizes 30″x38″ or 44″x56,” depending on the image, and are to be mounted on sintra and framed by using a simple white, wooden frame. The process of making this series has allowed me to acknowledge the beauty in everyday things and elevate that complex beauty to art. By connecting these disparate places through their common bonds, I’m able to make images that feel universally familiar and create a sense of home that is both emotional and tangible at the same time.

Village Drive, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Houses Off Old Route 22, Lehigh Valley Pennsylvania

Remnants From The Sign at Pocono Gardens, Paradise Valley, Pennsylvania

Quarry Street, Ormrod, Pennsylvania

South 4th Street, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Row Homes, Ormrod, Pennsylvania

Weona Park, Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania

Bio

Nicole Lloyd was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography. During her time at SVA, she was mentored by award-winning photographers Elinor Carucci and Dana Hoey and trained extensively with Julie Pochron in traditional C-printing. Shortly after graduation, Nicole moved to Los Angeles where she currently resides and continues to enthusiastically pursue her fine art career while also producing and curating art shows involving both local and international talent.  www.nicolelloyd.com

I Miss You Already, 2004 | Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks+Projects, NYC

WIPNYC and Leslie Tonkonow Present Tracey Baran

This online exhibition in conjunction with the exhibition Pictures of Tracey: Photographs By Tracey Baran at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks+Projects (September 12-October 17, 2009), honors the life and works of Tracey Baran who passed away after a brief illness in November 2008 at the age of 33.

From an essay written for Tracey Baran’s 2002 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, curator Karen Irvine wrote:

Tracey Baran creates visual journals, using color photography to record and refine her experiences into images that reference fundamental themes such as love, death, and regeneration. Rarely preconceiving her pictures, Baran works in an intuitive manner, casting her photographer’s eye on the world until something sticks. Thus a photograph can occur at any moment, in any place, in a practice that starts with instinct and results in the communication of very universal experiences.

Through a process of careful extraction and editing, Baran creates lyrical images that invite open interpretation. Her photographs function with a cumulative intensity. Like a written diary, in which each entry is better understood upon reading further, the true spirit of Baran’s photographs is discovered when they are considered as a part of the whole. Each photograph informs the others and in that interplay of images, their meaning fluctuates and expands.

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The Tracey Baran Memorial Auction has been arranged by The School of Visual Arts in order to provide proceeds for an annual grant, open by application, to an emerging female photographer from the US. For information please email info@igavel.com.

Kristy, 2004

Today I'm Thirty, 2005

Daren and Dylan, October 31, 2005

Oasis, 2004

The Winners, 2005

Suck and Blow, 2002

Mom's New Horse, 2003

Son and Father, 2005

Me, Myself and You, 2007

Who's Leda, 1999

See Through Me, 2005

Untitled (Cherry in Hand), 1998

Wishing and Hoping, 2007

Bio

Tracey Baran was born in 1975 in Bath, a small rural town in western New York State. In 1993, when she arrived in New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts, she began to define and record the story of her life in pictures of herself, her family, and friends, and the rustic landscape of her childhood. Possessing an unusual blend of candor and empathy, her photographs intermingle spontaneously-recorded moments with posed and directed depictions that resonate with intense feeling, a painterly sensibility and her consummate skill as a color printer.

Tracey Baran’s first one-person exhibition took place in 1998 at the Liebman Magnan Gallery in New York. She had six additional solo shows, including a 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and participated in more than thirty group shows at galleries and museums throughout the world, including, among others, the Guggenheim Museum (New York and Bilbao), the Folkwang Museum, Essen; P.S. 1/MoMA, New York; The Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Pusan Metropolitan Art Museum, Korea.

She was the recipient of several grants and awards including the Henry Buhl Foundation Grant (first prize) in 2002, the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship in 2005, and the Santa Fe Center for Photography Juror’s Choice Grant in 2006. Her work is included in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Miami Art Museum, and other institutions. www.tonkonow.com | www.mocp.org.

Border crossing, Kyrgyzstan 2007

Paradise Rivers

Curated by Sarah Bay Williams

Carolyn Drake’s photos catch the late afternoon light that lingers in piercing clarity before the day goes dark. Her subjects, when not in a state of waiting repose, are seen caught between moments—documented in the midst of action. The photos shown here, part of an ongoing project titled Paradise Rivers, illustrate in light and form the uncertain futures of the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, independent nations since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drake has been photographing this part of Central Asia and its relationship to the land and water with a traveler’s curiosity and a keen eye that expresses how these countries are coping with vibrant histories, economic and ecological distress, and political uncertainty.

Artist Statement | Carolyn Drake

Medieval Islamic writings call the Sayhoun and Jayhoun rivers two of the four rivers of Paradise.  The water they yield has sustained human life for 40,000 years, providing pastures for nomadic herders, irrigation for farmers, and enabling the development of culture, trade, language, literature, and in parallel, a succession of wars and imperial conquests from east and west over the centuries.

After incorporating the region into its empire in 1917, the Soviet government began transforming the rivers into a web of irrigation canals that brought cotton production to the area on a massive scale. Such large quantities of water were diverted that the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest inland sea, began to disappear, leaving salt and dust storms in its place. When Moscow’s rule ended in 1991, five new Central Asian nations appeared, burdened with plunging economies, artificial borders, and a growing environmental crisis.

This project follows the rivers from their source in the Pamir and Tien Shen mountains, downstream, and across borders to their dwindling ends at the Aral Sea basin, crossing into the lives of people and layers of history that they intersect along the way. The journey reveals Central Asia as a place where the connection between the earth and human life is at once plainly visible and complex, where human yearning and time come together, and progress is not bound to a linear path.

Border Guard, Kyrgyzstan 2007

Covered woman, Kyrgyzstan 2007

Trucker hotel, Kyrgyzstan 2007

Pilgrimage meal, Turkmenistan 2009

Khujand, Tajikistan 2009

Mineral Bath, Tajikistan 2008

Lada, Uzbekistan 2008

Home with cotton, Uzbekistan 2008

Swimmer, Turkmenistan 2009

Bathers, Tajikistan 2008

Sanatorium, Tajikistan 2008

Bio

Carolyn Drake was born in California, USA in 1971. She studied history and media/culture at Brown University, graduating in 1994, and later learned photography at ICP and Ohio University. Her photo career began at the age of 30, when she decided to leave her multimedia job in New York to learn about the world through personal experience. She currently lives in Istanbul and has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, a World Press Photo award, the Lange Taylor Prize, and a Santa Fe prize finalist. carolyndrake.com.

Sarah Bay Williams is the Ralph M. Parsons Fellow in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she served as picture editor for the virtual exhibition and print-on-demand book, Celebrating Urban Light. She is the author of The Digital Shoebox: How to Organize, Find and Share Your Digital Photos (2009). Previously, Sarah was head of the communications photography department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Wallis Annenberg Photography Department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, founded in 1984 through an endowment by the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, has a collection of approximately twelve thousand works. The collection maintains a primary emphasis on work produced internationally since 1940. In keeping with the encyclopedic nature of the museum, however, the department’s holdings include examples of photographic art from the medium’s invention in 1839 to the present. With the groundbreaking gift from the Wallis Annenberg Foundation in 2008, the museum acquired the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, a group of over 3500 prints that forms one of the finest histories of photography and collections of masterworks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. lacma.org.

Before the News, 25 November 2002

Journal: A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery from Breast Cancer

A few days before Christmas of 2002, my mother shared the news that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I was devastated, having lived with the impression that cancer was a death sentence. I began to imagine what she would look like without hair and a breast.  And as the idea was forming, she asked if I would photograph her.  I felt that if we turned the disease into a project, it would become less scary.  We could objectify and observe it. And if we could anticipate the completion of the project, then we could anticipate the end of the disease.

I photographed my mother over the next year, documenting her recovery from a full mastectomy, chemotherapy treatments and radiation. I knew that she had always kept a journal, and I saw her writing in one throughout treatment. So I asked to use her words to give the photographs a voice and with her permission, put together a book of images accompanied by her text. My photographs and her journal entries tell a parallel story of an illness that I now look back on as something we were lucky to go through.
While they highlight upsetting moments of vulnerability and hopelessness, they also show her incredible will to overcome this disease with both strength and grace. My mother’s will to live has been empowering for me and, I hope, will be for other women and their families who are battling cancer. This experience has shown me who my mother really is, and it has brought us together in ways I never could have imagined.

This is our journal.

Surgical Drains, 17 January 2003

Friday, 14 January 2003

I couldn’t write yesterday because I was in Morphine Land.   But anyway-my op went fine.   Some of the best moments were being with my group waiting to go in.   Laughing, loving, then up in the room in and out of consciousness.   Benjy came.   My beautiful Benjy.   My Annabel slept with me on the pull out chair bed.   I’ve seen my scar–it isn’t bad at all.   The only worry is what is my future prognosis.   How much chemo, etc.

I’m feeling really good–my scar doesn’t freak me out–I’m ok–I’m ok.   Everyone is so nice here.

Going Home, 18 January 2003

Sunday, 19 January 2003

As Annabel and I left the hospital we were helped by William, who had earlier brought me my paper and my breakfast.   Waiting for the elevator I started to cry.   “One day at a time” he said.   “One day at a time.   My Mom had cancer” he said, “so I’ve been on both sides of this.”

On the Subway, 10 February 2003

Stretch, 12 February 2003

Blizzard, 17 February 2003

Injections in Bed, 09 March 2003

Birthday Cake, 09 March 2003

Balloons, 09 March 2003

Monday, 10 March 2003

The birthday was wonderful.   To live in my memory of all those weird, emotional, happy, strange times that have happened to me in the new life…

…Yesterday, Sunday–The second gloriously sunny day in a row.   Then I went to church.   Once again pastor Melinda somehow managed to come up with the sermon that I most needed to hear.   About holding anger towards someone.   About forgiving?   Forgetting.   I really like her and really like this church.   It’s a wonderful haven for me.   I don’t know whether I’ve found God and Jesus yet.   But the comfort of shared prayer and company and singing and praying and focusing is healing and nourishing.

Radiation Table, 17 June 2003

Wednesday, 18 June 2003

So here is what happened.   Came with Annabel yesterday for what was going to be the dry run radiation but they decided to go ahead and treat me anyway.   First though, I had to lay still for over an hour.   In my cast.   At first its fine but then the fingers of my right hand go dead.   Then Annabel rubs it.   Much better but now my arm then neck, then head, turned to one side, begin to really really hurt.   Mustn’t move.   The technicians purposefully stride in and out.   Putting in film, moving the big machine.   Each time they leave, the radioactive proof door closes automatically.   I’m alone in there with a loud machine.   They can see me on a monitor, but I am alone.   Annabel of course has to also leave the room.   Whoever designed the treatment rooms has thoughtfully painted flowers on the ceiling.   It’s all very high tech, but they have definitely tried their best to make it patient friendly.   And the people are really nice.

In the Pool, 23 June 2003

Saturday, 28 June 2003

The sweltering heat of the last few days has cooled off and I have had two very happy days…

Suddenly I feel less fearful.   What will be will be.   The fear of early death seems lifted.   I feel good. I feel happy.   My 9 radiations are beginning to look a little red–but really not all that bad.   It’s easy to close my eyes under the machines and go somewhere else inside myself.   I’m not on the table.   I’m not being nuked, I’m off with my loved ones.   My ability to do this has grown during this funny old journey.   By the side of the stage each performance at Talking Heads, my ghosts visit.   Dad, Mum, Nanny, Vanessa, Corin, Robert Stephens, Noel Coward.   They send me out there calm and ready.

Survivor, 10 August 2003

Wednesday, 12 November 2003

Had my 4 month check up yesterday and all is well.   My face feels relaxed and peaceful.   My scar squeezes, but that tells me I am alive.

Bio

Annabel Clark was born in Topanga Canyon, California in 1981.  She received her B.F.A. in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2003.  During her final term at Parsons, she photographed her mother, actress Lynn Redgrave, during treatment and recovery from breast cancer.  In 2004, the project was published as a six-page spread in the New York Times Magazine and then as the award-winning book Journal: A Mother and Daughter’s Recovery from Breast Cancer, by Umbrage Editions.  Her work has been exhibited at the Minnesota Center for Photography, Peer Gallery and The National Arts Club as well as hospitals and medical schools across the U.S.  Her editorial work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Observer, Marie Claire, Glamour, Redbook and Proto Magazine.  Clark was the 2008 recipient of the Albina Taddeo Humanitarian Award from the Sass Foundation for her contribution to breast cancer awareness.  She also teaches photography workshops at the Creative Center, a nonprofit organization that provides free art classes to people living with cancer.   www.annabelclark.net

Untitled (Submarines)

Cover

For more than thirty years, Lynne Cohen has been photographing interior spaces devoid of people – laboratories, health spas, waiting rooms, classrooms. Their décor, sometimes kitschy, often funny, even if the humour reinforces the aspect of suspense, even of uneasiness. The rigorous framing, the distancing always much the same, the light that puts things in relief and the colour make the images seem constructed. By elaborating on the seemingly fictional quality of the spaces, the purposes of which are frequently ill-defined, Lynne Cohen plays up an aspect of social control, one that makes itself apparent in strange ways. The title of the book plays with multiple means of the English word ‘Cover’, which can mean lid, embellishment, protection or concealment. It refers to the book itself, a cross between documentary photography and contemporary art, sense and nonsense, the ordinary and dream-like. After Camouflage in 2005, Cover is the second book Cohen has published with Le Point du Jour. It brings together colour work from the past 10 years.

Untitled (Map Ladder)

Untitled (Piano Window)

Untitled (Underwater Bedspg)

Untitled (Olympic Shooters)

Untitled (Yellow Chairs)

Untitled (Russian Target)

Untitled (Mutant Lamps)

Untitled (Spaceship)

Untitled (Camouflage)

Untitled (Cats Paws)

Untitled (Empty Pool)

Untitled (Astroturf)

Untitled (Spawaves)

untitled (Dog)

Untitled (Gun Wires)

Bio

Since the early 1970s Cohen has been photographing living rooms, men’s clubs, classrooms, spas and military installations. Trained as a sculptor and printmaker, when Pop Art and Minimalism were dominant in the art world, she has a long-standing interest in the artificial and the everyday. She focuses on the psychological, sociological and political aspects of her subjects. But primarily she is concerned with the way things appear and function in our lives. As she once observed, “I feel as if the world can’t be like it is. It seems full of finished works of art.” The disorientation her photographs provoke is largely the result of the specific and mysterious nature of the places she photographs with their odd symmetries and disjunctions. Her work is marked by a strong visual and formal sense, one that conspires with the content to get under one’s skin. In conjunction with her art work, she has conducted workshops in Europe and North America and was for some thirty years a university teacher both in Canada and the United States. A major retrospective exhibition (accompanied by a new book, Cover) will open in July 2009 in Cherbourg at Le Point du Jour. lynne-cohen.com.

Untitled Gentleman #28

Untitled Gentleman

Untitled Gentleman is a series of fictional portraits created using anonymous faces from contemporary barbershop hairstyle posters combined with figures from discarded studio photographs. Through interventions in these found photographs, this work explores representations and constructions of identity in portraiture and appropriates value to images and individuals who are otherwise overlooked.

Existing between the real and artificial, these images are made effective by creating an expressive ambiguity in an unexpected context. In subverting the meaning and expectations of the traditional studio portrait, the images create an unknown narrative and visual tension that play with the viewer’s perception of the work.

The ambiguous expressions captured in these barbershop portraits inherit a vulnerable quality when placed inside the familiar frame of the studio portrait. In this new context, these once primarily functional photographs become unusually candid and passive representations of masculinity. Paired with figures from historical and contemporary found photographs, these men adopt new identities and are recognized as individuals, while remaining anonymous; identified by the hairstyle number originally found on the barbershop posters.

I am interested in shifting the frame of how we encounter and interpret images to investigate the meaning and construction of the photographic image. This work aims to encourage the viewer to reflect upon their own interpretation and projection of identity in the photograph.

Untitled Gentleman #2

Untitled Gentleman #32

Untitled Gentleman #29

Untitled Gentleman #20

Untitled Gentleman #25

Untitled Gentleman #13

Untitled Gentleman #24

Untitled Gentleman #23

Untitled Gentleman #14

Untitled Gentleman #1

Untitled Gentleman #12

Untitled Gentleman #15

Untitled Gentleman #6

Bio

Erica Allen was born in 1980 and raised in Oakland, California.  She received her BA in Fine Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2003 and completed her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, Photography, Video and Related Media program in 2008.  Past awards include the Aaron Siskind Scholarship and William Hyde and Susan Benteen Irwin Scholarship.  She has exhibited in NYC at Broadway Gallery and Visual Arts Gallery.  Erica currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  www.ericaallenphotography.com

We are very pleased to present the WIP-Lightside Individual Project Grant Runner Up Prize to Erica Allen for her project Untitled Gentleman.

Sunna & Laila

Sami, The People

I have seen the Arctic as a place where the extremes play out in the daily lives of the people that inhabit this land. It is a place where man has learned to adapt to the environment that surrounds him rather than adapting the environment to him. Here I found the Sámi, which translates to ‘The People.’ They are the indigenous people living in the Arctic Circle region of northern Scandinavia and it is the largest area in the world with an ancestral way of life based on the seasonal migrations of the animals. The Sámi are by tradition reindeer herders and live a nomadic lifestyle based on the reindeer migration.

I have come on a search to understand the primal drive of the modern hunter by taking an inclusive look at an original hunter-gatherer society. I have come to see if when the land speaks there are those that can interpret its language. I have come in search of silence so that I could begin to hear again.

I will spend the next year exploring the Sámi’s symbiotic relationship with the environment. They are the only people who can own and sell wildlife in Scandinavia. By possessing a livelihood that is dependent on their surroundings the Sami are acutely aware of the changes in nature. They have managed to survive in extreme climatic circumstances for ages. I believe that through exploring this culture I will better understand our role as stewards of the earth.

Wedding Pictures

Arild Slicing Meat

Mooseskin

Reinskin

Boazu Manno

Lailas Drums

Nils Peder

Arctic River

Nils Peder Manno

Feeding

Lavvu Manno

Bio

Erika Larsen’s (American, born 1976) most notable bodies of work, ‘Young Blood’ and ‘The Hunt’ look intimately at hunting culture in North America, its connection with nature and its role in the cycle of life and death.

 She has been recognized by World Press Photo, American Society of Magazine Editors, American Photography, Society of Photographers, and New Jersey State Council of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally.

 Erika is currently on a Fulbright fellowship to document the daily life and culture of the Sami people living in the Scandinavian Arctic. erikalarsenphoto.com.

We are very pleased to present the WIP-Lightside Individual Project Grant to Erika Larsen for her project Sami, The People.

Marlon Brando, 2006. Courtesy of Yancey Richardson Gallery.

What Still Remains

The idea for my project “What Still Remains” had been on my mind for quite some time. One morning, on my way to the darkroom, I was crossing Broadway, near Canal street, and in the middle of the street, I saw a clear blue plastic comb embedded in the pavement. That startled me, and I was beginning to wonder how this comb might have gotten there. Who had used it before, why did it end up in the pavement on Broadway? How do things get to where they are? They get lost in time and I am interested in what still remains. In our society of today, marked by our ability to consume, everything seems to be disposable, changes occur so quickly and things get left behind in specific places. Then they seem to take on a life of their own.

Bottle, 2006

Roses and Cables, 2007

Silence, 2008

Small Wonder, 2008

Pillow, 2007

One Day in November

The images from the series, “One Day in November“ is a tribute to Gisèle Freund on what would have been her 100th birthday in December 2008. “One day in November“ is a testament to the friendship between the great photographer and myself, a young photography student in Paris during the 1990’s. Intended as a posthumous birthday present, I have compiled a collection of images that are meant to convey visually what Gisèle Freund taught me and what Gisèle meant to me. Gisèle Freund herself can certainly be considered as one of the great artistic and intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Her impact can be traced to both her photographic and literary work and to her own colorful biography.

Morning

Lines

Spool

Greenpoint

Life

Niagara

Bio

Jessica Backhaus was born in Cuxhaven, Germany in 1970. At the age of sixteen, she moved to Paris where she studied photography and visual communications. Here she would meet Gisele Freund in 1992, who became her mentor and close friend.

In 1995 her passion for photography drew her to New York, where she started assisting photographers and pursued her own projects. Since then her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including The National Portrait Gallery in London and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

In Fall 2005 her first book, “Jesus and the Cherries” was published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg. Fall 2008 brought two new books, both published by Kehrer Verlag. The first titled “What Still Remains” and the second book “One Day in November” which is a visual homage to Gisèle Freund, who would have celebrated her 100th birthday in December 2008.

Jessica Backhaus is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, Robert Morat Galerie in Hamburg and The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

While based in New York, Jessica divides her time and life between Europe and the United States. jessicabackhaus.net.

Wine and Sup, 2007

Madame C

Seeing is not perceiving what we see through our eyes. It is feeling something invisible, or something that is obviously there, but invisible. The first impression we feel when seeing a person is not merely to see his or her face but to know it as it is. It is not about something, but to know something. Direct Insight into the object.

Do you see the moon when I see the sun? Even if I close my eyes, he is there and I am here. Even though we are near here, we see different things. He comes to me as he is there, and I go to him as I am here. There is something between us. Why do these women do as they are asked? A man acts while a woman is seen? Why do we try to be seen, not to see? My practice to see comes the place where the world of those women is to be seen. Starting from what I see to what you are as seen by somebody else. The chasm between what I view and what those women are seen. The dim gaze that looks at me again.

Most of these photographs were taken in Bundang, a boom town not far from Seoul, the capital of Korea. It seems to me that it is a forgotten city that buried all of its memories, without recollections, and with no flavors of life. Trying to perceive its interior space from a distance, I have found something not unique that we saw somewhere. It appears as a manipulated movie set and a place where happiness is made. In this place there is a slide between dissonance and consonance, which come from relationships between urban space and man.

The world speaks to us as if we may reach when we try for some more. To me, this is like an oasis. Saying it is what I want, I reach out my hands, but it is like a mirage, which is not attainable.

Always and Forever, 2008

Morning Makeup, 2007

Gold Living Room, 2007

A Room with a View, 2006

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 2006

Overshadowing, 2006

White House, 2007

Nobody but You, 2006

Iris Wallpaper, 2006

Lady in a Chiffon Blouse, 2007

Proportion, 2006

Bio

Yisook Sohn lives and works in Seoul, Korea. She received her BA in Korean literature from the Ewha Woman’s University and completed her MFA course in photography from the Graduate School of Sangmyung University at Seoul in 2007. She had her first solo exhibition this April. View website.