The Year in Pictures
(from the blog pictureyear.blogspot.com)
January 22 – February 27, 2010.
Opening reception: January 21, 6-8pm
Featuring the work of:
Jowhara AlSaud, Chan-Hyo Bae, Thomas Bangsted, Mandy Corrado, Stephen Gill, Joseph Holmes, Alejandra Laviada, Greg Miller, David Schoerner, Patrick Smith, Tommy Ton, Scout Tufankjian, Oliver Warden, Katherine Wolkoff, Tsukasa Yokozawa
And in remembrance of:
Evelyn Hofer, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, Julius Shulman, Bettie Page, and Charis Wilson
The exhibition "The Year in Pictures" presents a selection of photographs featured in the blog "The Year in Pictures" (pictureyear.blogspot.com). Begun in 2007, the blog has been a platform for my personal enthusiasm about the medium – a place to share good and new work that is sent to me or that I see on my travels; alert readers to new exhibitions, books, and other photography events; and reflect on ideas and issues. Since it's inception, the blog has posted over 500 stories, received over a million visits, and is viewed an average of 50,000 times a month.
Thinking about an exhibition to usher in the new year (which also marks the 20th Anniversary of the opening of the James Danziger Gallery in Soho) showing some of the young photographers whose work I had featured on the blog seemed an apt way of looking forward. Looking back, one wall in the show is dedicated to four giants of photography who passed away in the last year - Evelyn Hofer, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, and Julius Shulman - and two renowned photographic muses - Bettie Page and Charis Wilson - whose significance was noted on the blog.
The 15 contemporary photographers featured in the show represent 9 different countries – Saudi Arabia, Korea, Denmark, Britain, Mexico, Japan, France, Canada, and the U.S.. Over half have work I had originally only seen via the internet, evidencing the well-known power of the web as a connector, and what is sometimes taken for granted – the web's unrivalled capacity as a transmitter of photographic images.
James Danziger.
As featured in the blog The Year in Pictures, work by:
Jowhara AlSaud was born in Saudi Arabia in 1978 and now splits her time between New York and Jeddah, Saudia Arabia. As an undergraduate, she studied film theory at Wellesley College and she received her Master of Fine Arts in 2004 from the School of The Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University. Ms. AlSaud was a runner-up for the 2008 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Her work draws upon methods of censorship in Saudi Arabia, where portrayals of people in public, especially of women, are altered with black markers to make the images conform to cultural norms. She applies this idea to personal photographs of friends and family, etching line drawings onto negatives to create simplified narratives stripped of their documentary basis. She has exhibited her work internationally in group and solo shows, most recently at art fairs Paris Photo and the Aleppo 10th International Photo Festival in Syria.
Chan-Hyo Bae was born in Busan, South Korea in 1975. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2007, and currently lives and works in London. Mr. Bae's work has been included in numerous group exhibitions worldwide and collected by the Museum of Photography in Seoul, South Korea and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. His series Existing in Costume, from which the two photographs featured in the show were taken, has been shown internationally in solo shows and discussed widely by critics and viewers. In the series, he poses as a variety of noble women of England, exploring his assimilation into British culture while playing on ideas of gender, power, race and class.
Thomas Bangsted was born in Kalundborg, Denmark in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York City. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and Goldsmiths' College of the University of London, and received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2007. In his carefully considered photographs, Mr. Bangsted combines a strong sense of composition with a feeling of chaos, leaving the viewer unsure of his involvement in creating or manipulating the strange scenes he photographs. He has received several awards and fellowships for his work, including a Tierney Family Foundation Fellowship for emerging artists in photography in 2007.
Mandy Corrado was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1981. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. The works appearing in this show come from her series Reflections of the Muse, self-portraits taken while working as a figure model in a mirror she brought to her jobs. The series gained considerable attention in the photography blog community in 2009 for its smart inversion of the conventional relationship between artist and subject.
Stephen Gill was born in Bristol, England in 1971 and currently lives in London. He began taking photographs at an early age, eventually working in a one-hour photo lab at sixteen, then studying photography at Filton College in Bristol, and a year later beginning work as an intern at Magnum Photos in London. Since 1997, he has worked freelance, creating personal series of diverse subject matter and publishing his own photography books to wide acclaim. He has published eleven books since 2004 on his publishing imprint Nobody, which have won numerous awards, including three Photo District News Best Book Awards and two Photo Eye Best Book Awards. Mr. Gill's photographs have been exhibited in group and solo shows internationally, at London's National Portrait Gallery, and in solo shows in festivals such as Rencontres d'Arles, the Toronto Photography Festival and PhotoEspaña. Martin Parr has called Mr. Gill "emerging as a major force in British photography."
Joseph Holmes was born in 1954 in Pennsylvania and has lived in Brooklyn since 1984. He was one of ten winners of Jen Bekman's Hey, Hot Shot! Competition in 2005, and has since shown his work in numerous gallery shows across the United States. Much of his work focuses on public spaces of New York City, with projects focusing on street life, CBGB, the American Museum of Natural History, and cluttered workspaces across the city. His photographs have been featured in a national print campaign for Nikon, Stunning Nikon, and displayed on screens in Berlin subway trains as a part of Berlin Meets New York. Mr. Holmes is currently represented by Jen Bekman Gallery in New York and Wall Space in Seattle.
Alejandra Laviada was born in Mexico City in 1980. In 2009, she received the star prize at PhotoEspaña, the Descrubimiento Award, for photographs from her Photo Sculptures series, two of which appear in this show. She makes the work in abandoned buildings in Mexico City that are about to be demolished or redeveloped, first creating temporary sculptures out of objects found there, and then photographing the sculptures to make the final work. Ms. Laviada studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and received her Master of Fine Arts in photography from the School of Visual Arts. She was selected for Art + Commerce's PEEK Festival of Emerging Photographers in 2007, participated at the New York Photo Festival in 2008 and was named a Wallpaper Emerging Photographer in 2009. Her editorial work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wallpaper, American Photo, and Vogue.
Greg Miller was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1967. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 1990. In his carefully observed narratives, Mr. Miller looks at the often mismatched relationships between his subjects, themselves and their environments, focusing on social spaces like county fairs, band camps and his hometown of Nashville. In 2008 he received a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at the International Center of Photography since 2001. Mr. Miller has worked as a commercial photographer for over twenty years, working extensively for publications including the New York Times, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Esquire, Fortune, the Washington Post Magazine, Life, Time, and The Fader.
David Schoerner was born in Reno, Nevada in 1984 and now lives and works in New York City. In 2007, he founded the independent publishing company Hassla Books, which has been included in art book events and exhibitions worldwide. He also runs the Artist Book Database, an online database of artist publications. His photographs have appeared in art magazines including the Australian WON Magazine, the Mexican fashion magazine Celeste, the Brooklyn-based young culture quarterly The Journal, and the online photography magazine Ahorn.
Patrick Smith was born in Lille, France in 1955 and is currently based in Paris. He studied photography at CREAR Art School in Gouvieux, France, and graduated in 1981. In the fall of 2006, he was one of ten winning photographers in Jen Bekman's Hey, Hot Shot! Competition. Mr. Smith's photographic series, including the large format landscapes featured in this show, have been featured in group and solo shows in galleries across Europe. His personal work has been featured in the Russian design magazine Moloko+ and the French photography magazine Images. He has worked on commission for architecture, arts, design, and travel magazines since 1982.
Tommy Ton was born in Toronto, Canada. He has worked in the fashion industry since the age of sixteen, and in 2008 founded a blog called Jak and Jil. His blog, which receives over 30,000 hits a day, features photographs of models, designers, fashion editors, and stylists taken outside of fashion shows across the globe, and was voted best fashion blog in the Dazed Digital RAW Blog Awards in 2009. He has shot campaigns for Kurt Geiger, Complex Geometries, and Hong Kong's Lane Crawford, and published work in Vogue Paris, Elle UK and Vogue Nippon. In 2009, Mr. Ton was chosen to succeed Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist) to shoot street style for Style.com.
Scout Tufankjian was born in Massachusetts and is currently based in Brooklyn. She studied political science at Yale University, and worked for several years as a photojournalist in the Middle East, primarily in the Gaza Strip. Her photographs have appeared in a variety of publications, including Newsweek, Time, ELLE, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Essence, US News & World Report, Le Monde, Newsday, Der Spiegel, The Times of London and The New York Times. She spent 23 months beginning in December of 2006 independently documenting Obama's presidential campaign, resulting in her first book, Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign, published by powerhouse Books in 2008.
Oliver Warden was born in 1971 in Ohio and now lives and works in Brooklyn. He holds an undergraduate degree from the School of Visual Arts and a Masters degree from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Mr. Warden works in a variety of media, including film, painting, photography and interactive media. The photographs shown in this exhibition come from screenshots from video games, capturing entirely fabricated spaces of warfare and challenging the notion of photography as a camera-based art. His work has been exhibited in group and solo shows across the country. He is currently working on his first feature length animated movie, entitled The Wind.
Katherine Wolkoff was born in Indiana in 1976 and currently lives and works in New Orleans and New York. She received her undergraduate degree in American history from Barnard College in 1998, and her Master of Fine Arts in photography from Yale University in 2003. The next year, she received a 30 Emerging Artists Award from Photo District News and was included in the inaugural Art + Commerce Festival of Emerging Photographers. Her work has been exhibited widely nationwide, including at the New York Photo Festival in 2008, and is in the collections of the Addison Gallery of Art and the Norton Museum of Art. In the year following Hurricane Katrina, she made photographs of the aftermath in New Orleans, resulting in a series published in Aperture magazine and included in a show at Aperture gallery in 2007. Her photographs have been also published in the New York Times Magazine, V, Tank, Frieze, and 2wice as well as in online features at the Dossier Journal and Women in Photography. New photographs made in New Orleans were recently exhibited at University of New Orleans' St. Claude Gallery in a joint exhibition with Stephen Hilger. Her work will be included in the 9PH Photo Biennial in Lyon, France in the fall of 2010.
Tsukasa Yokozawa was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1971 and is currently based in New York. He graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in Yokohama in 1996, where he taught from 2000 to 2007. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. His series Spilt Milk features photographs of cities in Japan taken from a great distance. In 2007, he received an arts fellowship from the Japanese government to continue that series in the United States, leading to the creation of the series Parallel Lives, made in New York. Mr. Yokozawa's work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami.