Monthly Archives: February 2012
David Zimmer (b. 1965)
Joel-Peter Witkin (b. 1939)
Joel-Peter Witkin’s compositions are often inspired by classical paintings from art history (from Courbet to Seurat, Caravaggio to Dali), and often make specific reference to the history of photography.
Terry Winters (b. 1949)
JoJo Whilden
JoJo Whilden writes: “Skid Marks developed for several years as I tried to figure out how to photograph marks on the highway without getting hit by a car. It was exciting. The images were taken on road trips through Upstate New York, Long Island, Connecticut, and California. The skid marks were ubiquitous, and yet each one so unique. Each traumatic moment soiling a place on the highway represented an individual’s experience of fear and excitement, and possibly loss. The concept of rubber necking is about people wanting to know what happened at the trauma sight. They want to hear about fear. It seems to be a very human response to trauma.
“The project’s inception coincided with my desire to draw with charcoal. In a frustrated effort to command my hand’s movement on a piece of paper, I searched around for a different way to make drawings. These skid mark images were printed on a matte surface, which gives them the appearance of having been drawn. Though the subject matter may have a narrative or psychological value, the intent of the work is also formal in its attempt to honor the work of 20th century Modernist photographers and their aesthetic approach towards photography and nature. The framing and formality of the photographs, as well as the richness inherent in silver lining of black-and-white photography, suggest images of beauty, and at the same time, the marks represent something potentially more traumatic. Skid Marks as a project represents the fleeting and forgetful qualities of the new century and the obsession to look, but only for a second.”
James Welling
James Welling is an artist who is well-known for his ever-evolving photographic practice in which he produces of a wide range of imagery in order to comment upon the medium itself and its history.
Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) is an American artist working in a. variety of media, who is best known for her photographic imagery. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project “The Kitchen Table Series.”
Christopher Webster
Bruce Weber
Bruce Weber (b. 1946) is an American photographer and filmmaker known for his velvety, lush, gelatin silver prints.
Nick Waplington (b. 1970)
Robert Vizzini
Robert Vizzini was born in 1952 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography, New York City; and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York.
The artist’s photographs have been widely published in a variety of periodicals, most notably: Aperture (Winter 2000), Black & White Magazine (2000), Blind Spot (2000), DoubleTake (Spring 2000), LensWork (1997), Photo Metro (1977, 1999), The Photo Review (2000), and Popular Photography (1997, 1998). Vizzini’s work was also included in a book on contemporary photography published by Eyestorm, which included such artists as Ralph Gibson, Sol LeWitt, Vik Muniz, Ed Ruscha, and William Wegman, among others. Vizzini was the first place winner of the 1997 Ernst Haas Golden Light Award Print Competition for a Plastic Camera Portfolio. He has exhibited extensively in both solo and group exhibitions across the United States, and his photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris; and the Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin; as well as numerous private collections.
Bill Viola (b. 1951)
Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin (b. 1963, 1961)
Inez van Lamsweerde (b. 1963) and Vinoodh Matadin (b. 1961), known simply as Inez and Vinoodh, are an Amsterdam-based Dutch fashion photographer duo. They have worked for a long list of prominent fashion magazines and brands, including W Magazine, Vogue, WSJ Magazine, i-D, Acne Studios, Balenciaga, Dior, Gucci, Helmut Lang, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Tom Ford, Yves Saint Laurent, and numerous others. They also produce independent artwork, and were the subjects of the 2010 retrospective, Pretty Much Everything: Photographs 1985-2010, which toured internationally and heralded the publication of Inez and Vinoodh’s monograph of the same title: Pretty Much Everything (Taschen, 2011).
Brian Ulrich (b. 1971)
Brian Ulrich’s photographs explore contemporary consumer culture.
After completing his MFA in photography at Columbia College Chicago, Ulrich spent considerable time working at the Cleveland Museum of Art, often staying after hours to sift through the vast archives of photography. It is this understanding of the history of the medium that informs much of his work which today addresses issues social, political, and historical.
His work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
In 2009, Ulrich was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
Arthur Tress
b. 1940
Arthur Tress is one of the most eminent, and consistently imaginative, photographers of his generation, which includes Duane Michals and Jerry Uelsmann. His style originated in the 1960s when surrealist, staged photography ruled. But Tress evolved a style all his own that is both dreamlike and formally composed out of contemporary subject matter. He takes everyday objects and subverts their function so that they become something of myth holding a quixotic, playful meaning. Magic, theater, and fantasy are the markers in his unique works. About photography’s potential, he has written, “So much of today’s photography doesn’t ‘grab us’ or mean anything to our personal lives. …It fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination which is hungry for stimulation. The documentary photographer supplies us with facts or drowns us in humanity, while the pictorialists please us with mere aesthetically correct compositions. But where are the photographs we can pray to, that will make us well again, or scare the hell out of us?”
From the very start of his career, Tress demonstrated an understanding of photography’s potential to transform the mundane into the fantastic. His images are from the natural world, but are inundated with symbolism and strange juxtapositions. The photographer invites us into a dream world that can be playful yet threatening. Images abound filled with weapons and saws, machines, and ruins. Both the children and the male nudes in his photographs are rarely portrayed at rest or in formal portraits. They are rather engaged in modern tableaux acting out symbols of modern life, a pretend world with violence and mystery ever at hand. In the reviews of his major Corcoran retrospective he was dubbed “a national treasure,” fitting for a photographer who captures symbolically so wide a range of modern life. Tress’s work is collected by major museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; George Eastman House; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Bill Travis (b. 1957)
Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans, born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, is a contemporary artist best known for his observational photography, including snapshots. More recently he has turned much of his attention to abstraction. Tillmans was the first non-British artist to receive the prestigious Turner Prize.
Hank Willis Thomas
Gail Thacker (b. 1959)
Joyce Tenneson
Joyce Tenneson (b. 1945) is an American photographer particularly known for her ethereal portraiture, often of women.