PhotoWhoa Blog

It’s in the eyes. It’s there, in those pools of brown, blue, of color, where everything ahead is first given. Either you fall back and look away or you accept and thrust in. The connection between two is violent, fitful. There’s panic. Undecided mornings. But a connection must begin somewhere: almost always, it’s in the eyes.

But when a connection weakens, what are the first hints?Archipelago, the Spanish, Brooklyn-based staged photography artists Yolanda del Amo’s seven-year series, explores how connections reveal themselves in a communal home and in the body itself. In her staged photographs, the language of intimacy, or approaching disconnect, arranges around who’s looking at whom and who’s not. It’s not enough to say that they’re looking away. It’s how they look. And why—what are they’re still searching for?

I spoke with Del Amo over email about her staged photography.

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Capturing Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath pictures with Alex Fadkin

October 29 will mark three years since Hurricane Sandy battered through New York City. The superstorm was one of the worst in the city’s history, inundating some areas with water surges as high as fourteen feet, inflicting massive rain, and producing 79 mph wind gusts. And while most of the city was back to business relatively quickly, Lower Manhattan took longer to recover. In fact, for days after storm, the neighborhood—roughly south of 25th street—stayed without power, stuck in the dark.

It was during these pitch black nights that Alex Fradkin went exploring for photographs. His one point agenda was to capture hurricane Sandy’s aftermath pictures.

“It was so dark you could not see without a flashlight in many of the darkest streets,” he notes. “Looking up, the buildings appeared like dark canyon walls and stars were visible for a rare and brief time.” An architect before discovering photography, Fradkin knew that these buildings were designed with light in mind. To photograph them without their usual brilliance was perhaps to capture a truer face. “The architecture of Lower Manhattan…  was totally mute, deadened, and monolithic . . . rendered obsolete by a force much greater than the collective power of our species.”

I spoke to Fradkin over email about Dark Monoliths and about his ideas on photography.

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Landscape Photography Tips by Teri Fullerton

While in Barcelona, this past summer, Teri Fullerton, a Minneapolis-based photographer known for portraits of veterans returning from war, shifted her attention to a subject more often taken for granted than well shot. In photographing the landscape and how people—whether tourists, beach-goers, or other photographers—experience its beauty, she sought clear evidence of wonder.

Awe, the Small Self, the series started in Barcelona, is self-referential. Photographs of the landscape include portraits of other people shooting the same scene. “I was interested in observing other people looking and the complicated relationship between being and documenting,” she writes. The photographs also present a vast backdrop of ocean and sky. When seen from this scale, the body becomes small, the land more pronounced. “The world is infinitely large and man is a small player . . . [the camera] helps us appreciate our place in the world by paying close regard to it.”

I talked with Fullerton over email about her ideas on photography and Awe, the Small Self.

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To show what sustainability looks like on a personal and intimate level, Edgar Cardenas, a Ph.D. student in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University, began a series of photographs that would document his own land-conscious practice. He looked for the efforts made every day. Each photograph captured in one hundred little dramas was found in the backyard of his desert home.

Heavily influenced by the ideas of Aldo Leopold, the conservationist, ecologist, and “amateur” environmental philosopher, Edgar Cardenas embraced a personal narrative. There are portraits of his girlfriend basked in the red light of dusk, journal entries that poetically explain the stories behind several albumen prints, and meditations on loss. “Looking deeply at a small and personal space is actually not that common,” he notes. “I wanted to express that these [ecological] processes aren’t something that happen far away in the wilderness but in our backyards if we just pay attention.” 

I spoke to Edgar Cardenas about this project and about his ideas on photography and sustainability.

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Documentary Photography Ideas: Enter Your Past

In 2008, Susana Raab traveled to Peru, the country where she was born, to begin a six-year-long project about her lost homeland. Her family had left Peru when she was two, and she figured her photographs would take an anthropological vein—noting the land, people, and culture. But once back she soon realized how much her lost history was influencing her photography.

Cholita, both a term of endearment and an insult in Peru, became the title of her project. Originating in a colonial context, the word is used to identify children of indigenous and black parents. While traveling, Raab noticed she was being affectionately called La Cholita. Knowing the history of the word, at once a signal of familiarity and foreignness, she decided to document those who, like her, lived between worlds. And in exploring their history, she began exploring her own past.

I spoke to Raab over email about Cholita and about her ideas about photography.

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Once exclusive to those with access and money, photography is now in the hands of anybody with a phone. To communicate today is to know how to Instagram your meal in the right light or how to picture yourself in the right pose. Literacy in the language of photography fast approaches a necessary education. Nearly everywhere you go an ever-present camera may do what it pleases with your image. Has there ever been a time when knowing how your image is viewed has mattered so much?

Yet a flood of images—from memory, from painting, from poetry—has always been with us. What hasn’t been witnessed before is an availability of image-seizing tools. The freedom to shoot is now everybody’s. Perhaps in response to this flood of picture-making, some photographers, including a stable featured this past May at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, have stepped back to older tools with a forward thrust. Labeled by the New Yorker as “photo-materialists,” they’ve taken an older language to direct contemporary eyes to what’s still possible in the frame.

Some like John Chiara have gone back to the very beginning and reclaimed the camera obscura. On the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Coahoma, Mississippi, he drives around with one as big as a small shed. In this retro-wormhole of a camera, a new view can be revitalized with an old physicality. Chiara’s images are objects. In his language, those objects can then become pictures of memory and space. “I feel photography has a long and complicated relationship with memory and the madness of the self-encounter,” he says. Mystery, a purposely darkened insight, is part of his process, and so is chance and intuition. But it can all be as simple as doing what has always been done, too. “People approach me all the time when I am out shooting and ask what I’m doing. I answer simply: this is a large camera and I am taking a color photograph.”

I spoke to Chiara over email about his work and his experimental photography techniques.

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