Some photographers use light as a means to an end. Others like Jeff Brown perform with it. What may overwhelm somebody with an ineffectual sense of light’s fantastic, potent power seems to excite Brown. Constantly risking absurdity, he performs a high-wire act of vision, adding what may be three or four lights at any given time.

Many of the people Brown photographs are rich and famous, important and pretty, or all four and then some. They live their lives publicly. And they have public images to uphold. It’s no wonder why, when sitting for a portrait commissioned by a magazine or a newspaper, they perform a rehearsed self. But what’s going on in the portrait of Mitch McConnell above? Does Brown realize he’s illuminated the Senator from Kentucky down to the bone? Captured him as he is at the moment of a portrait: actor playing politician in what looks like a semi-ordinary grocery store, set in a fictional Kentucky town, where beer and sandwiches and pig-stuff are bought and sold.

While other portraits read as a profile of a person—capturing what’s simply given—Brown’s portraits wink at you, tipping you off that something else is happening. Because of the ridiculously energetic way he plays with light, color, and shadow, he creates portraits that somehow, someway feel more honest. They’re naked. Though not bare. You know you’re looking at a portrait made in the act. It’s as if you’re getting both the final photograph and a behind-the-scenes sketch. And if reality is increasingly judged by appearances, why can’t the truest portrait be the one that’s commissioned, rehearsed, and performed?

I spoke to Brown over email about his work and about his thoughts on photography.

Continue reading →

Nearly true but not truth, almost life-like and real but utterly false: There’s nothing neutral in how Rachel Roze one of the well-known contemporary photography artists uses her camera. Like any photograph, one of hers may appear like a document, one that seems willing, to tell the truth, but in reality, is put on. Another may seem unreal and strange but, when looked at for a while and taken in, seems closer to life than any photojournalist’s reportage.

As though caught in the charms of an impostor, you believe wholeheartedly in what you feel but know something is off. Working in a space between truth-telling and narrative gives her photos room to breathe. Here, a photo of a statue can hover between a casual snapshot and a deliberate staging. Was it her intention to make the statue’s eyes, lightened in a burst of flash, seem alive and knowing? Even the spidery way it holds its crucifix registers between two states: is this a motherly embrace or an intentional letting go?

“I think people should take everything with a grain of salt,” she says, “Rights and wrongs are blurred when it comes to art.” There are other photographs like this one in her We Were in Sicily series but most are simple captures: There are landscapes of Sicilian alleyways cut between dawn or dusk, kind portraits of young, carefree children, and blunt scenes of intimacy. Roze never reveals what’s romance, what’s ruse. It’s all made to look real.

I spoke with Roze over email about her photography.

The introduction was edited from what was originally published. 

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →