The PDN Photo Annual winners gallery is now online along with photos from last week’s party in New York (good luck spotting me above).

Again, congrats to all of the other winners!

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I’m honored to have my work in this month’s issue of PDN, featured as one of the winners of the anticipated 2008 Photo Annual. You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore to see all of the selected photographers.

I’ll be heading down to New York on the 13th for the awards celebration and the blog might be quiet until afterward, when you can expect reporting on some of the NYPH08 events.

Until then!

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Bill Burke passed along an excellent article – the best I’ve read in a while, in fact – titled Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey, written by Charlie LeDuff for the latest Vanity Fair. Once you start, you can’t stop (it has a nice humor to it):

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

The article itself is definitely worth reading the rest of, but I want to also pass along Pull My Donkey [the title references Frank’s first movie and important avant-garde film, Pull My Daisy (1959)], a simple film of Frank and and his wife, June Leaf, made by LeDuff in a style inspired by Frank’s own work.

A great little short to accompany the article. Enjoy.

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The Spring installment of Slash Magazine, the wonderful art/fashion/design quarterly “for the extra observant,” includes some editorial work of mine, shot to accompany an article by T. Cole Rachel entitled How Do Your Price Your Art? – a look at the importance or irrelevance of a degree in art for artists. The conclusion: stay in school, y’all!

See the tearsheets in the editorial section of my website.

Following my spread is an interesting piece by Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman titled The Economic Playground, accompanied by the photographs of Mr. Brian Ulrich. Nice to be in such good company!

Pick up a copy of the issue at any Barnes and Noble in the U.S. or at these specialty bookshops around the world. It will be available on the stands until June 6th. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the magazine’s online edition (and view the first four issue for free) right here.

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Sharon Wild, 2001 (from “The Valley”)
© Larry Sultan

Wallpaper Magazine did a feature on Larry Sultan with some “exclusive” new work and a short Q&A. Take a look.

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Can’t decide what to get someone (or yourself) for the holidays? Might I suggest a year long subscription to Cabinet Magazine?

Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet’s hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal. Playful and serious, exuberant and committed, Cabinet’s omnivorous appetite for understanding the world makes each of its issues a valuable sourcebook of ideas for a wide range of readers, from artists and designers to scientists and historians. In an age of increasing specialization, Cabinet looks to previous models of the well-rounded thinker to forge a new type of magazine for the intellectually curious reader of the future.

Each issue is themed. Here are the five most recent:

Issue 27 – “Mountains”
Issue 26 – “Magic”
Issue 25 – “Insects”
Issue 24 – “Shadows”
Issue 23 – “Fruits”

Take a look at the contents. But, believe me, they’re even better than they sound.

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In Issue 48 of The FADER Magazine, two photographers that I admire have pictures of musicians I also admire.

Tierney Gearon photographs Devendra Banhart:

Devendra Banhart for The FADER Magazine, Issue 48, Fall 2007
© Tierney Gearon

Devendra Banhart for The FADER Magazine, Issue 48, Fall 2007
© Tierney Gearon

And Anna Bauer photographs Spencer Krug (Sunset Rubdown):

Sunset Rubdown for The FADER Magazine, Issue 48, Fall 2007
© Anna Bauer

Sunset Rubdown for The FADER Magazine, Issue 48, Fall 2007
© Anna Bauer

Nothing like finding good editorial work. If you don’t think you’ll have a chance to look at the magazine on the shelf, you can actually download the whole thing here (PDF).

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Milan Cathedral, Milan, 1998 (detail)
© Thomas Struth

In The Politics of God – an essay adapted from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West – Mark Lilla considers the power of political theology. In this, his ability to present the history of theological politics up to the present day, in plain language, is masterful.

The full essay, as printed in the the latest New York Times Magazine, can be read online here. The article is lengthy but worth the read.

Additionally, I thought Thomas Struth’s images were an interesting compliment to the text.

Read this in print if you can.

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(from “History of a Villiage”), 2006
© David LaSpina

The subject of David LaSpina’s History of a Villiage intrigues me.

The following images catalogue how a small community exhibits, records, and experiences history; the community is Mamaroneck, New York, a village on Long Island Sound, founded by Jonathan Richbell at the onset of the colony charter boom of the 1660s. The project includes a wide scope of ‘facts’ interpreted as history and gives minor events the same historic weight as significant history. The evenhanded presentation, formal exhibitions and highly interpretive observations create an exhibition organized by a careless curator, canalizing the unedited material from which history is culled.

And, moreover, the photographs are really nice.

David was recently featured in the latest printing, Issue 35, of Blindspot (co-edited by Jason Fulford). More of his work can be found on his website and, occasionally, on his blog.

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In a recent comment, my friend Nicola Kast referred me to this article from an older ArtForum about Roe Ethridge. Good timing, as the article seemed to discuss a few ideas that have been stirring in my head lately, many of which are interesting to think about in terms of the work of Ethridge, specifically.

I’ve decided to present selected portions of the text along with some of his images. A few of the photographs that I used were made after the article was actually written.

After earning a BFA at the Atlanta College of Art, where, like so many photography students in the ‘90s, he fell under the sway of the Dusseldorf school, Ethridge tried out a systematic approach, the cold, observational logic of which seemed to make sense to a young photographer growing up in the rational, corporate environment of a town like Atlanta. A series of carefully described pictures of grassy patches next to highways—near freeway exit ramps and on medians—ensued, in which a Becher-style methodology was married to New Topographic understatement. But the impulse to shape the world to a predetermined photographic order, a form of stable compactness, came to feel inadequate to him, in the face of the multiplicity of the photographable, the fluidity of the medium, the rapid rhythms of contemporary life, and the changing sphere of ‘90s photography. The desire grew to rattle the discipline, to “get the typologies wrong,” as he says, to release himself into a more hyperactive form of production, which, without forsaking the concrete descriptive capabilities of photography, could also embrace its aleatory or involuntary possibilities—the natural “serendipity” of the medium, he calls it. “I like to keep the series short and linked,” he says. “And then there are these one-offs—travel pictures, pictures from a job, pictures of food—that aren’t part of a series but which become their own group.”

Junction, Atlanta, 2003
© Roe Ethridge

County Line Mall Sign 1/5, 2004
© Roe Ethridge

If commercial photography is about the stimulation of desire in the service of consumption, then Ethridge plays with this dynamic in two seemingly unrelated series: a group of effortlessly beautiful pastoral landscapes made in upstate New York, which he says relates more to the imagery of covetable real estate than traditions of the Romantic or picturesque, and a sequence of portraits of young models (2000-2001).

New York Water (White Pine Camp), 2000
© Roe Ethridge

Leigh Yeager, 2003
© Roe Ethridge

At one point, the author addresses the Typologies of the Bechers in order to apply their studies to the idea that “internal typologies” exist within the medium of photography—and that Ethridge explores the redundancy of the medium as a conceptual gesture.

The Bechers bequeathed to photography a form of restrained authorship based on the predetermined selection of strictly delimited, typological subjects in which meaning emerges from the description of differences observed among more or less similar things. By the early ‘80s, with the arrival of the Pictures generation and appropriationists such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, the possibilities for authorship were restricted even further: In a postmodern world supersaturated with imagery, the only conceivably radical act was to acknowledge the impossibility of photographic originality and to merely select and incorporate images that were already in circulation in the wider culture. The subject of photography shifted from the phenomenological world to the medium itself as a system of representation. For a photographer of Ethridge’s generation, in a world ever more choked with ever faster-flowing imagery, the philosophical dilemma remains, but the strategy is different. In rehearsing photography’s repertoire of subjects, genres, styles, and techniques—astrophotography, motion photography, editorial and fashion photography, portraiture, and landscape, for example—Ethridge moves through photography’s own internal “typologies” in a way that acknowledges the putative redundancy of the medium while simultaneously reclaiming a space for artistic maneuver. Ethridge sees reengaging with the range of subjects that now reside within the popular culture of photography as a conceptual gesture, a kind of post-appropriative act that recognizes the impossibility of absolute originality while still investing in photographic authorship. The act acknowledges art as one more system among many systems under capitalism, in which the dynamic of production and distribution is more meaningful, ultimately, than notions of innovation or transformation. As Ethridge expresses it: “Images are redundant. I am implicating myself as part of that redundancy.”

Town and Country, Liberty, New York 1/5, 2005 and R’Ville 1/5, 2005
© Roe Ethridge

Art photographers have long had a relationship with commercial practice, but where the pattern is usually to underplay the non-art roots of their work in order to release it more fully into art, Ethridge is unusual in his enthusiasm for photography’s double life, which distinguishes it from painting or sculpture. “New York is the Hollywood of print publishing,” he says. “The status of photography is different. I see myself on both sides; there’s a mutual attraction. Everything seems to end up in a magazine sooner or later.”

Is it true? Does everything seem to end up in a magazine sooner or later? I can’t help but think of Ryan McGinley’s new video for PUMA, or Alec’s hybrid of fine art and fashion—Paris Minnesota.

When Ethridge jettisoned a systematic approach to photographic depiction, paradoxically he freed himself to address the system as a subject in his art. He recognizes that the contemporary world is defined less by the objects it produces than by underlying networks and circuits, by the hyperkinetic systems of production and distribution that propel those objects out and around the world; in his view photography also is less a medium of fixed or static representation than a constantly motile carrier of information.

Orange Grove #4 1/5, 2004 and Rick 1/5, 2005
© Roe Ethridge

For Ethridge, the exhibition itself becomes—in a way analogous to the pages of a magazine—a containing structure in which to temporarily map and order images in terms of their interrelationships rather than their singular meanings. This thinking was behind his teasing juxtaposition of shots of UPS couriers, the young models, and pine trees in a 2000 exhibition at Andrew Kreps. “UPS is important because of what happens today with catalogues,” he says. “You put the clothes oil the model, take the picture, produce the catalogue—presumably from pine trees—and mail it out. We order the clothes off the Internet, and it comes by UPS. Everything is working. Everything is involved in production and distribution. It’s the natural order today.”

Red Diamondback, 2006
© Roe Ethridge

Read the full article here.

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