Over the last year or so, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Michael Bühler-Rose. Michael is one of the most intelligent photographers I’ve met. He’s a great critical thinker and he’s always eager to discuss topics of photography. This has made for a few good conversations on bus rides between Boston and New York.

I was shocked to realize that I have never posted about Michael’s work on the blog, so I thought I’d post some now. At present, his website only features a single project entitled Constructing the Exotic. I’ll leave it to him to explain:

This series explores the conventions of the figure in painting and photography through the lens of historical colonial and native art. By placing the unfamiliar within the familiar the door is opened to questioning the identity of the “exotic other”.

In these images western women who were raised either within the Indian subcontinent itself or simply born into its socio-religious heritage become, in one sense, the “other”. Their placement, the familiar contemporary western cultural landscape, draws the viewer into their world and pulls at the seams of the notion exotic.

Here are two of my personal favorites from the series:

Vani, Alachua, FL., 2006 (from “Constructing the Exotic”)
© Michael Bühler-Rose

Chandra & Kalyani, Alachua, FL., 2007 (from “Constructing the Exotic”)
© Michael Bühler-Rose

Some of this work will be on display from July 8th to August 16h at Bose Pacia in a group show curated by Peter Nagy titled Neti, Neti (Not This, Not This). If you’re in New York, stop by and take a look.

See more of Michael’s work online here.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Untitled, 2008 (from “Bloom”)
© Mårten Lange

Mårten Lange sent me an e-mail last week to inform me of an update to his website, including the addition of a new project entitled Bloom. The images in the series naturally remind me of Lee Friedlander’s Apples and Olives.

See more of Lange’s work here.

Popularity: 21% [?]

(from “After the Fall”)
© Hin Chua

Hin Chua just updated his website and his latest project, After the Fall (previously titled The World’s What We Make of It), is really shaping up! He writes about the series,

In the origin stories of many religions, the first humans dwelt in an earthly paradise, at one with nature. After their disobedience and subsequent expulsion, some believe that this Fall of Man transformed the very fabric of the natural world and the essence of our relationship with it. Made throughout the world in locations ranging from Berlin to Jersey City, this series is a meditation on that altered, yet fundamental bond.

See more of his work here or here.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Ilulissat Icefjord 5, 07/2003, 69°11’59’’ N, 51°08’08’’ W (from “Broken Line”)
© Olaf Otto Becker

I had picked up Olaf Otto Becker’s book Broken Line some time ago and, though I was intrigued with the project – Becker’s inspiration to photograph the Greenlandic coastline – I wasn’t able to spend much time with the images. Well, recently I had a chance to sit down with the book for a while and found the photographs to be very compelling.

More of Becker’s work can be seen on his website and, if you’re interested, a copy of Broken Line can be purchased here. Definitely look at the book if you can.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Untitled, 2005 (from “Icefishers”)
© Marco Bohr

Marco Bohr’s Icefishers series is a nice compliment to Scott Peterman’s Shack.

More work by Bohr can be found here (don’t miss Observatories).

Popularity: 31% [?]

About two years ago, I mentioned my first real encounter with the work of Mike Mandel. At that time, Mike sat in for a class that Bill Burke was teaching and talked about his career. One of the early projects that he discussed was his set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (1975), a collection of portraits of photographers as baseball players with their “stats” on the back. These cards have since become collector’s items in the photography community but rarely do you see a complete set.

Well, as it turns out, Mike himself has put a complete collection on eBay.

Complete set of Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

As he writes in the listing,

The Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards is a photo offset lithographic project that I authored and published in 1975. The project satirized the phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture. I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade.

Recently, I have offered complete sets for sale, but they are rare. This is a first edition of all 134 Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards (plus one checklist, 135 cards in all). MINT CONDITION, offered for sale directly by the artist. Photographs by Mike Mandel. Texts, statistics and quotes by the respective artists printed on verso. Each card 3-1/2×2-1/2 inches. The reverse side for each card enabled the photographer to fill in their own personal data that referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards. In a sense, each photographer’s response provides an insight about how they approached their participation.

Some of the photographers, curators, and critics included are: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Ed Ruscha, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, Robert Cumming, Lewis Baltz, Duane Michals, Edmund Teske, Peter Bunnell, Robert Heinecken, Beaumont Newhall, etc. The cards are stored in archival baseball card pages, no pvc, acid free, 9 cards to a page. The set is collected and sold within a storage binder, black, pure archival polyproylene.

I will sign my card upon request.

Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards: Mike Mandel, 1975 (auctioned on eBay)
© Mike Mandel

Have a few thousand to spend? Looking to do it in the next three hours? Then hurry up and place a bid!

[thanks Jason]

UPDATE: The auction sold for $4,049. The person who bought it is probably kicking themselves for not buying the same exact item here for $2,950 (a savings of $1099).

Popularity: 33% [?]

(from “Rabbit Hunting”)
© Colby Katz

Over on odpTV – accompanying a feature in the new issue of OjodePez, edited by Aaron Schuman – there’s a great NPR audio slideshow of Colby Katz’s Rabbit Hunting photographs (previously mentioned on the blog here).

Take a look!

Popularity: 30% [?]

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered a great commencement address last week at Harvard University entitled, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.”

If you haven’t already, see it, hear it, or read it here.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Zhehao, Shanghai, 2008
© Shen Wei

Friend and photographer Shen Wei has just updated his website with images from his new project, Chinese Sentiment. Beautiful, as always.

Popularity: 32% [?]

First Tears Over Another Man, 2002
© Elinor Carucci

Women in Photography has just launched with their first online exhibition of photographs by women photographers: photographs by Elinor Carucci from her projects Crisis and Pain. Every other Tuesday of the month, WIP will present a new photographer, co-curated by my lovely friends Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips.

Visit the site to see more from Carucci. If you’re a woman photographer, you can also find the submission guidelines there.

Popularity: 35% [?]