The infographic above appeared in the April edition of National Geographic, and it demonstrates that the American addiction to digital images has created a huge surplus of pixels that tell us what most of us already know, people like to take A LOT of photos.
America is a country of immigrants, and the perspective of foreigners, newcomers and outsiders has always played a large a role in the history of contemporary American photography. Immigrants often have a way of showing us that which we cannot see for ourselves. In keeping with the tradition of outsiders looking in on our culture, a small exhibition on the first floor of the International Center of Photography, titled Perspectives 2012, showcases the work of three non-American photographers — Chien-Chi Chang, Anna Shteynshleyger and Greg Girard — who all focus their cameras on different facets of American life.
“One picture leads to another,” Alec Soth tells the two filmmakers in Somewhere to Disappear (2011), a documentary that follows him around during the last two years that he worked on his photographic book, Broken Manual (2006-11). Later, in the film, he says: “I want to be carried.” Soth yearns for a subject to overwhelm his curiosity, leading him into places and situations that he couldn’t have otherwise foreseen. Photography is his means of discovering both the self and the Other, and where the two meet. It is how he finds “a path through the world.”
Cindy Sherman’s one-woman retrospective is profound, provocative and sadly incomplete, most noticeably in relation to her earliest works despite the inclusion of the entire black and white “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980), the “encyclopedic roster of stereotypical female roles” that skewered the post modern discourse on photography right through its kabobs.
The world of photography is changing fast. Here are some recent highlights … Kodak stops the camera biz, Flickr will upgrade, Gizmodo gets the exclusive about Instagram and Pinterest keeps growing …
LOS ANGELES — I love the rain, and especially the aesthetic of rain. I always think back to the work of Hiroshige, whose rainy woodcut prints famously inspired Van Gogh’s impressionistic landscapes.
CHICAGO — In his latest series of photographs, recently published by the Center for American Places, Wolke turned his lens on the landscape of southern Italy. Entitled Architecture of Resignation: Photographs from the Mezzogiorno, the series consists of large-format images of places filled with the architectural detritus of millennia — marble columns that are the lone survivors of an ancient city, an abandoned World War II military base, the interior of a Roman grave littered with modern garbage, the remnant of a quarried hill, sculpted by industry until all that’s left is an unearthly, oddly beautiful lump rearing up from a flat landscape.
The heart of a society is most open when dealing with death. Its spoken and unspoken fears and hopes, both for life and the afterlife, are embedded in rituals of remembrance and memorial. In China, this has taken the form of detailed objects made of Joss paper that are burned for the deceased.
LOS ANGELES — Standing atop buildings in skyscraper-bound cities like New York and Hong Kong, we’re bound to look out. And across. And somewhat downward. But never down, like straight down. Detroit-based photographer Dennis Maitland took a different approach.
Floating around Twitter and Sina Weibo as of late has been my new favorite blog, Yowayowa Camera Woman Diary. Lifted to the web by Tokyo-based photographer Natsumi Hayashi, the diary features a series of “daily levitations,” as Hayashi drifts through the hustle and bustle of her city.
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