Jagged Little Pills

“Better living through chemistry.” It’s a phrase coined by DuPont back in the 1930s to sing the praises of science, and has since been turned into a pop culture reference to mind-altering drugs. Photographer Andy Diaz Hope takes this phrase and runs with it.
I ran across Hope’s work last year during his open studio. [...]

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Anatomy Lessons

It’s the question every photojournalist might ask him or herself. When dramatic events unroll before you, do you stay behind the camera and document or do you step out and engage? Max Aguilera-Hellweg decided to engage.
It started back in 1990 when he was asked to capture a neurosurgeon at work for Savvy magazine. [...]

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Tattered and Torn

Sculptor and photographer Nadim Sabella studied archeology in his native Germany. He’s now based in Oakland where he turns out artwork that is very much driven by his training as a cultural detective. Sabella’s work puzzles together stories from the remnants of a not-so-distant past.
His photos capture abandoned rooms where plaster and sheetrock [...]

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Scratching the Surface

Gerald Slota traffics in fairy tales and mysteries. His images are often blurry, fleeting, difficult to read, the surfaces riddled with cuts, lines, tears, childish doodlings.
Slota manipulates his negatives, drawing on and scratching them, laying shapes over the negative to obscure or embellish the image while he’s printing. Looking at his pictures is like [...]

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Energy Saver

Most people view lightbulbs as mere functional objects. Catherine Wagner proves this wrong in her photographic catalog of these wonderful everyday glass sculptures (“A Narrative History of the Lightbulb“) that was on exhibit at Stephen Wirtz gallery earlier this year.
The Baltimore Museum of Industry invited her to document their prize collection of 50,000+ lightbulbs. [...]

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