Bringing the War Home

In her unsettling photo collages Martha Rosler combines domestic images with snapshots of war. 60s housewives pull the blinds back on soldiers in trenches while teenagers with cell phones yammer as explosions go off behind them. The New York Times recently published a video slide show of her work.

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American Negatives

Abner Nolan takes old found negatives and reprints them. There’s not a lot of his work online, but he did do a limited edition book with Trillium called American Negatives which looks like it might be out of print. He will have another limited edition coming out in the next year with These Birds [...]

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Lion King

Discovered this genius of a site by way of the blog “It’s Nice That.”
The Lion publishes one found photo a day accompanied by a song. The owner Arian Behzadi describes it simply as: “For when a song fits a picture or when a picture fits a song.”
Found photos invite us to dream up narratives [...]

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As Found

We tend to think of found photos as existing solely in the physical world, pieces of paper from the past covered with chemical emulsion and unknown faces, but the Internet opens up a whole new universe of vernacular photography where the images are less tangible, more ephemeral and free from the bonds of ownership. [...]

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Invisible Nation

Salvadoran artist Victor Cartagena’s latest installation, Invisible Nation, fills the walls of Galeria de la Raza with swarms of official Latin American ID photos, many of them passport pictures from the 70s and 80s, thousands of nameless faces that impress with sheer numbers, but also make it seem necessary to look more closely at [...]

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Reinventing Clichés

Cassandra C. Jones weaves mundane found photos into intricate floral tapestries. She takes images of cheerleaders in mid-cheer, hands and legs flying out in a whirlwind of exuberant gestures, and diffuses all of that overeager, adolescent energy into beautiful pinwheels of color and form. It takes a close inspection to see the details of [...]

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Other People’s Pictures

Bertien van Manen is a Dutch artist whose work is on display at Yancey Richardson in New York.
The current show features images from her travels across Russia, where she photographed people she befriended in the intimacy of their own home. Her style is an intriguing mix of documentary and personal.
Van Manen has an earlier [...]

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Black Holes

I’ve often wondered if memories were qualitatively different before photography was invented. When a loved one dies we have the crutch of a family snapshot to remind us of details that without the photo might become cloudy.
The online photo magazine, Lens Culture featured the work of Ludmila Steckelberg recently, a Brazilian artist [...]

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Gender Play

Kimberly Austin’s images waver and blur on silk and muslin banners. Her technique involves developing the same image on two different swaths of textile, using two distinct alternative processes. She prints one sheet of fabric using cyanotype and the other using Van Dyke then hangs both layers of material over a metal rod [...]

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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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