Samantha’s colourful photography is created using light leaks. Most often considered a problem in photographic circles, light leaks prove a dynamic tool enabling Samantha to create images innovative and vivid with colour. Models seem to disintegrate into the light, leaving two halves: one which is candid and present, and the other ethereal, aged, almost spiritual. It is the contrast of these two very separate, distinct photographic styles that gives Samantha’s work such an arresting quality.
 
Colour also seems to be used to reflect Samantha’s subjects. A group of young girls posing with “attitude” in the first image is represented by the vibrant urgency of blue and orange, contrasting colours on the colour wheel indicative of the fragmentation of teenage years. In the last image, a teacher with chalk to blackboard is re-imagined by a black-white contrast, as that blackboard seems to disintegrate into the encroaching white light.
 
Primarily, Samantha is a fashion photographer utlising her tools in both pre-and-post production to emphasise clothing, and it cannot be argued that Samantha’s clever use of light leaks provides that exact function. Clothes, especially in the first and second images above, are presented in the candid, clear half of the shot, whilst the models’ faces are slightly obscured by the orangey light leak reminding us of the anonymity of most models, their identity an unnecessary distraction from the clothing product on display.
 
Samantha’s work is full of dynamism, vibrancy and innovation- a true talent in the realm of photography.
 
Website: Samanthacasolari.com 

Dexter Lane (c) Matthew Brandt. Courtesy of M + B

Lake Union (c) Matthew Brandt. Courtesy of M + B

Stone Lagoon (c) Matthew Brandt. Courtesy of M + B

Wilma Lake (c) Matthew Brandt. Courtesy of M + B

Essential to the definition of any piece of conceptual art must be its scepticism towards contemporary aesthetic theory. It seems that all art in this category exists primarily to undermine the frameworks that critics find useful for discussing such art. It is the artist’s way of engaging with those critics. Of saying, ‘It’s probably not that simple.’
 
Usually, the artist is right. The effort to theorise too often demands that the theorist rely on unsafe assumptions or simplistic notions about the nature of art, and this is exactly why I find Matthew Brandt’s photographic project ‘Lakes and Reservoirs’ of particular interest. His imagination renders a serious challenge to ideas long accepted in the critical community.
 
Brandt has dipped each photograph in this collection in the water of the fluvial feature it depicts. The picture of Stone Lagoon, for instance, has been soaked in water from the Stone Lagoon. In a way, it’s a shame to categorise Brandt’s work as conceptual, because that seems to detract from the visual impact of these photographs, which achieve some surprising and often beautiful things with colour.
 
But their theoretical implications are nonetheless hard to ignore. Put one way, the photographic subject is here complicit with its objectification. Or, more precisely, the line between what is depicted and the mechanism of depiction is revealed to be fluid itself. This is a line that, with the emergence of digital photography, has become ever easier to imagine. Perhaps it remains in painting, but in photography it is based on a false distinction.
 
Photography is little more than a physical process in which certain chemicals react with reflected light, and the object of interest is therefore, from the moment the film is exposed, no longer absolutely outside of the camera system. Its natural imprint survives in this chemical mixture; the resultant image consists of the residue of the real thing. This is surely the message of Brandt’s work in ‘Lakes and Reservoirs’, in which the very life depicted in those photographs is responsible for its own renewal, startling and fresh, in photographic form.
 
Website: Matthewbrandt.com 

The work of David Zilber, especially as rendered in his project ‘Fallibilism’, occupies an intriguing position on the interpretive spectrum. It lies, as far as I can tell, at the point of intersection of two vectors. The first is properly aesthetic and leads us inwards, back towards questions about the native or intrinsic qualities of art, sustaining debate on the place of the image in the aesthetic realm. The second starts in the opposite direction and proceeds, extra-textually, to didactic questions that probe material existence, articulate moral imperatives, and serve to instruct, exploring the breadth of matters extrinsic to art.
 
The fallibility Zilber depicts is a series of preposterous but comical human errors. Important to observe for our thesis is the ironic negation of the photographic subject’s intended purpose. By placing one chair upside down on another, neither can be used for sitting, and we find that the utility or function of the object is thus wholly removed. It is from such unresolved irony that our interest in the image is captured and retained. Ultimately, this analysis seems to gesture towards an understanding that, in its ridicule of illogical human practice, is at least implicitly didactic. If we nonetheless seek a more overt exercise of pedagogy, still we need look no further than the photograph of the vehicle exhaust. Here is a complete, ironic inversion of the relationship between the polluter and the polluted: instead of dying to the fumes of the exhaust, the plant inhabits the pipe and thrives therein. However analysis proceeds from here, its message will surely be didactic, condemning the irreversible destruction of the natural world for the sake of modern
conveniences.
 
We can see, then, how Zilber’s photography directs us to the realm of concerns external to art. But as I suggested, we can take these same images and follow them along another, divergent vector.
Consider a second opinion on the photograph of the chairs. This perspective takes a less pragmatic stance on photographic subjects: it cares for neither the utility of the chairs nor the ridiculing of the humans that stacked them. It is impersonal, detached, and emotionally neutral. Its concern is really with the placement of individual works of art within ‘art’—in other words, with the purely formal. More likely, if we were to appraise Zilber’s work from this angle, we would draw attention to the many symmetries of this photograph. The barred doors, the posters, the chairs, even the arrangement of those smaller structures around each other, form a series of rectangles. From here, we might continue to discuss the beauty or overall merit of the photograph, quite apart from our appreciation of its message. Certainly the subtle structural underlay of this photograph is highly commendable. Where the photographer was lost or ignored in the first reading, then, he or she is instantiated in the second.

Website: Davidzilber.ca

The photographs I have chosen this week are from Paul Phung’s more recent work. Often his subject matter is dissatisfied youth, but what is particularly distinctive about these portraits is the seemingly causeless nature of the youths’ discontent. No coherent explanatory narrative forms between pictures of the same subject, and the various objects within the photographic space serve little historical function, either. Such is the disjuncture of past and present that the top picture, in which a young woman sits on a mechanical child’s amusement, appears almost anachronistic, impossible. It is clear that a rift has opened up in these young peoples’ lives. But it is equally obvious that we can only guess, never know, what made them this way.
 
The result is not an absence of depth. It is just that, by photographing subjects in this kind of isolation, Phung has made that depth inaccessible. We are certain that pain burns beneath those expressions, but are helpless to realise the exact texture and origin of the discontent. As a result, Phung’s subjects are all difficult to read and endlessly intriguing because of it. Though our interest may be stimulated by empathy, it seems more likely that these enigmatic young people retain our attention because we can’t tell exactly what we are meant to empathise with.
 
Perhaps this is why I find Phung’s monochrome portraiture particularly effective. The high contrast is consistent with the divide between the dark, unrecoverable past and the stark present in which his subjects find themselves. The grainy appearance of these pictures reminds us, first, that there is distance between the photograph, the imperfect copy, and the real world, the unattainable original, and second, that this distance is also what separates these flat depictions of pain from the complex, three-dimensional realm of causes.
 
Elsewhere, Phung’s photography draws attention to its status as an aesthetic practice through its selection of subject matter as well as through its formal qualities. Even the photographer, it seems, is a worthy target of photography. Either implicit or explicit in all of the images above, then, is a self-reflexive questioning of what role the photographer occupies. Is the photographer here to expose tiny fragments of the natural world that we would otherwise miss? Or is the photographer’s purpose merely to provoke more questions, to reveal the dark areas among the light?
 
Website: Paulphung.com 

The contact between the photographer and the machinery of representation has, in being simplified, gradually reduced. As an extreme case, some modern cameras react to the movement of the finger before the button is actually pressed. The result of this trend is that the imprint of the artist is ever less visible on his or her work. That’s not to say that it is no longer present at all. It’s just that, increasingly, we overlook the various creative decisions that the photographer makes prior and subsequent to the instant in which he or she decides to replicate the material world. My argument, last week, was that the wet-plate collodion technique is able to introduce the artist to modern photography, an aesthetic space from which his or her presence has been largely excluded. This week, I’d like to examine the concomitant. How does the re-entry of the subject affect his or her photographic object?
 
Already the wet-plate technique confers a death effect on the sitter. Take Jan Eric Euler’s fascinating portraits. Each of his subjects is invested with a posthumous quality, as if the photographic gesture would be meaningless were they not all dead. In general, using older techniques to depict living people draws on our expectation that those who have been photographed with such techniques will have passed away. When we see the famous daguerreotype of Edgar Allen Poe, for instance, we need know nothing about his life to be certain that he is dead. The historicity of the photographic form carries with it the implication of his death. The same assumptions we apply to Euler’s portraiture, even though his sitters are probably alive today.
 
Inconsistencies, which are an unavoidable part of the wet-plate process, are particularly noticeable on Euler’s work, but rather than detracting from the experience, they offer something otherwise unattainable to his sitters. The various marks on these photographs appear to have come not from Euler’s technique, but from his objects. We read them as projections outward of an inner mental strife, instead of what they really are: invasions of the subject into the objective world. Photography, as Susan Sontag has argued, has an aggressive relation to the reality it captures. I noted last week that the demanding wet-plate collodion process impinges on the life of the photographer. We might as well also remark that, as a result, the subject enters the space of his or her object.
 
The corollary, so vivid in Euler’s portraits, is the uneasy and indeterminate co-presence of the artist and the sitter, which initially seems to contradict the overt purpose of the portrait. Whereas portraiture purports to create an objective representation of the sitter, Euler’s work instead acknowledges the primacy of the artist. So if these thoughts about the modern use of wet-plate collodion amount to anything, it is surely a reminder that photography, no matter how mechanical it becomes, is inherently a subjective enterprise.
 
Website: Janericeuler.com 

In last week’s blog, I discussed how the work of Mark Giarrusso revisits the photographic epoch immediately before computer modification acquired its ubiquity. This week, I have encountered the fascinating pictures of Ian Ruhter, whose technique hearkens even further back in time. The process he uses, known as wet-plate collodion, was first introduced in 1851 by an Englishman named Fredrick Archer, and its results are astounding. If, now that it is all digitised, our photography has become increasingly disinterested, or at least pretends to be so, then the work of Ruhter and other contemporary wet-plate photographers reintroduces the presence of the individual behind the camera to the shot itself. It is a revival of the subject in the objective, neutral world of modern photography.
 
‘Wet-plate photography has given me the ability to work with my hands again. I’m using raw materials and creating my own film and making one-of-a-kind images. There’s no other feeling that can compare to that,’ says Ruhter. Whereas digital photography demands that its users know little about the camera’s mechanism, the wet-plate photographer must become proficient in a complex technique that uses dangerous chemicals. As Ruhter’s video attests, producing images with wet-plate collodion is physically and mentally testing. It is also expensive and unforgiving. If the photographer fails to apply the collodion smoothly or if his or her fingers touch the plate, the picture is ineradicably marked, although this is not always undesirable.
 
This video, which is artistry in itself and is perhaps better described as a short film, is by and large autobiographical. For a process that places the photographer’s wellbeing at risk at the same time as it makes permanent the imperfections in his or her technique, we shouldn’t be surprised that the focus is as much on the artist as the art. Ruhter’s commentary confirms this view. ‘This project,’ he says, ‘isn’t about making actual images. It’s not about creating the world’s largest camera. It’s about doing what you love.’ No doubt the stress that wet-plate photography applies to the body and mind of the photographer is reflected straight back onto the glass through the error that it induces. Movingly, Ruhter describes a period in which his failure to produce the photographs correctly provoked self-doubt to the point where every shot he took on a particular day didn’t come out.
 
‘I don’t know if it’s the silver,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if it’s cold. I don’t know if the collodion’s bad. I don’t know if I suck. I feel like I suck. I guess the biggest self-realisation I had in doing this was: the only limitations there are, are the ones I put on myself.’ We may remark how greatly Ruhter’s experiences contrast with those of today’s typical digital photographer. For him, this is not merely a challenge, a hobby, or even a profession. This is a part of his life that is indivisible from everything else.
 

Website: Ianruhter.tumblr.com 

Jin’s love for photography is an obvious influence from her father, an enthusiastic amateur photographer. With early access to a camera, Jin first tried taking photos randomly and then, amazed by some good shots she made, became addicted to it.

In spite of being unselective of her subject, Jin has a preference for natural scenery, especially light. ‘I have a worship of light. Photographs remind me of the moving moment when the beautiful light went through my eyes and I clicked the shutter. They stock light in my memory.’ As regards style, she defines herself as unfixed. ‘I like strong colours but also try fresh style sometimes’, Jin says. Actually, Jin’s works show great diversity, and the only common feature they share is her love for life. For Jin, photography is a record and an expression of life. Each of her photos tells a story.

The sky is one of Jin’s favourite subjects. This photo was taken on an early morning at Sanshui, a small city where Jin spent her first two years of university. ‘It was my last day in Sanshui. I was
waiting nervously to confess my admiration to a boy. Suddenly I saw this golden light piercing through the clouds, filling my heart with courage.’

The charm of the sky lies in its changeability. This photo, for instance, shows its transquility. ‘I was traveling in Oslo with my friend. The sunset glow was so beautiful that we stood there taking photos
until it became totally dark.’

Another peaceful winter shot was taken in York University during snowy days. Coming from a southern city, Jin had been looking forward to experiencing snow. It was in York that she truly felt the ‘UK in winter’. In the photo, the sky, the land and the frozen lake are of the same white colour. The horizon in the middle of the photo strenghens the sense of transquility, as if time stops.

Apart from natural light, Jin is also obssessed with electric light. This photo was taken when Jin was in Berlin. ‘It was the first time I travelled alone in a foreign country. Since it was the Christmas vacation, many others were traveling with families, and I missed mine very much. Yet standing in a huge Christmas tree with a lot of bulbs and decorations, I felt warm and happy.’

Among all the lights, the brightest one lies in the smiles of Jin and her friends. This shot records the happy day when they graduated from university. ‘These are my best friends. We have been friends for seven years and I believe the friendship will last forever. I set this photo as my desktop. Seeing it gives me strength and joy everyday.' 

Jin’s sources of inspiration are family, friends, and all the wonderful things throughout her journey. She is currently planning a trip to middle Europe, where we can expect some new photos to light up our hearts.
 
Website: Flickr.com/photos/jionng

Center Redux

Rockefeller Center in the Rain

The Bread Line

The Sentinel

Where Light Has Gone to Rest

On the Society6 website, Mark Giarrusso dismisses the production techniques of contemporary photography. ‘No photoshop, just eyes and cameras,’ he writes. It is true that digital modification has changed the way the photograph relates to the world, and therefore Giarrusso’s comment promotes a return, not a regress, to the original form of the image. Alterations made to pictures are almost always an effort to distance the image from the slice of material reality it is meant to represent. Such an attempt is often one to inject the surreal into the real. But as Susan Sontag has argued, photographs are already surreal, moreso than painting, poetry, or any other art form inhabited by the surrealist movement. ‘Surrealism lies at the very heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive—the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be.’
 
I have encountered few photographs as unnervingly real as Giarrusso’s ‘Where Light Has Gone to Rest’. The lighting instalments are alien and sit threateningly among the trees, whose green suddenly appears dull, and the historic buildings, which seem out-of-place. Not only are the spatial qualities of these objects seemingly incompatible; the odd mixture of timeless nature, historic edifice, and futuristic implement distort the temporality of this photograph, too. We could cite such an image in support of Sontag’s claim that photographs are natively surreal. By arresting the relentless progression of time, by reproducing the conflicting space of reality unaltered in the unified space of the image, the photographic enterprise edits and de-familiarises the world all by itself.
 
Even a brief look at Giarrusso’s portfolio will perceive its refrains and returns. The symmetry of ‘Rockefeller Center in the Rain’ and ‘Rock Center Redux’ is sublime, prophetic, and curiously manufactured all at once. Yet Giarrusso’s attention to the arrangement of objects in the picture is not limited to images of the inanimate and the monolithic. How do we react to a photograph such as ‘The Sentinel’? And what about the stark representation of humanity in ‘The Bread Line’? These pictures of ourselves are just as surreal as those of alien lights.
 
See more of Mark Giarrusso’s work at: Society6.com

Name: Valeria Cherchi
Age: 26
Occupation: Photographer
Inspiration: Memories, landscapes, dreams
 
Valeria describes her photography with three simple words: ‘What I see’. This could appear as somewhat of an obvious statement, but within it are allusions to authorship and visual interpretation. Valeria is the author of her photography. It is constructed by what she sees, what she is inspired by, her creative vision. She also collaborates with other visual authors such as designer, Yong Kyun Shin, featured above. When you combine beautiful photography with innovative, stylish design, the inevitable result is visually captivating fashion photography. 
 
Valeria describes the shoot above as one of her favourites this year. She explains ‘It was pretty last minute - Yong Kyun needed the pictures urgently but I am usually really organized and I don’t like to make shoots hastily, unless I am not feeling very inspired. That was the case with Yong Kyun. There was no concept for that shoot, I just adore his work, it is already very strong by itself and when you have one day to organize everything, no time/money to get props, to think about a consistent concept, for me the best thing is to trust your aesthetic and make things as easy as possible, just making sure that the team get the mood you want to achieve’. Here, Valeria points out the true collaborative nature of fashion photography. A designer and photographer must work together to achieve their shared creative vision. In this particular case, the photography needed only to complement the designs. However, Valeria’s beautiful camera work does not merely complement Yong Kyun's clothes. Rather, it accentuates the designs, contextualises them in an outside wilderness.
 
Surprisingly, fashion photography came as somewhat of a late revelation to the Sardinian-born photographer. ‘I discovered design and fashion in Rome, and after several experiments I understood that mixing photography and fashion was the best way to express myself’.
 
Asked on what she enjoys about photography, Valeria answered ‘Photography, for me, is a border that I am still not able to get, and I love more than anything else. It’s my memories, my everyday research; it’s my feelings and my job’. The most challenging thing about photography, she explains, is ‘that border. When I do photography for someone else and I cannot express myself 100, I start seeing it. I feel caged, and at times I think I would rather do another job’.

 
Well, I, and I’m sure many others who have viewed Valeria’s beautiful work, would be horrified at the prospect of her giving it all up. Safe to say, it seems that Valeria isn’t letting go of her passion any time soon – ‘I just want to keep doing what I really like, but in a sunny place’.
 
Website: Valeriacherchi.com 

Betsy Blue

Iron Born

Somewhere

The Dying Light

The maritime prospect is an exciting one for the photographer. Even before the camera intervenes, the sea is already a marvellously referential body, replicating the sky’s blue in its own natural aesthetic act. But in the series of photographs I have selected here, Mark Nelson both injects meaning into and preserves the beauty of images of the shoreline. His shots and modifications lift this everyday, physical space onto the metaphysical plane of thought, where our very existence in that space is questioned.
 
The ontological challenge is most palpable in ‘Iron Born’. All that is left of the human is its silhouette, which the whitish haze of the sea gradually overcomes. The whole scene, from the erasure of the person itself to the endless, ominous blue of sky and shore, is invested with the deathly, with the post-apocalyptic. Yet the fatality that Nelson’s photograph prophecies is juxtaposed with the wind turbine and the building, perhaps a control tower, which rupture that symbolic coherence. These mysterious figures are faint and in the background, almost as though they are disappearing—as though, instead of the tide, it is the modern world that recedes.
 
Compare this with the millenarianism of ‘Somewhere’. The shoreline here is transfigured for the opposite purpose: to depict an idyllic scene that is, critically, inhabitable by humans, as the minute couple to the left of centre affirm. Whereas the common, singular, and bleak destination of mankind is evoked in ‘Iron Born’, this photograph suggests that, somewhere, we can find a utopian future. The astounding beauty of this and the other images above is in immediate, perennial, and provocative conflict with their intrinsic themes of death and rebirth.
 
Buy Marks work from: Society6.com