Camille Seaman has a new body of work titled “The Big Cloud”, some of it currently being shown at Soulcatcher Studio’s website. Seaman has already garnered some renown for her series of photographs of icebergs (”The Last Iceberg”), and that seems likely to grow based on the evocative images of supercells that Seaman chased for 10 days in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota. Via Soulcatcher Studio:

The storms we were chasing were Supercells, capable of producing grapefruit sized hail, and spectacular tornadoes; they were 50 miles wide and reached as high as 65,000 ft. into the atmosphere. These clouds were so large that they had the capability of blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them.”

-Camille Seaman

© Camille Seaman "The Collapse III (3), South Dakota, USA, June 2008"

© Camille Seaman "The Collapse II (2), South Dakota, USA, June 2008"

© Camille Seaman "Chasing the Storm, Kansas, USA, May 2008"

I loved Seaman’s icebergs, not simply for the subject matter, but also how she personified them, in addition to her overall treatment, toning etc. All of that carries over to the “The Big Cloud” images, which for me evoke much more than a simple awe for the power of nature. Striking work from a great photographer.

Check out Camille Seaman’s website at www.camilleseaman.com.

All work is copyright © Camille Seaman.

Up right now and through November 29 is Sam Taylor-Wood’s exhibition of photographs at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London. Titled “YES | NO”,  the exhibit includes three series of photos and one film, in which Taylor-Wood explores “absence and mortality”. Via White Cube:

…the pictures depict a beautiful and expressive landscape, and yet one that is also bleak, almost exhausted, as if the landscape itself expressed the novel’s brutal take on the themes of desire, thwarted love and suffering. One picture depicts two leafless trees, one large and dominant, the other appearing to turn away meekly, in a relationship that seems to embody that between Catherine and Heathcliff. In another, a brisk wind pushes some yellow-grey grass along a ridge beneath a moody sky. Although the photographs are suffused with the chill of winter, the harsh beauty of the landscape gives the photographs a hint of vibrancy and resilience.

© Sam Taylor-Wood Ghosts X 2008

© Sam Taylor-Wood Ghosts VI 2008

Mason's Yard, Ground Floor Gallery Photo: Todd-White Art Photography (click to enlarge)

I was lucky enough to see some of these works at Mass MOCA a little while back. Lovely landscapes with such a somber tone to them.

Find out more and see some of Taylor-Wood’s work at White Cube.

Closing this week is an exhibition of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s latest series of work, “Lightning Fields”, at San Franciso’s Fraenkel Gallery. This latest work depicts electricity, quite literally. For the images, Sugimoto used a Van De Graaff 400,000 volt generator to apply a charge directly to the camera film. The resulting images can take on any number of forms and blur the lines on what viewers might consider abstract or representational.

Exhibition view

More information at the Fraenkel Gallery.

One portfolio I’ve been turning to quite frequently over last month is photographer Josef Hoflehner’s. Hoflehner is a landscape photographer, of both the urban and more natural varieties, whose exquisitely done black and white prints capture slices of time with near sublime results.

© Josef Hoflehner Burj Dubai - Dubai, Emirates, 2009

A frequent traveler, Hoflehner has photographed the landscapes of too many places to fully mention here, but the list includes the likes of Yemen, India, Iceland, Vietnam, Cairo, Venice, New York City, and most recently the rapidly changing cityscape of Dubai. I had hoped to pick out some favorites, but ended up failing, there’s unfortunately just too many gems in Hoflehner’s many series of works. Hoflehner has a keen eye for picking out just the right composition, and does so without falling back on any formula. From symmetry to asymmetrical, balanced to unbalanced, Hoflehner finds a way to make everything work, and does so with great aesthetic effect. That’s not to say Hoflehner just takes a pretty photo though. Unquestionably Hoflehner’s skilled technique at working in black and white, and frequent use of long shutter times do make for beautiful photos, but Hoflehner’s photographs don’t leave the seriousness out in the field, instead they easily balance depth and beauty with profound results.

© Josef Hoflehner Black Beauty - Dubai, Emirates, 2009

Josef Hoflehner (b. 1955) is an Austrian photographer know world round for his black and white photography work. Hoflehner was the winner of the Nature Photographer of the Year 2007. Hoflehner is represented around the world in over 13 galleries including the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York City. Many more examples of Hoflehner’s work, as well as finely produced monographs of his work, are available at his website, www.josefhoflehner.com.

All images in this post: © Josef Hoflehner.
Title image features: Water Buffalo II – Guangxi, China, 2007 © Josef Hoflehner.

"The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage"

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now showing the work of photographer/artist Frederick Sommer, in a show titled, “Frederick Sommer Photographs”. From the show description:

Over his long life Frederick Sommer (American, 1905–1999) crafted a body of art inflected by surrealist ideas and distinguished by his meticulous love for the art of photographic printing, his broad knowledge of art history, and a keen sense of how the parts of a picture come together to produce meaning. This exhibition surveys five decades of his photography, including disorienting compositions such as Arizona Landscape (1943), a

Max Ernst, 1946 © Frederick and Frances Sommer Foundation

horizonless image that only gradually resolves its components into a desolate desert scene, and equally bewildering subjects such as Max Ernst (1946), in which Sommer experimented with layered negatives, superimposing an image of a rock onto a portrait of the pioneering Dada and surrealist artist to create the illusion of a human morphing into rock.

Some of Sommer’s techniques may seem old hat by now, double exposures, etc. but Sommer was one of the first to explore photography as an artistic medium, and is generally considered one of the “masters of photography”. Using large format cameras and unconventional methods, Sommer made influential works that are still interesting today.

Availability

• “The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage” is available at Amazon

Additional Resources

• The Frederick Sommer Foundation
• Learn more about Sommer at the Getty’s website

The Tate Modern has removed a work by Richard Prince from their exhibit “Pop Life”, after the obscene publications unit of the Metropolitan police paid a visit to the museum. The piece titled “Spiritual America” is an appropriated photo of a then 10 year old Brooke Shields, in the nude and heavily layered in makeup. From the Guardian:

The decision by officers to visit Tate Modern is understood to have been made after police chiefs saw coverage of the exhibition in today’s newspapers, rather than as a result of complaints.

Officers met gallery bosses and are also understood to have consulted the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether the image broke obscenity laws.

A Scotland Yard source said the actions of its officers were “common sense” and were taken to pre-empt any breach of the law. The source said the image of Shields was of potential concern because it was of a 10-year-old, and could be viewed as sexually provocative.

The work has been shown recently in New York, without attracting major controversy, where it gave the title to the 2007 retrospective of Prince’s work at the Guggenheim Museum.

-Guardian.co.uk

The photographer who actually took the photo, Gary Gross is said to be “disappointed” in the decision. From the Telegraph:

Prince’s work is a photograph of a photograph. The original was taken by Garry Gross, a US photographer, in 1975. It was commissioned by Shields’ mother, who was intent on turning her little girl into a child star and signed away the rights. The picture was later featured in a Playboy Press publication, and Gross planned to turn it into a poster.

On Wednesday night Mr Gross told the Daily Telegraph: “The photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be,” he said, adding that he once sent a copy to Switzerland only for it to be seized in France.

Gross, 71, said he did not consider the photo pornographic although he conceded that “she was supposed to look like a sexy woman”. It was supposed to have been displayed alongside another photo he took of Shields without make-up, he said.

“It certainly doesn’t breach child pornography laws here because a judge said so,” he added, referring to a US judge’s ruling in 1983 that the photographs he took were “not sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic”.

“In order for it to be considered pornographic here, she would have to be doing something sensual or sexual,” he said. “But she’s not. She’s just sitting in the bathtub.”

-Telegraph.co.uk

On person unphased by this I suspect is Richard Prince, who typically seems to have “screw you” type attitude towards, well, everything.

Georges Rousse is a photographer who frequently, with the help of volunteers, creates installations with geometric shapes floating in (usually) industrial type spaces. The final result coming together perfectly at one exact point, where Rousse begins and ends the process with photographs.

Rousse’s website here.

Bending Space: Georges Rousse and the Durham Project.

MASS MoCA is currently exhibiting a very cool installation by Simon Starling titled “The Nanjing Particles”. What’s interesting about the two main pieces (one seen above) is there abstractness (though actually representational) and incredible surfaces, but also their curious ties to photography. From MASS MoCA’s description:

Engaging with MASS MoCA’s industrial past, Starling’s installation began with an 1875 photograph of a group of Chinese immigrant workers brought to North Adams to break a strike at the Sampson Shoe Company (once located on what is now MASS MoCA’s campus). Literally and figuratively mining this image, Starling extracted silver grains from the photograph and presents these particles as stainless steel forms enlarged one million times their original microscopic size. Forged and hand polished by workers in Nanjing, China, the sculptures connect the museum’s past and present to global economic conditions. The shiny forms reflect the museum’s historic architecture as well as the visitors who have replaced workers in the space.

If you’re still curious, you can check out MASS MoCA’s page on “The Nanjing Particles” here.

A much larger version of my photo above can be had here.