@anastasiakole – Untitled (2015)
I’m obsessed with the mood of this set. With the second photo
especially, I can *hear* the echoes of the cold concrete, I can feel the
chill of the wet fabric and hair. There’s something athletic and
dance-like in these movements, but they aren’t ethereal
levitation jump shots. This is someone violently throwing themselves at
the floor, the walls.
Arseni Khamzin – Untitled (2013)
…holy shit: this. is. FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC!
It’s a compositional marvel, really–the interplay between line, texture and shadow vs. light is exemplary.
The subject is slightly off-center to the right of the frame; allowing the top and right of frame to be counter-balanced by the much darker shadows cast by the subject and chimney.
There’s an intoxicating variety of sumptuous texture–poured concrete, mortar, corrugated metal, skin, hair and fabric. (It’s an especially inspired touch that the lines on the tartan print blanket reiterate the two point perspective of the composition, but in their slightly imperfect alignment, they server to further direct attention toward the subject.
Why does it all work so well? Two years ago I would’ve just offered the cop out of attention to detail regarding texture and balance but actually, the frame works off a simple 45 degree clockwise re-orientation of the rule of thirds.
And I’m not even to the best part–this is a Pietà! Yes, it’s oriented differently. Traditionally, Pietà present Jesus from head to toe starting with his head at frame left and his feet towards frame right. [Can someone with a little bit more comprehensive of an Art History background explain the relevance of such positioning? I suspect there’s something to it (sacred vs profane, which would be interesting given the fundamentally humanist trappings underlying the codification of the trope)–not unlike the direction Ganesh’s trunk curls having distinctly different meanings.]
Yes, it’s also short a figure and the genders are swapped–or so it seems to me. But there’s really some fascinating reinterpretation going on surrounding the trope. I can’t help but think the point of this variation has something to do with the loneliness of existence and a sort of embodiment of that notorious line from Donnie Darko: every living creature on earth dies alone.
Lastly, this was made on Impossible Instant Black and White Film with Hard Color Frame–which in my experience is not the easiest film to use if you want to produce a thoroughly luminous result such as the above.
Stunning and exceptional.
wonderlust photoworks – Echo from Address the Void series (2009)
To my Darkness and my Light,
I
unfold myself; you, in turn, call to me with your warm and aching
mouth— its tongue, a delicate command I will not long withstand.
Your lips spill sighs; I drink until your thirst is sated.
Trembling
hands steady me beneath you. You guide me toward your deepest
acceptance. I find a center in you; you grasp me and gasp.
(You
shudder— hands bracing the afternoon light dying against such white
walls. I see your ineffable Beauty with the eye of god. I fall and
place this feeble kiss to caress the spine as I pass.)
With you I experience annihilations most will never know.
After
I am restless; you know what I want is what I will never achieve
alone— you coax from my every ending its next beginning.
We must map these new and nameless oblivions together.
Magdalena Wosinska – LA, CA (201X)
Quite frankly, there’s a lot of entirely unmotivated nudity in so-called fine art photography. (Not to hate on nekkid folks–after all, I’m a fan.)
You hear a lot of talk about not wanting to have images tied to a particular historical epoch. Or, it’s insinuated that there’s some nebulous narrative impetus. (Only in both cases, those justifications are more get out of jail free card since the work to which they are applied barely/rarely supports them.)
That’s what I am in love with about Wosinska’s work: nudity in her work reads like it’s motivated by the same compulsion behind Walt Whitman’s sentiments early in Song of Myself:
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised
and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
wonderlust photoworks – Mx Inchoate (2014)
I always thought that if I could just figure it all out then they saying would take care of itself.
…except when understanding dawned, fitting the unexpected truth of knowing to words proved more impossible than I could have imagined.
But, maybe if I can’t say it, I can show you.
I’m still failing and it’s not really any easier than finding the right words but despite it sometimes the feeling, the tone and the scope of a moment bleeds through from around the edges of my desolation and stuborn idiocy.
It hurt to shoot this. It hurts to look at it. But I have to look.
If I could just show you, if I could offer but a flickering glimpse…
Acetylene Eyes 