Antoine D'Agata: Möbius Strips of Secret Selves

"From the pit of the Empty heart, the empty dark..."

 

"I don't protect myself, I let things come close to me... I can't help it."

 

"I try to distance myself from a certain type of documentary photography that often avails itself of symbols that are too easy to read and assimilate in order to present a complex reality in a balance that is endlessly discussed over and over between photography as an instrument of documentation and photography as being completely subjective. It isn’t the eye that photography poses on the world that interests me but its most intimate rapport with that world." Antoine D'Agata

"D'Agata spares us nothing, and he spares himself nothing... (He) even includes himself in some pictures, as if to show that to leave oneself out would be a delusion."

"My desire is never a mistake, Fear is the mistake."

Jon Edwards: The Fourth Kind

 

 

 

 

 

Miwa Yanagi: Japanese Women and Physical Reversal

The White Doves, 2005, from 'Fairy Tales'

Windswept Woman V, 2009

Windswept Woman II, 2009

Snow White, 2004, from 'Fairy Tales'

Miwa Yanagi has much to say about the Japan's society of women today, and derives much of her inspiration from the dichotomy between youth and maturity intermingled within that specific world. Yanagi's creations are reactions to the social restraint of Japanese culture.

"Japanese women today conceive themselves as someone who are lovable. They think they have to be lovable and liked by everyone around them. Especially young women think that they don't deserve to live if they are not like that. As a result, they don't talk openly about their wishes or strange desires even though they had some ideas about who they wanted to be when they were children. In order for them to recall their childhood dreams, they need to be liberated from their youthfulness."

"It's maybe easy to go your own way in America, but in Japan self-centered individualism is not acceptable without you being totally on top of others. Otherwise, you cannot keep on living. If you brake off from your family and decide to never see them again, you can be individualistic. But, if you like to keep a certain distance from your family yet maintain the balance, there are a lot of concerns."

 Reflecting on her work entitled, 'Fairy Tales', Miwa Yanagi explains her use of youth and monsters: 

"Monsters are anomalies on the edge of society, and that exemption from social constraints in a way mirrors the freedom of children and the elderly."

Quotes from Yanagi's Interview with the "Journal of Contemporary Art"

The Grandmothers

(2000-2009)

SHIZUKA

"Do I or don't I stop these hands at this very moment."

In her nine year project, 'My Grandmothers," Yanagi used young women ranging between the ages of 18 and 40 to express how they envisioned themselves forty, fifty, or sixty years from the present. What she avoided were expressions of being close to family and a loving home life in order to highlight the possibilities outside of traditional hopes and dreams and centering on her preference for more independent women.

"I think if you are too young, like junior high school students, you don't have any realistic view of life. They haven't lived long enough yet. Many in their twenties are the same. So, when they apply via e-mail, I turn down their applications and advise them to take a first step in the real life before dreaming about being an extraordinary grandmother."

"I really respect elderly women or men in their 80's and 90's who care for others, and have opinions about the society and beyond until they die. There are only few people who can do that."

MISAKO

"How many more nights are yet to pass for this desolation to cease"

YUKA

 "I told one of my grandkids over the phone that I've been zapped off into some other universe."

MIWA

"Whenever I go out to meet one of my new offspring, we all end up going on a journey together."

"It is strange to me to emphasize the importance of the biological connection to your children, which can lead to cloning. The emphasis is on physically feeling the pain of giving a birth to a child who carries your DNA. The idea of surrogate mother also raises a question. Having someone else carry your ovum in order for you to have a biological child."

Chambliss Giobbi: A Fractured Perception

Self Portrait I, 1999

collage & beeswax on aluminum panel

Chambliss Giobbi is first a composer of music, wherein his initial concepts of time and layered composition became the vital ingredient of his signature style. I once e-mailed him, inquiring about being apart of a project and I received an immediate and delicate response:

"...A complete series may take over a year to make, so I
only really work with people I know intimately or have wanted to work with
for years. This is a testament to the level of commitment I need to have
toward an individual before shooting..."

 As a result, Giobbi's work is intensely personal as he becomes intertwined psychologically... layering time like musical notes and exposing the individual through his eyes....

Combined portrait of Edward & Elanor Giobbi VII, 2001

Torso of Gina Depalma

"One is left with the notion of witnessing an intense, virtually operatic compression of moments, catharsis and myth: an intimate viewing of entropy."

Tanz Fur Mich, Salom 3, (self-portrait), 2009

Simen Johan: Re-Imaging the Unseen

Now at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York:
Until the Kindom Comes;  a collection of the unseen; photographs and sculpture of secrets... proof of life beyond our own...
"solitary paths towards imagined fulfillment"  
Now through October 31, 2009

Where do children go in the night, in their dreams, in their own homes? What do they do, for the short time in which they remain untarnished by the awareness of ugliness and suffering; a time where the wondrous is limitless, and nightmares are adventures to be conquered... 

(From, Evidence of Things Unseen) 

And what of the animals, feasting in darkness and light, roaring upwards in delight- What of their  prey? Who sees battle and decay in the kingdom of the wild ones... 

Under heavy fog, the difference in visibility depends on the extent of what you are willing to witness.

dR American Suburb

There is a vile pulse in your veins; a longing for something never near you. Guilty even in your own dreams when the vortex of your desires swallow you up each night... wandering silently through broken doorways and in between the walls of abandoned rooms, you are haunted by the all consuming labyrinth within you. Gut-wrenched by the path you have taken, no longer able to blame it on innocence or lack of forethought. These are not lies to be shared with anyone, these are the places where unquenched love is kept. 
These are the chasms Doug Rickard presents... so breathe it in, all you can get, love without thinking, deny all regrets.

From the 'Victor Cobo "Remember When You Loved Me"  ' Highlight.
by Doug Rickard
"There is a place of inner dreams... of a love-quenched-vicious-thirst-longing that can inhabit the body, inhabit the mind and suck one inward with the relentless force of black hole gravity. The pull - it's ferocious as the fantasies grow. The isolation from society becomes a force, the separation from “the normal” is a rolling-boulder momentum. You’re here, they’re over there… you and your self - they and "the rest". Your deepening slide, the accelerating fall inward becomes your exile… an exile by yourself, within the self... to the self. The vivid dreams become all consuming... the chains latch shut while your prison grows - shaped as self imposed walls. A maze of self-built brick barriers, a mental cage of unadulterated urge. Desire, hidden beauty, secrets and open space exist but you’re all alone… the space is only the internal. Your falling-inward thoughts become your god. " 


check out more words from dR on excellent photographers at American Suburb X 

Tom Hoops: Mirror in the Lens

Mirrors reflect wonderfully dreadful ideas of ourselves; we see with inaccuracy more or less.... What expels these images we project not only upon ourselves, but on others? In the tangle and snarl of insecurity and overconfidence or even sublime aloof acceptance exists that snapshot of ourselves in memory. So how does one expose in exactness someone's particular qualities of being in the moment? These photographs provide a story no longer confined to the eyes, but one shouted from every line and sunken shadow in each expression. 

Catherine Larré: Wide Eyed and Dreaming

Catherine Larré - "The Man, the Magic and the Child..."
by Doug Rickard via American Suburb X

"And the child saw the world for what it was.

She saw the magic and magical things… the shadows and sparkles and whispering beings… the butterflies and flowers, thorny branches and towering-towers, the spider webs, singing birds and dark-moonlit powers…

And the man saw the world for what it was.

He saw that it was full of logic and intelligent beings and rational sense and science and flesh and blood things… of war and fighting, of cancer and of dying… of buildings and automobiles, of sorrow and of crying.

The child's clear eye's saw everything that the man could no longer see so the child said to the man… “Come Man and let me show you my dreams and the magical moonbeams and the soaring skies and the Man said, little child, I can no longer see the moon or the skies but only clouds with cloudy eye's and of what are dreams?”

And the child could see God everywhere… and the man could only see himself.

And the man saw all of the other things that the child did not see so the man said to the child… “Come child for it is time... I must show you death and disease and "the ugly" and the child said, Man of what is death and of what is "ugly" for I do not understand and I cannot see?” The man could see what was coming… and the child could only see what was already there.

Catherine Larré tells of the shimmering dreams and the singing birds, the whispers of moonlight and the oh-so-beautiful words… the darkness and the light, the mysteries in the night… the magic of the wild… the fragility of the child... the adult and his sadness, the ugliness and the madness."

Interview : Nobuyoshi Araki In Conversation With Kohei Yoshiyuki

Of my more influential idols is the eccentric Japanese Photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki; one of the most published photographers in the world. He is best known for capturing erotic poses of women distorted by Japanese rope bondage. But because these images are so explicit, they have not been able to elude the pornographic label (probably very much to Araki's delight). If thats the case, I'd classify his work as some of the most poignant porn I've ever seen. Sex is represented playfully, with both fascination and absolute freedom... and of course a cutting sense of humor.


Check out the documentary 'Arakimentari' ,  a film by Travis Klose for more insight into the process and life of Japan's most controversial photographers.



  
Above, Araki mixes paint and semen for a final touch.






So who better to interview the charmingly introverted man responsible for photographing unsuspecting lovers and their sometimes multiple peeping toms!


Read the Interview Here

Nobuyoshi Araki talks about his work. (Part I)
From Contacts Vol. 2, Portraits of Contemporary Photographers. Initiated by William Klein, 2000.
Nobuyoshi Araki talks about his work. (Part II)
From Contacts Vol. 2, Portraits of Contemporary Photographers. Initiated by William Klein, 2000

Angelo Musco: Aranea

Recently, I was able to participate in Project, 'Aranea' a spiderweb of naked humans which makes it's debut in Miami at Pulse Art Fair December 3 - 9, 2009. That's me curled up in  the fetal position to Angelo's left.

Project 'Parthenogenesis'

Project "Ghiaccio"

                                  



Project 'Unconditional Love'

Project 'Nest' 

Project ' Murmek"