Everything! After 9/11, police officers and transit authority officials have been forgetful of photographers’ legal rights, coast to coast. In this latest account, a New York Times reporter was prevented from taking photos of the 126th Street Bus Depot, a former movie studio that you can see on Google Street View. Who you gonna call? Read more »
Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena works in the haphazardly built, poorly planned suburban communities near Monterrey, Mexico where sullen teens roam cramped housing clusters and the drought-ridden landscape. This latest series — Car Poolers — is a bird’s eye view of men in trucks, just riding prostrate, looking skyward, some spotting the photographer, some of them asleep. There’s something decidedly eerie about them being slumped alongside barrels and buckets of bolts, like so much work equipment. One of these photos is currently shortlisted for Sony World Photo Awards.
The “Soldier” series by Suzanne Opton was previously featured and gigantic billboards in nine US cities and set off enough people to spark a debate about the image of America’s military. Read more »
Photographer Brock Davis has reenacted the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Hindenberg airship mishap of 1937 and the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster with heads of cauliflower and dramatic lighting. Also toothpicks, wire, skewers, pins and an entirely inappropriate attitude towards tragedy, that sick bastard. Mmm. Crunchilicious. Ah, don’t fret. It’s tasteless, I know, but don’t think of this food play as belittling of human disaster, instead, imagine the veg nobs as microcosms of the very explosions they’re imitating. Nature is all fractals anyway. Whoah, man. Whoah. Read more »
David LaChapelle’s “Earth Laughs in Flowers” series takes from the Dutch Masters’ still life and its opulent piles of fruit, only, his throws in some signifiers of the modern age that “explore contemporary vanity, vice, the transience of earthly possessions and, ultimately, the fragility of humanity.” It’s all vapid hues of pink and yellow, plasticine sheen and nothing subtle: Silicone assholes, Vienna sausages, blooming, flowers, wet fruit, a praying mantis, blood-splattered wine-glasses, more flowers, more fruit, clouds of cigarette ash, Cheetos, junk, a toy airplane, a burning American flag. See them for the first time on US soil at “David LaChapelle: Earth Laughs in Flowers,” Feb 23 – Mar 24, Fred Torres Collaborations, NYC
A one-man trailer park, old hippies in the desert, a monk in a ghost town — Alec Soth traveled 20,000 miles tracking these modern-day hermits for the mysterious, unsettling series Broken Manual. These men trust Soth. They leave their caves and cabins and pose for portraits. They show off their make-shift huts, home-made shivs and lonely rubber fuck holes. They just want to be left alone. Gawk at them with this highly anticipated New York show at the Sean Kelly Gallery. The accompanying road trip documentary Somewhere to Disappear plays hourly. “Broken Manual,” Alec Soth, Feb 3 – Mar 11, Sean Kelly Gallery, NYC
Throughout the 1950′s, Greenpoint-born bank-industry dude Frank Oscar Larson was handy with the Rolleiflex, capturing “the life of the streets” and “candid portraits of working stiffs” on his weekends. Culled from a recently uncovered hoard of thousands of unseen negatives, the Queens Museum of Art’s exhibition features shots from Chinatown to the Hell’s Kitchen to Times Square to Central Park, with ladies with gams and street urchins without teeth and Brando still in theaters. Don’t even try to feign nostalgia on this one. You’re not that old. “Frank Oscar Larson: 1950s New York Street Stories,” Feb 5 – May 20, Queens Museum of Art, Queens
When Tokyo-born photographer Motoyuki Daifu met this girl, she was twenty, with a two-year-old kid and pregnant with another. “I fell in love with her at first sight” … for six months. “I had never met a girl like her — a girl full of motherly love.” See the photographic record of their brief but deep affair at Lombard Freid Projects and you’ll feel like a voyeur. NSFW. Read more »
In her photographic series Learning To Love The State I Am In, photographer Samantha Shubert squeezes herself between dumpsters, hugs a jagged curve of a crippled wall and shoves herself into the hollow of a broken highway curb. She’s from woodsy upstate New York, so this urban Baltimore scene is new, but she’s learning to love it, clearly, physically, prollifically. Read more »
French photographer Thomas Czarnecki’s fallen princess series From Enchantment to Down is some dark stuff. It’s sinister, glum, and almost glib. Unlike other IRL fairy tale shoots, these princesses don’t end as alcoholic spinsters or neglected housewives. They don’t get to. The Little Mermaid, allegedly like all precocious young girls, ends up dead, wrapped in plastic. Sleeping Beauty apparently lands herself in a sex torture dungeon. Read more »
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