research extra: Film

Akram Zaatari

The work of Akram Zaatari explores the role of images, memory, and desire in situations of war. Describing his artistic practice as “field work,” the artist addresses the cultural and political conditions of postwar Lebanon and the Middle East. Along with the events of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and the history of conflict and resistance in the region, Zaatari’s work also focuses on representations of sexuality and intimacy.

Key words: Culture - Politics - Middle East - Lebanon - Sexuality - War - Religion - Taboo

Alan Cohen

Since the late 1990s, Alan Cohen has photographed “improbable borders” around the world. His abstract black-and-white photographs are visual evidence of generally invisible geological or geopolitical demarcations. Examples are borders between states or territories rich in historical contest, or navigational tools such as lines of longitude of latitude.

Key words: Borders - Barriers - Lines - Division - Maps - Abstract - Territory

Alexander Rodchenko

Russian avant-gardist Alexander Rodchenko gained an international reputation as a pioneering photographer, painter, sculptor and graphic artist in the years after the Russian revolution. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.

Key words: Angles - View-point -Experimental - Documentary - Contrast - Shadows

Alexey Titarenko

Titarenko uses all methods to create these mysterious, evocative spectacles, both during shooting and printing. His visual language reveals continuous movement and mobility, refusing to freeze reality by means of the banal or stereotypical. Magic indeed is in his pictures - to borrow a word from the title of one of his series - yet his lens is also tinted with a certain classic romanticism.

Key words: Street - People - Movement - Time - Mystery - Journey - Travel copyright, Alexey Titarenko, Courtesy of Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York

Alice Hargrave

Conceptually, I am interested in how these images speak to the nature of photography itself, how we create & recreate images generation after generation; the images could almost be interchangeable, only the characters have changed. They represent the cliché subjects that people often use photography to capture. Leisure, travel, the american road trip, photos or film footage shot from the window of the moving car are all topics that the work references.

Key words: Home - Memory - Time - Record - Nostalgia - History - Travel - America - 8mm

Amanda Marchand

Series title: '415/514' - In part, this work speaks personally to the idea of "home", to the emotional resonances embedded in photographs of place. Here the landscapes of California (415) and Quebec (514) are paired, as mostly diptychs, juxtaposing the two places I was living at the time. In these photographs I am less interested in specific locale (the images are not titled, for example) than in something ineffable. I was initially drawn to the idea that the horizon does not exist in nature, per se, but is purely a visual construct. This work begins with an interest in horizon lines, the strange fact that what you are seeing in terms of composition is not physically there. The series carries forth with its own specific and formal syntax, employing dissonance and resonance as poetic logic.

Anna Victoria Best

Key words: People - Identity - Youth - Objects - Portrait - London

Baltz Lewis

Lewis Baltz documents the changing American landscape of the 1970s in his series New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California. The project’s 51 pictures depict structural details, walls at mid-distance, offices, and parking lots of industrial parks. Contrast and geometry are important in these pictures, but what marks them as uniform is Baltz’s attention to surface texture and lifeless subject matter.

Key words: America - Contrast - Texture - Industrial - Geometric - Line - Man-made - Urban

Barbara and Michael Leisgen

Barbara Leisgen’s silhouette is set, and leaves its fleeting trace in landscapes; the actions involve stretching out her arms to follow the contours of undulating countryside, or to include the sun in an arc drawn by her arm while she is seen from behind in the centre of the image.

Key words: Silhouette - Landscape - Horizon - Freedom - Humanity - Interaction - Depth of Field - Distance

Bill Jacobson

Bill Owens

Each of the scenes in Bill Owen's famous Suburbia series, document a world and a time that most of us can only recall through Winnie Cooper, Kevin Arnold and the Wonder Years. The images depict a culturally vacuous, middle-class suburban California in 1972 and became known worldwide as the classic photographic description of the American suburban dream.

Key words: Suburbs - America - 70's - Family - Middle Class - Home - Memory - Family - Nostalgia

Caleb Charland

By exploring the world at hand, from the basement to the backyard, I have found a resonance in things. An energy vibrates in that space between our perceptions of the world and the potential the mind senses for our interventions within the world. This energy is the source of all true art and science, it breeds those beloved “Ah Ha!” moments and it allows us to sense the extraordinary in the common.

Key words: Experiments - Science - Long Exposure - Fire - Energy - Extraordinary

Carolyn Krieg

"I start with photography and may layer and erase drawing, painting and resins –it can be a lengthy process, creating a history with each piece--light leaking, emotional and sensorial. My thematic focus is the necessary tension of opposites—the irony, humor, sadness and beauty of it all."

Key word: Layers - Abstract - Memory - Narrative - Transparent - Double Exposure - Focus - Imagery - Pattern - Colour

Chris Faust

Landscape are constantly changing which has given an urgency to my need to document this change and record the decisive moment. Common subjects that anyone can see on any given day revealed in an uncommon way will remain my particular aspiration.

Clare Strand

Strand belongs to the everyday, yet her images evoke the mesmeric, the talismanic and the unsolvable. Solutions reporting the ordinary often turn up further layers of complexity and reveal problems as yet un-considered. Strand is interested by imagery in which the aesthetic are secondary to function.

Key words: Crime - Documentation - Evidence - Narrative - Everyday - Function - Forensic - Aftermath

David Maljkovic

David Maljkovic examines collective memory and amnesia in contemporary Croatia. Maljkovic's work consists of collages, installations and videos and drawings. His work incorporates images of dilapidated modernist landmarks, monuments and buildings commenting on the country's idealistic discontinuity. Erected during the communist era and left empty or deprived from its original use, these rundown monuments mark the gap between utopian heritage and disillusioned presence.

Key words: Amnesia - Collage - Croatia - Multiple - Double Exposure - Buildings - Urban - Landmarks

Dorothea Lange

The most poignant and moving photographs from Lange's trip convey a mood rather than describing circumstances or activities: the man hunkered at the edge of the field, the mother and child in the tent opening, and the trio of men, one of whom casts a defiant glance at the photographers. The photographs are character studies that render the textures of skin and clothing with an artist's eye and depict posture, gesture, and gaze with an ethnologist's.

Key words: Mood - People - Documentary - Portraits - Gesture - Emotion - Expressions - Moments

Edweard Muybridge

This extensive work depicted men, women and children variously running, jumping, falling and carrying out athletic or mundane activities. This section of Muybridge's work reiterates the imperative Muybridge felt to explore time in modernity, as explored in 'Animals in Motion'.

Key words: People - Athletic - Anatomy - Motion - Movement - Time - Sequence - Animals - Action - Animate

Eric William Carroll

Carroll’s work includes cyanotypes based on the drawings of Henry Fox Talbot, photographs of hand-drawn camera calibration charts, as well as a large-format photograph produced using a fogged negative; each work representing a “failed” attempt to perfect photographic technologies or to truly master drawing a straight line.

Key words: Darkroom - Experimental - Accidents - Mistakes - Process - Abstract - Memory - Colour - Landscape

George Tice

Gerald Slota

Harold E Edgerton

Hengki Koentjoro

Henryk Ross

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto packed up a folding 4x5 camera & tripod, surreptitiously entered matinees and documented the interior of movie theatres across the United States—invoking a classic procedure borrowed from Conceptual Art. He would open the shutter just before the “first light” hit the screen and close it after the credits finished rolling and before the house lights came on.The unavoidable allusions of mass social programming and lack of content are implicit in the act. This content, largely unaddressed critically, is what lends the images their incredible power - to experience a finite collapse of time.