Working in photography, video, print making and installation, Eric Baudelaire is interested in the relationship between images and events, documents and narratives. Recalling factographic practices, his work can involve elaborate staged situations that appear to be real, but are somewhat off-kilter, and place the viewer in a situation of questioning the modes of production and consumption of images. He also uses simple techniques of assemblage, sampling and mechanical reproduction, applied to real documents, to playfully extract fictive narratives or new formal vocabularies.
BALLEN was born in New York in 1950, and has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for nearly thirty years. Working as a geologist, Ballen began to photograph the homes and white residents of rural South Africa before developing his more theatrical and expressive style in the late-1990s.
“I first began experimenting with cameraless techniques in a colour darkroom in 2010,” says Russian photographer Tatiana Gulenkina, who is based in Washington DC. “I originally thought it would be a fun side project but I ended up falling in love with the process. There is something magical about working with your hands.”
Weems came of age in the 1960s and early ’70s in the US, amidst the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism. When she got hold of her first camera in 1973, a 20th birthday present, she was working with a Marxist organization in San Francisco where she lived with her young daughter. Like many artists questioning cultural myths and social conventions around this time, it was through photography that she found a way into the complicated power structures and histories she wanted to redress. Since the 1980s, most often via conceptual photographic series, Weems has recalibrated the visual cues through which we read and understand gender, class and, most powerfully, race. If this makes her work sound didactic or antagonistic, it’s neither. Weems has an intractable belief in the capacity for compassion that inflects her work with wit and generosity. Continue reading Carrie Mae Weems→
Hawgood is an artist combining photography, CGI, lighting design and installation. Within his work three main themes persist, a fascination with technology, states of mind, and the removal of something from the real world. He takes inspiration from things he observes, studying, isolating and reconstructing, and there is a constant drive to conjure something through the work, an attempt to transport the viewer.
Contemporary Photography Index 