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.
“Photography is our exorcism”, Jean Baudrillard, La transparence du mal
Thanatology asserts that not seeing the dead body of our beloved ones, prevents us from accepting their death. Contemplating the body of the deceased helps us overcome one of the most complex stages of grief: denial.
The story of Ramayana were first recorded in 24,000 stanzas by the Hindu sage and Sanskrit poet Valmiki around 300 BC. It is constantly rewritten and reinterpreted, continuing to evolve today. In 1987 the Ramayana TV-series became the most-watched mythological series ever.
Holly Andres uses photography to examine the complexities of childhood, the fleeting nature of memory, and female introspection. Typically her images rely on a tension between an apparently approachable subject matter and a darker, sometimes disturbing subtext. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, Istanbul, Turkey and Portland Oregon where she lives and works. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Art in America, Artforum, Exit Magazine, Art News, Modern Painters, Oprah Magazine, Elle Magazine, W, The LA Times, Glamour, Blink and Art Ltd. – which profiled her as one of 15 emerging West Coast artists under the age of 35.
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→
Contemporary Photography Index 