The Punk Project is one of over a dozen series of photographs in which Korean-born New York photographer Nikki Lee pushes the boundaries of identity and place, of who we are and how others see us in proximity to the people we choose to surround ourselves with. She places herself within the frame of her images, transforming herself into the documented subject after constructing the context and setting the stage. She performs identity – reinventing herself with the stereotypes, media hype, codes, and clues that look into and out from a given community, infiltrates that community, and presents us with a new version of herself. She is a respectful tourist shopping for who she is within a subculture, stretching the very skin of her own identity to find a fit. Her images dig deep into the construction of community and ego, of social roles and what it means to be self-defined and/or categorized by someone else. She ultimately asks, are personal identity and communal identity fluid?
Vasco Araújo works in a variety of media, including video, installation and photography, to explore ideas of community and marginality. Gestures of seduction, cultural stereotypes, political characteristics as well as sexual identities have all been the focus of his work. It has been described as Baroque in its literary, historical and art historical references and he draws the viewer into looking at society, providing both honest as well as artificial reflections.
Photography maintains a substantial collection of negatives and slides in trust for the community. The collection has been compiled over the past 30 years through contributions from professional and amateur photographers and communities. It represents a valuable historical document recording political, cultural and social change in Northern Ireland over more than 3 decades.
A recently deceased famous French critic once compared Thomas Mailender’s work to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher under the influence of Pastis, a local aniseed liquor popular in the south of France.
He focuses on the source material and subjects and appropriates and diverts found images from the Internet, flea markets and the like. Mailaender is an insatiable and compulsive collector of photographs and sociological patterns. One of his major investigations is a typological survey, inventory and recycling of human behavior, particularly hobbies and incidental activities, using entertainment as a substance and a means to develop his practice. Through his mise en abyme of the frivolous he allows a multitude of amateur and/or vernacular objects, images and customs to attain the status of artworks, repeatedly questioning the notion of artistic legitimacy.
Fiona Tan initially became known for a body of work that relied on the use of archival films, questioning the observer and the observed and challenging the assumptions of the colonial past. Portraiture has been explored in various works combining an analysis of its art-historical and sociological context with how time influences our perception of those portrayed. Recent works concentrate on how memory is connected to images in our mind and on how inaccurate and yet creative memory can be. Throughout her work Tan shows a continuing interest in the motivations of the traveler or explorer. The question how we represent ourselves and what mechanisms determine how we interpret the representation of others, are repeatedly being investigated, revealing what is behind and also beyond the confines of the image.
Contemporary Photography Index 