°|°| Amy Stein |°|°

My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the "wild" and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild.

The photographs in this series are constructed based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals. The narratives are set in and around Matamoras, a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania that borders a state forest. 

amy stein 

|\| Susan Worsham |/|

 

This series of photographs is taken in and around Virginia, the place in which I grew up. The title comes from a book written by my father's ancestor, to show the lineage of the Fox family in Virginia. For my own purpose, it acts as a metaphorical map, of the rediscovered paths of my childhood home.
 

At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return. As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends, and their new families. I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father's old office, and rests them in my old bedroom, while he changes their cages. My mother always promised that there were no snakes in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.

These photographs are not meant to be purely autobiographical, but rather representations of how I view things, based on my own experiences, and those of the people that I have met along the way. My boyfriend Michael, stands on the street I grew up on, bridging the gap between past and present. Lynn, the first stranger that ever sat for me, continues to pose for me, along with her son Max.
I have been photographing her for seventeen years now.

susan worsham  

[° Phil Toledano - Days with my father °]

 

 

My Mum died suddenly on September 4th, 2006After she died, I realized how much she’d been shielding me from my father’s mental state. He didn’t have alzheimers, but he had no short-term memory, and was often lost.I took him to the funeral, but when we got home, he’d keep asking me every 15 minutes where my mother was. I had to explain over and over again, that she had died.This was shocking news to him.Why had no-one told him?
Why hadn’t I taken him to the funeral?
Why hadn’t he visited her in the hospital?He had no memory of these events.After a while, I realized I couldn’t keep telling him that his wife had died. He didn’t remember, and it was killing both of us, to constantly re-live her death.I decided to tell him she’d gone to Paris, to take care of her brother, who was sick.‘Days with my father’ is a journal.A record of our relationship, and the time we spent over the last three years.2006-2009Published by Chronicle Books in 2010. 

 www.dayswithmyfather.com

mrtoledano 

_-_ Rebecca Fanuele _-_

rebecca fanuele

*(( John Divola ))*

Zuma Series (folder two) / cb Zuma A 5_17_02. 1975
© JOHN DIVOLA
-
Los Angeles based artist John Divola explores the contemporary landscape as a complex site of loss and potential. In the Zuma works from 1977, he entered a lone vacant house on Zuma Beach many times over the course of a year not only to record the decomposition and dilapidation of this structure, but to participate, like an natural elemental force of nature, in the transformation of the structure.
“On initially arriving I would move through the house looking for areas or situations to photograph. If nothing seemed to interest me I would move things around or do some spray painting. The painting was done in much the same way that one might doodle on a piece of paper. At that point I would return to the camera and explore what ever new potentials existed.”

Through the mechanics of photography John Divola truly reveals the nature of his subject, the stark flash of the camera lays bare all that is painted, in motion and burned against the background of ocean waves at sunrise or sunset. A remarkable body of work which skirts the borders of fiction and the real.

°°° Kolo. 2009 °°°

Kolo from Natacha Paganelli on Vimeo.

courtesy Méroé Film. music by MATTHIEU CHAUVIN




Just because it was excellent: today, I’m strongly decided to present you two artists that I had the chance to discover yesterday evening during the opening of the exhibition “N’oublions pas que le vertige se prend sur les hauteurs” at the Kunsthalle Mulhouse (France).

French artist NATACHA PAGANELLI created this kaleidoscopic fiction during an artist-in-residence program in Serbia. Her work created there depicts the conflicting elans and the hopes of this country where the folklore, like all the traditions, evokes the time “before the war” but can also become an identity assertion.
You can view this video in person at Kunsthalle Mulhouse until 09 January, 2011

-::- Cedric Delasux -::-

cedric delsaux

Born in 1974, Delsaux studied Literature and Cinema in Paris where he still lives and works. He looked after an antique bookshop in the 9th arrondissement of Paris before entering the advertising world as a copywriter. In 2002, he decided to devote his entire time to photography. Alongside his personal work he grew as an advertising photographer and signed campaigns for major advertising agencies (DDB, Euro RSCG, Publicis, Ogilvy, Young & Rubicam, BBDO, Leo Burnett, TBWA ...). In 2005 he received the "Bourse du Talent", French photography award. His work "Here to Stay / Nous Resterons sur Terre", published by Verlhac editions in October 2008, explores the ambivalent relationship between man and nature. Random House in New York edited the American version of the book under the title "A Common Destiny.". Robert Redford, wishing to support the book, wrote for the back cover: " A Common Destiny is a hauntingly beautiful narrative, a meditation almost, reflective of how each action of our lives results in an impact, a consequence, a reaction somewhere else, near and far. In a decidedly ethereal manner, photographer Cédric Delsaux frames the collision of man and nature and the fragility of their dance together.".

Cedric questions our relationship to the world, he creates a new time frame where all boundaries are blurred, between reality and fiction, madness and sanity, where the past and the future are trapped in the present. His work challenges our relationship with time and space, forcing us to reflect on our perception. Elements of our common visual memory, holding a different relationship with every human being, inhabit each of his series.