++ geir moseid +++

 

The series Plucked is an investigation into the duality of the home, urban alienation, social segregation and human relationships. This duality of the home extends further, adding layers to the series, incorporating the ethics of both social documentary and staged photography, as well as the possible cognitive dissonant experience of the viewer. This dissonance was built around notions of ambiguity and the uncanny.

The home is often known to be a safe space where one can be private and intimate. The home has a sentiment of security that is built around the fact that we can seclude ourselves, distancing oneself from the interference and surveillance of others. It is with this point that its most problematic duality is made evident. The home is a harbourer of some of humanities gravest crimes. These crimes occur behind closed doors, including physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

The element of time and death is also present in the repetition of flowers throughout the series. Here flowers act as a subtle metaphor concerning the duality of life and death, of which are inseparable through time, not unlike photography itself. The act of plucking/picking flowers is death and once the plucked flower is severed from its life force, it is subject to a slow, often beautiful, process of dying. This dialogue with death has the ability to create notions of the uncanny. By depicting something that is familiar, yet strange, or appealing and repulsive at the same time is often regarded as a signifier of the depiction of the uncanny and raises contradictory beliefs (cognitions) for the viewer, encouraging the viewer to create his/her own opinion, which is hopefully based on the emotion that the photograph offers the viewer.

The images are talking about the everyday with a calm and beautiful surface, but that, on closer inspection, raises question about the apparent peaceful depiction, juxtaposing the viewer's emotional response to the photographs with a subtler sinister undercurrent. When this emotion is strong enough to allow the viewer to travel back through their personal history, to where a similar emotion was encountered, the viewer is removed from the physical object, that is the photograph, and the situation it is depicting. This journey is a personal reflection that considers social truth. This is emphasised by the deliberate open-ended narratives and cognitive duality of the series, encouraging a subjective journey through the work rather than a dictated reading.  The subjectivity is also important in recognising scenarios through the viewer's experience of the everyday. This is also in dialogue with the viewer's memory vault of images derived from painting, cinema and TV and helps the viewer in understanding a visual, gestural language. It is related to a subliminal aesthetic pleasure that is not, as I understand it, dependent on authenticity, hence verifying the staged documentary photograph as a relevant approach concerning social understanding and investigation. By plucking specific moments of everyday narrative my work is confronting the way in which social truth should be depicted.

geir moseid 

  

°°° julia hetta °°°

 The Swedish photographer Julia Hetta graduated from the Gerrit Rietveldt Artacademy in Amsterdam in 2004. Her work has since then been shown in magazines and exibitions around Europe, e.g. Holland, Belgium, Sweden and France. The images of Julia Hetta contains both the very beautiful, sensous and romantic as well as the dark and lurid. Her colour work has a nearly renaissance palette quality to it, while her black and white work is rich in contrast and does not fear the very dark, the very black.

Clients
Acne Paper, Another Magazine, Dazed and Confused, Elle, ArtLover, Double, Costume, Dossier Journal, Rodeo, Warner Music, Lovisa Burfitt, J.Lindeberg, Diana Orving, Lowe Brindfors, etc. website: www.juliahetta.com

 

---Richard Billingham---

richard billingham :

'my father raymond is a chronic alcoholic.
he doesn't like going outside, my mother elizabeth hardly drinks,
but she does smoke a lot.
she likes pets and things that are decorative.
they married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
my younger brother jason was taken into care when he was 11,
but now he is back with ray and liz again.
recently he became a father.
'dad was some kind of mechanic, but he's always been an
alcoholic. it has just got worse over the years.
he gets drunk on cheap cider at the off license.
he drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
originally, our family lived in a terraced house,
but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation,
sold the house. then we moved to the council tower block,
where ray just sits in and drinks.
that's the thing about my dad, there's no subject he's interested
in, except drink.'

'it's not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise,
be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually
meaningful as I can make it -
in all these photographs I never bothered with things like
the negatives. some of them got marked and scratched.
I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed
at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.' biography

richard billingham was born in birmingham in 1970
and began taking photographs while studying fine arts at
sunderland university.
after college he returned to birmingham, and worked stacking
shelves in qwik save, doing art by night.
billingham began photographing his family as reference
material for paintings.
the subjects are his father ray, his obese and tattoed mother liz,
his unruly younger brother jason,
the dog's another character: caught flash-pupilled with the cat
beside the fridge with the brown dribbles all down it;
or thoroughly chewing its behind on the sofa.

he took so many shots that the family stopped noticing
and the result is that they are portraited without artefice.
his photos were first shown in the barbican art gallery, london in 1994
entitled 'who's looking at the family'.
two years later these selected images feature in billingham's book,
'ray's a laugh', published by scalo, 1996.

after the overnight fame, he stopped taking still pictures,
but moved on to hi-8 video footage, resulting in the 47minute
TV film called 'fishtank', commissioned by artangel.


first exhibited in 1995 at anthony reynolds gallery, london,
the works have since received international acclaim.
in 1997 he won the citibank private bank photography
prize and his work was one of the talking points of 'sensation',
the exhibition of contemporary british art from the saatchi collection,
in london and berlin (1997), and new York (1998).


the latest stills are depopulated landscapes:
dead-end waste ground; patches of semi-rural / industrial
dereliction behind red-brick walls; threadbare greens and
eroded playgrounds between housing estates;
a windblown spinney mirroring a painter's cloud-puffed sky...
lives and works in stourbridge (uk).

*+ Frank Schott +*

Joseph Paul Jernigan (January 31, 1954 – August 5, 1993) was a Texas murderer who was executed by lethal injection at 12:31 a.m.

In 1981, Jernigan was sentenced to death for stabbing and shooting 75-year-old Edward Hale, who discovered him stealing a microwave oven. Jernigan spent 12 years in prison before his final plea for clemency was denied. His cadaver was sectioned and photographed for the Visible Human Project at the University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center.

Visible Human Project
The Visible Human Project is an effort to create a detailed data set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body, in order to facilitate anatomy visualization applications. Jernigan's cadaver was encased and frozen in a gelatin and water mixture in order to stabilize the specimen for cutting. The specimen was then cut in the axial plane at 1 millimeter intervals. Each of the resulting 1,871 slices were photographed in both analog and digital, yielding more than 65 gigabytes of data.

Concerns
At the prompting of a prison chaplain Jernigan had agreed to donate his body for scientific research or medical use, without knowing about the Visible Human Project. Some people have voiced ethical concerns over this. One of the most notable statements came from the University of Vienna which demanded that the images be withdrawn with reference to the point that the medical profession should have no association with executions, and that the donor's informed consent could be scrutinised.

Mark 12:31, "The second most important commandment is this: 'Love your neighbor as you love yourself.' No other commandment is greater than these."

project 12:31 

||\ HELLEN VAN MEENE /||

Hellen van Meene is an artist who makes photos, mostly portraits, mostly of young people, and mostly of girls. Thanks to her galleries she can make a living out of this. Her work is shown in museums and galleries all over the world. She is the single subject of three books and appears along other artists in many other books and magazines. She lives in Heiloo, The Netherlands.

hellen van meene