New Work

Here are some new pictures from the last month. A bit from Massachusetts, a bit from North Carolina and back to New York.

New Aerial Photos

Seasons Project- Part 1 in Progress- Winter

My favorite place at MOMA is located up the first set of stairs and straight through to the back of the floor in front of Cy Twombly's Four Seasons paintings. For those of you not familiar with the paintings, here they are below.

I love the way that the colors of each season are separated into such clear and separate sections. This project is a work in progress for me and I imagine that I will work on it for the next few years. For now, the groupings are based on color and the season in which the photographs were taken. I am starting to move out of these confines slightly and would like to start the groupings based more on the subject matter. I am doing a lot of color work in Photoshop after scanning the negatives to create the feel of different seasons. For the winter series, I am making the colors really desaturated and pale. Looking out the window of my studio in Brooklyn this morning, the skyline is pale and foggy. It makes for perfect reference. I'm really enjoying playing with color so much.

When I show this work as a whole, they will be printed small (8x10") and arranged in a grid for each season. I like the idea that from far back the colors will form similar palettes to the Twombly paintings. I have been so inspired by these paintings. Of course the other set of the Four Seasons at the Tate Modern are also a huge inspiration. Here are some of the photographs from the winter group.

after the snow, new london, new hampshire

hotel bed on christmas morning, cambridge, massachusetts

temporary grave marker, auckland, new zealand

fog on the island, the coromandel, new zealand

Gallery Update

I didn't get a chance to post anything about the shows that I saw last week. Before the snow came, I went for a quick walk in Chelsea and was able to pop into a few galleries. As always, there was so much more that I would have liked to have seen. Gallery hopping with a 5 month old baby tends to make for shorter viewing days. Here are a few of my favorite shows from last week.

The first gallery that I went to was Paul Kasmin. I was lucky enough to drop in right before the Santi Moix show came down.  I was at first drawn into the gallery because I am really interested in smaller framed pieces lately. The exhibition is called May the Earth Rest Lightly on You and is a selection of new watercolor paintings that feel like a visual diary. They are quite stunning as a group. The subjects of the paintings range from intimate domestic scenes, to food, to street scenes and portraits and landscapes. I love the color palette that you see as you walk into the gallery.  Here are a few quick snapshots of the show. 

 Next we stopped in at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery to see sculptures by Jane McAdam Freud. The artist is the great granddaughter of the late Sigmund Freud. The relation is evident in some of the larger figurative pieces. I really liked necktie piece and the large faces. Here are a few images from the show.

I would definitely recommend going to the new show at Aperture. reGeneration is a group show of eighty young photographers from photo schools around the world. I was really impressed by some of the work. There were some pieces that I felt were overly reliant on the digital aspect of the medium. As a retoucher, I am very involved with digital photography, but think that in some parts of this show it was a bit flashy and over used. Beyond showing off knowledge of the tools, some of the work lacked depth and left me feeling uninterested. That being said, there were some photographs from the show that I really loved.


Here are the pieces from the Aperture show that I loved.

Florian Joye

Robin Friend

Di Liu

Ya'ara Oren

That's all for now. In my next posting, I will put up some new scans that I made yesterday. I'm really excited about some of them.

Have a great night!

Aerial Project- part 1

For the past year, I have been working on a project of pseudo aerial photographs. I have always loved aerial photographs, but unfortunately I do not own a plane and coincidentally am deathly afraid of heights. I suppose that this project came as a happy compromise for me. In addition, I am very interested in creating falsehood in my work. Previous to this project, I was making pictures of habitat dioramas in natural history museums and cages and tanks in zoos. I like what happens when the real and the recreated intersect. This group of aerial photographs is a work in progress and feels like an apt extension of the diorama work. 

I am finding this project challenging because I am unsure where to find these pictures. I walk around staring at the ground, always trying to imagine that I am a giant looking down on a landscape. As can be imagined, there are lots of misses with this approach. The project is very slow moving, but I am really thrilled whenever I get a new image that fits in. I shoot with a Pentax 6x7 camera with a waist level viewer. Looking down through the viewer to see an image helps for me to image what the final photograph will look like. I am also trying to figure out how ambiguous I should be about the images. I'm not sure whether I should present them solely as aerial photographs, or if I should include in the title what they really are. The 1st image of the group, for example, is of tiny packing peanuts on the sidewalk in the West Village. I thought that it looked like a constellation, so I found images of constellations and tried to match the color to that of a grainy constellation photograph. I like this part of the project; that there is a way to monumentalize  very ordinary trash on the sidewalk.

I have posted the aerial project below as a work in progress. I'm really excited to scan the new work from the last month. There are four new aerial photographs in that batch. I will post them once they are finished. 

Four of these images were included in the July issue of Abe's Penny. For those of you that don't know about Abe's Penny, you should definitely check it out. They put out really beautiful work.

Packing Materials, West Village, NYC

Sidewalk, Sun Valley, Idaho

Kate's Roof, Boston, Massachusetts

Ocean, Wilmington, North Carolina

Driveway, Northfield, Massachusetts

Sand, Pauanui, New Zealand

Sand, Waiotapu, New Zealand

Inspiration for Aerial Project

I grew up staring out airplane windows. I have always loved the way that an entire landscape can be flattened and made to fit in a small oval window. I can only imagine what astronauts feel like when they look out their windows; when they are flying high above the earth. It must be such a spectacular feeling to look down and see the world from this angle.

Here are some amazing aerial photographs that i found on the Life magazine website. They are all taken from the Columbia and Challenger 5 space shuttles. The colors are just incredible, aren't they? I'm so inspired by the color palettes in these landscapes. The shapes in some of these images are so abstract that they feel like line drawings or paintings.

I talked briefly in my last post about the aerial project that I have been working on for the past year. Images like these have been so inspiring for me to look at while thinking about how to make the pictures and how to deal with the color palette of the project as a whole. I will post the pictures from this project early next week. Have a great weekend, where ever you are out there in the world or in space.

Back from New Zealand

Hello to all from snowy Brooklyn!
 
I thought that I would start the new year with a picture of my magnet boards in my studio. I realized when I was putting these photos up last night that I never show people the images from wide edits. There are always images that I am excited about when I get back from the lab, but they don't make it into the final edits of my projects and so no one ever sees them. On this blog, I will periodically put up pictures of these editing walls. At the Robert Frank show at the Met last year, there were large prints of his contact sheets. I think its so interesting to see what was left out. It feels voyeuristic in a small way, like you get to peek into someone's studio when they're not looking. I'll be posting pictures of the magnet boards in my studio whenever I have new work.

Just got all of the film from our trip to New Zealand back from the lab. I'm still working through a wide edit, but I'm really excited about some these pictures. I spent a short afternoon in the Auckland Zoo. I always try to visit the zoos and the natural history museums whenever I visit a new city. I was also able to get a few new images for the aerial project that I am working on. These are on the lower left side of the magnet boards. I started this project last year when I was pregnant, and I've started to add more to it in the last few months. I am making pictures that feel aerial but are taken from waist level in most cases. This project is moving slowly, but I'm really excited about it.

Some of the other landscapes are for a larger project about seasons that i've been working on for the last year. The project is loosely based on Cy Twombly's Four Seasons paintings. I'll post more of these soon.

new work from New Zealand