I keep trying to look at the work of South Carolinian Hollis Brown Thornton without thinking I’m asleep. But the quality of his work is so dreamlike that I just can’t manage it. There are vague, ambiguous shapes drifting through static points in time, like every dream I’ve ever tried to grab onto while asleep. It’s the shock of grasping something intangible that is constructed from my collected ideas of tangibility. I don’t know how to make that sentence sound any less pretentious. Regardless of me sounding like a complete douchebag, the work of Hollis Brown Thornton is definitely worth a look. Several looks. Just openly stare at it for a while.

Hollis Brown Thornton

I see a lot of great work most days. I see a lot of bad work, too, but I can filter it pretty well. Maybe about five or six times a year I actually see something that moves me, that is deeply personal yet completely open, a shared experience of emotion through art. That is certainly the ultimate goal of any artwork. This morning I came across a photo-essay titled Days with My Father by the photographer Phillip Toledano. The series captures Toledano’s life with his father, who has no short term memory, after Toldeano’s mother died. The series is heartbreaking and hopeful, and brought up a mix of emotions I wasn’t expecting. It’s interesting to see someone else’s perspective on their feelings for their father, and to view my own paternal relationship in that light. Toledano shows his mastery of the photographic art as well with each staggeringly expressive shot. Every portrait captures the sum total of the subject, even though that total is completely different from one shot to the next. At the heart of the series is just the simple act of a son demonstrating his love for his father in the only way that he knows to express such powerful emotions. You can almost stand at the edge of the limitless expanse that is that love and peer over. Almost. Some things are just too personal. Now I’ve gotta go call my dad.

Phillip Toledano: Days with My Father

I was going to do separate photography posts for Debora Mittelstaedt and Yelda Yilmaz, but the similarities between the two were too good to pass up. Both German photographers, both have great light and tone in their work. Ok, not a pile of similarities, but for my purposes here they’re perfect. Plus there are all kinds of interesting parallels drawn between two German photographers, one living in New York and one in Hamburg. Is their German-ness the source of their shared styles? Does being German automatically make you a good candidate for warm, buttery lighting and a feeling of cold morning air? Check after the jump for more of my bullshit along the same lines.
Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled across photographer Dulce Pinzón’s brilliant photography project, Superheroes, this morning, and it immediately grabbed me. Having moved to California in the last year or so, it was quite a change for me to see the large population of Mexican immigrants firsthand. Most of them hold down the hard jobs and the dirty jobs that need to be done. They remind me of my Dad, working 16 hour days in 130 degree temperatures with a broken foot so that I had clothes (yes, that actually happened). He did it for his family. Pinzón’s project documents the immigrant workers who are doing it for their families. She photographs them at their jobs dressed as various Superheroes, because that is exactly what they are. They push themselves to superhuman levels to help those they love. My favorite part is probably the little captions under each photo telling how much that person sends home to their family in Mexico. If I could ever get my Dad to wear anything other than LSU sweatshirts I would probably put him in a Hulk costume, and under the photo it would say: Dennis Martin, sends home everything he’s ever had.

Dulce Pinzón - Superheroes

Photographic master Phillip Toledano has just dropped his latest project, titled Phone Sex. The project is actually a book (with previews available on its website) that chronicles an unsung class of sex-work heroes (wait, are there any sex workers that are sung?), the phone sex operators. Possibly one of the strangest of all human occupations is the person whom is called upon to help suspend belief for a fleeting fantastical flirtation (ALLITERATION FREAKOUT!). Each incredible photograph is accompanied by some glimpse into the world that each operator inhabits, from scat fetish to the deeper psychology of why their business even exists. I actually considered this as a job when I was broke in college, but then I realized that I hate talking on the phone. If there was a service that did sext-messaging, I could be their top earner in no time. “sext-messaging” is copyrighted, don’t go using that shit without asking me. Nah, it’s ok. I can’t contain that kind of genius anyway.

Phone Sex

I could make a whole site devoted to various Flickr users who have incredible photos, but that’s not what I’m after. In fact, I rarely mention Flickr photgraphers because it’s so easy to find them all without my help. Sometimes though I come across a photographer whose work I really dig, and I get the jones to spotlight ‘em. Such is the case with Drew Murray aka diothedog. Drew is a couple of years younger than me, and relatively new to photography, but he’s already built up a nice set of photos. He uses depth of field really well, and has some great light in his shots. He’s even managed to get some good portraits, which are, in my opinion, the hardest part of photography. SHit, he even has abstraction and color on lock. Dude has skills is what I’m saying. Don’t take my word for it, use those pretty peepers of yours.

Drew Murray’s Flickr

This is pretty late in posting, but I’ve got a lot of pictures of various shows I went to a couple of weekends ago. Maybe longer than that. I could check, but I’m not all that into facts. Let’s just see some art, huh?

Read the rest of this entry »

I just wanted to point out this amazing photoset over at NPR. It’s called Standing By Their Men, and it features photos of scandalized politicians and their wives at press conferences explaining the scandals. The array of faces the women display is what makes it all worth while. I especially like the Hillary Clinton picture, because she’s smiling lightly but her eyes seem dead. She might make a great leader, but I don’t like her at all as a person. It’s impossible for me to understand what these women are going through, but my natural reaction would’ve been to beat my husband to within an inch of his life and then light all his stuff on fire. And that’s all before I try to destroy him in the divorce. It’s cute how full of rage I am.

Standing By Their Men

Photographer Matt Stuart shoots people. His work focuses on the strange and wonderful interactions of people and their environments. Think of it like a candid look at small moments of synchronicity. They’re photos of the human condition, caught unawares, at its finest. Each photo seems to be looking back and smiling, probably with a mischievous wink. Stuart’s work is one, big, mischievous wink with an arm around your shoulder. What more could a photographer want than to show humanity that we’re all human?

Matt Stuart

I love good photography, probably more than any other art form, which is why I don’t report on it much here. I’m picky as all hell when it comes to photography, because it has to be great for me to pay any attention to it. Mikael Kennedy can be proudly added to that list of great photographers in my head. The first image I saw on his site was a photo in the forest, and I’m missing the South pretty hard right now so it immediately kicked me in the feelings. It’s not just nostalgia or homesickness that makes the photos mean something, but more that he captured what it feels like to actually be in the woods; not what the woods look like, but being there. That feeling is difficult enough for me to describe in words, so it must have been pretty tough to capture on film, and yet he does so over and over again. I’m looking out a window at a gorgeous, blue California sky with an ambient temperature of 65 degrees or so, but one look at his photos and I want to be back in the freezing, slumbering forests that I grew up in. That to me is great photography.

Mikael Kennedy