I’ve been a long-time admirer of the husband and wife duo Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison.
They’re work is conceptual, and centers around the “Every Man,” who interacts with the landscape and works tirelessly to repair the damage done by man’s insatiable desire for expansion and advancement.
I really love the work of Korean photographer Seung Hoon Park (or Park Seung Hoon).
Montmartre 1 (Textus #252)
Park works with an 8x10 camera, and 8mm and 16mm film strips. He makes two exposures, then weaves the strips of film together. I love the discontinuous and misaligned nature of his pieces.
Textus #053-1
You can check out more of his work and read more about his process by following one of the links below:
https://susanspiritusgallery.com/artist/seung-hoon-park/
https://www.artsy.net/artist/park-seung-hoon
https://theartling.com/en/artists/seung-hoon-park/
http://www.lifestyleasia.com/413789/moment-photographer-seung-hoon-park/
After last month's post on Timothy O'Sullivan, I thought it might be fun to make that a pattern, and talk about some of my influences each month.
Eadweard Muybridge didn't immediately become one of my influences. I think in my History of Photography class we mainly discussed his motion studies and experimentation. But I could be wrong; I was in Seattle for half of that semester while I was prepared to donate bone marrow to my brother who was undergoing treatment for Leukemia. It wasn't until about three years after that class that I really began paying attention to his landscape work he did in Yosemite.
Today, Muybridge is most known for his motion studies, which began with him being hired to settle a bet between two men, one of whom was Leland Stanford. The bet was whether a horse, when galloping had all four hooves off the ground, or if an animal that size was always in contact with the ground. Muybridge was hired, and devised a system of 12 cameras set at intervals along a race track, which was all in white. A trip wire was attached to each camera so that when the horse passed in front of it, the shutter was tripped and the exposure was made. This was in the days of wet plate collodion, when exposures were seconds long, so it really is remarkable for Muybridge to have figured out how to reduce the exposure time enough to stop motion the way he did. This led him to perform many more studies of animals and humans in motion. These studies ultimately led to the invention of the motion picture.
Though most known for the motion studies, Muybridge started out his professional photographic career as a landscape and architectural photographer. He photographed San Francisco, and surrounding areas including Yosemite. Some of the scenes he photographed in Yosemite were made from the same point as photographs made by his contemporary and competitor, Carleton Watkins.
For an excellent biography on Muybridge, read Rebecca Solnit's book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Or if you don't want to buy a book, you can read this excellent bio over at Imaging-Resource.
Or you can just check out the Wikipedia article on Muybridge.
Melinda Hurst Frye is a Seattle-based artist, who uses a scanner in her work to create fictional scenes of plants and their root systems, and the creepy crawly bugs that live under our feet.
For her Underneath body of work, she started out in her front yard, where she would dig a hole big enough to fit her scanner, let the dirt settle for a few days, and then return and place the scanner in the hole, add any insects that she didn't want to add to the scene in post production and scan an image. She makes 5-30 scans of the scene, with lights aimed strategically, and sticks propping the scanner up to keep it still. Afterwards, she scans other insects, or visits Burke Museum of National History and Culture, and photographs taxidermy specimens of moles, or groundhogs in their labs.
This work evolved from an exploration of what was above the earth by scanning high resolution "portraits" of insects, and grubs, caterpillars, and larvae, but her interest in what is hidden led her to start digging into the ground and scanning the critters found below the surface. This play then brought her to her current process of placing the scanner in the holes she digs.
I love the playful and experimental nature and quality of Melinda's work!
I asked Melinda about her influences, and she responded with this:
“My experience as a mother has had a big impact on my work. I mine my personal life for subject matter, and kids are pretty consuming. Their initial wonder and exploration of nature, watching insects and digging in the soil, have been a big influence on my work. I want each image to present or inspire curiosity in the viewer, the kind that echoes what we felt as kids when spotting a bug in a flower or under the leaves. Additionally, the general aesthetic (lighting, color palette, and tableaux-like compositions) of Dutch master still life paintings helps me make certain decisions when building an image. When I get stuck, I go to them.
I adore Louis Bourgeois and her spider series—specifically Maman* in Ottawa. First off, it is 30 feet high and when you stand under it you feel like prey, it is an experience rather than something you walk by. I connect with her nod to motherhood in the piece: motherhood that is less saccharine or huggy, and more raw and sharp. Still loving, however, packaged in a leggy spider that is not interested in our acceptance, but the survival of her babies.
Lori Nix and Julie Blackmon are big faves with their narrative photographs and unique approaches. I can stare at those images for days. Both Emmet Gowin and Harry Callahan made imagery of their family that are so tender and kind. Recently I saw an image by Gowin of his wife Edith with silhouettes of moths** all over the image and I just about
died. All of my worlds came together in that piece.”
Head on over to Melinda's website to view more of her work, and then go follow her on Instagram!
I don’t remember exactly when or how I discovered the work of Klea McKenna, but I’ve been following her Instagram feed for a while now. She makes photograms of rubbings of photographic paper rubbed on cross sections of trees, and cracks in rock and cement. Think of the rubbings of tree bark and rocks you did as a kid with crayon, but done in the dark with light sensitive paper instead and then exposed to light. The resulting prints are really quite intriguing and beautiful, and the process involved is pretty impressive.
Other work involves her making photograms of raindrops that fell on her photo paper, or spider webs in a forest, or grass collected from the landscape.
This post originally appeared on my Departures Blog on May 27, 2017, and the interview in a subsequent post on June 2, 2017.
Clear back in October, Lenscratch had an article in their Art + Science series on the body of work by David Shannon-Lier titled Of Heaven and Earth. The first image in the article, Chalk Moonrise, Muley Point, Utah, pulled me in, since I love long exposures of the moon and sun, but also, there was more to the image than just the long white arc of the moon as it traveled across the sky: on the rocks in the foreground is a light line that matches the radius of the moon's path.
Chalk Moonrise, Muley Point, Utah
Not only are these absolutely gorgeous photographs, but the concept behind them is so fun and interesting!
In a LensCulture article, Lier says this about his work:
“To produce each photograph, I leave open the shutter for a very long exposure. The result is an image of the moon or sun playing off of an altered landscape. In this way, the heavenly meets with the human, the immense with the intimate and one of the most constant forces in our world—the movement of the solar bodies—interacts with a line of rocks or grass: a mark that is small and completely fleeting in meaning and form.”
Badlands Moonset, Badlands National Park, South Dakota
I emailed him and asked some questions about the body of work, and he was kind enough to answer.
Andy Duncan: How long have you been working on this project, and do you think there will ever be an "end" to it, or point at which it will be considered finished?
David Shannon-Lier: I have been working on this project for a little over 5 years now, though the first year and a half to two years of that was spent figuring out how to make the pictures and refining my methodology. I hope to put a book of this work together and I am actually working on including long exposures of the movement of the sun. This is a little trickier as days tend to be a bit windier than nights. I am now building a folding wind break to bring with me on my trips after this last outing.
AD: What was your inspiration for this work?
DS-L: The inspiration for the work came when I was driving from Massachusetts to Arizona for graduate school. I began to think about our old home and how as we drove west it was slowly setting below the horizon. It occurred to me that I rarely thing about the larger world in three dimensions. I wanted to make work that would point to that gap in our thinking. Now I see that gap as a metaphor for the gap in our conception of our own lives: we know we are small, ephemeral beings, but we can't shake the notion that the things we do every day carry some sort of weight.
AD: How did it begin, and how has it evolved?
DS-L: The work began as mostly technical problems and solutions. How to plot the motion of heavenly bodies? How to do it accurately enough to where the pictures didn't fall apart? How to nail down the exposure, especially considering small apertures and reciprocity failure? These problems took the better part of a year an a half, most of the experiments taking place in my back yard. As I solved those problems, I began to travel in concentric circles around our home in Arizona, at which point I had to solve other problems to do with travel and how to do this out of a car and away from the support of a home base. Now all that is behind me, which makes the work easier, but in some ways less exciting in the execution. The concepts have developed a bit and I now see the work as about that particularly vexing mix we have as a species of being mortal, conscious and aware that we are both.
AD: Do you have any thoughts or ideas of what comes next for your photography?
DS-L: I am always taking pictures of things that fascinate me. I am interested in the landscape and the sublime, particularly that aspect of the sublime that is closest to fear or dread. It seems to me in these moments we can begin to get at that human knot I mentioned above.
AD: Who is a favorite photographer of yours?
DS-L: There are a lot. I find the best persona to embody as a visual artist is a compulsive thief. It does no good to steal from one artist or movement, or even one medium. But if you can constantly be taking in new information, and stealing a bit from here, a bit from there, from other artists as well as science, philosophy, theology, culture the work will end up being rather more interesting. This is all to say that sometimes (as is the case with compulsive thieves) I am unaware that I am borrowing from some area until long after and I could spend entirely too long listing all of them. All that being said I will mention Bill Burke and Mark Klett, who I worked closely with and who have influenced me by osmosis. Also, someone who is working now and really gets at the ideas of the landscape and the sublime is Michael Lundgren.
AD: Because I'm a bit of a tech junkie, what programs or software do you use to project or predict the positioning of the sun and the moon?
DS-L: The solution to that technical problem was to use very accurate data and a very accurate tool for measuring the data. I started getting my data from the U.S. Naval Observatory, but I now use an app called stellarium. It has the same data, but is a little easier to access on the road. From that I can get the precise location for any heavenly body at present or in the future. I use a surveyor's tool called a transit, or a theodolite to plot the points that I get from the data, and then place my camera in the spot where the transit made its measurements. It's a bit more complicated than that and a lot more tedious, but that's the gist of it.
Man, I loved the part about stealing from everywhere! I've heard the quote that's often attributed to Pablo Picasso: "good artists borrow, great artists steal." But for all the times I've heard it, I never really thought to apply the stealing to all facets of life, not just to steal from other artists.
Thanks for your time David! I can't wait to see more of your work!
To see more of Lier's work, which I highly recommend, you can visit his website. Also, he's been featured on LensCulture, Fraction Magazine, and Hoctok.
I began the 52 Photographers Blog circa 2007-2008 as a way to expand my photographic/artistic vocabulary and get to know many more photographers than I already knew and share the work of artists that I enjoyed looking at and who were currently influencing my own work.
I never actually made 52 posts, as I got super busy with other things. Posts became spaced out, and clustered, and then it finally died off, and I let the domain expire.
Then in 2016, I thought of resurrecting the idea, but instead, decided to just write blog posts on my Departures Blog with no set schedule or plan. For 2018, I debated with myself whether or not I would fully resurrect 52 Photographers or not, and I ultimately decided to take the plunge, and here we are!
While 52 Photographers will be heavily photography-oriented, I've come across artists working in other media that I am going to want to share with you! I can't wait to share the work of so many really great photographers!
Jim Stone is the juror for PhotoSpiva’s 2009 33rd Annual National Photographic Competition (submission deadline is Friday, are you ready?). I decided to check his website out to find a little bit more about him, and see his own work and like it quite a bit. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Thanks to my friend Scott for the tip on John Chiara.
