nasa self portraits . . .

Curiosity, the recently dispatched Mars rover, took a beautiful photograph of itself earlier this month. Given the great range of terrestrial artists who have documented themselves—Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander, Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee—it’s not easy for a humble space rover to distinguish itself in the field of self-portraiture. Here’s a selection of ten NASA self-portraits.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth#ixzz27DW30kaU

ZOE CROSHER

PERRY RUBENSTEIN GALLERY

Announces

ZOE CROSHER

The DISAPPEARING of Michelle duBois

September 14 – October 27, 2012

OPENING RECEPTION, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

 “This, in the end, is the artist’s fantasy: that over-exposing, fading, blurring or breaking up an image can be a liberated and liberating act. In Crosher’s presentation, it’s as if duBois’ image has consumed itself and left her, not captive to what the world projects on her or to a fixed self she must uphold, but freely undefined. –Catherine Wagley

Los Angeles, August 20, 2012 — Perry Rubenstein Gallery announces Zoe Crosher: The Disappearing of Michelle duBois, the inaugural fall exhibition in our new Los Angeles gallery.  For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Crosher will present final works from the Michelle duBois project, aseries of photographic investigations that reimagines and intervenesin the extensive amateur archiveof relentless traveler andself-documentarian, Michelle duBois.  Through this multi-year project, Crosher calls into question our sense of photographic narrative at the end of the analog.  By re-photographing, scanning and re-ordering duBois’ “autoportraits” into a careful amalgam of documentary and the imagined, Crosher blurs the line between fantasy and reality.

Since acquiring the archive of Michelle duBois, Crosher has moved through evolving iterations of exploration, highlighting the strategies and structures of fantasy as much as they expose anything concrete about Ms. duBois herself.  Crosher has created new works that emphasize the impossibility of knowing oneself, even after an endless accumulation of images.  Early approaches often involved the simple act of selecting and grouping images to focus attention on recurring patterns and references.  Later works expansively highlight the archive’s physicality as a relic from the pre-digital era by incorporating images of handwritten notes, photo paper boxes, and film.  The most recent works have featured highly manipulated versions of the original imagery through re-photography and reassembly.  As Crosher has moved through the duBois project, her investigations have resulted in increasingly pronounced interventions leading to the near-disappearance or even total obfuscation of the original source material.  The result is a body of work aiming for complete liberation — from photographic, literary, identity and historic constraint.

Zoe Crosher: The Disappearing of Michelle duBois represents the culmination of the Michelle duBois project and effective dissolution of the archive.  In theAdditive Dust series, the artist has reversed a typical “cleaning up” of photographs by instead accumulating dust from one photograph to the next in 46 steps, completely disappearing the final image.  In the Last Four Days and Nights in Tokyo, prints made from badly damaged negatives depicting duBois posing in an anonymous Japanese love hotel room draw the viewer unusually close before revealing their subject matter.  duBois’ Triple Vision Fantasy Landscapes (Sunset) is evidence of how she merged fantasy and reality during her many travels throughout exotic locales such as Guam.  And, in keeping with Crosher’s interest in creating multiple iterations of the same subject, a new series of crumpled, disappearing nurses perfectly marries two important styles of intervention that have become iconic of the duBois project.

Crosher’s work is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California through October 14, 2012.  She was recently awarded a solo exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary, Texas, and appeared in the 2010 California Biennial presented at the Orange County Museum of Art, California.  Crosher has been selected to participate in the prestigious Museum of Modern Art’s, New York, New Photography 2012 exhibition on view October 3, 2012 through February 4, 2013, and is represented in major private and public collections.

Zoe Crosher, Mae Wested no.6 (Crumpled ) from the series 21 Ways to Mae Wested, 2012.  Digital C-Print, 36 x 36 inches

© Zoe Crosher

Click here to see more of Zoe Crosher's works.

richard avedon . . .

The New Yorker magazine as frame . . .

 John Bayley and Iris Murdoch in London, December 1, 1995. For a Life and Letters piece by Ian Hamilton.

Salman Rushdie in London, September 26, 1994.

 Saul Bellow in 2003. For a Life and Letters piece by Joan Acocella.

Toni Morrison in 2003. For a Profile by Hilton Als
.

The New Yorker has been around since 1925, but didn’t publish a single photograph for its first forty-six years. That changed in 1971, when a tiny photo of a bonnet-clad piglet made an appearance on page 64 of the issue of January 30th. Twenty-one more years passed until the magazine took on its first staff photographer: Richard Avedon.

“When Tina Brown brought him to The New Yorker, in 1992,” Adam Gopnik wrote in his 2004 Postscript on Avedon, “she was rupturing a long-standing taboo against photography, and even those who loved his work must have had their doubts. But his photographs, in their epigrammatic compression of a whole subject into a single black-and-white image, were New Yorker profiles in miniature, and within weeks it was as if he had always graced these pages.”

Two years ago, The New Yorker’s embrace of photography expanded to include Photo Booth—the blog you’re looking at now—and today we’re introducing a new design for Photo Booth, including a new fullscreen slide-show function. (Just click on the red arrows  in the upper right corner.) In celebration of our renovation, here’s a look back at Avedon’s portraits of writers commissioned by The New Yorker, including the portrait of Salman Rushdie that appears in our current issue, alongside Rushdie’s account of his life after the fatwa. “A portrait is not a likeness.” Avedon wrote in his book “In the American West.” “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth#ixzz26ZI4xyfn

rashid johnson . . .

The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett), 2008. Lambda print, 48 ½ x 73 in. (123.2 x 185.4 cm). Edition 1 of 5, aside from 2 artist’s proofs. Collection of Elliot and Kimberly Perry, Memphis.

This September, Miami Art Museum presents Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks, the first major solo exhibition for Johnson, a preeminent artist of his generation. Johnson’s practice encompasses photography, sculpture, painting and video and explores diverse questions relating to the self, identity, metaphysics and art, rooted in his individual experience. On view September 7 to November 4, 2012, the exhibition includes more than a decade of Johnson’s work with an emphasis on major works from the last five years. 

"Rashid Johnson’s unusual vocabulary of materials and innovative mixing of diverse forms and cultural references makes him one of the most vital and interesting artists working today," said Tobias Ostrander, MAM chief curator and deputy director. "Johnson’s work has been supported for many years by our collecting community and we are thrilled to present his first museum exhibition in South Florida." 

Throughout his work, Johnson evokes shared memories by referencing icons and figures from American and African-American culture. The exhibition fosters a dialogue by inviting viewers' free associations with familiar figures -- such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, and Public Enemy -- and everyday objects that appear in Johnson’s work, including plants, mirrors, rugs, record albums, CB radios, shea butter and books. 

Johnson’s conceptually loaded and visually compelling works also allude to alchemy and transformation though his materials and play with the significance and symbolism of different media. His work creates a sense of wonder in the unknown and allows the viewers to draw their own meaning from his works. The exhibition also presents examples from ongoing bodies of work such as Cosmic Slops, abstract paintings made with melted black soap and wax; The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, portraits of members of a fictional black bourgeois secret society; recent "shelf sculptures" featuring found objects, such as The Shuttle (2010) and Triple Consciousness (2009); and early photographs made using the nineteenth-century Van Dyke Brown printing process. 

Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977 and currently lives in New York. He has a BA in photography from Columbia College and attended graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Art. His work has been featured in major group exhibitions including 30 Americans: The Rubell Collection (2008); Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self at the International Center of Photography (2003); and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001); and in 2011 was featured at the International Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale. He is one of the nominees for the Guggenheim’s 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, and the winner of the 2012 High Museum’s David C. Driskell prize that honors excellence in African-American art and scholarship.

rineke dijkstra . . .

From the antique statue of the Kritios boy to Edward Weston’s photographic meditations on his son Neil and beyond, youth and its attendant qualities of beauty and innocence has fascinated artists for centuries.  Rineke Dijkstra’s retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York affirms that the Dutch-born photographer is in many ways part of this enduring tradition. For Dijkstra, however, “youth” is not some timeless ideal, but a state of uncertain transition, and since the early 1990s she has produced a complex body of work that offers viewers a decidedly refreshing take on adolescence. Click here to read and see more.

Rineke Dijkstra. "Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26, 1992." Chromogenic print, 117 x 94 cm. 

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © Rineke Dijkstra.

richard learoyd . . .

For those of you interested in portraiture, take a look at the work of Richard Learoyd, currently on view at McKee Gallery. According to the press release, "Mr. Learoyd’s large-scale, unique photographs are achieved through his mastery of the camera obscura technique. His studio, a single room in which the subject, the lens, the Ilfochrome film, the artist, the lights and the darkroom occupy most of the space, becomes, in effect, the camera itself."

henry anszczak . . .

Does the name Henry Anszczak ring a bell? You may not recognize his name, but you surely have some photographs of yourself that reveal his influential ideas. Click here to read about how he transformed the art of the school portrait.

ruud van empel . . .

Ruud van Empel (1958) is one of the most extraordinary photographic artists of this moment, both nationally and internationally. From hundred of fragments adopted from digital photos, he compiles new images that seem very life-like and realistic, but also conjure up a world that has never existed. Click here to view the artist's website.

Trailer: Ruud van Empel. De onschuld voorbij from Groninger Museum on Vimeo.

chris marker . . .

Take a look at Chris Marker's series "Passengers", composites of art history masterpieces with photographs of people on the Paris subway. Click here to see more.

laurie simmons . . .

Laurie Simmons' Love Doll series inaugurates Salon 94's renovated space in the Bowery. Click here to read about the work of this Pictures generation photographer and to see more.

alec soth . . .

Take a look at this interactive "portrait" project in the 3/13/2011 New York Times Magazine.

mario cravo neto . . .

Take a look at this artist's "sculpture-like" portraits. Click here for more.

ichat portraiture . . .

Take a look at Laura Sackett's images of young teens iChatting with their friends. She thinks of her work as a new kind of portraiture. Click here to see more photographs and read about her concept.

is there such a thing as privacy? . . .

Philip-Lorca diCorcia talks about shooting his "Heads" series. Watch as he describes his simple lighting set-up and discusses the existence / non-existence of "privacy" in our contemporary world.

lupita murillo tinnen . . .

UNT photography alum Lupita Murillo Tinnen is showing her work alongside that of Keith Wilson in a new exhibition "Context" at Richland College in Dallas. Click here for more information. The "cityscapes" of these two artists depict interiors and exteriors of the homes of Mexican-Americans.

Lupita Murillo Tinnen, mesa

Lupita Murillo Tinnen, pajaritos

Lupita Murillo Tinnen, el sofa rojo

Kieth Wilson

Kieth Wilson

seeing without eyes . . .

Take a few minutes to watch this short inspiring film about a project by blind photographer John Dugdale. Watch to the very end to see his provocative, elegant, inspiring photographs.

lolo veleko . . .

New York Times critic Holland Cotter has described these portraits by South African photographer Lolo Veleko as "eye-tingling", and Nigerian-born art historian and curator Okwui Enwezor considers this work an antidote to what he calls "Afro-pessimism". Click here and here to see and read more.

take a look . . .

Two contemporary artists look at South Africa. Check out photographs by David Goldblatt

and films by William Kentridge at The Jewish Museum.