Joshua MacDonald: Suspension

Portrait week continues with a post by Sarah Stankey...

Joshua MacDonald is an artist based in Toronto Canada and holds a BFA from Ryerson School of Image Arts in Photography. His work has been exhibited at MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art) in Toronto among other venues. Joshua draws lighting, and colour from much of the photographic conventions of cinema. His interest in the arts is not limited to photography and is reflected in his work which spans of film, photography, and music. Joshua is currently investigating portraiture through documentary and travel.

 Suspension 

The process of acting creates complex states of identity within the performer: they split into a dual state of both themselves and the character they seek to represent. In this series “Suspension”, actors are photographed in this process of becoming someone other than themselves. Each actor was asked to choose a character and perform this character in their home, workplace, or another familiar setting. Despite the the fact that these portraits are staged, they are in a sense documentary photographs.

This work raises questions about the ontology of portraiture, as well as identity and self-image. The implication is that a traditional portrait, where one attempts to present themselves “truthfully”, communicates less about a subject than one where they are acting a character. At times, it seems we are all more comfortable acting as someone we are not.

Additional Images not in Suspension

Gregg Evans: We Only See The Sky As It Was

Portrait week continues...today's post written by Grant Gill

Gregg Evans and I met almost a year ago at Chicago’s annual Filter Photo Festival.  As I browsed through his portfolio, I was confronted with bold, suggestive portraits of men.  Each photograph evoked a different scenario, hinting at nostalgia and lust, but it was the gaze of these men that became the constant theme.  Gregg’s approach to the male gaze works in a unique way that speaks both about the photographer and about his male models.  

Gregg Evans is a photographer living and working in Chicago, IL.  He holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BFA in Photography from S.U.N.Y Purchase.  Interested in the similarities and differences between the dynamics of power in photography and romantic or sexual encounters, Evans creates images laden with tension between dominance and submission, and inhibition and brashness.  Recent exhibitions include New York's White Columns gallery, Envoy Enterprises and United Photo Industries, as well as Northern Trust, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Ebersmoore Gallery in Chicago.  He likes milk shakes in almost any weather condition, Roseanne, and My Bloody Valentine.

We Only See The Sky As It Was

For a moment I step away from the camera and look you in the eyes, unmediated by a screen. “What’s wrong?” you ask me, only a few short steps away, just beyond the warm glow of daylight. “Are you not getting what you want?” The tenor of your voice seems lower than usual, more deliberate, like the carefully placed steps of a man wandering in blinding snow.

It is Sunday afternoon, and unseasonably warm for December. You lie quietly in my bed, grey jersey reflecting light onto your legs and chest like diffused ripples of water. Your left hand rests somewhere between the V of your ribcage and your chest, your right hand tucked defen- sively between two pillows. Your eyes are awash with anticipation, the uncertainty of what’s to come. I sense a shift in your mood, a weari- ness that I don’t fully understand. I take off my shirt.

Your eyes dart from the lens to my chest, from the camera to the tattoo that covers my stomach. We no longer know where to look.

My work examines the tension between representation and presentation, between the traditionally singular desire inherent in the photographer’s gaze, and the mutual desires involved in cruising, one night stands, and other casual encounters. Through the use of models met on cruising and dating sites, as well as strangers I approach on the street, I create images which are both confrontational and infused with intimacy; of figures at once caught in the act and looking to engage in it. By constructing images rife with sexual tension, I complicate traditional depictions of desire, blurring the line between what is a genuine connection and what is only momentary.

Heather Evans Smith: The Heart and The Heavy

Portrait week continues...today's post written by Sarah Stankey.

Wade

The first time that I saw the photographs of Heather Evans Smith was when I first started working on Lenscratch and I was putting together one of the large group exhibitions that the site hosts. I immediately visited her website and loved what I saw. Heather's work is both technically and conceptually brilliant. This work is transportive and cinematic.

Heather is an award-winning fine art and conceptual portrait photographer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work captures both the everyday and the whimsical, telling stories of women and struggle, reality and the surreal. Smith’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions, magazines, literary journals and online publications. She conducts creativity workshops around the country. Recently, she was chosen as winner of Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n. In the fall of 2013 her winning image will be brought to life in a short film directed by Jamie Foxx.

A Soft Place To Land

The Heart and The Heavy

Life is full of stories – some deeply personal and specific, others universally relatable. My story is beautiful and complicated and bittersweet and hard. Life is just that way. So are photographs. The birth of my daughter was life-changing, but not in the way I expected. Though there has been no greater joy for me, the responsibility of another life has proven to be at times a heavy load. Thinking about this in a literal sense, I imagined a heavy home on my shoulders, yet held tightly with love – a burden and a joy, a challenge and a reprieve. This became the first image in the series The Heart and the Heavy. From there the stories evolved, just as my life has. The genesis of an image comes from moments of life, like a still from an old movie. Movement and pain and the simple joys of being alive are frozen in time – a study of fictional worlds based in reality. Compelled to shoot these stories, I am haunted for days and months until it is released in an image.  Telling someone’s tale in a world not quite like our own.

 The Unraveling 

 The Collector

Facade

 Flight

 The Heart and The Heavy

 A Beautiful Smothering

 A Slow Sink

 Moored

 Collide

 Rooted

 As The World Collapses Around Her

Domicile 

Nir Arieli: Inframen

When I first started looking at portrait photography for this week, I came across the work of Nir Arieli.   I approached him to be featured, but one question from him set me back, “Where did you come across my work?”  I had no clue.  It wasn’t until I revisited one of my static Tumblr blogs that I had realized that I had been admiring many of his photographs, unknowingly, for quite some time.  Hundreds of images were passing by me daily, yet Nir’s portraits seemed to stand out from the rest.  It was unfortunately the lack of credit to his work that prevented me from becoming familiar with his name.

In this particular body of work, Nir's editing technique reveals the beautiful subtleties that usually go unlooked.  These images are lush with contrast that enhances a super realistic way of seeing the human form.  His work also comments on the flaws that are found on even the most beautiful of men.     --Grant Gill

Nir Arieli launched his career as a military photographer for the Israeli magazine Bamachane, before receiving a scholarship to pursue a BFA at New York’s School of Visual Arts; he graduated with honors. Nir's photographic passion is within the portraiture and dance fields. He is an admirer of beauty and gentleness, these qualities are the heart of his work.

 Inframen

To be a dancer is to work your body to the breaking point. In my project "Inframen", I created a series of portraits using an infrared technique that reveals details that are under the subject's abused skin. I am taking the dancers out of their roles as performers and revealing personal intimate individuals. Through these subtle and surreal portraits, I aim to continue my studies of contemporary male dancers, peeling the physical shield and exposing fragile human beings - The scars show on their skin and in their eyes.