Lenscratch Exhibition Opportunities

LENSCRATCH is creating exposure opportunities for photographers with group on-line exhibitions. Photographers will be allowed ONE entry per exhibition and ALL photographs will be published. I firmly believe in having occasional unjurored opportunities that allow for community and conversation. International submissions are welcome!

Submission Guidelines:

Image size: 72dpi at 1000px on the long side, save as a jpg.

Send name, title, location (where you captured the image), and link to your work (website or other). It makes it easier for us if you follow the example below EXACTLY.

Example:

Aline Smithson, The Red Rose, Los Angeles, CA http://www.alinesmithson.com

In the subject of your e-mail, type the name of the exhibition (example: CELL PHONE PHOTOGRAPHY) and e-mail to:

lenscratch2@gmail.com  (don't forget the "2")

If your images are sized incorrectly or the submission is incomplete, they will not be posted.

Submission Categories and Due Dates:

Due Date: May 19th

BACKYARD

Exhibition to run on May 31st, 2013

image by Aline Smithson

Due Date: June 9th

LENSCRATCH STUDENT COMPETITION

Exhibition to run on June 28th, 2013

image by Sarah Stankey

Open to all students: high school, BFA, MFA, Continuing Education

a scan of your student id will be required...for the 2012-2013 school year.

LENSCRATCH is awarding 1st, 2nd, 3rd place prizes and 2 honorable mentions: each winner will receive a focused post on their work and given world wide exposure. There are no fees involved, but guidelines must be followed correctly to be considered:

1. Submit 10 images from one body of work--work that is shot with intention and has something to say.  Images need to be 72 dpi, 1000px on the long side, saved as jpgs.
2. Submit a well written statement for the work
3. Submit a written bio
4. A scan of your student id
5. Also include: age, name of school, if you are pursuing a degree, website (if you have one) and one sentence as to why you are a photographer.

Alma Haser: Magenta Foundation Bright Spark Winner

I had the great pleasure of being one of the judges for the Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward Competition.  Judges and entrants came from the U.S., Canada, and the UK and after spending days going through over 600 portfolios more than once, we narrowed down our choices and then had a lively debate over who should win the Bright Spark Award.  This year Alma Haser received that honor for her project, Cosmic Surgery.



Alma has also been shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize for 'The Ventriloquist'. Her shortlisted portrait, taken in her house in South London, is of friends Luke and James who have known each other since they were 12. Struck by their hairstyles, an East London bowl cut, Alma initially planned to take separate portraits but it was difficult to get them to focus so decided to photograph them together. She says ‘I asked them to sit on a tiny, wobbly coffee table, forcing them to almost cling onto each other. I wanted to exaggerate their amazing size difference, by making Luke slouch and James sit bolt upright. The title is designed to help the viewer make up his or her story about what is going on.’ 

Born in Germany in 1989, Alma  moved to the UK in 1995 and received a BA in Photography from Nottingham Trent University before moving to London in autumn 2011. Her work has been included in over 10 exhibitions internationally, receiving third place in the People’s Choice for Foto8 Summer Show 2012, and Fourth prize in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Cosmic Surgery

Since leaving University in 2010, Alma has been working on self-portraits, being her own willing and available model. More recently she has started taking portraits of other people and is interested in making work that has a disquieting or disconcerting resonance. The series has three distinct stages. Firstly Alma photographs her sitter, then prints multiple images of the subjects face and folds them into a complicated origami modular construction, which then gets placed back onto the original face of the portrait. Finally the whole thing is re-photographed.

Origami is very meditative, you can get lost in the world of folding for hours. It is also extremely delicate and fragile, so by giving each geometric paper shape somewhere to sit within the final image, the origami has been given a backbone.

There is something quite alien about the manipulated faces, as if they belong to some futuristic next generation. In these portraits the children become uncanny, while their parents are seen in a more familiar moment.

With the simple act of folding an image Alma can transform each face and make a sort of flattened sculpture. By de-facing her models she has made their portraits into her own creations.

Jodie Goodnough: Variants

Jodie Mim Goodnough recently relocated to Los Angeles, but has one foot in Boston as she completes her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University.  Her thesis exhibition, Variants, opens on May 4th at 6pm at Fourth Wall Project in Boston.  The work explores our relationship to medications and the phenomenon of a culture taking medication to treat a psychological disorder or symptoms with positive and negative results. Jodie has captured a population that rarely gets brought into clear focus.

Jodie is a Los Angeles-based artist who uses photography, video, performance and sculpture in her work. She attended the photojournalism program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine and will receive her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in May 2013. Her work looks at the various coping strategies we employ to find comfort in an often-uncomfortable world, from religious rituals to pharmaceuticals and everything in between.

Variants

Today, in the United States, one in five adults take at least one type of medication to treat a psychological disorder. Many of my friends and family members are or were on antidepressants and other medications, as was I for many years. Variants began as a research project into the ways people like us, psychiatric patients, has been visually represented over time. It has since turned into a portrait series that examines the impact of classification on identity and the representation of illness in the media. 

I’ve long been interested in early asylum photography, like that of Hugh Welch Diamond at the Surrey County Asylum and Henry Hering at Bethlem Hospital, both working during the Victorian era. Their photographs, straightforward images of patients posed against plain backgrounds, were used as illustrations of various diagnoses. They were also used as teaching tools during a time when physiognomy (reading the character of a person by their appearance) was commonplace, and photography’s objectivity was largely unquestioned.

Since then, many photographers have taken the mentally ill as subject under the guise of documentary. Yet today, the most commonly seen image of mental illness exists as advertising for psychiatric pharmaceuticals. The catch is that these are, of course, models and actors playing a part. These stock images have an iconography and regimented style all they’re own, nearly as strict and recognizable as that of the asylum image. 

The subjects of Variants are not simply “types” or actors, however. They are real people: friends, family and strangers who at some point in their lives received a psychiatric diagnosis, and took medication for that diagnosis. Not all continue to take medication today but many do, and their opinions on the experience run the gamut, from “it saved my life” to “it nearly ruined my life”, and everything in between. They are all active participants in this work, and the images are a result of hours of conversations, laughter and learning from each other. Their faces may ask you to read them, to classify them, to make guesses at diagnosis, but resist. It’s only a photograph.

Exhibition Installation Shots

1. Part I, 24 clipboards, file folders and archival digital images from 4x5” color negatives, 2013

(l to r) Alexa, Jess, Shawn, Katherine, Laura, Matt, Alex, Megan, Rachel, Rhiannon, Gillian, Suz, Tom, Case, Susan, Jodie, Laura, Julia, Barbara, Sandy, Katie, Kate, Emma, Brian

2. Part II, Single channel video, 6 minute loop from digital images, 2013

Sandi Haber Fifield: After the Threshold

Pained Smile, 2012

Dreaming in Blue, 2012

Sandi Haber Fifield has much to celebrate: a new monograph and an accompanying exhibition of her deftly executed body of work, After the Threshold. The project combines photographs from her vast archive of images, exploring relationships and constructing new visual narratives.  It is not an easy task to create visual stories that have a connected complexity and a richness of visual associations.  The result is a form of visual poetry that feel as if they are reconstructed from memory or dreams. The book is published by Kehrer Verlag and her exhibition is at Rick Wester Fine Art's new location in New York (526 West 26th Street, Suite 417) and will run through June 15th, 2013.

The book includes an essay by renowned photography critic, Vicki Goldberg. Goldberg writes: “[Haber Fifield’s] sequences, leaping through illogical hoops, revel in ambiguity, yet they cohere in mood and tone, much the way a piece of music does when the same key persists while melodies change. The clues to coherence are subtle: compositional elements recur, color plays nuanced games, and each sequence projects a consistent range of feeling.” 

Sandi was born in Youngstown, Ohio. She has a MFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and notable museums throughout the United States including The Art Institute of Chicago, The DeCordova Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Museum of American Art, and The St. Louis Art Museum. Sandi's photographs are held in numerous private and public collections, among them The High Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, The Los Angeles County Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art. After the Threshold is Sandi's third monograph. In 2009 her book of grids and multiple image installations, Walking through the World, was published (Charta), and in 2011 Between Planting and Picking was released.

©all images courtesy of Rick Wester Fine Art

White Sun, 2011

Sunday Morning, 2011

Bryan Formals of LPV Magazine has written a wonderful essay about meeting Sandi and how the work has transformed the way he sees: "In the months after encountering After the Threshold, I managed to finish editing my first book, Genesee Ave. It changed the way I think about photography. Editing and sequencing are how you unlock the potential from a series of photographs. It’s an aspect of photography that I knew was critically important, but it wasn’t until after I did it myself that I realized how challenging it was to do in an interesting way. You have to make so many small decisions to assure the whole is unified body of photographs."

 Montauk Blue, 2011

Island Reflections, 2011

Sandi states: My work is born of collisions and alignments. I gather images from experiences exceptional and mundane, intentional and spontaneous. A visit to the Louvre might find its place alongside a glance through my kitchen window. I work from an inventory of images created and collected over time. I am on the lookout for the small parts that make the whole. Through the process of combining disparate moments of vision, formal connections reveal themselves and suggest the reassuring possibility of meaning and order in the apparent randomness of experience. My studio is the place where visual associations begin, vibrate, rattle and resolve, and where the unnoticed is examined, the familiar is seen, and the margins are mined for the meanings that collect there.

Hidden Man, 2012

Knotted Vine, 2011

Wandering Monach,  2010

Noto, 2012

Red Dot, 2011

Corunucopia, 2012

Rock Candy, 2012

Night Station, 2012

Premonition