Rebecca Sittler Schrock

California photographer, Rebecca Sittler Schrock is part of Daniel Clooney's Summer Salon of Emerging Photographers, on exhibition at the Daniel Clooney Gallery in New York through July 30th. Rebecca received her MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, attended an Artist-in Residence program in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 2005 and 2007, and is currently on the faculty at California Sate University, Long Beach.

The work featured at Daniel Clooney is from her Leisure and Wilderness series, imagery that explores human interaction with the natural world. The second series featured is a typology about Long Beach donuts, which look very appealing right about now.

Leisure and Wilderness










Donuts of Long Beach

Tim Simmons

It's been really hot on the West Coast, and discovering Tim Simmons images of snow (thanks to J. Wesley Brown of We Can Shoot Too), was the perfect visual relief to the heat.

A British photographer, Simmons has an array of night photography images from many areas of the globe, including California, Scotland, and Hawaii. He manages to make the ordinary, magical, as if his photographs are out of a fairy tale, with something ominous right off camera.

"Shooting at night or in twilight, he manipulates his subject into something beyond mere landscape, achieving a pictorial language that alludes to fairytale worlds or stories of alien visitation.
Through subtle changes to familiar territory, Simmons creates sublime vignettes which resonate feelings of the spirit of a place. Cleansed of imperfection, and seemingly abandoned, familiar scenarios become strange and dreamlike; more like the memory of a place than the reality. Like mementos to instants of heightened awareness, these images provide spaces for reflection on our existence in this world."

Edgar Martins

After writing this post on Mr. Martins, I discovered many blog conversations about work that he had done for the NY Times. The work was called into question, as he claimed their was no post Photoshop manipulation, and the Times determined otherwise. Mr. Martin has not commented on the situation. Photographer David Maisel commented, "There is no such thing as photographic truth, in architectural photography or any other kind of photography for that matter." Hmmmm....not so sure about that.

Since this is a fine art exhibition, I have decided to still feature this post.

Portugeuse born photographer, Edgar Martins, grew up in China where he received a degree in Philosophy, then later moved to the UK to complete an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. He currently lives and works in the UK. Mr. Martins has an extensive and varied list of projects, all smart and many dealing with space. One project, The Accidental Theorist, is on exhibtion at the Paul Kopekin Gallery in Los Angeles, through August 22nd.

"Martins photographs the beaches bordering cities in Portugal and Iceland creating flattened and timeless images. As he explains: "These nighttime beach images are all about temporal experience - there is a kind of theatricality to them, a sense of observing an abandoned stage, or a stage awaiting some event." These moments bring the viewer to another world, yet he does not manipulate or stage any of his photographs. While these images convey a sense of solitude and emptiness, the manner in which they are composed fills the viewer with a sense of calm rather than abandonment. Nostalgic props of an imminent event or one in the recent past are also an important aspect of the work in this series. As a result of his positioning of the camera and use of natural ambient light, life size objects can seem minuscule. He plays with the notion of scale and composition to confuse the viewer, not knowing whether we are viewing an inhabitable space or simply model created in its form. Even though the figures and subjects of these images appear to be contrived and manipulated for the scene, they are almost all found by the artist."

Jeff Whetstone

There have been a number of contemporary series exploring man's effect on nature and nature's affect on man. Jeff Whetstone's project, Post Pleistocene, not only has a remarkable quality of altered beauty, but provides thought provoking images of man's desire to mark his territory. Upon first glance, the viewer feels distress at the visual invasion of graffiti, and then comes to the realization that these markings are just another layer of history.

"The 160 years of graffiti on the walls of these caves in Tennessee and Alabama are commemorations of the ritual of exploration. When the work on these cave walls is compared to Pleistocene era art making, like that in the caves of Lascaux, one can imagine the course of human evolution--from frank representations of nature, to layered, expressive gestures that reflect a culture fascinated with personal identity.

I photographed these caves from the vantage point of an artist, explorer, evolutionist, and native son. These catacombs elicit and archive the drawn voices of wild adolescents, homegrown explorers, criminals, scientists, and slaves. Their names, messages, and drawings together with the entropic, bodily forms of the cave walls tell a complicated story where human culture and the changing earth intertwine."

After receiving his MFA in photography from Yale in 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Sakier Prize for photography. Jeff currently in on the faculty the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Whetstone was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 for a body of work entitled, New Wilderness.

Why I love the New York Times

The New York Times on-line and in print is a remarkable publication. Sunday's wouldn't be the same without The Ethicist, or NY Times magazine which has the most amazing photo editor on the planet, and the on-line version is rich with stories and columns like these:

One in 8 Million, stories about the citizens of New York City

Bill Cunningham's description of the new Highline in NYC and the fashions that find their way there.

Lens, a NY Times blog about Photography, Video and Visual Journalism

Abroad by Michael Kimmelman who keeps us informed about art in the rest of the world.

Jay Mark Johnson

Jay Mark Johnson's opening at the Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills was on the check list of many Angelenos this summer. The exhibition, Spacetime, runs through August 29th.

Mr. Johnson brings an impressive list of life long visual explorations to his work--starting with a degree from Tulane in Architecture and Urban Studies where he explored "questions of representation and time" in his associations with well know architects like Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman. Later he moved into perfomance art in NYC collaborating with, amongst others, Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith.

By the late 1980's, Johnson was creating alternative television collectives in the U.S., Mexico, and El Salvador, and began to master digital video technology. In the early '90s, Johnson moved to Los Angeles, supervising computer generated imagery for films such as the Matrix, Titanic, Molin Rouge, and Outbreak, and music videos for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Michael Jackson.

At this point he "he devoted two years to graduate study in Linguistic Anthropology and Biological Anthropology at UCLA. Additional years of study focused on reading in the cognitive sciences."

Since 2005, Jay has been working on a project that combines his amazing resume of interests. "Johnson produces photographic images that challenge the norms of perception. Employing a process that is distinct from conventional photography, he creates works that merge the recording of space and time into a single, linear “spacetime” continuum. The resulting photographs are akin to both seismographs and electrocardiograms in that, as timelines, they begin on the left and end on the right. The horizontal length of the image conveys an uninterrupted and fluid measurement of a brief span of time, varying in duration from 10 seconds up to 45 minutes."

Johnson writes, “Human knowledge expands and matures through advances in the arts and the sciences in one of at least two general manners. Either they push the outer envelope into newer territory or they construct new symbolic scaffoldings which span across and link together previously disparate disciplines. In the empirical sciences, discernible advances are made when an established instrument or practice develops greater refinement or greater range. Art contributes by challenging perceptions, shifting perspectives or otherwise strengthening or broadening established understandings.”

"The artist views the works in these series as spacetime photography. He equates his visual experimentation to stepping “through the looking glass” with Alice. In this parallel world of shifted perceptions, the ground rules are changed. Horizontal space is obliterated, shadows are crisscrossed, directional movement is confounded. Individuals appear isolated from the spaces they inhabit, and the relative speed of an object causes its expansion or contraction. Though the images are true photographs, they challenge the viewer’s effort to decode them."