Claire Martin

My friend, Ann Mitchell, gave me the heads up about Claire Martin's engaging project, Slab City. Claire started her career by exploring a degree in social work, but changed her focus to photography when she realized that change can be effected through images. The photograph reveals and illuminates: it educates and inspires action. Her work has garnered many awards including the Deeper Perspective Photographer of the Year by IPA, and the Up and Coming Portrait Photographer at the Sony World Photography Awards. Claire recently relocated to Perth, Australia and is now working as a freelance photographer.

Slab City has been created by a small but committed squatters community. It lies in the Colorado Desert in southeastern California and takes it's name from the concrete slabs that remain from an abandoned World War II base. It is a truly horrific and romantic landscape that commands residents to possess the same balance of beauty and beast. Unbearable temperature highs in the summer weed out the many who inhabit the free space in the winter, leaving only the most resilient, or the most unfortunate to become permanent residents.

Images from Slab City












I would be remiss not to include Claire's series, The Downtown East Side, featuring residents of Vancouver that live below the povertyline.

Send your photos.....

Looking for your one best image that reflects your Thanksgiving--the food, the family, the city, the mess, the reality... please send a 72dpi, 1000px on the long side image to alinesmithson@yahoo.com by December 5th. All images will be published. Please include your city!

La Toya Ruby Fraizer

La Toya Ruby Fraizer was born in Pittsburgh and received her BFA in Photography and Graphic Design from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She received her MFA in Art Photography from the School of Visual Performing Arts at Syracuse University. La Toya's work has been exhibited widely and in 2007, she won the Geraldine Dodge Fellowship Award. She has has worked as a photo editor for Newsweek and is currently the Associate Curator for the Mason Gross Galleries in the Department of Visual Arts where she also teaches Digital photography in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ. She will be having her first solo show at the David Castillo Gallery in Miami in December.

La Toya's images of family are honest and intense, creating a tension between documentary, self-revelatory, and psychological explorations. The Notion of Family allows us a window into her journey of self discovery.

The collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social document. Utilizing photography and video to navigate dynamics of the roles we play complicates the usual classifications of functional and dysfunctional families. My work has a deep concern for the mother/ daughter relationship. Relentlessly documenting encounters with Grandma Ruby (b.1925), Mom (b.1959) and myself (b.1982) enables me to break unspoken intergenerational cycles. We are wrestling with internalized life experiences, perceptions of our-selves and familial personas developed by sociopolitical baggage.

The role of the male figure; father, brother, lover and son resides in the visual tensions of a dying old man; Gramps, my adolescent cousin; JC, Mom’s boyfriends and a soldier; my brother Sergeant Brandon Frazier. They indicate the absence of men in the household. Grandma Ruby played the role of mother to me and JC, and caretaker to her father, Gramps. Being home consisted of routine checks on Gramps who screamed for help to be picked up off the floor or carried to the bathroom. If we were not tending to Gramps we sat in separate rooms. Family secrets, hidden history and constant silence defined our coexistence.

Mom is co-author, artist, photographer and subject. Our relationship primarily exists through a process of making images together. I see beauty in all her imperfections and abuse. Her drug addiction is secondary to our psychological connection. When we are photographing one another we meditate on our difference and sameness. Holiday visits home rupture the silent familial gaze in our experimental documentary series A Mother to Hold. Through the first person point of view, the camera becomes a magnet attracting and repelling; the viewer has the access to experience and acknowledge our relationship without judgment.

THE NOTION OF FAMILY: FAMILY WORK 2002-2009

Margot Quan Knight

Looking at photographers included in The Prime Years, an exhibition at the Houston Center for Photography, curated by Fernando Castor R. This exhibit depicts centenarians, artists, relatives, and other individuals enjoying, enduring, and living their lives beyond the age of 60.

Margot Knights's remarkable video of her mother's life is included in The Prime Years. This college of photographs takes us through 60 years of her mother's life.

Margot received her MFA from the Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, after working as a photographer at Fabrica, the communication arts research center of Benetton in Italy. Her work has been exhibited in personal shows in London, Milan, Paris, and published in over 30 international magazines. Margot currently lives and works in Seattle.

The first time I was exposed to Margot's work was with her 2003 series, Taking Care:
These images of dismembered bodies, inspired by the paintings of French surrealist Fernand Leger, were made over a period of 10 months in 2003 using sculpted plaster body parts. The images served as a reflection of my thoughts during that time. I considered whether caring for someone can be enough, or not, the calm feeling after falling apart, and the importance of loving and protecting one's self. For more surrealistic imagery, be sure to look at her Fabrica series.







Margot's new series, Underphotos, explores the familial reflections.
Underphotos is a series of photographs of the framed photographs that hang in my parents’ house. By photographing them at an angle, I capture reflections on the glass surface of the picture frame. Rather than offering a window to a different time or distant place, the picture frame becomes a mirror, a companion to the here and now. These works are framed under acrylic so the surface can again reflect the room in which the work hangs.

With Gratitude

I'm in a Normal Rockwell frame of mind, especially since reviewing the new book Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera for photo-eye recently. And today being THANKSgiving gives me the opportunity to share what I am grateful for:

I am grateful for being continually inspired, moved, and wowed by photographers willing to take chances, expose realities, imagine new ones, document and think about our world.

I am grateful for our wonderful community of caring, supportive, and enthusiastic individuals that take the time to send an e-mail, comment on Facebook, send a tweet, pass on a high-five, or a hello.

I am grateful for all the gallerists, curators, editors, directors, and organizations that support our journeys and really want us to succeed.

I am grateful for my students who have all become friends and inspirations.

I am grateful for well made equipment that lasts for half a century.

I am grateful for film and the feeling of excitement that comes from looking at new negatives.

I am grateful for Translight Colors darkroom and local labs that continue to support film shooters.

I am grateful for my fellow photographers who have given me so much to think about, to write about, to learn about...

I am grateful for your comments, for taking the time to read Lenscratch, for making me aware of your work, or sharing someone else's.

I am grateful for the internet and the world-wide friendships it has allowed me to create.

I hope your holiday is filled with warmth, love, food, drinks, memories, and photographs...don't forget to send your one best image of Thanksgiving to me by December 5th...

Miloushka Bokma

Looking at photographers included in The Prime Years, an exhibition at the Houston Center for Photography, curated by Fernando Castor R. This exhibit depicts centenarians, artists, relatives, and other individuals enjoying, enduring, and living their lives beyond the age of 60.

Dutch photographer, Miloushka Bokma, works as an editorial and fine art photographer. The series, Grandparents, is featured at HCP. Miloushka’s depictions of grandmothers have the unsettling quality of Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage. Her subtly colored scenes, which aim to bring together women generations apart, are simultaneously intimate and detached, tender and cold.