Magda Biernat

This week I am featuring photographers that have current exhibitions or upcoming exhibitions.

Not too many of us get the opportunity to travel around the world, exploring different cultures through our images. Fortunately Magda Biernat had just that opportunity. Magda's exhibition, Continental Bounce, closes on March 2nd at the Clic Gallery in New York. The show opened February 2nd and features Magda's graceful, color-saturated photographs of architectural structures recently won her first place in the Architecture/Interiors category at the 2009 International Photography Awards. A native of Poland, Magda currently lives in New York and has had her commericial images of interiors and travel featured in a wide variety of publications. This is her solo debut exhibition at a New York gallery. Magda was also recently recgonized with an Honorable Mention in the Hey Hot Shot competition.



Continental Bounce showcases the photographs taken during the year she spent traveling the world, photographing the built environment and living spaces in 17 countries. Her vibrant, minutely detailed shots are deliberately void of any known geographic or cultural identifiers, and the viewer is left to search out any possible clues of location as they look at an arid South African township, a futuristic Taiwanese diving resort, or the interior of a yurt in Mongolia. Biernat's photogaphs of uninhabited rooms and homes express a sense of the disorienting universality of human spaces. The compositions are quiet and pristine, but despite the emptiness of the scenes, there is a warmth and richness to the images, and a respectful fascination with the unexamined landmarks and objects of everyday life.

Kim Stringfellow

Kim Stringfellow recently opened a show at the Michael Dawson Gallery in Los Angeles, a few hours from her residence in the desert town of Joshua Tree, California, known for it's animated saguaros and other-worldly landscapes. An Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University, Kim's work and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, and locative media.

Kim recently published the book, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008, and her exhibition at the Dawson Gallery features twenty four images from the book. The exhibition and publication explore the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park.

For those planning on attending the Palm Spring Photo Festival, you can visit the Jackrabbit Homestead, a web-based multimedia presentation featuring a downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park. Stories from this underrepresented regional history are told through the voices of local residents, historians, and area artists—many of whom reside in reclaimed historic cabins and use the structures as inspiration for their creative work.

All images feature different homesteads in the Joshua Tree area

Jeremy Edwards

I’m 29, I have a beard, I play guitar and make music, I wear skinny jeans, I live in Chicago, I take public transportation, I’m a really cool Dad, I love cherry sour candy and caramel, I like beer and cigars, I have a Masters degree, I speak Japanese sometimes, I can throw a baseball really hard, I like most things design, I speak Chinese sometimes, I can’t cook, I can’t say the ABCs backwards, I can’t touch my toes, but I can beat-box, water plants, eat sunflower seeds like a pro, and take pictures.

Chicago photographer, Jeremy Edwards, has been exploring all types of photography since he was 16, and it wasn't until he moved abroad that he began to see his images as art. I purchased my first iPhone in late 2008 and was immediately struck with the experience of capturing images with raw spontaneity. Just like most hipsters with cameras, I also have a deep artistic appreciation of the ordinary and mundane. I feel that our obsession with production, progress, and aesthetics has trained our eyes to ignore the beauty in the ordinary. This is why I created the FROM THE POCKET project.

IN THE POCKET: Book One is due to be released this Spring, but in the meantime, you can read Jeremy's 7 Tips to Better iPhoneography here.

The intention of the project was to highlight the beauty of the ordinary. And if there isn’t any beauty there, hopefully the picture will fool you into believing there is. The motivation of the project is to remain true to the authenticity of spontaneous subjects and minimize unnecessary processing that I’m convinced washes out the organic beauty of simple subjects. I just used the word organic. For the most part, as it stands today, the growing medium of iphoneography has yet to mature into a substantial art form that is respected by the entire art community. I hope my project will serve as a valuable contribution to the growth of iphoneography with artistic integrity.


From the Pocket images

Laura Burlton

Wedding, portrait, and fine art photographer, Laura Burlton, mines her immediate family for many of her photographic musings, in fact, her daughters are the subjects for her new series, Dreams in Chalk. A native Texan, her life long love of photography is evident in the enthusiasm and commitment she brings to her craft. For much of her fine art work, Laura uses toy cameras to bring her ethereal and other worldly images to life, though she still uses the occasional large format camera for some of her work.

Laura and Warren Harold will be exhibiting in conjunction with Fotofest 2010 and both will be co-teaching a toy camera class at The Havens Center on March 21st and April 8th in Houston. Besides her exhibition list, Laura's work has been featured in BW photography UK, Kamera & Bild ( Sweden), Camera Arts ( online only), Lightleaks Magazine, The Knot, Modern Luxury, Weddings in Houston, and Plastic Cameras:Toying with Creativity ( Focal Press).

The series "Dreams in Chalk" started as a project I could easily do at home with my kids. My daughters enjoy dressing up and we liked to draw and act out scenes for the camera. We enjoy reading fairy tales and other classic fiction like Alice in Wonderland. While oftentimes these stories come with illustrations, it is always fun to interpret them on your own and draw out our own version.



Fairy tales and folklore started as an oral tradition, long before the advent of movies, television, or even the written word. These fireside tales were the entertainment of their day, a diversion from the drudgery of manual labor and the harsh reality of life at that time. While most tales are morally ambiguous, they do give occasion to think through a lot of fears and desires we humans inherently have. They are a place for children and adults to safely confront anxieties: the baddies, the stepmothers, monsters, beast, giants and ogres and with some cunning or luck, come out the other side vanquished. For beauty and love to triumph at the end and for happily ever afters.



I chose chalk and sidewalk as my canvas and backdrop of whichever story my daughters want to act out, as it is easily available and quick to change to suit the needs of the session. My daughters (and occasionally friends) find themselves the subject of my fairytale world and I make them up to suit my inner vision's needs. One minute we may be interpreting a rather Grimm story while the next we are trying to see the inner eye of a passing white rabbit. My chalk seems to have visions of it's own and a need to help us create our own happily ever-afters.