Of Interest 5.30.11: 500 Photographers

500 Photographers, run by Rotterdam-based photographer Pieter Wisse, will post the work of 5 active photographers a week for 100 weeks. The weblog, started April 5th, 2010, accompanies an edit of images by the selected photographer with a short biography and summary of the work. The photographers can be from any discipline within the photographic range, with quality being the singular criteria for inclusion. The goal of the project is to develop a single-source database of great photographers. You can stay updated with Wisse and 500 Photographers on both Facebook and Twitter.

Wisse is also the owner of Four Eyes Photography & Art, a gallery and bookstore that publishes Four Eyes Photography Magazine and that recently published Wisse's own book, I Believe in 88. The 500 Photographers site offers Wisse's book for sale, as well as limited edition t-shirts and a donation button to help support Wisse continue his project.

Although many blogs and sites have run posts on the project, Wisse's own words on the project have been missing. Here they are:

500 Photographers started out as a project purely for myself. In the beginning of 2010 I came to the point where I asked myself where my photography should really be going. As I'm a firm believer that photographers who are consistent, persistent and make very clear choices in what they do are the one's that create something of value, I needed to make some choices for the future. One of the things I needed to do was to really start looking and learning from all the great photographers that I respect. As I'm really bad at remembering names, I decided to put them in a blog, add some photographs as an archive for myself in order to always be able to look back.

Within the first few weeks the world media started writing about the project and the amount of visitors grew and grew. This was a great surprise to me and to be honest, I never anticipated the popularity the website has generated. It adds another dimension to the website as it has put an extra weight on my shoulders in a positive way. Although time consuming, it is a pleasure to make and I try to keep the website to the highest quality possible for all the viewers and myself.

The choice to make the blog time-limited was made because this way I knew I would only have 500 spaces, which obliges me to get the absolute best of them on the blog. It forces me to do the best research possible in order not to miss those photographers that absolutely deserve to be on the weblog. I am sure that when the blog is finished I will find some amazing photographers that I regret not being on the blog, but I have to get that number down to the minimum. If I achieve that goal, I can honestly say that the archive I have build has value and importance to me.

500 Photographers has become close to a fulltime job with no income. However 3/5th down the road I've learned so much on various levels. The starting point was to learn and grow as a photographer and even though currently I have little time to photograph, I've grown a lot. At the same time I've learned about many other facets within the photographic world. 500 Photographers has been one of the best choices I’ve made.

Cori Pepelnjak on Portraiture

© Katy Grannan. "Anonymous, LA, 2009"
from the series Boulevard.

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 10th in the series of their responses. The other responses is the series have come from Anastasia Cazabon, Margo Ovcharenko, Shen Wei, Lucas Foglia, Susan Worsham, Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell, and Jess T. Dugan.

Cori Pepelnjak strives to depict the power of human resilience and tenacity through her photography. Primarily self-taught, she was the recipient of the 2009 CENTER Project Competition Award for her ongoing series JoJo and was a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Grant in 2010. She was a Critical Mass Finalist at Photo Lucida in both 2009 and 2010. Her work has been included in group shows at the Rayko Gallery of San Francisco, Art of Photography Show 2010 in San Diego, Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, and IFP in St. Paul, Minnesota. She resides in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

Cori Pepelnjak: Great portraits make me ask questions. They arouse memories, emotions, and challenge personal perspectives. This experience is compounded and transmuted by the intentions of the photographer and some essence of the subject.

For instance, with Katy Grannan's image from her series, Boulevard, age, time, and experience are written across the woman's face. I find myself wanting to position myself in some way to be able to look directly into her sea-grey eyes. She takes me to a memory of my grandmother who in the winter wore a full-length fuchsia down coat and grossly applied lipstick to match, her drugstore foundation painted on the coats' collar. I am reminded of the time I asked her why her skin looked like salami. She told my mom that I had been impertinent—a new word to me at the time that left me feeling terribly guilty and confused. Still lured by the image, my mind jumps back to the woman in Grannan's photo. What is that look, almost a glint, in her eyes derived from? Is it sorrow, pride, or admiration? The light, tilt of her chin and the complexity of her gaze give her a sense of the timeless and eternal. At the same time, we get to unabashedly examine the immediacy of her aging flesh. There is such a raw beauty to her and I begin to picture her as a young woman in a one-piece swimsuit sunning herself in the company of equally beautiful young women. I then wonder, what will my face, my gaze look like at that age if I were posed in that place, in that light? I am coming out of one of the most difficult times in my life. My eyes, swollen frames to my blue, bloodshot pupils, still maintain a smile even during times of relentless tears. Over time, how will this experience be imprinted on my face, in my eyes? A new narrative is constructed in my mind, old memories are brought to the surface, and current conditions color my emotional response. This is the effect a great portrait can have on me.

I am inspired to approach an individual to make a portrait when I find myself visually absorbed by, or lost in thought around, an individual—essentially, when I realize I am staring or unable to avert my eyes. The portrait is a format in which I attempt to convey my obsession with humanity and what it means to be human. Alive, impassioned, and active when photographing, I am acutely aware of the energy between myself and the subject. I try to create space to allow something obscure or mysterious to surface that will take the portrait beyond the expected and ordinary. I always inquire how the experience feels to them and why they oblige me. Asking those questions creates a dialogue that often reveals some significant characteristic or circumstance, further fostering the connection between us. It is easy to take for granted the simple fact that making great portraits creates fundamental human associations for the photographer, subject and viewer, not only in a moment, but also in perpetuity.

"It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it." — Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner: Early Stories

© Cori Pepelnjak. "Deon, Drake Motel 2009" from the series By the Week

Anastasia Cazabon on Portraiture

© Timothy Archibald

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 9th in the series of their responses. The other responses is the series have come from Margo Ovcharenko, Shen Wei, Lucas Foglia, Susan Worsham, Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell and Jess T. Dugan.

Anastasia Cazabon is from Cambridge, Massachusetts and graduated from the New England School of Photography and from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She was a co-founder of the photography collective The Exposure Project. She was included in the Humble Arts Foundation publication The Collector's Guide to Emerging Art Photography. She has shown her work internationally, including shows in Greece, Germany, the United States, Italy, and a solo show at The Gallery for Photography in Gdansk, Poland.

© Andrea Modica. Treadwell, NY (1987)

Anastasia Cazabon: For me a good photographic portrait is more then just an image of someone, it also tells a story and makes me want to know more. Honesty and sensitivity are critical components to a portrait. I see so many photographs that treat the subject as a commodity or an object, completely stripping away the humanity and leaving the viewer empty. Those types of photographs disinterest me as they are devoid of soul and sensitivity.

I love to see the moment captured when the subject is not conscious of the camera. I know that it’s close to impossible for an individual not to be aware of the camera and not to involuntarily put up and hide behind a defensive wall. Even when someone takes a picture of me I can feel myself tense up. So when I see a portrait that seems to be free of the veil of self-consciousness, it's refreshing. That's perhaps the reason I love the freedom of expression emanating from the photographs of children and young people, because as subjects they are unpretentious and not overly self-aware.

© Viktoria Sorochinski

The portraiture of Andrea Modica, specifically the work in "Treadwell" is an example of photographs that I find to be beautiful, honest, sensitive, and yet mysterious. Some work that I have seen recently that has affected me is Timothy Archibald's project "Echolilia", which focuses on his son who is along the autism spectrum. It's free of any sense of frustration and reverberates with love, acceptance, and humor. Another photographer whose work I just recently saw is Viktoria Sorochinski. Her project "Anna & Eve" is quite exquisite and another example of enigmatic portraiture that speaks to the viewer.

Photographers on Photographers: The Other Annie Leibovitz by Steve Davis

©Annie Leibovitz

Olympia-based photographer Steve Davis won 1st place in the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project Competition Award in 2002 and is the recipient of two Washington Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowships. His images have appeared in Harper's and The New York Times Magazine and are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the George Eastman House, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Musee de la Photographie in Belgium, and the Haggerty Museum at Marquette University. A full-length interview with Steve was published on fototazo on March 1st and can be found here.

The Other Annie Leibovitz

by Steve Davis

As a young teenager in the early 1970's, I was interested in two things besides girls -- photography and rock music. Having a tin ear and proving too lazy to practice, that left me with photography -- a pursuit informed by family snapshot photography, classic Adams type landscapes, and increasingly by images celebrating rock stars, and a hip "counter culture" of which I was painfully ignorant. Most of these images were black and whites from Rolling Stone Magazine.

Annie Leibovitz began honing her craft at Rolling Stone at about that time. Her early photography proved to be exceptionally influential to me. Her images, like her subjects seemed mystical -- ambiguous and incomplete by design. Definitive clarity, obvious and accessible visual statements were more traits of an authoritarian culture, and not of Rolling Stone's or early Leibovitz. Her pictures were grounded in a grammar of grainy 35mm Tri-X, sometimes exposed properly, sometimes not; sometimes in focus, sometimes not so much. (I can still experience the smell of film and fixer whenever I lay eyes on those early pictures, and that alone makes me smile).

©Annie Leibovitz

Today it seems, the great celebrity photographer-turned-celebrity is hardly known for her early photojournalistic work. Her post 70's color portraiture has easily earned her a place at the 20th Century Great Masters Supper Table, (and I'll take no time in expressing the importance of that work in this article). One might see no need, I guess, to look back too far into the beginnings of her career and her art. No need to review her remarkable series about Nixon's resignation, the Rolling Stones on tour, or Ken Kesey's farm.

The best of her early portraiture is in my opinion, as good as her later, more polished and refined examples. The 1976 Brian Wilson standing on the beach in his bathrobe shows a man walking out of both surf and Bible. The 1970 John Lennon portrait shows a man both regal and common. Mick Jagger standing in a hospital elevator, patient and mystic -- examples of the photographer making pictures inviting contradiction and open-ended interpretations. If there was a clear message or overarching statement to Leibovitz's pre-1980's work, it is that there is no clear message or overarching statement to be had. Mystery and grace go hand in hand with berserk fans, drugged out rock stars and political corruption.

©Annie Leibovitz

Years ago I attended a workshop by Neal Slavin (famous for his large scale group portraits,) and as it turned out, friend and neighbor to Leibovitz. After speaking briefly about her Vanity Fair style of big business portraiture, he denounced her pre-color photojournalistic brand of photography -- the results of a beginner, not the master she would become. If that wasn't enough, he assured me that Leibovitz herself felt even stronger about the insignificance and amateur nature of those early photographs.

That kind of sucked. One of us was clearly wrong about the strength of that early work. It seemed unlikely that it could be Annie, or even Neal for that matter. What does it mean to base your entire life plan on bad work? Nothing, really. Even Slavin recanted his denouncement on the following day. I realized that none of that really matters. You see what you see.

©Annie Leibovitz

The last time I picked up a Rolling Stone was January 1981. It had the super famous John and Yoko image on the cover, taken by Leibovitz on the last day of his life. His death was a huge sensation of course -- described in the media as the "day the music died," his elegy was the elegy of an era. In looking through "Annie Leibovitz, 1970-1990" (Harper Collins, 1991) I am struck how this John and Yoko image serves as the line of demarcation between "Nikon Annie" and "Leibovitz Inc." I often wondered what could have gone through her head -- to take the final pictures at such a final point in popular culture. (How would you process that?)

Her later flashier, classier, hyper-real fantasy portraits for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the advertising industry will eclipse the kind of work I mention here, probably justifiably so. But seeing pictures made by one person, sans directors, makeup artists, stylists, assistants or a script makes me remember why I picked up a camera.

Project Release: Rory Mulligan's "Cindy Timberwolf"

fototazo continues posting new photography projects, providing a first look at work from select artists. Today's Project Release is Rory Mulligan's Cindy Timberwolf. His statement on the project follows the images.

Mulligan was born in New York in 1984. He received a BA from Fordham University in 2006 and an MFA from Yale University in 2010. His work has been published by J&L Books and is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He currently lives and works in New York.

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Statement
I’m back where I grew up, immersed in the landscape that made me want to take pictures in the first place. I’m older now. In previous work, I tried to give concrete form to the lingering, vaporous residue of childhood experience. Here I’ve become that child once more. Of course, it’s not that simple. How could it be? There’s pain in going back and there’s pain in the present. Insecurity hovers over me like an unwanted halo. Am I a regressive man-child or an artist following his instinct? Is the instinct corrupt? Worse, is it utterly boring? But there’s also this place. It’s probably unremarkable to most, even those who live here. It’s special to me, sacred even. I haven’t lived here since I was seventeen, but it’s all as I left it give or take a few people and some trees. Home really is where the heart is, no matter how heavy or befuddled it may be.

Margo Ovcharenko on Portraiture

Margo Ovcharenko. Without Me, 2008.

fototazo has asked twelve photographers what makes a good portrait. This is the 8th in the series of their responses. The other responses is the series so far have come from Shen Wei, Lucas Foglia, Susan Worsham, Steve Davis, Elinor Carucci, Mark Powell and Jess T. Dugan.

Margo Ovcharenko makes portraits of young Russians of her age, her close friends, the ones who share her life and in whom she finds a little bit of herself. She was born in Krasnodar, Russia and studied at The Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. She recently completed a residency at FABRICA in Treviso, Italy and is represented by The Russiatearoom Gallery in Paris. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows including in Switzerland, Denmark, the United States, Russia, and France. She had a solo show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art as part of The Seventh Moscow International Festival: Fashion and Style in Photography 2011. She was selected for the traveling group show "reGeneration2 - Tomorrow's Photographers Today" by the curators of the Musée de l'Elysée. She currently is part of the group show "Hope" at the New York Photo Festival 2011.

Margo Ovcharenko: I guess photographing a person not always results in a portrait, even if you're asking them to pose for you. For me it is very important to talk or to have some kind of relationship with a person whom I am photographing. I like it when a person in a photograph looks very fragile, while not being fragile actually, when a look in the eyes in a photograph makes one wants to cry and to smile simultaneously. In the end a good portrait is not about a person, it's about the history on their shoulders and the resulting image is a concentration of the emotions and beauty of the experience of a human being. And of course it's the biggest catch when one image weds to a series of others, creating not a dry catalogue of faces but a poem on time, age, feelings and desire.

Emerging Mexican Street Photographers V: Alfredo Moreno

This post is the fifth and last in a series exploring the work of five emerging Mexican street photographers. The series will include work from Nayeli Cruz Bonilla, Fermín Guzmán Martínez, Jair Cabrera Torres, Irving Cabrera Torres, and Alfredo Moreno. Mark Powell and Tom Griggs have curated and edited this project to give exposure to these young photographers. All five began their careers as students of Powell's in El Faro de Oriente in Iztapalapa, Mexico City.

The first post in the series featuring Cruz Bonilla can be found here, the second with Guzmán Martínez here, the third with Jair Cabrera Torres here, and the fourth with Irving Cabrera Torres here.

This post features the work of Alfredo Moreno. His work can be further explored on Flickr under the name "paskualito."

In 2005 he was part of the first generation in Powell's digital photography workshops in FARO de Oriente where he studied until 2008. In 2008, based on his street work "Estar Guars" he was selected to be part of the workshop "Anatomy of Creativity" with Erik Ravelo (editor of the magazine Colors, Italy) and Andrés Reimondes (Fabrica, Italia). He was subsequently part of a group exhibition of the same name as the workshop at the Museo de la Ciudad de México. He was given a grant in July 2009 by Toxico Cultura Contemporánea to be part of a workshop offered by Amy Stein called "The Photographers Book." As part of this grant, Moreno was selected by Stein to publish his first book Unbroken City. He has worked for the agency Latitudespress, the magazine Quehacer Político, IQ Magazine, the Government of Mexico City, and he currently works for the magazine Reforma.

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Emerging Mexican Street Photographers IV: Irving Cabrera Torres

This post is the fourth in a series exploring the work of five emerging Mexican street photographers. The series will include work from Nayeli Cruz Bonilla, Fermín Guzmán Martínez, Jair Cabrera Torres, Irving Cabrera Torres, and Alfredo Moreno. Mark Powell and Tom Griggs have curated and edited this project to give exposure to these young photographers. All five began their careers as students of Powell's in El Faro de Oriente in Iztapalapa, Mexico City.

The first post in the series featuring Cruz Bonilla can be found here, the second with Guzmán Martínez here, and the third with Cabrera Torres here.

This posts features the work of Irving Cabrera Torres. His work can be further explored on Flickr under the name "kafkiano."

Statement
My name is Irving Cabrera Torres. I'm 29 years old, I'm a photographer and I have been dedicated to photography since 2003 and have become a student of photojournalism. I got interested in this profession through an exhibition of a Mexican photographer from the 50s, 60s, and part of the 70s named Héctor García. His images struck me. It was an account of the streets of Mexico City from the perspective of an resident of this great metropolis.

I like to speak with images, to express myself through photography is the way I have enjoyed living the last seven years. Observing the world, recreating it, rediscovering myself and my environment are things that photography has given me.

The world of images is the universe that gives me shelter, it was the place where I found a future for myself; the opportunities that existed in the neighborhood where I grew up were very few and sometimes none. The neighborhood where I live gave me the best education for walking the streets without any fear, to face anything anywhere. On these streets the friends of the neighborhood and I graduated to fight for the length of our lives.

Now that I have my goals with photography a little clearer, the barrio seduces me with its aesthetic, with the smells, sounds, characters, shadows, texture, its dangerous atmosphere that at the same time results in the challenge to get out the camera and photograph friends and all the things that cross my eyes. Walking for hours under the sun or rain, taking risks just for the pleasure of finding a good photo is the best enjoyment a new day can give me.

Thanks to photography I was able to get excited about life, even if humanity is a lost cause. I want to be a photographic witness of this last era of humanity because the planet will not stand much longer the abuse that it is being given.

Photography is my life and the best emotional, occupational, and creative therapy that I could have. The district in Ermita Zaragoza located in Iztapalapa is one of the most marginalized and dangerous areas of eastern Mexico City. After having the luck to know photography I hope that other people like me will have the same joy that I'm living. The experiences photography has given me have been wonderful, from managing my own newspaper, working in media as a photojournalist on a national level and, best of all, meeting people from all areas of the city. The best of photography is to create an unexplored world.

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Emerging Mexican Street Photographers III: Jair Cabrera Torres

This post is the third in a series exploring the work of five emerging Mexican street photographers. The series will include work from Nayeli Cruz Bonilla, Fermín Guzmán Martínez, Jair Cabrera Torres, Irving Cabrera Torres, and Alfredo Moreno. Mark Powell and Tom Griggs have curated and edited this project to give exposure to these young photographers. All five began their careers as students of Powell's in El Faro de Oriente in Iztapalapa, Mexico City.

The first post in the series featuring Cruz Bonilla can be found here and the second with Guzmán Martínez here.

This post features the work of Jair Cabrera Torres. His work can be further explored on Flickr under the name "rastamaniaco."

Statement
My name is Jair Cabrera, I'm 23 and a photographer, born on April 2, 1988 in Mexico City. I have a graduate degree in Communication Sciences. Ever since I was a child I belonged to and lived on the streets. Six years ago I found photography; now I try to use the camera to tell in great detail every story that happens around me.

I live on the border between Nezahualcoyotl and Iztapalapa. My work has focused on finding a material aesthetic for where I grew up, an area has been poorly represented when someone from outside has been given the job of photographing it. I would like to take apart the myth of what is my space, my people, and my family. It is easy from the outside to label and judge without knowing what goes on inside the place. In recent years I have worked with images that represent the everyday life of my neighborhood, a working-class area on the edge of the city. We have been labeled a social threat, I am from and represent a neighborhood in the east of my city, designated a red zone or high-risk area for the high rate of violence, crime, and vandalism.

I had been fortunate to be given scholarships on several occasions through the Centro de la Imagen de la Ciudad de México, and by the collective Toxico Cultura and have been invited to participate in various group exhibitions by city of Mexico City, and my work has been published in various print publications and via the Internet. Photography has taught me to appreciate what many people would be afraid of, which is to live in a marginal area; this has given me experiences, laughter, and good times, but most of all, friends throughout the city.

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