New Ideas in Photography: Bryan Graf

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Wildlife Analysis"

Colin Pantall and Joerg Colberg have organized a collaborative community initiative to start the fall. They asked a range of bloggers and editors to select up to five photographers who "have demonstrated an openness to use new ideas in photography, who have taken chances with their photography and have shown an unwillingness to play it safe. These three categories can be interpreted in any way."

The nominations are being posted starting today. This week I will select and post a photographer each day. My five selections are not in any order.

Other selections for this initiative will be posted on (or by): Conscientious, Andrew Phelps, aCurator, Mrs Deane, Reciprocity failure, Harvey Benge, Microcord, eyecurious, and LPV Magazine.

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First a few words on how I made my selections and interpreted the criteria.

I took "new ideas" to mean visually and thematically fresh photography, but not necessarily working within or creating new modes of photography.

"Taken chances" and "unwillingness to play it safe" I understood as photography that has prefaced the pursuit of the internal logic of a project and individual artistic lines of thought over engaging contemporary visual trends - as well as over the artist's own history in making images.

Finally, I also added my own final criteria, choosing photographers I believe produce strong images in addition to using new ideas and taking chances.

I came up with a list of 24 photographers over the last couple months, adding names as I came across new work or thought of someone's work I believe fits the criteria. I cut the list down to 10 fairly quickly, but have had a hard time getting from 10 to 5. At this point, however, it's time to leap.

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My first selection for the series is Bryan Graf.

The rich depth, importance, and thorough exploration of the landscape in photographic history makes it a difficult genre for "new" and "taking chances." How the hell is anyone going to reinvent the landscape photograph? Graf has worked on this question, using explorations of darkroom post-processing, materials and lighting not for effect, but in service of heightening the grace, simplicity, and atmosphere of the environments he photographs, pushing lines of what the landscape photograph can be conceived of in the process .

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Interchanges, B-Sides & Remixes"

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Winter Sun"

f100: Cole Caswell, CJ Heyliger, Caleb Cole, Susan Worsham

© CJ Heyliger, Wreckage, Edison, NJ, 2010, from the series "Dream of Pines"

fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.

We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann, Bryan Formhals, Richard Mosse, Shane Lavalette, Amy Stein, Amani Willett, Wayne Ford and S. Billie Mandle.

Today we continue with responses from Leslie K. Brown and Gordon Stettinius

Respondent: Leslie K. Brown is an independent curator and educator pursuing her Ph.D. in art history at Boston University. A former curator at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, she holds an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. Besides working at and guest curating for several museums, Brown has also taught at the Art Institute of Boston, BU and the Rhode Island School of Design and regularly serves as an invited guest critic, juror, reviewer and lecturer. Her recent projects include a solo exhibition of Daniel Ranalli’s work and an essay for photographer Sandi Haber Fifield’s book, Between Planting and Picking. Currently living in Cambridge, MA, she is the product of a Kodak family.

Selections: Cole Caswell and CJ Heyliger. Exploring the boundaries of landscape—literally, geographically, and metaphorically—both photographers are graduates of the Art Institute of Boston. Caswell (Peaks Island, ME) earned an interdisciplinary MFA from Maine College of Art and is an adjunct instructor and active collaborator with the Geographic Observatory and WE ARE X [wax]; Heyliger (Somerville, MA) teaches at AIB and currently works as an assistant for Abelardo Morell and Nicholas Nixon.

In addition to their personal work seen here, together with Bryan Graf, Caswell and Heyliger maintain the blog Swamp Recordings as an archive of their collective ramblings in the wetlands of the east coast and in preparation for their upcoming multi-media installation and interactive/inhabited studio at Bodega in Philadelphia next spring. Jointly, they have also recently launched the publishing venture Sun System.

© Cole Caswell, reservoir, 2011, from the series "Fallen Volume #2"

Respondent: Gordon Stettinius has been exhibited nationally and internationally, his photography can be found in both private and public collections, and he is a winner of the 2009 Theresa Pollak award for Excellence in the Arts. Stettinius taught at Virginia Commonwealth University until 2009 when he decided to take some time away for teaching to start an independent publishing company, Candela Books.

Selections: Caleb Cole and Susan Worsham

© Caleb Cole, Woman Looking In, 2008, from the series "Other People's Clothes"

Caleb Cole: The first work of his that I was drawn to was "Other People's Clothes," a body of work that involves Caleb finding or borrowing an outfit or a piece of clothing. He then will construct a scenario with himself as subject. It sounds simple, and maybe it is, but he does a brilliant job avoiding campy self-portraiture by adding vulnerability with trace amounts of melodrama. It is hysterical and the more I find myself considering photographers and their very meaningful projects from all over the globe, the more I need work like this to pick myself up again.

Susan Worsham: There is a resonance in Susan's work that I take in on a level just beneath comprehension. Her work is autobiographical in a way. She writes of family and loss but then photographs the vibrations of these experiences and somehow manages to bring together constructed scenes and familiar people, intimate scenes, but suggests those people and those times that she misses the most. As if the soup will always remember the garden. To see it unfold is subtle and persuasive.

© Susan Worsham, Untitled, from the series "Some Fox Trails in Virginia"

f100: Thomas Bangsted, Bryan Graf, Andrew Miksys, John Houck

© Thomas Bangsted, Fisherman's Wharf, 2009

fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.

We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann and Bryan Formhals. Today we continue with responses from Richard Mosse and Shane Lavalette.

Respondent: Richard Mosse was born and grew up in Ireland and is now based in New York. He is driven by an ambivalence toward photography and a desire to revisit and even rewrite traumatic cultural histories. Mosse studied at Yale, Goldsmiths and the London Consortium. He was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and has exhibited extensively internationally.

Selections: Thomas Bangsted and Bryan Graf. Both are old friends. I've learned so much from each of them. I first met Thomas at Goldsmiths in 2004 and Bryan at Yale in 2006.

Thomas Bangsted
Thomas composited this tableau of pelicans [above] at a wharf in North Carolina from one hundred different 8x10 inch negatives, each one painstakingly drum scanned and worked over. The finished piece is a spectacular 80 x 126 inches and reminds me of a Gustav Le Gray composition. One of the strongest photographs I've ever encountered.

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Shot/Reverse Shot"

Bryan Graf
In his new series titled Shot/Reverse Shot (title taken from Jean-Luc Godard), Graf poses in shrubbery by night with a sheet of black and white fiber paper, which he then exposes with the flash of his Polaroid camera. In a single instant, this exchange of flash light results in two unique prints showing a mirror image of subject/object, mise en abyme. The work brings to mind Velazquez's Las Meninas and Foucault's meditation on it.

© Bryan Graf, from the series "Shot/Reverse Shot"

Respondent: Shane Lavalette is a photographer and the Founder, Publisher and Editor of Lay Flat, an independent publisher of limited edition photography books and multiples. He currently lives and works in Somerville, MA. His photographs have been shown widely, including national and international exhibitions. He was commissioned by the High Museum of Art to create a new body of work as part of the "Picturing the South" series, from which a selection of photographs will be exhibited in 2012.

Selections: Andrew Miksys - Buses and John Houck - Crisis of Accumulation.

© Andrew Miksys, Bus Window #8, Lithuania 2002, from the series "Buses"

© John Houck, Sweep First in Front of Your Own Door, from the series "Crisis of Accumulation"