The Image: Thomas Bangsted, "Lobster Study"

I made this photograph some years ago while contemplating what an interior maritime picture would look like. Several attempts at photographing the lobster industry in Maine and Massachusetts preceded this picture, but that environment just seemed impossibly quaint and unsuited for a deadpan depiction.

I went home to Denmark for Christmas that year. While browsing through old boxes in the attic I found some unfinished childhood drawings I had once made of a red lobster. Later upon my return to Connecticut I purchased a dead specimen from a local seafood store and resumed this study of crustaceans.

I would keep the thing in the freezer and only take it out for an hour or so, leaving enough time to complete a new sketch. The freezer block served as a pedestal for the model. After a few months of repeating this ritual, I set up the camera one day and made the picture.

I have made few of these still lifes since, but once in a while the occasion presents itself. These pictures always come as an utter surprise to me.

- Thomas Bangsted

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"