Month: March 2011

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Maxime Brygo

MaximeBrygo.com

Newland presents photographs of spaces built in the last few years in five new Dutch towns. This project questions the construction of the identity of these towns. How have these cities with no history been drawn and laid out? What has been erected there? Which monuments for which celebrations? However, we don’t have enough distance with these objects to be able to appreciate their legacy value for the next generations. It seems that photography, by freezing places and times in such spaces, vouches for or creates the legacy status of these objects.

The drawn spaces take shape through the photographic staging, whose role is here to create a moment – a moment and a monument. Newland is an imaginary space because it merges the landscapes of five cities. These landscapes present a scenography of the promotional/advertising town. This photographic corpus claims to be, maybe paradoxically, an archive in becoming. We ask ourselves the question of durability, while facing landscapes that were still but drawings half a century ago. Now it’s up to the viewer to question the shift between the imagined territory, photographed here, and the representation of reality, that often escapes us.

— Maxime Brygo

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John Loomis

JohnLoomis.com

“All the past we leave behind,
 we debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
 Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
 Pioneers! O pioneers!”
 – Walt Whitman, 1865

Pioneers! O Pioneers! is a survey of the modern American west, looking at a forgotten and rutted history of western expansion across the nation via rivers turned emigrant trails turned train tracks turned interstate, sprawling though still largely un-tamed and under-developed land, with much of it re-claimed, or “won” back, from the hand of progress.  

So far I’ve traced back roads and emigrant trails through Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah, as well as taken a small glimpse into the way we both use the land of the west and strangely recast history to make it tourist-friendly, as seen in Oregon and Colorado.

The project stems from my childhood fascination with the emigrants who first journeyed west as distorted and immortalized for a very different generation and audience through the computer game Oregon Trail, and also through my adult travels through the west where I have found and been inspired by a vast, beautiful, and empty America. I have plans to head back west to New Mexico and California over the new few months to continue the project.

— John Loomis

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Oliver Ogden

OliverOgden.com

ticky-tacky: (adj.) made of shoddy material; cheaply built.

legacy: (n) something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor.

In this series, I use two cameras to convey my notion of our ticky-tacky legacy. In the spirit of shoddy craftsmanship, one set is photographed with an old medium-format camera that leaks light. I take little heed to convention points of focus and composition. In contrast, with a large format view camera, I aim to capture, with precise detail, the structures and environment we leave as our legacy.

— Oliver Ogden

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Noah Devereaux

VisualMumbling.com

When I moved to Brooklyn in 2009, Newtown Creek was this great mystery lurking to the north separating my neighborhood of Greenpoint from Long Island City in Queens. I knew it was considered one of the most polluted waterways in the nation, but there was a lot that I didn’t know because the creek is hidden from view and walled off on all sides by industry.

After a year of digging I found layers of history embedded in the banks of the creek, dating back to the dawn of industry in the United States. Today on the surface one sees a wasteland stripped bare by generations of degradation, but the areas adjacent to Newtown Creek still serve as an important role in New York — at once a part of the city yet a world apart.

— Noah Devereaux

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Greg Jones

www.GEJones.net

My body of work, Rochester, began as an exploration of street photography in the digital age. Building on the genre’s tradition and mantra of the “decisive moment,” as well as considering contemporary photographic practices that incorporate digital technology, these photographs could be considered “constructed moments.”

I photograph the landscapes and city scenes that surround me, and by compositing together multiple frames from the scenes I photograph, I create fictional narratives of the everyday. I often look towards mid-century street photography as well as pre-modern landscape painting to inform my own work.

Often when I’m out shooting I search for imagery that resembles common motifs in those types of pictures. I see it as a way of carrying on a type of conversation with artists of the past, the subject being the myth and mundane of the life that surrounds us, and the character of the environments we live in.

— Greg Jones