September 2016 – New Landscape Photography

Phoenix is intense and harsh under the daylight sun, yet magical and beautiful at night when color is sultry and saturated – it’s palatable. A time when color reveals itself as tangible. I want to capture this heady mix within the urban landscape. Deliberately devoid of humans, my photography centers on architecture, streetscapes, city vistas – the lesser seen and the unseen within a human built framework.

Night Water is my third series exploring Phoenix at night — focused solely on the nine canal systems. Scenes here are from portions of two of the nine.

I am motivated by not knowing what I will find — yet knowing I will find something. Something beautiful, intriguing and worthwhile. It’s within this process; seeking, seeing, capturing — this is where I am most at home, this is where I want to be — here in the desert, at night.

— Catherine Slye, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

September 22, 2016September 3, 2016

Manolis Karatarakis

ManolisKaratarakis.com

I picture every day.

I have no program with any dictation… inside… outside… everywhere. I do not get into molds and orders. I shoot whatever appears in my eyes and stimulates my soul…

Many of my photos are the same and thus acquire a coherent grouping… almost always without people… only their traces… empty landscapes… but are they so ”empty” therefore?

I shoot statues, hangers, trees, washing lines, stairs.

I want my photos to stand alone, without the previous or the next photo, without titles or a supporting text… just to speak to the viewer without the need of any of these… without being warned, without limits and signs… just my photo and the viewer… and if I manage to make my photo and the viewer talk… then all the pleasure is mine.

— Manolis Karatarakis, Rethimno, Crete, Greece

September 15, 2016September 3, 2016

Sophie Barbasch

SophieBarbasch.com

Fault Line is a project I am doing in the small coastal town of Brooklin, Maine. The protagonist is my younger cousin Adam, who lives there. I also photograph my brother, father, and other cousins. I chose the title because a fault line alludes to where the earth splits in an earthquake (a metaphor for a divided family with a complicated history) and also alludes to fault, or blame (I wonder, how does a family support each other, even when things aren’t perfect?) My goal is to show the weight we all carry and how we are both connected and isolated from each other.

— Sophie Barbasch, New York City

sbarbasch 009

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September 8, 2016September 3, 2016

Bill Lane

Billane.com

The Older Industrial Parks Near Newport, Victoria

This is an extended dialogue with the late Lewis Baltz’s seminal 1974 work The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California. The result offers images that transform Baltz’s stark Californian minimalism into an ethereal antipodean nocturne.

Baltz’s spartan boxes manifest a common American theme: the promised land defiled. He was interested in “the phenomena of the place. The effect of this kind of urbanism… What kind of new world was being built here?”

Australian landscape rarely elicits such blatant anger. Our notion of landscape seems very different. Baltz documents the short-term impact of money while my project explores the mildly subversive impact of people after the event (more erosion than explosion).

My aims and Baltz’s may seem different and yet they are very much connected. Both projects are deeply rooted in an exploration of place and time, there and here, then and now, Baltz and Lane.

— Bill Lane, Melbourne, Australia

September 1, 2016August 18, 2016

Jasmine Clark

JasmineClark.co

After Eisenhower is directly shaped by my upbringing in a conservative military community in Twentynine Palms, California. Both of my parents served in the United States Marines Corps. My own conflicted view of the military has spurred my curiosity about its role in American life.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the grave implications of the growing power of the military and the military industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address. Eisenhower’s speech provides the framework for this project. Was his concern justified? My work explores the signs and clues that reveal the influence of the military on American culture and also the attitudes of Americans toward the military.

In many American places, especially areas surrounding military bases, military culture is an inseparable part of the landscape. One can see many signals of how the military is intertwined in the established American patriotic, national and Christian identity. Support for the military and veterans is simplified through iconography and combined with complex and polarizing issues such as religion, race, class, patriotism, and gun culture. I find the saturation of these oversimplified messages disconcerting; however, I am also fascinated by what they reveal. These messages, in both public and private spaces, are meant to have clear meanings, but these places and artifacts suggest other, more problematic truths about American life and our relationship to our military.

— Jasmine Clark, Chicago