Author: Willson Cummer

I'm a fine-art photographer and teacher who lives near Syracuse, NY, USA
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Loretta Ayeroff

www.Loretta-Ayeroff.Photoshelter.com

This current work is “noirish,” a darker view of my hometown than my previous images presented. I have always been interested in photographing the mundane, the obvious and proletariat vistas of the middle-class.

Upon research, and a Raymond Chandler reading spree, I discovered that I had been living the past three years only blocks away from two Chandler residences.

“Towards Drexel Ave.,” shot from my current studio window, is homage to Mr. and Mrs. Chandler, who lived around the corner during the years 1943-1946.

— Loretta Ayeroff

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Jason Reblando

www.JasonReblando.net

During the Great Depression, the U.S. government built three planned communities of Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin.

In photographing these “Greenbelt Towns,” I explore the New Deal vision to resettle displaced farmers and poor urban dwellers in model cities which unified the best elements of “town” and “country.”

I create an evocation of utopia as a place and idea in the American mind, while examining how this vision plays out in the contemporary moment.

I draw inspiration for my work from my curiosity in power structures and urban planning, in order to explore the complex relationship between humans, nature, and the built environment.

— Jason Reblando

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Ferit Kuyas

www.FeritKuyas.net

City of Ambition is a series of citycapes from Chongqing, one of the largest cities in the world. My images reflect the sheer dimensions of the place. Like most of my work this project has autobiographic roots: I got to know the city through my in-laws, who live there. The people of Chongqing are very eager to show the world and their sister cities in China who they are. Together with the booming economy, this leads to an explosion in city development.

I am mostly interested in the outskirts, where the city can’t really be seen, but rather sensed. Also construction sites and places of change are of interest to me. They show us metaphorical facets of the huge changes taking place in contemporary China.

Astonishingly, Chongqing is an unknown place for most people in the western world. The city is located in Southwest China’s region of Sichuan and was the capital of China during World War II. The municipality is populated by approximately 32 million people.

— Ferit Kuyas

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Patrick Shanahan

www.ShanahanPhotos.com

Patrick Shanahan’s photographs of Britain and Europe investigate the contemporary cultural landscape, offering a seductive and unsettling re-imaging of modern urban environments.

Making full use of the scenographic, artificial aspects of large-scale photography, Patrick produces topographic images that are close to the kinds of minimalism found in painting and sculpture.

His largely unpopulated compositions are subjected to a pristine finish and treatment of light, colour and space that help to establish a tension between a real and constructed landscape – a landscape in which the distinction between reality and imagination seems to blur and we are left with a peculiar sense of spatial estrangement.

— Patrick Shanahan

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Melanie Bahuon

www.MelanieBahuon.com

From Odessa to Kertch, on the shore sides of the Baltic Sea, from sea to earth, in Jurmala or the Tallinn suburbs, Melanie Bahuon carries a unique eye which questions the wonders and the finiteness of the world.

Her eye, looking “a little beyond the horizon”, at the tips of unnamed territories or in the depths of hostile seas, travels across the universe and its elements, scattered by discrete human traces.

Naming neither the lands nor the shores, Melanie’s eye wanders in the vastness, reuniting the antipodes and takes us on a mind journey tinted with melancholy.

What is it to guess beyond the perspective and the textures?

In a colourful and poetic mastering of the medium format Melanie Bahuon is humbly questioning planet earth, and beyond, mankind.

— Arnaud de La Bouillerie

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Joni Sternbach

www.JoniSternbach.com

The Salt Effect is a phrase that I first heard while photographing during an artist-in-residency in northwestern Utah, a region of great beauty and harsh conditions.

It was meant as a play off the term “The Lake Effect,” which describes the odor of Great Salt Lake: The wind blows southward with a sulfur-like smell that ironically transforms a breathtaking place into one where it can be unpleasant to take a simple breath.

The Salt Effect aptly describes my immersion and experience in the weather of the high desert surrounding Great Salt Lake. This series of photographs is my initial investigation into understanding the western landscape.

— Joni Sternbach

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Gianpaolo Arena

www.GianpaoloArena.com

The area situated in the Treviso and Venezia districts is a workshop of languages, historical stratifications and quick occupation processes of agricultural lands.

On the remains of changes of the territory, some marks and fragments of rural archeology emerge: farmhouses and agricultural ruins where the vegetation, like a virus, has damaged the architectural structure itself, changing its morphology.

Immediate in the observer is reference to the past, the experience of time, memory, the charm of the ruins, the idea of sublime suggested by Piranesi and Goethe, the promised revelation by this invasion of disorder and devastation.

It almost looks like nature can take care of the secrets of the past better than man: decadent but animated by its own inner life made of plants and animals, extraordinary evidence of memory, history and culture.

— Gianpaolo Arena

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Douglas Ljungkvist

www.DouglasLjunkvist.com:

I am a Brooklyn-based photographer originally from Sweden. My personal work is intuitive, self expressive, and about feeling and mood.  Attributes to describe my personal work include urban, graphic, vernacular, and quiet.  I am drawn to color, space, lines, and form.

— Douglas Ljungkvist

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Dave Hebb

www.DaveHebb.com

The natural environment, our industrial and technological infrastructure, and my place within them, are the focus of my work as a visual artist.

Timescapes, my most recent body of work, uses photography and video to document the transformation of various landscapes over long spans of time.

Questions about the long-term global impact that industrialized civilization has on the environment are framed within the context of my own rural surroundings in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

This relationship with nature is investigated by examining long term natural effects on industrial artifacts within the landscape, such as a discarded computer monitor or sewer drainage pipe.

I invite the viewer to contemplate their own relationship with nature as a formal meditation while also implying complicity in its destruction and ultimate responsibility for conserving natural resources and preserving what’s left of our natural environment.

— Dave Hebb

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Susan May Tell

www.SusanMayTell.com

In Auschwitz, I felt the presence of its ghosts guiding me, guiding my camera, and was then, and continue to be now, moved to share this place’s tale of tragedy through the images I saw through my lens.

I arrived there almost by happenstance. While planning a trip to Prague and Budapest, I learned that an overnight train goes from Prague to Krakow – and from there it was a short local train ride to Auschwitz.

I walked the grounds in silence, in meditation, photographing the aesthetics, the mood, the sense of foreboding – and tried to capture the energy that lives in that space.

Equally important to my artistic vision is my commitment to Auschwitz as a meditation on decay and memory. Like others’ sacred grounds that are decaying, Auschwitz today is disappearing and raises questions about whether places of this kind should be restored and the importance of memory and commemoration.

— Susan May Tell