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© Laura Pannack
Laura Pannack is based in the UK and Lydia Panas in the US.
Pannack deals with the awkwardness and the concealed emotions of adolescence, Panas deals with the small gestures between family which may or may not infer awkwardness and concealed emotions.
The bare back, the turned back, the turned head, the caught glimpse and the avoided glance are all enticing props for a charged portrait.
Through their eye contact, both Pannack and Panas’ subjects foolishly ask us questions. Foolish because, let’s be honest, what do we know about childhood or teenage conundrums?
© Lydia Panas
© Laura Pannack
@ Lydia Panas
© Laura Pannack
© Lydia Panas
© Laura Pannack
© Lydia Panas
And Still We Gather With Infinite Momentum 1. © Justin James King
© Justin James Reed
Both of these photographers deal with big spaces in different ways.
Maurizio Anzeri
Asger Jorn
Ever since Maurizio Anzeri was roundly acknowledged as the star (here and here) of Paris Photo last November, his embroidered portraits have hung in a stasis awaiting the key association which my visual memory was willing upon them.
It only took six months, but the penny of association dropped: Asger Jorn‘s Defigurations (1962). Both artists appropriate existing images with humour, a touch of spite and avian motifs.
As Jorn used flea-market paintings and vintage subjects, so Anzeri picks up vernacular photographs and family portraits. Given their choice of materials you might think that they hold some reverence for the original object, and yet their surface interventions are violent, in most cases obliterating recognisable features.
Maurizio Anzeri
Asger Jorn
Maurizio Anzeri
Asger Jorn
I am currently obsessed with Alex Webb and the way he piles everything on top of everything else. Working on a post last week, I was reminded of a commercial shoot I saw last year.
© Alex Webb/Magnum Photos. CUBA. Sancti Spiritus. 1993. Baseball fans.
@ Ben Baker. FedEx Board of Directors
Samuel F. B. Morse's Daguerreotype Equipment, by Thomas Smillie, 1888, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Little Electric Chair (Detail). Andy Warhol, 1965
Merry A. Foresta, Director Smithsonian Photography Initiative, informs,
When I saw the deathly familiar blue of Smillie’s cyanotype, I was thrown back to the electric hues of one of Warhol’s many electric chair prints.
From the rarest, unique image to the mass produced commodity. Both images of apparatus; both apparatus a steal on time and both definitively (institutionally) American.
The Smithsonian has operated Click! Photography Initiative for a couple of years now. They publish sporadically on The Bigger Picture Blog with a variety of essays about every imaginable application and interpretation of photographic culture in society. Contributors include high school kids to photography greats such as Robert Adams and a wealth of respected curators and educators including Wendy Ewald and Sandra Phillips. There’s even space for you if you wish to try you hand.
The project also nudged me back into the mind space and work of Bay Area heroine Carla Williams. Read her blog and your life will be better.
High Security Prison, Beit Lid, Israel, 1969. © Micha Bar Am
Hyse (from the Fish Work Norway series) © Corey Arnold 2009
Convergences Archive
A study Salvador Dalí drew for a dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1944). Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí/Artists Rights Society, New York
A detainee kicks a soccer ball around the central recreation yard at Camp 4, Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, June 10, 2008, during his daily outdoor recreation time. Detainees in Camp 4 get up to 12 hours of daily of outdoor recreation, including two hours in a central recreation yard. Photo Credit: U.S. Army 1st Lt. Sarah Cleveland
Prison Photography 