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The ISO Staff

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1. Boston: ‘Process and Dreams’, At Panopticon Gallery – January 12^th to February 28^th 2012

Eight photographers explore the mystical realm of the ethereal through the exhibit ‘Process and Dreams’. Subconscious illusions and fragmented memories dance together in the hands of Jennifer Hudson, Ken Rosenthal, Michael Donnor, Tami Bone, Bryan David Griffith, Rachel Phillips, Curtis Werhfritz and Emmanuelle Germain.

2. Los Angeles:  Gusmano Cesaretti, At the Roberts & Tilton – From January 7^th to February 18^th 2012

Italian born Gusmano Cesaretti moved to East Los Angeles in the 1970s, and was immediately fascinated by its energetic subculture. The exhibition includes twenty-four vintage prints portraying East Side society, ranging from its most violent to its most loving aspects. In addition, the exhibition features Cesaretti’s Panama pictures, a series of intimate photographs about children from an impoverished community in the city of Colón.

3. San Francisco:  Hiroshi Sugimoto, At the Fraenkel Gallery – from January 5^th to February 25^th 2012

Inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot’s paper negatives, Hiroshi Sugimoto returns to the very beginnings of photography with his ‘Photogenic Drawings’, a series of images embracing the most characteristic subjects in photography’s history.

4. Chicago: Steven Frost and David F. Hartwell, At the Robert Bills Contemporary – Through January 21^st 2012

‘Joint Dissasembly’ features the work of Steven Frost and David Hartwell, and pinpoints the relationship between the decision making taking place during the creative process and the final presentation displayed for the public to see.

5. New York: ‘Mind the Gap’, At Kent Fine Art –January 5^th to February 25^th 2012

“Look at the spaces between seeing and not seeing (where you’ll catch a glimpse of the ‘phantom traces created by the sluggish eye’).” Lise Patt

‘Mind the Gap’ features the work of ten very talented artists (Dennis Adams, Fernando Bryce, Heide Fasnacht, Charles Gaines, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Mark Lombardi, Antoni Muntadas, Walid Raad) whose eyes have captured the in-between moments that inhabit our world.

I know very little about Soap Operas. I’ve never seen a full episode of one and I don’t really plan on it at this point.When I was a kid I used to leaf through those dollar circulars you could pick up in the check-out aisle of grocery stores and try to figure out what all these shows were about. The answer is probably “nothing” but I guess that’s why people watch them in the first place. (Well, where “nothing” = canned melodrama.) More than anything I was always fascinated by the culture and the fact that there were even these little circulars that people could buy on a weekly basis.

German Visual artist Julian Rosefeldt  also seems to be fascinated with Soap Operas. He’s now showing a collection of screen shots at the Saatchi gallery in London from various soaps that collect and distill the melodrama into recognizable emotions. It all lands somewhere between hilarious and haunting. When grouped together it’s a dizzying collage of bad acting and unsettling body language. The Guardian has a great slideshow of the work.

One photographer who has taken a special approach to Manhattan photography is Dave Beckerman. Dave was born in the Bronx and has pursued several career options, including working as a screenwriter, cab-driver, bus boy, lighting director, and TV programmer. He was introduced to photography when he was an early teenager and has now become a full-time photographer who currently lives in upper Manhattan. An important note is that Dave spent two years at NYU’s Film and Television School where he learned lighting techniques from several professors and students, however, other than this brief stint at NYU, Dave is a self-taught photographer.

Dave has taken to the thought that a passion and true interest will outshine any formal education on photography. “I don’t believe that you need to go to school to learn photography. It is more important to have something interesting to say about life, or if not interesting funny. When people ask me about where to study photography, I tell them to study literature or music instead.” Much of Dave’s early work was influenced by “A Vanished World” from Roman Vishniac.

Dave has created an extensive portfolio of work, including his famous images of Central Park and Midtown Manhattan. Much of his work includes Black and White photographs that have become quite popular. Dave especially enjoys shooting during the snowstorms of winter and has become a premier photogrpaher for those looking for images depicting the culture in Manhattan during the cold snowy months.

One groom isn’t happy  with his shots though and rather than chalk it up and call it a day, he’s decided to sue H & H Photographers for inadequately documenting his special day. Thing is, his special day was eight years ago.

Todd Remis started suing back in 2009 (the wedding was in 2003) and he has some bizzarre claims: on top of a $4,100 refund for the services, he wants $48,000 to fly all the principal players of the wedding and recreate the entire event to finally capture those special moments that H & H didn’t get the first time around. As the NYTimes points out, this is a problem because Todd divorced his wife Milena Grzibovska and she has now supposedly moved back to her native Latvia.

There’s something to be said about what a photograph means to someone and how it manages to define a specific time and moment in one’s life. This guy’s marriage is obviously no more but he still wants pictures to remember the good times. At least that’s what I thought until I read he’s been unemployed since 2008 and Remis’ father is a litigation partner at the firm where Remis’ current lawyer works. Genius conceptual art prank or NY socialite with no job, too much time on his hands and a bit strapped for bread? Probably the latter, but maybe Remis should head over to the Guggenheim and check out Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective for more inspiration.

Shortly after he was awarded the Hasselblad Masters prize in 2009 for portraiture, Napolitano undertook a project for the Hasselblad Masterbook 2010 about emotion. The project highlighted the raw emotion felt by children about the world; their aspirations and their dreams. But it also showed the intertwined reality that children discover as they grow up and that sometimes clashes rather brutally with their innocence. Napolitano did not dress up children as scary monsters, rather, he inserted them in the professional sphere conferring each one of them a job that they might or might not enjoy, from ballerinas to dictators.

There is a constant push and pull feeling in Napolitano’s work: an image of a little princess standing in a playground invaded by nature’s wilderness is followed by the vision of a butcher child, surrounded by a row of dead pigs that drip blood from their headless bodies. The gravity that pierces in all of Napolitano’s subjects confers his children actors the status of miniature adults, conscious of the world’s complexity, of its synchronized happiness and sadness, understanding of the fact they play a role in our society they might not have dreamed of, and however, still hopeful. Always.

Keeping with the spirit of Halloween there are several photographers who echo the sentiment of Halloween in their work, best of which could possibly be Amy Stein. Stein is a teacher and photographer who lives in Manhattan and works at Parsons The New School for Design and Visual Arts. In the last few years, she has focused the latter part of October towards looking at community, environment, and the role of a great holiday.

Photographer Ian Pool also has an innovative take on superheroes and villains that bring the spirit of Halloween to life. Ian Pool lives in Toronto and has been studying how to bring realism past the costumes and imitations walking the streets.

Batman stops in for a little late night coffee and donuts

London is currently in the midst of its annual Turner Prize which sees four shortlisted British artists competing for a £40,000 prize. The artists are given space in a museum to exhibit their work—usually the Tate Britain in London but this year at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, North East England. Among the artists nominated is George Shaw, a painter who presents the bleak existence of Suburban England in a hyper-realist style. (Having visited London I can confirm that it’s about as bleak as this guy presents it to be. Favorite painting title: “Landscape with Dog Shit Bin”) What strikes me about the paintings is their overwhelming photographic qualities. Shaw uses Humbrol enamel paints—which hobbyists use for painting models—to create hyper-realist images that at first glance look more like photographs than paintings; as Shaw says, he’s making the paint doing something it’s not made to do. The way light plays off of buildings and the brutal composition of many of Shaw’s works seem like the work of a camera capturing a moment in time. In fact, many of Shaw’s works are from specific places in his hometown of Conventry, as if preserving a moment already lost in time despite being painted over the course of countless hours and nonetheless seeming to define and capture the despair and gloom of present day England. There’s something mysterious and alluring about Shaw’s work and I find his mix of highbrow style with lowbrow materials to be captivating, insightful and altogether refreshing.

London’s Guardian has great coverage of the Turner Prize with information on it’s other three shortlisted nominees (Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd) as well as a great photo gallery of Shaw’s work. The winner will be announced in December.

Spanish photographer, Eugenio Recuenco, is a master of creating the sorts of uncanny universes, perturbing images and supernatural landscapes that will delight the senses of any Halloween fan. His pictures transport the viewer from hotel rooms full of vampires and spooky dolls, to bathrooms inhabited by psychopaths and serial-killers, always with the most complete detail. Furthermore, his creations borrow from different cinematic styles, from Tim Burton and his “Nightmare Before Christmas” animated characters, to early horror movies where women are but helpless victims awaiting for a strong masculine hero.  As a consequence his series are all unique within the realm of the fantastic.

Eugenio Recuenco, who started out as a taxi-driver, is one of Spain’s most renown fashion photographer. He has worked with Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Yves Saint-Laurent, Life Magazine, etc among others. He considers himself a “creator of images”, although he has always been interested in movies and has produced a number of short films.

I hopped on a train to Boston and was picked up by my uncle who lives year round on Cape Cod. The surf was nearly perfect and with a fun group of old friends I realized that I missed the summer. But enough being nostalgic. The heavy waves did a number on me after a only a few hours and I decided to take a quick break to take some photos, but I wanted something different. This was a special moment I thought, a rare opportunity to show east coast surfers challenging a mighty ocean. A grabbed the camera from the car and trudged around the cold sand, my wet suit still dripping water, and snapped shots of the surfers sliding along slow graceful breakers. Quickly I took an odd disliking to these photos that had no story or scene to them. Who would care about these shots, and i what could I do to show people how special this day was for me. With an enormous dune rising above the beach I thought it would provide an ideal platform to photograph the scene; fall surfing at its best.

In several shots I wanted to capture the enormity of the ocean with the surfers seeming as only tiny specs, and in other photos I tried to capture the moment; the fleeting wash and tumbling surfer. I enjoyed trying to make dynamic shots during my much needed time away from the city.