Uta Barth

Uta Barth's hazy photographs occupy the territory between abstraction and representation. Their lack of focus has become something of the artist's signature, and it often elicits comparisons between her work and that of such early-20th-century pictorialists as Gertrude Käsebier and Edward Steichen. In some regards this association is apt, especially when one considers the matte surfaces and heavy wooden backing of some of Barth's photographs, which emphasize their presence as objects. Moreover, as in pictorialist work, light evanescently illuminates many of Barth's scenes and subjects. For the most part, though, the fuzzy glow of her pictures far exceeds that of her predecessors' photographs. Barth renders landscapes and everyday spaces all but illegible by employing an extremely shallow depth of field. In doing so, she ruptures the age-old emphasis in photography on the referent and instead turns her audience toward its own experiences. In their banal beauty, her photographs hold a mirror up to the limits of perception itself.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Field%20%2323&page=&f=Title&object=98.4629 

Often blurred or with only one element rendered sharply, clinging to the margin of the composition, Uta Barth's deceptively simple photographs of ordinary, ambiguous places are both elegant and challenging. Walls, windows, patches of light on a rug, the glow of an out-of-focus glance toward the horizon: all these provoke phenomenological reflections on perception and subjectivity, often suspending a viewer in the midst of the customary attempt to make sense of what is being seen, to reduce it to an accessible package of associations and meaning. "Certain expectations are unfulfilled: expectations of what a photograph normally depicts, of how we are supposed to read the space in the image, of how a picture normally presents itself on the wall," Barth has said. "This kind of questioning and reorientation is the point of entry and discovery, not only in a cognitive way, but in an almost visceral, physical and personal sense."
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Uta_Barth_the_Long_Now.html?id=W5PPI9T_6RUC&redir_esc=y

... to walk without destination and to see only to see...

 http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artist.php?art_name=Uta%20Barth

I don’t want the work to be about me, so I carefully edit out autobiographical information. In 1998 I made a decision to only make photographs in my house because I wanted to find another way to empty the subject out of my images, to separate meaning and subject. Seeking something to photograph made no sense anymore, but I still had to point the camera somewhere, so I point it at what’s familiar and everyday that it’s almost invisible. I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase.

By photographing what’s invisible to me, and repeating it endlessly, hopefully it becomes clear that something else might be happening other than describing my home. I point the camera at things I stare at day after day while talking on the phone, sitting around, or waking up. When editing negatives for a show, I take out anything with "stuff" in it, because it instantly grabs attention. Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject. So, I diligently erase myself from the work.

                              http://db-artmag.com/archiv/2006/e/2/1/421.html

 

Bruce Gilden - street photographer

'I am known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get.'

Bruce Gilden's childhood in Brooklyn endowed him with a keen eye for observing urban behaviors and customs. He studied sociology, but his interest in photography grew when he saw Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up, after which he began taking night classes in photography at the New York School of Visual Arts.

Gilden's curiosity about strong characters and individual peculiarities has been present from the beginning of his career. His first major project, which he worked on until 1986, focused on Coney Island, and on the intimacy of the sensual, fat or skinny bodies sprawled across the legendary New York beach. During these early years Gilden also photographed in New Orleans during its famous Mardi Gras festival. Then, in 1984, he began to work in Haiti, following his fascination with voodoo places, rites and beliefs there; his book Haiti was published in 1996.

In June 1998 Gilden joined Magnum. He returned to his roots and tackled a new approach to urban spaces, specifically the streets of New York City, where he had been working since 1981. His work culminated in the publication of Facing New York (1992), and later A Beautiful Catastrophe (2005); getting ever closer to his subject, he established an expressive and theatrical style that presented the world as a vast comedy of manners.

His project After the Off, with text by the Irish writer Dermot Healey, explored rural Ireland and its craze for horseracing. Gilden's next book, Go, was a penetrating look at Japan's dark side. Images of the homeless and of Japan's mafia gangs easily bypassed the conventional visual clichés of Japanese culture.

 Haiti 1984 - 1995

 GO - Japan

'In 1998, I met an ex-professional boxer and martial-arts expert in Japan, and we became friendly. He introduced me to these two yakuza, and we went for dinner in a small tempura place in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

My father was a racketeer type, so they got along with me and I got along with them.

I know their background of respect, and generally they're polite. Some of the low-level yakuza that I've seen in an area of Tokyo called San'ya are really nasty and vicious, though - not nice people, and quite dangerous.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/20/best-shot-bruce-gilden 

 5 Weeks after the earthquake and beyond

 USA. New York City. 1986

 USA. New York City. 1989. Feast of San Gennero, Little Italy

 USA. New York City. 1984. Feast of San Gennero, Little Italy 

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_9_VForm&ERID=24KL53ZS6V

There is Sergey, a small-time gangster whom his cellmates nicknamed Wild Boar. There is Vasiliy, a retired criminal who murdered his stepfather. And then there are the scenes from everyday life: a drunken Sunday afternoon picnic; a husband and wife snogging on a sofa; local thugs showing their mafia tattoos.

Gilden travelled to an ordinary village in Russia's decrepit provinces, 70km from the city of Yekaterinburg. Here, he encountered a bunch of small-scale hoodlums: pickpockets, armed robbers, car thieves, a crooked cop, junkies and a reformed ex-con. All live in a bleak community of decaying wooden dachas and muddy fields. All are trapped in a cycle of vodka, violence and crime. "I like bad guys," Gilden says. "My father was a gangster. I've always liked extreme-type dark side people."
Of the village where he spent 16 days in May and June, he says, "It's quite medieval. Life has been going on like that for centuries. Now they [the local mafia] are being squeezed out."

  A tattoo on Alexey's foot.

 Sergey fighting with Dmitriy, 28, a ­police colonel.

Vasiliy, 50, has spent 22 years behind bars. He killed his stepfather and also three men who had raped his wife.

Alexey, 29, has given up the criminal life. ‘Now I’m honest,’ he says.

 

Eugenie, 37, a drug addict and gangster. 'I've chosen this way. I dunno why. That's my life.  

Born in 1946, Gilden has always been attracted to the underclass. His previous studies have included portraits of Japan's Yakuza mobsters, the destitute, prostitutes and members of bike gangs. These low-life characters remind him, he says, of his late father: a cigar-smoking tough guy who may have been a criminal and who died broke. Gilden's subsequent career as a photojournalist is a one-sided conversation with his flawed dad. "I idolised my father. He screwed me around. The reason I stick a flash in people's faces is to get back at him in some way."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/27/bruce-gilden-magnum-russian-gangsters

 

'Find the extraordinary in the ordinary' - Martin Parr

_{Street photography is all about the everyday people, things, and moments. It is often the most common and mundane things which make the most interesting and meaningful images.}

_{Martin Parr for me is one of the most creative street and social documentary photographers because his photography is incredibly unique and has strong statement about society. It's funny, interesting, depressing, sad, simple, straightforward but not crude, provocative, challenges us to see world differently.}

_{I like his never ending passion about photography. He doesn't care what people say about his work but his huge 'collection of everything' proves his sensitiveness. Parr nails the details, the facial expression, even the situation and place that allow the viewer to recognize the point he is trying to make.}

_{He can see interesting subject and topic to take the shoot everywhere. His photography doesn't have a barrier and it has exceeded the most daring expectations of viewers.}

 _{I took of him some ideas...}

Paul Hill - photographer, jurnalist, author and teacher

Born in 1941 in Ludlow, Shropshire, Paul Hill worked as a newspaper reporter from the late 1950s until he became a freelance photographer in 1965. As a photojournalist he worked for the Birmingham Post & Mail, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, and the BBC, amongst others.

'Hill tackles life’s big subjects but his approach is oblique, evocative, always pointing beyond, which is why he moves us. If a camera could capture poetry, this might well be what it would look like.’

http://www.hillonphotography.co.uk/biography.php

 'I am an amateur photographer living in South Wales. I enjoy taking pictures of all kinds of subjects which I find interesting.'

 http://www.paulhillphotography.co.uk/photo_1159306.html