Photography

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Photography

Strange Leaves: An Imagined Future Filled With Bizarrely-Toned Plant Life by Al Mefer

In his new series Strange Leaves, photographer Al Mefer (previously) creates an atmosphere of post-disaster biodiversity by shifting the hues of tropical plants to bizarre and even unsettling color palettes. Mefer shares with Colossal that his body of work, including Alien Architecture and Deserts of the Future, aims to “develop a kind of pseudodocumentary in which humans have left Earth because of the current environmental and social issues we’re facing.”

The series is comprised of serene scenes, with the visual field filled entirely by monstera leaves, ferns, and palm branches tinted to intense—almost luminescent—reds, purples, and blues.”In this landscape,” the artist explains, “the grotesque aspect of mutated plants is commonplace in a world where the bizarre is the only beauty to be experienced.”

You can see more of Mefer’s manipulated photography on his website and Instagram. (via Fubiz)

Art Photography

Dreamlike Balloon Compositions by Charles Pétillon Form Hovering Clouds and Lines in Space

Charles Pétillon (previously here and here) arranges groups of balloons in unlikely places—tying bundles of the light white objects to the top of aircraft loading stairs, or positioning them between concrete blocks at the ocean’s edge. Recently the photographer has been focusing on producing sculptural lines in space by linking several of his preferred subject matter together end-to-end, or placing them on top of polls in open landscapes. These images, along with a site-specific balloon installation, are included in Pétillon’s solo exhibition Stigmates at Danysz Gallery in Shanghai through January 10, 2019. You can see more of his balloon compositions on his website and Instagram.

Photography

Charming Photographs Capture the Daily Life of Three Daughters Growing Up in Kamakura, Japan

Japanese photographer Shin Noguchi’s series One Two Three follows the daily explorations, amusements, and tantrums of his three daughters, nine-year-old Yumeji, four-year-old Kotoyo, and two-year-old Hikono. The unplanned snapshots capture split-second moments of beauty such as a bubble floating perfectly in frame to surround his daughters’ faces in one image, or a photograph of his toddler at the table fast asleep behind a large cheese pizza.

“I just click the shutter when the moment is right during the life of my family,” explains Noguchi to Colossal. “I definitely hear a kind of music while clicking the shutter—the unposed, unstaged moments that exist. It’s like improvisations in Jazz. Like Eric Dolphy said, If I missed it, it’s gone in the air, I can never capture it again.”

Noguchi was inspired to start documenting his children after losing his father to stage four lung cancer in 2017. When packing up his father’s things he found previously unseen pictures of his own childhood taken by his mother which inspired him to engage in a more comprehensive documentation of his own family’s life. “If someone asks me, ‘Are these photos then art, or life?’ I want to say that ‘life is art,'” he explains. “I never called my photography ‘art,’ but definitely they show me what I feel art to be.”

You can see more photographs from the quiet and loud moments of Noguchi’s daughters’ lives on his website and Instagram. (via Īgnant)

Art Photography

Camouflaged Self-Portraits Conceal Photographer Cecilia Paredes Against Bright Floral Patterns

Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes is the subject of her own richly patterned photographs, yet her figure is often difficult to locate at first. For each portrait she hangs boldly printed fabrics as the backdrop, which she then matches either with her painted skin, custom clothing, or both. Her torso, arms, and face fade into the background, as the curvature of her body and brown hair become some of the only indicators of her presence.

“I wrap, cover, or paint my body with the same pattern of the material and re-present myself as part of that landscape,” she explains. “Through this act, I am working on the theme of building my own identification with the entourage or part of the world where I live or where I feel I can call home. My bio has been described as nomadic so maybe this is also a need of addressing the process of constant relocation.”

Paredes was born in Lima, Peru and currently works between Philadelphia, Lima, and Costa Rica. Currently she has a solo exhibition at Museum of Latin America Art (MOLAA) in Los Angeles through December 30, 2018, and will open another solo exhibition at the Museum of the University of Navarra (MUN) in Spain on March 27, 2019. (via LensCulture)

Photography

Mexican Guardians Haunt Familial Portraits by Photographer Diego Moreno

Photographer Diego Moreno incorporates ancestral imagery with a familiar contemporary universe in his series “In My Mind There is Never Silence.” The artist shares with Colossal that the characters that populate the series draw from his personal family history along with pre-Hispanic Mexican traditions. Each photograph depicts a normal domestic scene: gathering around a table for coffee, getting a hair cut, or playing in the living room with television on in the background. Moreno’s grotesque guardians are participants in or witnesses to these everyday tableaux, which doesn’t seem to surprise or alarm the humans in the room.

Each large, monstrous character, the Panzudo (which translates roughly to “paunchy”) guards a neighborhood in Chiapas, Mexico, and their size and grotesqueness reflects each individual’s scale of sin. He explains, “This work gives new meaning to the intricate tangle of the concealed and the visible, the individual and the collective subconscious, on the highly complex map of coexisting cultures and beliefs in contemporary Mexico.”

The series will be released as a photobook in 2019. The images will also be on view, representing Latin America, in the 5th African photo biennial in Ethiopia in December, 2018, in the Photo Vogue Festival in Milan, Italy on November 15, 2018. (via Lens Culture)

Photography

A New Book Reveals a Colorful Side to Vivian Maier’s Renowned Street Photography

Nanny and self-taught photographer Vivian Maier (1926–2009) (previously here and here) kept nearly 150,000 photographic images, including street photography and self-portraits, hidden from the world until an estate sale in 2007 revealed a large bulk of her secretive hobby. Since 2010 her photographs have been widely exhibited in galleries and museums across the world, and were the subject of the 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Although her mostly Chicago and New York-based photographs have become infamous in the decade since their discovery, her color images have been less prevalent due to the technical challenges involved in their development and recovery. This month the largest monograph of her full-color photographs was published by Harper Collins, which includes images pulled from the roughly 40,000 Ektachrome color slides spanning the last 30 years of her life. Vivian Maier: The Color Work explores over 150 of her colorful images with details that have been gathered about her story and photographic process. The book also features a forward by photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by Colin Westerbeck, a former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Maier was a self-invented polymath of a photographer,” writes Westerbeck in the book. “The one advantage Maier gained from keeping her photography to herself was an exemption from contradiction and condescension. She didn’t have to worry about either the orthodoxy or the approval of her peers.”

Vivian Maier: The Color Work was created in partnership with Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City, who will be presenting an exhibition of the same title opening November 14, 2018 and running through January 5, 2019. Several of the color photographs included in the exhibition will be presented for the first time. You can see more of Maier’s black and white and color photography on this portfolio site dedicated to her collection, and you can purchase a copy of the new book on Amazon. (via Chicago Magazine)

Photography

A Sharp Look at the Surprisingly Complex Process of Pencil Manufacturing by Photographer Christopher Payne

Photographer Christopher Payne (previously) spent several years building a relationship with the owners of General Pencil Company in Jersey City, New Jersey, one of the last remaining pencil factories in the United States. His dedication to working with the factory paid off, and between fall 2015 and summer 2017 Payne was granted access to the production floor for photo-documentation more than thirty times.

The photographer, renowned for his cinematic images that show the architectural grace of manufacturing spaces, shares that he has held a lifelong fascination with design, assembly, and industrial processes. “The pencil is so simple and ubiquitous that we take it for granted,” Payne tells Colossal. “But making one is a surprisingly complex process, and when I saw all the steps involved, many of which are done by hand, I knew it would make for a compelling visual narrative.”

Payne received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture, though he has long focused on photography in his professional life. He has published three books and exhibited his work widely, most recently at the Wellcome Collection in London, U.K. and the Museum of the City of New York. You can see more of his work on Facebook and Instagram.