from Landscapes by Sandra Kantanen



(Copyright - Sandra Kantanen)

"Sandra’s works are combination of painting and photography; it’s more about abstract than figural, however, she’s always following the canons of art photography. Fusion of different cultures seen by the photographer gave her insight to perceive image from a different angle."

Exhibited at Pobeda gallery, Moscow

from 'Evidence' 1977/2005 by Mike Mandel / Larry Sultan



(Copyright - Larry Sultan/ Mike Mandel)

"Today the Evidence project is considered a milestone of both conceptual and appropriation art. It is an early example of artistically subverting the notion of the original and of authorship. Moreover, by omitting all textual explanation, the project directs attention to the structure and poetry of the images."

Exhibited at Fotomuseum, Winterhur

3265, 2010 by Stefan Heyne





(Copyright - Stefan Heyne, Galerie Kaune, Sudendorf Cologne)

"Looking at his pictures reminds you of the situation of awakening, when reality slowly takes shape and everything seems a little out of focus. One wants to rub his eyes, to wipe off the remains of dreams that veil his gaze. But the cognition hoped for fails to appear. Haiziness remains persistent.

Heyne's pictures are no easy entertainment. We are spellbound by the mystical aura of his pictures, enchanting and unnerving at the same time. This conflict of curiosity and anxiety entices the beholder to abandon his usual way of perception, hoping to remove the blurry haze and discover the message behind it."

Exhibited at Galerie Kaune, Sudendorf Gallery for Contemporary Photography, Cologne

from 'Dream Villa' 2010 by Dayanita Singh



(Copyright - Dayanita Singh)

"The absence of people is manifest in empty rooms and spaces and in remarkable still lifes of everyday objects. People are also emphatically absent from her most recent series, Blue Book (2009) and Dream Villa (2010), yet they do remain omnipresent in details and even in the color and light. The urban scene full of movement and vigor has turned into a desolate, surreal world that offers an endless range of interpretations and meanings."

Exhibited at Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam.

Grable 15 kilotons, Nevada, 1953 by Michael Light (born 1963)

(Copyright - Michael Light)

Michael Light (1963) has been exhibited internationally and his works are in numerous public and private collections. His archival photographic projects FULL MOON (1999) and 100 SUNS (2003) have garnered global acclaim.

Exhibited at Foundation Yours Gallery, Warsaw

Real Tennis by Elliott Wilcox

(Copyright by Elliott Wilcox)

"The exhibition PRUNE - abstracting reality focuses on the complex but intriguing relationship between realism and abstraction in contemporary photography. The exhibition includes only photographic work that is based on reality but which depicts this reality with a greater or lesser degree of abstraction. On show in the exhibition is work that first and foremost can be appreciated for its abstract, formal qualities, such as form, colour and composition. Only afterwards does the viewer recognise the subject rendered in the work. Then the viewer becomes aware of an underlying story and the concept employed by the photographer. Usually it is the information in the caption which compels the viewer to relate to the work in a new way. The exhibition emphasises that abstraction of reality is always present in photography and that there often is an underlying story which only reveals itself indirectly."

Exhibited at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam.

Lehman Brothers 92-08 by Michael Najjar

(Copyright - Michael Najjar)

"(His) photographs take impressive cliff and rock formations to exemplify the development of leading stock exchange indices over the past 20 - 30 years. Like blueprints Najjar suspends the performance charts of such indices as the Dow Jones, Hang Seng, Nikkei and Dax over the mountain peaks, and changes the natural course of mountain borderlines, pairing pure natural beauty with the development of the global financial system."

Exhibited at Bitforms Gallery, New York.

'Lust' from Gabriel Jones - Somewhere on Time II

(Copyright - Gabriel Jones)

"Jones has an eye for the subtle, barely perceptible gestures, glances and stances that become visible through his male and female protagonists.
Recording them, he plays with the difference between the precise moment of a spontaneous 'gesture' and the extended duration of the frozen 'pose'. His achievement is to reveal to the viewer aspects of the human psyche concealed for their laying bare our vulnerability and proportionately evasive of neat words."

Exhibited at Galerie Bugdhan und Kaimer, Düsseldorf

Unseen vistas of the Big Apple by Swiss photographer, Christoph Studinka

(Copyright - Christoph Studinka)

"He's interested in the miraculous moment of seeing and framing the image, which is often happening in a matter of seconds. Studinka strolls through the chessboard of New York's streets with his preloaded camera, the lens on f 8, the shutter on 1/125 second, waiting, watching, searching, waiting, wondering, deciding, and instantly shooting the picture of a concerned wall street banker, of a young couple in love at SoHo, of an elegant lady approaching the stretch limousine waiting in front of the Plaza Hotel. He is fascinated by New York's greed and poetry, its success and failure, the symbols for world power and (like Ground Zero) destruction."

Exhibited at Gallery See 301, Zurich.

early "Bilder über Landschaften" 1979-1984 from Knut Wolfgang Maron

(Copyright - Knut Wolfgang )

"The extraordinariness of Knut Maron's universe does not lie in astonishing forms or new themes. Its profound distinctiveness is not the consequence of breaking through hitherto accepted boundaries of art. Instead it results from a meditative reversion to art itself, from transcending its timeless truths."

Exhibited at Zone E, Essen

from Carte Blanche VI: VNG Verbundnetz Gas AG

(Copyright - Berndt Borchardt)

"The photo collection of Verbundnetz Gas AG is one of the most significant collections of contemporary photographic art in Germany. It is a reflection of a period of social transition, documenting the radical political, economic and social changes that took place in the former GDR between 1992 and 2000."

Exhibited at GfZK Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig.

sans titre by Ralph Gibson

(Copyright by Ralph Gibson)

"Says Gibson, "A Photographer once said that beauty in women is endless.
Perhaps it was I who said it. In fact, I remember distinctly having done so...and the thought persists to this day. We stare in the psychological mirror of the human body with a fascination that endures indefinitely. At least art history indicated this to be so. The Willendorf Venus is said to date from 25,000 BC...that is a old enough for me to believe in the subject."

Exhibited at Photo 4, Paris.

Vidauban, France, 2007 by Ad van Denderen

(Copyright - Ad van Denderen)

"At the same time, So Blue, So Blue breaks the conventional mould of photojournalism. Ad van Denderen's documentary photographs are a far cry from the lurid and judgemental images of catastrophe that feed the news tickers through the internet. Using a medium format camera, he takes pictures that demand lengthy preparation and research. His photographs are the result of intense and sensitive observation conducted over a period of five years, yet they are never patronising."

Exhibited at Fotomuseum Winterhur, Switzerland.

JUVENILIA no 39(Kiss) by Ole John Aandal

(Copyright - Ole John Aandal)

"In his works, Ole John Aandal uses photography to question the politics of the medium and how it shapes and charges our culture. JUVENILIA is the voice of teenagers in a new media world where everybody is an artist and everything you can imagine is real."

Exhibited at Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

(from) Nickla by Armand Quetsch

**
(copyright - Armand Quetsch)

"The photographic approach presumes a distance, a highly particular space time. The photographer carries out an inventory with technical equipment that is both cold and direct. Yet through his gaze what ought to have been a mere recording becomes a quest for time, for the past... for a person."

Exhibited at Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA), Luxembourg.

Russkie #24 by Anastasia Khoroshilova

*(copyright - Anastasia Khoroshilova)

"Anastasia Khoroshilova's vision as a photographer is characterised by the immediacy of her creative path. This path is indivisible from her personal life, from the drama of her biography, which is connected to the socio-cultural "wanderings" of the artist. Anastasia Khoroshilova encounters the people, things and landscapes in her photography at eye level. She never takes recourse to unusual perspectives, shooting from above or below. Khoroshilova shows us people at eye level, but she does not unmask them; she never gets too close."

Exhibited at Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

geveldetail by Ellen Korth

(copyright - Ellen Korth) 

"In her detailed research with her camera, the photograph artist Ellen Korth has detected in the buildings of Herman Bessels traces of the relationship, capturing them in excerpts that nevertheless represent the whole. This book bears no claim to documentary or biography, but makes a theme of the interplay of two closely-interwoven art forms.

It is largely the outer shells of the buildings, which mirror the striving for function, form and shape. And likewise, these are the intentions of the artist, who desires a view behind the façade of human appearance in her photographs."

Les Vitrines #6 by Annette Kisling

(copyright - Annette Kisling)

“Annette Kisling photographs unintelligible things with utmost lucidity. In her current b/w series, "les vitrines", these are the shop windows of the early 21st century, embedded in the bourgeois facades of Paris's inner boroughs-commodity stages arranged for optimal visibility. In Annette Kisling's work, however, their purpose is lost. Here the gaze expands to capture both the interior and the exterior, that which lies behind the windowpane and that which it mirrors: cars, trees, sky, building facades, street alignments. Everything stands side-by-side and simultaneously permeates everything else. This is necessarily so, yet the principle underlying this order is difficult to name. Annette Kisling calls this principle "layering", and by this she refers also to an intertwining of history and the present.”

Exhibited in Galerie Kamm, Berlin.

Elvis by Erik Steffensen

(copyright - Erik Steffensen)

“Erik Steffensen investigates art history and its theoretical perspectives as well as current popular culture. His photos offer a reflection of the significance of our common cultural references and the fascination that they hold, through an exploration of places and phenomena that are part of the contemporary mythology. His work deals with fears of nothingness and with solitude, yet it never lacks humour and irony.

In Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' two men are guided through 'the zone' by a third, the Stalker, in search of a nearly unreachable place called 'the room' where a person's innermost dreams and desires are said to come true. In the film as in the work of Erik Steffensen the journey in itself is paramount compared to its objective.”

Truck stop by Mark Kimber

(copyright by Mark Kimber)

"Kimber is compelled to find "situations where the play of light, form and landscape converge in time and space to create an elusive and ephemeral piece of theatre." To produce EDGELAND he changed cameras, this time using a high definition model and shooting at dusk, the edge of the day. The intense colour of the twilight sky mixes with the artificial lights of the night. The car parks, containers and buildings become poetic summaries of themselves. The street and building lights that proliferate in his scenes are like beacons, calling our attention to details, which we would, in the bright light of day, disregard. Despite the lack of human actors, the lights suggest a stage waiting for the performers to return, with the sun."

Exhibited at the Stills Gallery, Sydney.