Justin Beck’s photography is featured in the exhibit “Eulogies” showing through Feb. 23, at the SMAC Gallery in Marshall. Beck, a resident of Hutchinson, received a SMAC Individual Artist grant in 2022 to frame his photography for this exhibit. Beck is pictured with a gallery guest during the opening reception Jan. 11.
Photographer Justin Beck’s work featured at SMAC Gallery
The series features Australian photographer Krystle Wright, alongside wildlife photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier, science photographer Anand Varma, conflict photographer and Pulitzer prize winner Muhammed Muheisen, fashion photographer Campbell Addy, and portrait photographer Dan Winters.
The six-episode docuseries focuses on photographers across many industries, including conservation, wildlife, and fashion, and is produced by filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin.
“The diverse range of photographers at the heart of this series each have different focuses in their work, but the throughline across all of them remains: to inspire a deeper connection to the world and to ignite curiosity through striking images,” says Tom McDonald, EVP, Global Factual and Unscripted Content, National Geographic.
The series premieres March 18 on National Geographic, and streams March 19 on Disney+ and Hulu.
There are also images of the large scale battle for Bakhmut; the tragic impact of the environmental catastrophe following Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023; as well as memorable portraits of Ukrainian soldiers, doctors, and firefighters in the dramatic moments of their military and everyday life.
The project of bringing the collection to the Commons has been led by Chris Awre, the University Librarian. The exhibition has been curated by John Bernasconi, Director of the University Art Collection, in close cooperation with Olena Hatton, a Ukrainian writer and journalist, and an extensive team from both inside and outside the university.
Mr Bernasconi said: “It is a great privilege to be able to bring this exhibition to the House of Commons, recording the Ukraine war through the work of some of the world’s leading war photographers.
Morris still recalls the wonder of seeing a picture developed for the first time. “I was nine and watched one of the older boys in the dark room. When he put the paper in the dish and rocked it back and forth and this image appeared, it was magic. I was smitten.
“Donald Paterson saw my amazement and took me under his wing. He taught me everything – took me to museums, gave me books and magazines to read.”
“His second love was table tennis. This was in Jamaica, in his house. In every room, he would have a map. And on the map in this room, there were tiny little pins in different countries. I asked him why and he said because I’m gonna touch all those places. And he did. He was a messenger. Throughout the ages, we’ve always had messages – particularly individuals who come with a message, male or female, good or bad. But certain people come specifically to give a message. And for Bob, the message was to be delivered through music. And that’s why to this day, people are still listening. And every song is even more pertinent. He was a revolutionary. But it was all about love. And he was, for us, the first black messenger for my generation.”
For the next few years, Morris honed his skills and the style that would stand him in good stead on the road.
“Reportage photography, Don McCullin and Henri Cartier-Bresson, that was where it was at,” he says. “The powerful images in Life magazine were partially responsible for stopping the war in Vietnam.”
Morris was inspired. “I would take pictures of my surroundings. I would take pictures of my friends. And I would go off on adventures,” he says. Many of these early works ended up in his photo series Growing Up Black, some of which are now in the Tate Britain’s collection.
Shooting on the move, when opportunity presented itself, was key to capturing Marley – “We never did posed shots. They are three or four frames. Photographing Bob you always had to be, as I call it, conscious.”
Morris was there when Bob Marley & The Wailers played to 200 people in 2,000 capacity venues across Britain later that year on the Burnin’ Tour – their fame had yet to spread outside West Indian communities. “Bob stepped out every single night as if it was sold out. For him he was building a biblical movement.”
And Morris was with Marley when the singer first saw snow. “Bunny Wailer was convinced it was a sign from Jah that they should leave Babylon, so he and Pete Tosh left and the tour collapsed.”
“Bob Marley had this incredible aura. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had such an incredible aura. In all my years of photography, he’s one of a very few people where you don’t need any light. It’s just coming out of him. He had that magic about him. It might look like these are taken in the studio, but they’re not. He just had this aura about him. And I think what he saw from those early shots that I had the ability to capture how he saw himself.”
Morris was also with Marley at his home on Hope Road in Kingston, Jamaica as the singer grew into a global superstar. “At that point, there was no one bigger. Before his success in Jamaica, Rastas were looked down on, like tramps or something. Bob spun all that around. Suddenly, there was this Rasta the entire world wanted to come and see. He bought a house on Hope Road, where the prime minister lived. Before that, if any Rasta went up that road, they would be shot, but Bob had a house there, so all the Rastas would go and no one could touch them. Because he was the man. He made Jamaican society rethink its attitude.
“One of the main reasons I’m doing this new exhibition with The Big Issue is Bob Marley’s song, Talkin’ Blues. One of the lyrics is ‘Cold ground was my bed last night/And rock stone was my pillow.’ That lyric was written from the time when he was homeless, when he was sleeping on the floor. Bob’s songs spoke to everyone. He was such a unifying force.”
Morris remained a member of Marley’s inner circle – touring the world, taking photographs, inhaling the wisdom – until the singer’s life was so tragically cut short by illness in 1981. During those years together, as Marley became one of the most famous musicians on the planet, Morris was often with him, taking pictures that would become iconic. And the striking photographs got Morris noticed.
“This was the last time we met. I never knew how ill he was. No one did, apart from his family. But when I met him that time, I knew something was wrong. He wasn’t his usual self. He wasn’t his usual vibrance. When we were talking, I almost felt self-doubt in him for the first time. Then he picked up the guitar and started playing. I didn’t realise, but he was playing Redemption Song. I was back home, staying with my mum, when we heard he’d passed. It was a newsflash on the radio. We both broke down in tears, because we knew that was the end of an era.”
Morris was handpicked by the Sex Pistols and, after their split, worked with John Lydon on the imagery for Public Image Ltd. He took a job as art director at Island Records and signed The Slits to the label. He photographed and designed graphics for Linton Kwesi Johnson, and shot everyone from Marianne Faithfull to James Brown, The Stone Roses to Benjamin Zephaniah as he became a mainstay of alternative culture.
“After that I worked with every single movement coming out of England,” he recalls. “Within the indie dance movement with bands like Flowered Up, drum and bass with Goldie, photographing The Stone Roses from the very beginning.”
But it all began with a special connection made with Bob Marley.
Bob Marley – Portraits of The King is a new exhibition of Morris’s photographs from that life-changing, world expanding, mind-blowing eight-year period. It opens this month at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, just a short walk down Oxford Street from where it all began more than 50 years ago.
“Every West Indian person was talking about Bob Marley’s music,” recalls Morris, who had lived in Dalston, East London, since arriving from Jamaica with his mother as a four-year-old.
“He was the new voice of Jamaica. The new rebel voice. His music was being played in every household. So when I read he was coming to play these gigs, I decided I wanted to meet him. I didn’t go to school that day. I went down to The Speakeasy Club at about 10am, which I now know was silly. Bands don’t get up that early! But I waited and waited and at 3pm, Bob turned up with the rest of the band. I said, ‘can I take your picture…’”
Morris was invited inside. And right from the start, the interest was mutual.
“They were doing a soundcheck,” Morris recalls. “And between songs, Bob was asking what it was like to be a young black kid living in London. He was fascinated by me; I was fascinated by him. Then he told me about the tour and asked if I wanted to come along.
“The next day I packed my bags, went to the hotel where he was staying, and one of my iconic shots is him in the van looking back and saying, ‘Are you ready, Dennis?’ And so that adventure began…”
Bob Marley – Portraits of the King is at Stephen Friedman Gallery, 28 Old Burlington Street, London, 16 February to 7 March. Entry free.
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Barbican Business Events also exhibit annually at FOCUS London, the UK’s leading event bringing together suppliers and content creators.
The Barbican Centre, London’s iconic multi-arts and conference venue, is growing its position as a location of choice for film and photography shoots.
In the last calendar year alone, the Barbican Business Events team has hosted more than £150k of shoots, attracting prestigious brands such as Yves Saint Laurent, Adidas, Harper’s Bazaar, Amazon, John Lewis, Doc Martens, French Connection, Net a Porter, Madame Tussauds, and Tinie Tempah for Chase Vodka.
As a hub for high-profile productions, the Barbican’s unique architectural and aesthetic appeal has made it a sought-after location for various high-profile shoots. This was recently highlighted when ‘The Kitchen,’ directed by Daniel Kaluuya and starring Kano, spent a week filming in the Barbican Conservatory. The film, which was recently released on Netflix, showcases the versatility and visually inspiring offering of the Barbican’s spaces.
From the lush greenery of the Conservatory to the vastness of the Barbican Hall, and the iconic brutalist architecture framing the London skyline, the Barbican offers an array of unique filming locations. These spaces provide a mix of inspiring backdrops and transformable canvases for a wide range of productions.
Barbican Centre, Conservatory (Photo: Max Colson).
With event planning and the arts at its core, the Barbican team is experienced in managing both large and small-scale productions. Each booking is allocated a dedicated event manager, ensuring shoots run smoothly and successfully. This operational excellence, combined with the venue’s stunning aesthetics, makes the Barbican an ideal choice for filmmakers and photographers alike.
“The Barbican has had many memorable moments in images and on screens over the years, however, this focus from our team on the development of new business in this area is not just reaping significant rewards, it is also opening new areas of the venue and estate for external usage,” comments Barbican Head of Sales, Jenny Waller. “As a not-for-profit organisation, the funds generated from these shoots are reinvested directly into our arts and learning programme, making this not just a growing revenue stream but an opportunity for us to enable the widest possible range of people to experience the joy of the arts.”
A representative of The Production Factory said following a recent shoot: “The Barbican team were incredibly helpful with all elements of pulling our shoot together. In preproduction they were quick to respond to all queries and very clear with the parameters we could work within. On the shoot day we had an assigned event manager to help that the day ran smoothly, and it made a huge difference having someone on hand to offer support as and when needed. Will definitely be coming back for another shoot soon!”
Vicky is the co-founder of TravelDailyNews Media Network where she is the Editor-in Chief. She is also responsible for the daily operation and the financial policy. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Tourism Business Administration from the Technical University of Athens and a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Wales.
She has many years of both academic and industrial experience within the travel industry. She has written/edited numerous articles in various tourism magazines.
Acclaimed underwater shutterbugs Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier are among the photographers featured in a new National Geographic series premiering next month on Disney+ and Hulu.
From Academy and Emmy Award-winning filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the “PHOTOGRAPHER” series flips the lens on some of the world’s most extraordinary visual storytellers to see what makes them click.
Each hour-long episode follows the life of an iconic photographer – Cristina Mittermeier & Paul Nicklen, Dan Winters, Campbell Addy, Krystle Wright, Muhammed Muheisen and Anand Varma – from their childhood and career beginnings to their present-day life and endeavors.
From the frontlines of war to the covers of fashion magazines and the depths of the oceans, the show takes viewers on a journey alongside these renowned photographers who have spent a lifetime in the endless pursuit of perfecting their craft to learn their incredible stories.
Through verité footage of their current mission interwoven with backstory, archival materials and interviews, audiences will gain a deeper understanding of each photographer’s process, how they found themselves behind the camera, and discover how they see and experience the world.
Check out the series trailer below.
“The first time I held the camera in my hands, I was excited but also scared, as a sense of duty crept in,” said G. Bharathi, a class 10 student of the Government Model Higher Secondary School, Saidapet, who is looking forward to displaying her photographs at an upcoming exhibition.
Government school students from 11 districts will showcase their photography work in a culmination of a year-long workshop they participated in. The photography exhibition, titled ‘Unseen Perspectives’ will display as many as 800 photographs shot by 560 students at the Lalit Kala Akademi on February 16 and 17. This is part of an Art Labs project, introduced by the School Education Department, where students of government model schools take up extra-curricular activities.
Mentored by photojournalist M. Palani Kumar and 11 other trainers in the districts, the students were taught the nuances of photography. “This was the first time that photography has been introduced to students and they have been encouraged to take photos that depict stories about people and their livelihoods,” said an official from the government.
Speaking about the exhibition Mr. Palani Kumar said that the workshop nudged the students to look at what was happening in their surroundings. “The exhibition is about more than photographs, it is about their stories,” he said.
After handling a camera and mobile phones at school, Bharathi got to take a DSLR camera to her home in Gummidipoondi for the Deepavali holidays to take photographs; to tell a story. “For the first time I visited my father’s workplace. He and his friends were very encouraging. I spent all my holidays documenting them to do justice to their work,” said Bharathi, who has since developed a more keen interest in photography.
Kavyasri, also a class 10 student, said, “The classes were a stress-buster. We learnt how to tell a story through a photograph and the power it has to create a social influence.”
The Art Labs programme was introduced to students of classes 9 to 12, for a chance to take part in any one of seven art forms: theatre, karate, storytelling, parai attam, silambam, photography and art and craft. Each year, the students get to explore any of these art forms and get a diploma certificate at the end of it. “There are plans to now expand this programme to all the schools,” said an official from the department.
“The extra curricular activities have given avenues for many students who wouldn’t communicate to now speak up and express themselves,” said Hemalatha. K, a staff member at the Government Model School, Tiruchi.
Reflecting the passage of time and global interconnectedness, Athens photographer Jason Thrasher’s exhibition “Kashi Washi,” on view at ACE/FRANCISCO Gallery, combines photographs taken in Benares, India in 1998 with those shot in 2023. Benares, also known as Varanasi or Kashi, is an ancient and holy city located in northern India on the bank of the Ganges river. In addition to its beautiful temples, Benares is renowned for its ghats, or embankments of stone slabs that lead down into the river. The majority of these ghats are used for ritual bathing by pilgrims, while two are used exclusively as cremation sites. Offering an alternative to travel photography that primarily focuses on these riverfront scenes, “Kashi Washi” ventures deeper into the sacred city to connect with the individuals who call Benares home.
Prior to his first visit to India, Thrasher was working as an employee of The Globe, where he would frequently meet graduate students and other international travelers who all naturally gravitated towards the pub for its name, occasionally even encouraging him to come visit them one day. After waking up one morning from a dream in which he traveled around the world, Thrasher felt inspired to turn the dream into a reality. However, as he began planning his trip, which was initially envisioned to cross several countries, his curiosity and focus shifted entirely to India.
Thrasher was able to fund his travels by pre-selling roughly 50 photographs over the course of six months to friends, relatives and collectors who would not see the prints until the following year—a precursor to today’s popular crowdsourcing models like Kickstarter. With a new Leica camera in hand, Thrasher landed in Mumbai and spent the next three and a half months traveling to various cities across India, shooting anything that caught his eye.
A major turning point occurred in New Delhi, when Thrasher visited with Raghu Rai, one of India’s most prominent photographers and photojournalists, who has spent over five decades documenting the culture and people of India. Leafing through various publications, the two discussed a prevalent, underlying sense of disconnect between Western photographers and their Indian subjects. Rai then asked Thrasher about his motivations and purpose, to which he responded, “I’m trying to see who I would be if I was born and raised on the other side of the planet.” This conversation brought into focus his distinct perspective and the intentions behind his artistic endeavors, greatly impacting how he approached the remainder of his time in India.
With its beautiful architecture and deep spiritual and cultural significance, Benares is a widely popular destination for tourists who can often be found by the boatloads photographing bathers along the banks of the river. When Thrasher first arrived in the city, he wanted to avoid being invasive and felt uncomfortable taking any photographs for several days. Instead, he spent his time wandering the city’s old historic alleyways and frequenting a chai shop—located near a convenience store and barber shop—where he gradually began meeting and photographing locals.
This little corner of the world, tucked away from the bustle of the riverfront, recalled memories of his own father’s clothing shop in Alabama, which was located next door to a barber shop and a few doors down from an ice cream shop. Finding parallels between his life and the lives of these men, Thrasher finally felt like he had an impression of who he may have become had he been born on the other side of the world. For the next two weeks, they became the focus of 30 rolls of film.
In November 2023, 25 years after his initial trip, Thrasher returned to Benares with a yearning to revisit the specific street corner he had so deeply connected with years before. He came prepared with 50 physical prints, as well as many more photographs organized digitally on his phone. His first night in Benares, he went down to the river towards the burning ghats and was quickly approached by a local who earnestly offered to lead him around the site. Thrasher explained why he was there and showed him a few photographs. As luck would have it, the man quickly identified several of the people in the portraits and had Thrasher on his way to finding them by the next morning.
“Kashi Washi” offers windows into two specific points of time in the history of Benares and bridges them through the connection created between Thrasher and his photographic subjects. Featuring several recreations of images from 1998, the exhibition pairs black-and-white originals alongside recent color counterparts that draw attention to aging, familiarity and change. A personal reunion of sorts, as well as an update on the lives of the people who have been working and living in Benares all of these years, “Kashi Washi” demonstrates how a large city can begin to feel like a small town as relationships between community members are discovered.
ACE/FRANCISCO Gallery, which is co-owned by Jason and Beth Hall Thrasher, will be open in conjunction with the citywide gallery-hopping initiative Third Thursday on Feb. 15 from 6–9 p.m., as well as Saturdays through February from 11 a.m.–4 p.m. The gallery will host a special free performance by Elephant 6 affiliated psych-folk pop act The Rishis on Saturday, Feb. 17 at 7 p.m. Thrasher will offer an artist talk a couple doors down at ATHICA on the following Saturday, Feb. 24 at 7 p.m., while ACE/FRANCISCO stays open for viewing from 6–9 p.m. “Kashi Washi” will remain on display through May by appointment, and future gallery hours can be found at acefranciscogallery.com.
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A photograph is instantly nostalgic, capturing a time that starts deliquescing even before the shutter completes its snap. You can look at a picture from 30 seconds ago and immediately start remembering. Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, the Metropolitan Museum’s latest love letter to the mnemonic power of photography, amps up that effect — or tries to.
This sporadically successful show gets it exactly right with Larry Sultan’s enigmatic wall of prints, which vibrates with refined ambivalence. Sultan plucked each image from his family’s home movies, an anthology of mid-20th-century leisure preserved on 8mm film. In the grainy textures and light-washed colours of the 1960s, a slim young mom cradles her baby by a fetching waterfall. Dad proudly pushes a brand-new lawnmower over emerald grass. Here, a long-limbed boy in an orange life vest scuttles on to an inflatable raft. There, he hurls himself through a hoop held by an adult’s hand. We witness picnics and trips to Disneyland — all the recorded rituals of the suburban middle class, or those who ache to belong. Similar films lurk in the attics of millions of families, uniting Americans across ethnic, political and regional divides.
To the adult Sultan, revisiting that footage allowed him to understand his family’s move from a five-storey walk-up in pre-gentrified Brooklyn to California as an almost mythic journey. “The home movies seem to me the visions that a family in Flatbush, New York dreamt up,” he has said. “If you took all our hopes and projected them on to emulsion, it would look like those movies.” The Sultans were the dramaturges of their own lives, and the lawn was their stage.
Snapshots are often posed, composed and intentionally artificial; home movies, on the other hand, follow the flow of movement and mood, the transitions from self-conscious clowning to flickering distraction. Those unguarded moments are the ones that interested Sultan, and it’s there that he went hunting for single frames to extract. In one, the boy — Larry himself, presumably — clutches his lower back like an old man who’s just levered himself out of an armchair. In another, his mother claps her palms to her cheeks in exasperation, pantomiming “The Scream”.
A viewer might miss one of these 16ths of a second when they slip by on a projector, but in Sultan’s selection each one becomes the main event. The stills pick up disquiet, tension and the slight taint of unhappiness. They are acts of retrospective investigation.
“I am still caught in that longing for that same utopia my parents were longing for by coming out west,” Sultan has said. “And I’m caught between knowing better and still desiring that security and some past that doesn’t exist except in home movies.” That mixture of feelings, preserved on now-archaic film and printed on paper, yields a perfect fusion of subject matter, medium and technique.
Unfortunately, the rest of the exhibition doesn’t live up to Sultan’s standard. Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother focuses on artists who recycle found pictures, treating them as relics and looking for ways to wring new meaning from them. It tries to capture the plaintive wistfulness encased in obsolete media. In practice, though, most of the works here do the job meagrely or not at all.
A two-pronged piece by Sophie Calle consists of a picture she took of a white terry cloth bathrobe and a printed first-person narration of her memories — or, possibly, inventions. Calle doesn’t evoke the past so much as confuse it, mixing what was with what might have been. Annette Messager did use found images early on, but for “My Vows”, she shot and arranged countless tiny photos of mouths, ears, hands and breasts into a vague thesis about the compound nature of identity. A photograph by Maurizio Cattelan of a red neon bar sign spelling out the show’s title seems neither salvaged nor old, or even especially wistful.
At least we get a strong pair of pictures by Sheng Qi, who fled China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Before leaving, he chopped off the pinky of his left hand and buried it in a flowerpot, an act of public despair and disgust. Here, we see two views of his mutilated hand against a communist-red ground. In one, the upturned palm cradles a miniature black-and-white headshot of himself as a child in a worker’s cap, a young soldier of the Cultural Revolution. In the other, the same hand proffers a picture of Chairman Mao. The diptych collapses recent events with more remote history, mixing the intimate with the epic and violence with nostalgia.
The show eloquently contrasts the way memory and aspiration interacted differently during the last century in China from the way they did in the west. Instead of copious images of intergenerational bougie fun, we get sober mementoes of national horror. In his series They, Hai Bo pairs decades-old formal portraits with recent photos of the same people, and the juxtaposition does something more poignant than just draw attention to the sitter’s wrinkles.
A pigtailed teenager in the cap and tunic of the Red Guards stands facing the camera head-on in 1968, a proud half-smile on her face and Mao’s Little Red Book in her grip. Three decades later, there she is again — still black-haired and mildly amused, if a little more hunched — in a sleeveless flowered dress. She is no longer off to make history or build a nation; rather, we see that she has survived an era of murderous idealism with her good humour intact.
Other pictures in the series are less upbeat. In “They No 7, Three Sisters”, a trio of girls in the 1970s adopt severe expressions that let a girlish glow shine through. In the companion piece, that sense of suppressed energy is utterly gone, and so is one of the siblings. Of the two who remain, the one on the right with the high cheekbones and luscious coiffure has aged into a gaunt sage with a haunted look. Time, that sinister sculptor, pocks and gouges the body, turning each of Hai Bo’s subjects into a breathing memento mori. At its best, Call Your Mother is a hymn to the momentous events we miss or misunderstand, the changes we fail to track, the clarity that comes from seeing the ordinary tinged with melancholy.
To September 15, metmuseum.org
For the first time ever, I’ve become absolutely elated with landscape photography in a museum. Fotografiska has covered landscapes and the environment before, but nothing prepares you for Human / Nature. It’s up until May 18th, 2024 — and I’m bound to go see it again! I’ve been thinking for a while about how we, as photographers, should redefine the idea of landscape photography. For years, journalists and magazine editors I’ve worked with have stated that landscapes should show no human interference in the scene. One of the biggest proponents of this idea was Wes Pitts — the former Editor in Chief of Outdoor Photographer. It’s a stalwart yet antiquated idea in a world where humanity has changed the entire face of the planet and where it’s become more common for landscape photographers to use AI to replace entire skies. I think we can all agree, though: the days of Ansel Adams are long gone — and the romantic notions of the work he did have faded due to globalization.
Human / Nature is on exhibit at Fotografiska NY, until May 18th, 2024. Go check it out.
In Human / Nature, we’re treated to the work of several different photographers. Here’s a list:
Each of these photographers actively plays a role in the scenes within the exhibit. Sometimes, they’re in the scenes and work to bring conceptual ideas to the art form. One of my favorites to do this for several years is Lizzy Gadd. In our 2015 interview with Lizzy, she told us the following:
I definitely relate more to landscape photography, for the simple reason that landscapes and nature are what calm, inspire and refresh me the most. I do love portraiture, but I’ve always been a nature person and am continually drawn to the mountains, forests and ocean. You’ll notice in most of my work, the people are not looking at the camera but are fully enraptured by the landscapes around them. I like to capture that feeling of awe and peace that I get when seeing these beautiful places, and that’s what I feel when I look at photos of people just “being” in nature.
Lizzy Gadd
In the same way that traditional landscape photographers put their own creative vision into their landscape images, so too are the photographers in Human / Nature. However, they’re taking it a step forward by also accepting that humans have changed or touched all land on Earth. Here in America, we have almost every type of biome the world has. We can venture into the deserts around Death Valley, the rain forests in Hawaii, the vast landscapes of Yellowstone, the Everglades in Florida, etc. And all of it has been touched by humans in some way or another.
To me, accepting this idea and inserting ourselves into the images makes something much more of a photograph than doing an entire sky replacement using AI. The images of Cig Harvey speak to so many things about how humans and nature go together. Without reading her description, one could easily see the blending of human and natural elements and how it makes her feel. Staring at David Uzochukwu’s work makes me wonder how David achieved such masterful photos. Born in 1998, he surely has studied or been around a lot of art. Perhaps the more important thing is that the photographers in this exhibit are creating art — not content around #landscapephotography looking to please an algorithm.
Even when you go to the exhibit at night or during a busy time, you’ll notice the irony of all this. Sometimes, it’s nice to be at exhibits alone or with a few other people to get in the way of the small spaces. This is why we go into nature, to begin with. If you’re the type of person who likes to go out into nature alone, then you might want to be in this exhibit alone, too. That way, you can stay a while and carefully study the images and the text alongside them, explaining the work.
It should go without saying, too — but Fotografiska’s lighting is exceptional, way beyond anything else in NYC. They should literally teach the masterclass on framing, gallery splits using specific colors and decorations, etc.
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