In closing, as my last post, I would like to show the work of C Wright Daniel. I met Wright some years ago while we were both working/teaching at the Harvey Milk Photo Center in San Francisco. I noticed he would take fully exposed (all black) RC prints and run them through the Fiber paper dryer. The result was a black piece of photographic paper with streaks of shiny areas. I imagine those were produced by the heat of the fiber dryer burning in some way the resin on the paper. I thought the result was an incredible image. As time went by I saw more and more of these images coming from him. As he puts it »I am trying to explore what photography is by understanding its materiality. In doing so I have been working with the materials that construct the actual photograph itself: light, chemistry, silver gelatin.« (more…)

Max and I meet a few years back at a Photo Alliance Portfolio Review at The San Francisco Art Institute. We look over each other’s shoulders to look at our relative work. Our work is very different in nature but I found something extremely compelling in what he does. We have since become friends and he has allowed me to share his beautiful darkroom, I am very grateful for that. He has several different bodies of work that I admire but here I want to show his series Blues. (more…)

Lately, maybe due to the conservative approach art galleries in the US have towards photography, I am rarely surprised when I go to a show. I came across the work of Lukas Hoffmann while walking around Paris Photo LA in 2014. I walked into the space curated by Galerie De Roussan and noticed these stunning prints on the wall. For me, that made Paris Photo worthwhile. It’s an incredible experience when you find something unexpected. I’m so drawn to these images that I’m not really sure what words to use, but I’ll try. (more…)

I’ve always found one of the most significant divisions in photography to be that between images that depict and images that evoke. When looking through the beautiful box set of Casual Encounters I can’t help but feel what it is like to be in those images. I think Mike has done an incredible job at breaking through the documentation of an event and actually allowing us to experience the event, two very different ways of producing images. When I first saw his work I purchased the first 5 booklets in Casual Encounters. I eventually got the box set that contains 10 stapled booklets. They can be purchased as single volumes or together. Each one is numbered and titled with the name of the person I believe to be the person he is meeting. When I asked him to send me a statement just to get a better idea this is what he sent: »I don't have a statement for Casual Encounters other than the fact that I spent about three years photographing men I met on dating and sex websites. I often didn't know anything about who I was meeting and would photograph pretty much anyone who was willing to be photographed.« That’s exactly what we see in Casual Encounters, men he was supposedly going to have sex with. (more…)

Alessandro Imbriaco and Tommaso Bonaventura (Photographs) Fabio Severo (Text) I was born and raised in Naples, Italy, an area highly affected by organized crime. Often, when asked to explain the crime situation in Italy, the only words I can find are that just about all Italians are part of it. In one way or another you deal with it on a daily basis. You interact with it when you buy your newspaper at the stand, when you get your espresso at the bar, and when you play soccer with your friends. It has become very hard to pinpoint it, or confine it to a specific location or series of actions. One of my best friends in high school was part of it, some of the people I would see on a daily basis in my twenties were part of it, and the people I had to deal with when I opened my business in Naples were part of it. Organized crime in Italy is invisible, or rather, is so integrated within the system that it appears invisible. (more…)

I met Carlos in San Francisco about 3 years ago, and we have since become good friends. His knowledge of the history of photography, particularly the history of the photobook, is impressive. I find all his work, including the editorial assignments, to be inspiring. In this post I would like to talk about The Sketchbook. The Sketchbook is comprised of found images and images taken by Carlos, either from personal projects or editorial assignments. In his words »The Sketchbook is a compilation of ideas, references and photographic notes.« (more…)

I don’t really remember how I came across Federico’s work but I remember not forgetting it. His latest work, Italia o Italia, has gotten really great reviews and in my opinion deserves all of them. In this post I wanted to point out an older body of work, the one that I first saw. La Vertigine, Italian for Vertigo, holds certain qualities of photography that I have come to appreciate very much. Part of the definition of Vertigo says »… sensation of loss of balance«. To me that translates into the weight one feels while facing the possibility of falling. I find his images to contain that weight. If a photograph can make me feel my own weight, and consequently a powerful sense of tension, then that image has gone beyond the depiction of a scene and has opened up to something new. When Jim Goldberg gave a brief presentation to the Sophie Calle lecture for the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program at CCA in San Francisco, he said something about evoke/provoke. I find that word combination to fit Federico’s work perfectly. His intelligent use of forms, light vs dark, abstraction, and the human presence in some of the images, allows for the images to haunt the viewer with an anxiety that goes further than what is in front of the camera. www.federicoclavarino.com