Agnes Denes – I reviewed Denes’s work for the Landscape course via her retrospective: https://land515050.home.blog/2020/02/05/agnes-denes/
Andy Hughes – Andy was my Tutor for Context and Narrative and I reviewed his work here after visiting an exhibition: https://contextandnarrative515050.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/raw-truth-plastic/
Chris Jordan Intolerable Beauty
Jordan investigates the immense scale of anonymous consumption, in particular making use of repeated patterns or forms in waste collections to create largescale images. Many of the photographs approach abstract art, featuring thousands of cigarette butts, spent bullets or glass fragments. The glass is particularly effective on the eye due to all the colour fragments, although there is an argument that this beauty aestheticises the message (despite the project’s title trying to steer the viewer away from this). The pattern of images is broken by different aspect ratios which in this case probably works to bring the project back from the abstract to the reality it is trying to highlight. In addition contextual images such as yards of sand and gravel or of containers help punctuate the flow of the series.
Also of interest to me was Ushirikiano, Jordan’s project/photobook sponsored by Prix Pictet about sustainable living in Northern Kenya (I used to live in Kenya).
Vera Lutter
German artist who moved to NYC and took up the camera obscura as a new means of artistic expression, using architecture (her room) to record architecture (the city outside the window). The image inside the camera obscura is recorded on analogue photographic paper (note this is therefore a negative), often taking hours, days, or even months. Lutter makes only unique editions, and believes her dyslexia helps her make sense of the upside down or backward imagery she works with. In effect she is working with pinhole cameras, but very large ones (for example created out of shipping containers).
See https://www.ft.com/content/589a6bd2-4cca-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4 (Accessed 15.7.2022)
Mitch Epstein American Power
Epstein’s work which “examines how energy is produced and used in the American landscape, and how energy influences American lives” (https://mitchepstein.net/american-power-intro, Accessed 15.7.2022) has parallels with the work of Richard Misrach. For example the Chalmette oil refinery image from New Orleans is similar to Misrach’s Sugar Cane and Refinery (also from Lousiana) justaposing a rural scene with a distant view of an industrial plant. However Epstein’s work has a different feel to it – the lighting is more positive, often sunny, with little of the ominous mist and green-yellow colour cast – a less judgemental and more traditional colour photographic rendition. While both photographer’s are searching for an aesthetic, for Epstein this seems to be the priority whereas for Misrach the aesthetic is driven by his vision for the series.
Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo The Hell of Copper
Ouedraogo’s series was nominated for the Prix Pictet in the same year that Epstien’s American Power won it. It’s not the first time I have seen images of these African dumps (Pieter Hugo has done similar work in the same place – https://pieterhugo.com/PERMANENT-ERROR, a year later in 2009 so not sure about originality but Hugo’s work is stronger for me) , where Western waste is brought to be recycled for the valuable metals it contains. There is a strong message in such work of the overuse of resources by the West at the expense of poorer nations – a sort of out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach where less value is placed on the environmental or human health of more needy and far away places. The palate for the work and others of the site is a burnt black with occasional glimpses of colour to provide scant relief to the eye and less to the other senses. Ouedraogo’s has a couple of interesting images such as the boy by the fire and the low shot almost as if looking up a slope, towards smoke. It must have been difficult to shoot in those conditions, in that light and terrain – but I felt as if the series had stepped away before it was really done, that there were perhaps better shots/angles/stories to tell of the place.
Level 3.1 Learning Log 