Category: on photographers

Show+: Judith Joy Ross

Posted on Posted in Criticism, minimum daily requirement, old bones, on photographers, Theory: figurative, Theory: narrative

Judith Joy Ross, April 24–August 6, Philadelphia Museum.

“The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the only US venue for the retrospective exhibition of work by Judith Joy Ross, which opens April 24. The museum is showing some 200 of Ross’s gorgeous and unassuming portraits of ordinary people: students, soldiers, voters, members of Congress, children at a Pennsylvania park during summer vacation. Ross has focused much of her work in and around eastern Pennsylvania, where she was born and still lives, making portraits that reveal a deep, if brief, connection between photographer and subject.”

https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/judith-joy-ross

“Judith Joy Ross has, as an artist, no formula. She starts over again each time—the riskiest way to do it. She has a style, of course, but it is austere. It cannot, if she panics, be used to take the place of content.”
—American photographer Robert Adams
extended conversation with Judith Joy Ross

More about her: The American documentary photographer, Gregory Halpern, recently called her “the greatest portrait photographer to have ever worked in the medium”. Alys Tomlinson, an acclaimed young British photographer, who acknowledges her as an influence, says: “I don’t understand why she isn’t more well known. Maybe it’s because she is drawn to people that you might well pass on the street and not notice. She elevates them with her camera. Her portraits are not neutral. There is an empathy on her side. A deep connection. She makes you look closely at her subjects, and think about them.” Interestingly Ross tells me that she seldom photographs rich people and “only sometimes” poor people. “I’m looking,” she says, “for people like me.”

–from a long, and compelling article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/22/my-subjects-feel-special-most-of-the-time-judith-joy-ross-on-her-sensual-portraits) from 2022.

Names Midweek

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, creativity, minimum daily requirement, on photographers, visual mind

in contrast / counterpoint to :

Adams, White

Les Krims

Duane Michaels

Arthur Tress

Lucas Samaras

Jerry Uelsman

Legacy of Larry Sultan: 
Dru Donovan, 
Jeff Rosenheim, 
Alec Soth & 
Kelly Sultan in conversation
Kelly Sultan
Kelly Sultan is a residential interior designer. She also assisted Larry in the studio and on various shoots. They collaborated on the project Have You Seen Me, 1994. She and Larry were married in 1987 and have two children. She is now the director of his estate. Kelly lives in Greenbrae, California.

Followed by signings with:
Talia Chetrit
Moyra Davey
Roe Ethridge
Nona Faustine
Rosalind Fox Solomon
Paul Graham
Justine Kurland
D'Angelo Lovell Williams
Ahndraya Parlato
Gail Rebhan
-Stephen Shore
-Alec Soth
dr. Sally Stein The interrelated topics she most often engages concern the multiple effects of documentary imagery, the politics of gender, and the status and meaning of black and white and color imagery on our perceptions, beliefs, even actions as consumers and citizens.  

Jameson- end of modernism” FREDRIC JAMESON, in his magisterial work, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), has offered us a particularly influential analysis of our current postmodern condition. Like Jean Baudrillard, whose concept of the simulacrum he adopts, Jameson is highly critical of our current historical situation; indeed, he paints a rather dystopic picture of the present, which he associates, in particular, with a loss of our connection to history. What we are left with is a fascination with the present. According to Jameson, postmodernity has transformed the historical past into a series of emptied-out stylizations (what Jameson terms pastiche) that can then be commodified and consumed. “–https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/jamesonpostmodernity.html