Category: on photographers
Dark Mirrors —
Dark Mirrors assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life. — publisher
Deana Lawson, —241 Dana Lixenberg, — 139 Paul Pfeiffer, — 213 Arthur Jafa, —79 Katy Grannan, and — 117 Robert Bergman — 131 Ron Jude — 159 Rosalind Solomon — 147 Charlotte Cotton — 47 Joel W. Fisher — 63 Rabih Mroue —87 Daniel Shea — 107 Kristine Potter — 201 Mark Ruwedel — 187 Jason Koxvold — 171
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (B. 1980–):
RISD: https://www.risd.edu/academics/photography/faculty/stanley-wolukau-wanambwa
Aperture: https://aperture.org/author/stanley-wolukau-wanambwa/
Light Work: https://www.lightwork.org/archive/stanley-wolukau-wanambwa/
Books by:
- One Wall A Web. Amsterdam: Roma, 2018. ISBN 978-9492811226. Photographs and an essay by Wolukau-Wanambwa as well as appropriated archival images.
- Hiding in Plain Sight. Harun Farocki Institute; Motto, 2020. Co-authored with Ben Alper. ISBN 978-2940672073.
- The Lives of Images, Vol. 1: Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation. Aperture Reader Series. New York: Aperture, 2021. Edited by Wolukau-Wanambwa. ISBN 9781597115025.
- Dark Mirrors. London: Mack, 2021. ISBN 978-1-913620-39-4. Sixteen essays by Wolukau-Wanambwa on Deana Lawson, Dana Lixenberg, Paul Pfeiffer, Arthur Jafa, Katy Grannan, Jason Koxvold, Robert Bergman and others.
and
Lawson —
She is honest, sincere, forthright. Read her; hear her; watch her.
Arbus, Lawson, lighting
taking a simple approach to picture making: place your emphasis on what is to be pictured. what the camera sees. Get the whole frame exposed equally. Solves several matters: exposure, depth, movement. Everything can be frozen, even using slow films, cumbersome cameras.
This is the lighting solution used with the first color photographers. And as color TV came to the home, the studio lighting was broad, full, and frontal. Shadows and highlights had to be reduced to prevent screen ‘bloom’ — those ghosts across the TV — specters of technology.
We grow; new history comes, but old solutions remain, keeping the past vantage-point. Technology never answers anyone.
Technology carries culture
Reusing, or using a solution from past technology, from a past culture doesn’t overpower that culture; doesn’t revise that history; it renews it; it reasserts it ; it carries it forward. ATV culture; a TV set ; a TV studio built to prevent bloom, by reducing contrast when new color TV sets, new color cameras came into the household, that required an over lit scene. Full frontal lighting. Alive in this century.
If it looks like a passport; it is. If it looks like it was meant to put you in your place; it was.
No one ever freed themself by shaking shackles — that’s a magic act on TV.
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/deana-lawson/
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