Carl

Carl
Market Street
Paterson, NJ
April 2012

Nikia

Nikia
Dr. Martin Luther King Way
Paterson, NJ
May 2012

Culturehall Feature 86: THE SPACE WE LIVE IN

I had the opportunity to meet a curator based in Moscow, Yulia McCutcheon, on her trip to New York in the summer of 2011 and to discuss her ideas about photographers working today in Russia. Culturehall is pleased to present an issue on contemporary Russian photography that she co-curated along with her colleague Dasha Kutasina. THE SPACE WE LIVE IN features work by Natasha Pavlovskaya, Valeri Nistratov, Andrey Abramov, and Nikita Pirogov. Pirogov's photographs were also recently shown in an exhibition of Contemporary Russian Photography at the Houston FotoFest 2012 Biennial.

Cathy selected for semifinalist round of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2013

Cathy, Market Street, Paterson, NJ, 2011

I'm excited to share some wonderful news that the portrait of Cathy from my Paterson series in progress has been selected for the semifinalist round of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2013. The final round of judging takes place at the Smithsonian Museum's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC on September 13th. The finalists will be included in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014, and the winner will receive an award of $25,000. The public will also have the opportunity to vote from amongst the finalists for the People's Choice Award.

My deepest thanks to the jury for recognizing this portrait and to Cathy for sharing part of herself with me on Market Street in April 2011. A special thanks also to my friend, artist June Glasson, for encouraging me to apply to the competition.

Portraits on JENREN

Elpraa, Market Street, Paterson, NJ, 2011

Minneapolis-based curator and producer Jenny Barnes has included a selection from my two portrait series shot in Binghamton, New York and Paterson, New Jersey on her art site for creative inspiration, JENREN. The portfolio of 12 images can be found at: JENREN / Tema Stauffer. Thank you, Jenny.

The Paterson series in progress is also now on my website: Paterson

On and Around East Caesar Chavez Avenue with Francesca Romeo

culturehall feature 84: NEW ARTISTS FEATURE, WINTER 2012

Congratulations to the four artists selected for culturehall's NEW ARTISTS FEATURE, WINTER 2012: Margot Hester, Stephanie Prussin, I-Hsuen Chen, and Ruben Nusz.

The next juried application opens in mid-April.

Flak Photo's Winter Pictures

Thank you to Andy Adams for including Tree, 2003 in Flak Photo's Winter Pictures series featuring 20 photographs each weekday in January. All of the winter images can be found in The Collection.

Jorge

Jorge
Main Street
Paterson, NJ
December 2011

Country Life: Poetry by Amy Beeder

Field of Sad Trees, 2008

One of my photographs, Field of Sad Trees, was published in the Design Observer/Places accompanying a poem by Amy Beeder, author of Burn the Field and Now Make the Altar and professor of poetry at the University of New Mexico. Country Life is poem about Eastern European immigrants in the American Midwest.

Thank you to Places editor and friend Josh Wallaert for making the connection between my image and her words.

Country Life, by Amy Beeder

They came for land. For hog-high wheat to Dixon, Weeping Water, Garland Falls;
came to Midland hamlets, made their farms from bogs & marshes,
fens & bottomland: immigrants from Kraków, Darkov, Lasko

who fled famine, coming wars, or the Eastern factories, left
the city rivers thick with indigo & slaughter’s crimson, tenement
air: TB & boiled tubers, fled the bellows & gutter cast, sawdust & accident;

left forever what Riis called the strip of smoke-colored sky so that
their children’s children might grow up corn-fed, reverent,
thrifty; that they might join 4-H & raise lambs, might

crochet & macramé; might play the clarinet or their fathers’ accordions, always
optimistic despite the blizzards & drought, locust & blight.
Where there’s space to push the earth aside: that’s the place

to raise a child — here amid arrival’s plenty: starch & punch in a church basement; even so, a century later their descendants hear another music
over the television, the civics lesson, over the highway’s drone:

a white noise off the flat plain, an echo of the empty well’s temptation,
as if something in them yearns after all for chimney spill, the gritty stink of war,
how else to explain how some came to worship this caustic god,

taking in their bodies his small poison, in abandoned barns & chicken coops:
battery acid, lye, brake cleaner, Sudafed, salt & red sulfur —
Was it to hear clearly the deep corn’s chorus, maybe; maybe

to be nightwind, milkweed, goldenrod, chaos & immersion: to be the intolerable wild unplowed field, to be the one elm black with starlings?
Those whose parents thought they’d never be suppliants, never

wilt or starve — but we’ve seen them in mug shots, baffled
& sallow, broken as those girls in sweatshops going blind,
or the rawboned young Spinner in a Carolina Mill 1901

or the miners’ families evicted, or the garment workers corralled:
faces smeared & scattered as blossoms before the plow; all
catastrophically struck in the light of their own interminable

now, weary, girding themselves, helpless before the lens.

Culturehall Feature 81: NEW ARTISTS, FALL 2011

Congratulations to four artists presented in culturehall's Fall 2011 New Artist Feature Issue: Livia Corona, Mandy Cano Villalobos, Justin Gainin, and Elliot Wright.

Applications for our Winter 2012 New Artists Feature open in mid-January.

Akeem

Akeem
Summer Street
Paterson, NJ
October 2011

CCNY Conversation Series: Molly Landreth with Introduction by Tema Stauffer

Cruz, aka Jalessa, Columbus, OH, 2007
© Molly Landreth

Friday, November 18, 7pm
at the CCNY studio
336 West 37th Street, Suite 206

Free admission - Seating is limited

CCNY presents a talk with artist Molly Landreth, with an introduction by curator Tema Stauffer on Friday, November 18 at 7pm at the CCNY Studio. Landreth will present both work from the Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America series, as well as other bodies of work.

This Conversations Series artist talk is held in conjunction with CCNY’s Other Places exhibition, guest curated by Tema Stauffer.

Q & A to follow the talk

“Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America” is a series of photographs in an archive and a journey through a rapidly changing community and the lives of people who offer brave new visions of what it means to be queer in America today. Stopping in churches, parks, high school classrooms, back yards and bedrooms, I have collaborated with individuals from both urban and rural areas for over six years. With this ever-growing archive of portraits, I aim to highlight a national experience while acknowledging its many diverging, overlapping and at times conflicting parts.

Created as a joint effort with participants who boldly stand in front of my lens, “Embodiment” reveals images of love and survival, the process of growing into one’s self, creative forms of gender expression and the ever-changing anatomy of a family. It is my hope that these photographs will become a lasting archive for generations to come.
-Molly Landreth

Molly Landreth is a Seattle-based artist who explores concepts of identity and community by way of intimate large-format film photography and multi-media collaboration. She has been recently featured in the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Time Magazine’s Lens Blog and in The Advocate for her work on “queer America.” Landreth holds an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York; and a BA in Studio Art from Scripps College in California. She is faculty at The Photographic Center Northwest and Seattle University. Visit her website at: www.mollylandreth.com

Pictures are Words-not-Known at LiShui Museum in China

Two of my photographs, White Horse and Burning Brush, are included in an exhibition curated by Sean Justice at the LiShui Museum in China on view through Spring 2012. Pictures are Words-not-Known presents work by faculty from the International Center of Photography exploring the limits of language-centric knowing in photographs to a Chinese audience.

Culturehall invited artist and educator Sean Justice to feature the portfolios of four exhibiting photographers and new Culturehall members in Feature Issue 80: Pictures are Words-Not-Known. Thank you to Lori Grinker, Abraham McNally, Claudia Sohrens, and Bradly Dever Treadway for sharing their work with Culturehall.

Other participating photographers and ICP faculty include Nelson Bakerman, Marina Berio, Rhona Bitner, Jean-Christian Bourcart, Christine Callahan, Elinor Carucci, Jean Marie Casbarian, Ken Collins, Cecilia Dougherty, Suan kae Grant, Michael Wesley Ham, Curtis Hamilton, Thomas Holton, Bill Jacobson, Susan Jahoda, Sean Justice, Ed Kashi, Joshua Lutz, Jay Manis, Tanya Marcuse, Karen Marshall, Garret Miller, Yola Monakhov, Kambui Olujimi, Sylvia Plachy, and Andreas Rentch.






White Horse and Burning Brush exhibited at the LiShui Museum in China with photographs by ICP Faculty in Pictures are Words-not-Known

Other Places at CCNY

Becoming 10, 2010
© Kerstin Honeit

Other Places / Curated by Tema Stauffer
November 9 - December 10
Camera Club of New York
336 West 37th Street, Suite 206, New York, NY

Opening Reception on Wednesday, November 9, 6- 8pm

The exhibition at the Camera Club of New York stems from Culturehall Feature Issue 60 published online in January 2011. This issue drew connections between contemporary artists whose work in photography focuses on identities, relationships and environments defined by unconventional expressions of sexuality and gender. As the idea of realizing an exhibition of this work at CCNY evolved, the original group of artists expanded.

Other Places brings together different generations of international artists whose photographs contribute to a dialogue about individuals and communities—past and present—existing in social and political margins based on sexuality and sexual identity. A selection of work by five artists from the United States, Mexico and Germany serves as a foundation for examination of each of their larger series and continuing practices.

Los Angeles-based artist Kaucyila Brooke documents the history of lesbian bars in cities and towns across the United States and Europe. This ongoing project, The Boy Mechanic, has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world throughout the past decade. Other Places includes Brooke’s two-sided offset poster originally produced for exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, depicting photographs of the sites of seventeen former and three current bars, along with narrative descriptions of her encounters with owners and patrons of these establishments. The photographs, videos, maps and text of the larger project create a historical record of lesbian bar culture and assert the significance of these social spaces and the recollections of those who participated in them.

Doug Ischar produced a series of photographs documenting a community of gay men who congregated on a Chicago beach in the mid-1980s. Two of the twenty-six images comprising Marginal Waters are included in the exhibition, and the entire series is reproduced in a catalogue published by Golden Gallery accompanying the first exhibition of prints in 2009. The images convey the relaxed intimacy and open expression of sexuality at the Belmont Rocks, one of the most visible urban gay beaches in North America nearly a quarter of a century ago. Omar Gamez similarly photographs environments where gay men gather to celebrate their physicality and to create bonds without inhibitions. His Natura series provides an insider’s view of a nudist retreat near Mexico City—a weekend meeting spot for men to engage in bare-fleshed communal revelries.

Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America by Molly Landreth reflects a cross-country journey over the course of more than half a decade photographing gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people of various ages, races and economic backgrounds. Two portraits from this study of what it means to be queer in America today focus on Cruz, aka Jalessa, performing drag for the first time in a backyard in Columbus, Ohio, and Clare Mercy, a truck driver and musician perched on the back of her car in Bellingham, Washington. Berlin-based artist Kerstin Honeit, in Becoming 10, explores gender construction through a series of photographs in which she assumes the identities of nine half-siblings whom she has never met. The images appear as film stills of everyday urban scenes in which Honeit performs a cast of vivid male and female characters.

In conjunction with the exhibition of Other Places from November 9 – December 10, 2011, additional images and information about the participating artists will be available through their Culturehall portfolios. Also as part of the Other Places exhibition, CCNY presents a talk with artist Molly Landreth, with an introduction by curator Tema Stauffer on Friday, November 18 at 7pm at the CCNY Studio. Landreth will present work from the Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America series, as well as other bodies of work.

Brian

Brian
Paterson, NJ
September 2011

Tasha

Tasha
Market Street
Paterson, NJ
September 2011

Culturehall Feature 77: NEW ARTISTS, SUMMER 2011

Congratulations to the artists whose work is highlighted in culturehall's NEW ARTISTS FEATURE, SUMMER 2011: Antoine Lefebvre, Jenny Herrick, Bahar Yurukoglu, and Irina Rozovsky.

Our next juried application opens mid-October.

culturehall feature 74: TRACES

The four artists presented in this issue engage in photography’s dialogue with mortality and memory, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. Through individual methods of photographing physical environments, each artist blurs the distinction between what exists and what is imagined or felt. Their relationships to the external world reflect personal investigations into themes of death, dreams, desire, attachment, and transformation. In some works, they look for evidence left behind even where it is not visible on the surface, and in others, they transfigure spaces to express internal realities.

During her early adolescence in Israel, Ayala Gazit learned from her father that she had a half-brother named James who lived in Western Australia with his mother and her children by another father. Six months later, James took his own life at 20-years-old. Driven by a desire to know James through the spaces he had occupied, Gazit traveled to Australia thirteen years after he passed away to search for traces of her brother’s existence in this barren terrain where fierce winds reinforce a feeling of isolation and eerie discordance. Her series of photographs, Was it a dream, convey the mystery and sorrow surrounding his death by focusing on trees, details of rooms, resonant natural light, and deep shadows. Also by combining portraits that she made of living family members with letters exchanged between them, as well as found photographs of James himself, she explores the layers of a complex story surrounding the enormous tragedy of her family’s loss. Together, these pictures and words communicate a haunting sense of absence and a quest for answers to questions that can never be fully answered.

Inspired by late 19th century spirit photographs and Victorian ghost stories written by women, Corinne May Botz collected oral stories and photographed over eighty locations where ghosts were reported throughout the United States. Over the course of nearly a decade, Botz investigated attics, bedrooms, bathrooms, hallways, windows, doors, and staircases in private residences as well as taverns, inns, army barracks, theatres, and museums. The images she made at these sites suggest the notion that the imprint of an event, real or imagined, imbues each place with a metaphorical hauntedness. The photographs reveal psychically charged visual clues about the history of these interiors and their inhabitants, or in some cases, allow the power of empty space and what is not visible or explicit to create mystery and ambiguity. Haunted Houses essentially speaks to the personal and subjective experience of perception of place particularly as it relates to narratives of memory, loss, and mourning. As Botz writes in the introduction to her book, “Houses are real and they are not real; they are both a physical space and a mental space full of dreams and desires.”

The relationship between the external world and the human psyche similarly informs landscape photographs made by Megan Cump. She, too, cites spirit photography as an important influence on her work. Feral explores personal mythology as the artist infuses herself into a sublime wilderness. Traces of her body appear in primordial landscapes, transforming them into mythic and paranormal scenes. Cump retreats into water or fog or dark shadows like an apparition, as animal as she is human. A fire burns in a river, the blood of a human heart stains a frozen waterfall. In Phantoms Limbs, Cump references 19th century paintings by French Realist Gustave Courbet. Reminiscent of the nude figure in his erotically charged L’Origine du monde, the lower region of her body is the focal point of the image – her legs spread under the rush of water – while the surrounding rocks and trees evoke Courbet’s reverent depictions of caves and grottos in other works.

Paola Davila’s photographic studies, Interior Seasons, are surreal and painterly meditations on water as a metaphor for human existence and the passage of time. The recurring motifs of a pillow and a puddle in each scene imply states of being and dreaming; lush color and texture dramatize the visceral beauty of these symbolic beds in natural settings. Davila photographs an actual bedroom, no less dreamlike - a stream of sunlight cast across a pool of fluid soaking dark red sheets. The image is quietly violent, deeply sexual. Elegant folds of the sheets undulate in light and shadow. The glistening liquid is the aftermath of a force and a flow – the revelation of what exists inside of us.

The Chain

'Balance' (set by Ye Rin Mok) - photograph by Tema Stauffer

Stuart Pilkington (curator of The Alphabet Project and the 50 States Project) invited 107 photographers from around the world to participate in The Chain, a series of photographs responding to a title set by the person directly behind them in a chain of photographers. The title they set inspired the photographer in front of them.

I revisited Frye, a disc jockey whom I discovered in the parking lot of Dreamers Video Store in Austin on Christmas Day in 2009. I asked the photographer in front of me, Bieke Deporter, to consider 'oversaturation' - a condition to me that is not just about color density in photography - but also about life in New York, life in the arts, life in the wide wild world of images and the internet. Bieke made something deep, dark, beautiful, and serene.

Please see 105 more links in the chain here: The Chain


'Oversaturation' (set by Tema Stauffer) - photograph by Bieke Deporter