#photography – Art Spiel

December 18, 2024December 17, 2024

Oskar Landi: Trekking unfamiliar environments

Hot Air

Oskar Landi was born and raised in Italy. In 1998, he moved to New York to pursue art, arriving with two tools: a saxophone and a camera. Over time, the camera became the better instrument for making a living. With several years of experience as a photo assistant in Europe, he adapted to New York’s photography industry, building a basic commercial and editorial client base that allowed him to sustain himself while continuing to explore the medium’s possibilities.

September 9, 2024October 6, 2024

Reshaping space through photography: Anna Berenice Garner & Janila Castañeda

IN CONVERSATION

*Anna Berenice Garner, installation view of exhibition titled, Topografías y otras ficciones, image courtesy of Lateral gallery*

For a few months now, Anna and I have been discussing her practice in preparation for her most recent solo show in Mexico City titled Topografías y otras ficciones. As we have been navigating concepts around the notions of landscape and the role of the image in the construction of truth, our exchanges included topics such as the body and its relationship with space, methods of reshaping space through photography, as well as the potential of merging sculpture and photography to rethink the environments that construct the unquestionable truths under which we guide our existence. This interview compiles key points from our face-to-face and written exchanges while capturing insights into the artist’s current approach to her work.

May 13, 2024December 6, 2024

David Samuel Stern: Does a portrait need a subject?

Stern positioning two fabric-wrapped models during a shoot in Chelsea in 2022. Photo by Jaymye Thomas

In 2018, I interviewed David Samuel Stern about his process of creating woven photographic portraits. In these portraits, he interlaced photographs into intricate, tactile artworks, emphasizing the medium’s tangible qualities. Stern has been relentlessly exploring what it means to portray through photography and the medium’s place as a recorder of time and nature. Since our initial interview, he has produced captivating new work. Here, we survey his evolution over the last six years and his current work.

April 8, 2024April 8, 2024

The Burden Archives

Featured Project

Western Addition sign, photo Sheila Stover/Erni Burden circa 1960

A 1949 US Federal law set the stage for crisis-level upheaval. Cities across the country used the money it provided to launch “urban renewal” projects that often only added misery to the communities they professed to be helping. In San Francisco, a largely Black neighborhood in Western Addition was targeted on the premise that the vibrant ‘Harlem of the West’ was blighted. This misconception has gone unchallenged until now, thanks to the photographic documentation Ernest Burden III exposed in his late father’s immense photograph archive.

December 15, 2023December 24, 2023

Photograph anemones, not wars: The legacy of Roee Idan

A field of flowers under a blue sky with Hitachi Seaside Park in the background

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This article was initially published in Portfolio Magazine in Hebrew on October 25, 2023. It was translated into English and edited by Art Spiel. This publication in Art Spiel is in collaboration with Portfolio Magazine.

Photographer and photojournalist Roee Idan preferred to aim his lens at capturing the quiet drama of nature rather than the fraught tension along Israel’s borders—the first anemone bloom, the winter streams of the northern Negev, the majesty of flash floods in the desert, and the joy of bathers on the beach in summer.

November 7, 2023November 6, 2023

Reef Avni – This Was My Home

Photo Story

For 18-year-old photographer Reef Avni, photography became a way to speak at 14 when words were hard to find, a tool against his social anxiety. His father, Hagi, was not only a strong supporter but also a frequent face in his photos, becoming an integral part of the narrative Reef was creating with his camera. The other constant in Avni’s work is documenting daily life in his Kibbutz. As a fourth-generation member of Kibbutz Be’eri, his roots were as embedded in the kibbutz as the farmlands and community his great-grandfather founded in the arid Negev in the south of Israel on the night of October 6, 1946. His grandfather was among its first newborns.

October 18, 2018December 6, 2024

David Samuel Stern’s Portraits: The Mechanics of Longing

For photographer David Samuel Stern’s photography typically serves as a departure point for crafting tangible objects. In his Woven Portraits series for instance, Stern physically assembles pieces of his photographic portraits into new forms, aiming to fuse the notion of photographic representation with its own material nature, making a new essence. The imagery in this series may bring to mind Cubists’ and Futurists’ paintings, or David Hockney’s Polaroids, but in Stern’s hybrid artworks, the imagery derives from a photographer’s imagination and can be distinctly traced to our digital age – the manual counterpoints the virtual. Here Stern shares with Art Spiel some of his ideas, process, and projects.

Aaron; 2015; Photographic prints on archival translucent vellum, physically cut and woven together; 40 x 31 x ¼ in, 101.5 x 78.75 x 1.25 cm; Courtesy David Samuel Stern

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