As our pre-screening heroes finish their work this week, I will attempt to loosely categorize the varied content that emerging photographers put forth into the world via Critical Mass this year. We received submissions from people in 36 countries. What matters to them at this point in time? How are they portraying people, places, ideas, feelings? Below is a visual sifting of method, content and trends that I jotted down during my pre-screening. Please note that no topic listed has any more weight than another, and this certainly is not an all-inclusive list. The point of this record is to give a condensed peek at the topics photographers find personally relevant enough to create bodies of work around:
Format/mediums: digital, 4x5, 8 x 10, 35mm, Rolleiflex camera/120mm film, infrared film, Holgas, SX70/Polaroid, pinhole, “light drawings” (no camera), ICM (intentional camera movement), animation stills, “hyper-collage”, medical imaging/collage, x-ray film, photomontages, ziatypes, chemigrams, cyanotypes, Polaroid peel-away film, Polaroid transfers, Google Street view images, transparencies, silver gelatin, platinum/palladium, pigment prints, wet-plate collodian process…Appropriated imagery: appropriated from other artists, vintage photography, ‘found’ photography, family archival photography.
Price range:$39 to $9500
Influences: Anselm Kiefer, Clarence John Laughlin and Jerry Uelsmann, Susan Sontag, Leonard Cohen, Diane Arbus, Edward Hopper, Atget, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jeff Wall, Rineke Dijkstra, Alec Soth, Thomas Struth, Irving Penn, Richard Avadon, Luis Gonzales Palma, James Agee, Ernest Hemmingway, Cezanne, Walker Evans, James Agee, Disfarmer, Nan Goldin, Imogene Cunningham, Annie Pike Greenwood. Dadaism, Surrealism, Impressionism…
Places/about: Rangoon, Montana, San Francisco, Greece, Haifa, Nairobi, Hawaii (the pre-conception and the real), Capetown, Tanzania, the Rocky Mountains, the Catskills, the Guarani Tribe in Brazil, civil war in Sri Lanka, Palazzos in Venice, Martha’s Vineyard, New Orleans post-Katrina, Albanian identity, Latvia, Appalachia/West Virginia, India, San Andreas Fault, Guatemala City, California, Cuba, Gorno-Badakhshan Province, “The West”, “The South”, “The Orient”, “The Great Plains”, Egypt, Leicester’s industrial past, Australian pastimes, Florida’s Gold Coast, Silo City, homogenous culture in Hong Kong, lives of disabled Afghans post-war, Bolivian circus, new generation in Poland, gravesites in Columbia, Capital Hill/Washington DC, Coney Island, Urban Detroit, Sudanese refugees, social transformations in Nepal, Gowanus Canal, Silicone Valley electrical lines, St. Simons Island (Georgia), Ruegen (Baltic Sea island), homicide sites in Chicago…
Landscapes/Nature: Nocturnal Landscapes of off-season Mediterranean beaches, roots/shrubs, wrapped bushes, “Mother Earth”, night imagery, spaces of ‘dross’, flowers, Urban Nature, man-altered landscape, interior landscapes of Brazil, Central Park, aerials of human-altered landscapes, angels trumpets, industrial landscapes, mountains, seascapes, primitive landscapes of Florida, French Folly gardens, real and imagined trees…
Portraits: Self-portraits (conceptual and realistic), filmmakers, super heroes, subway riders, Guatemalan city dwellers, farmers & chefs promoting organic food practices, one’s “dancing lover”, “Portraits of a Generation”, characters in Portland, Oregon, Holocaust survivors, Tibetan refugees, people with the autoimmune disease Alopecia Areata, ROTC Cadets, long-term relationship gay couples, self-portraits as a “salary-man”, opera characters, bearded men, American military veterans, children role-playing, Russian people, figures in water, three generations of Romanian women, Civil War re-enactors, commuters, children in Zimbabwe with facial disfigurations, Japanese citizens on streets, people living in Lustron Homes, known artists active in early part of 20thcentury, teens, folks in their “Golden Years", rodeo girls, faces constructed with flora, fauna & animal parts, surfers, primates in captivity…
Socio-documentary themes: Hinduism, “On Gender”, “Sworn Virgins” in Albania, NYC’s Bike Renaissance, sanctuaries/intentional communities, urban street studies/cityscapes, Irish “travellers”, cultural transitions from old to new, memorials to those lost to the “war on terror”, bus-riders/socio-economic factor, decreasing masculinity in Japan, abandoned hotel interiors, plastic surgery, urban “no trespassing” zones, “Black Lung” history in Ireland, Fukushima’s nuclear disaster/radioactive material found in family members, aerial perspectives of prisons, individual & collective identity/intermarriage, tradition in Japan through images of women and bonsai, cultural dynamics surrounding the identities of Mexican-American women, rural Zionist churches, women in abusive relationships, global proliferation of urban sprawl, the sudden radicalization of previously apolitical, marginalized & disturbed individuals, the effect of shock media on children’s psyches, Klan rallies, bachelorette parties, extreme tanning, people on Rodeo Drive, American Apparel billboards, social protest through graffiti in Russia, animal overpopulation, midnight party romps in Madrid, lawn mower races in Texas, psychological components of twin daughters, hardhats bearing stickers that reflect identity, psychology of US/Mexico border, Japanese traditional identity post-Fukushima, fiscal responsibility for grandparent with Alzheimer’s, women’s relationship to guns, cultural ancestry, economic hardship/recession, urban architecture as a reflection of psyche, Russian identity, migrants in California’s Central Valley, communities of utopian vision, psychological ailments of luxury class/generation, interiors of foreclosed homes, lives of monks in Myanmar, Colony Collapse Disorder, grandparents living separate lives during retirement…
Issues of sexuality: Wrestling/homoeroticism, gay youth prom, the “Invisible Forties”, the rejection of traditional female nude in landscape, transgender communities in Cuba and other places, Arab male masculinity, the media’s portrayal of women, sexuality vs. sensuality, homosexuality in black communities, homosexuality in Cuban communities, gender non-conforming boys, LGBT youth…
Imagery as Therapy/emotional issues: Dealing with a father’s death, leaving a home/place, insecurity/disconnectedness, depression, memories, loss of friends through documenting light, melancholia, parents aging, mother-daughter relationships, autism, ‘Pro-Ana’/promotion of anorexia as a life style choice, loss of a friend, anxiety-based mental illness/definition of normalcy, resolving issues with father through images of military service, opposition to boyfriend’s love of guns, documenting a daughter’s transition from child to woman, issues of abandonment/decay, x-rays of bodies suffered during violence in El Salvador, loss of a spouse, nightmares, finding a sense of place, betrayal, sibling’s failing health, D & C experience, childhood abandon and neglect, inability to sleep at night, psychology of family relationships, loss of self-identity in mothers, search for peace after loss, playful collaboration between mother and child with Down’s Syndrome, divorce, perpetual anxiety, dark side of child play, adopting child with disabilities, father’s suicide, going deaf/adjustment of senses, the compulsion to self-injure…
Tangible/specific: Country fairs, trees, flowers, horses, museums, “modern relics”/signage, estate sales, billboards, dachas, layered street posters, hood ornaments, hands, negatives from the 1970’s found in a Jerusalem portrait studio, atomic overlooks, intimate appliances, dried remains of single-malt scotch, Islamic tile patterns as a mathematical construct, slaughterhouses, ink factory interiors, taxidermy, property lines, co-eds on Yale campus, bedrooms, rest areas, rock quarries in Vermont, power lines in the West, the escape route of John Wilkes Booth, enlarged water samples, a traveling circus, interpretive tarot cards, objects of potential legacy, the Fourtieth Parallel, RV’s at night, animals, sites of abandonment, basement sanctuaries, TNT storage sites, the aftermath of wildfires, 24 hour self-service car wash, balloons, tire marks on road barriers, house interiors, house exteriors, Amtrak travel, cells from the human body…
Abstract: “factual record/abstract construction”, “the mysterious” , “the hollow”, “empirical study of ballistics and geometry”, “home”, “internal landscapes”, disembodiment/holding one’s breath, stone meditations, mental breakdown, defining a void, collisions of cultural values, genetic code, decay, dreaming, gambling, markers of time, feelings of atmospheric love, death/art-history, the path into the world, beauty, happiness, deep intimacy of friendship that can exist between men, the sublime, limbo, cellular and the metaphysical connections of the natural world, photography without permission, broken dreams, fleeting days of childhood summer, being human, poetry of the everyday, the feminine mystic journey, faith, notions of strengthening, our collective American consciousness, states of decay, energy consumption, walking as a form of meditation, the use of advanced simulation techniques within the fields of medicine, people/objects standing for narratives of belief systems, surprises in the common place…
All of the Critical Mass 2013 submissions are recorded on DVD and sent to all who entered. The DVD is a great learning resource - we hope that photographers will utilize this record of Critical Mass to look at the work of their contemporaries and think about how their own photography fits into the larger survey of work being produced internationally.
Next week: Finalist list will be announced!
