I Write Artist Statements. Liz Sales
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the items imaged began as useful objects, but as a result of human behavior, negligence, or forgetfulness, they ended up on the street. I transform this trash into art with an important message: I am a special person who sees beauty everywhere.
Fans of my street photography often ask me, “Is that real, or did you use Photoshop?” I do not “mess with nature.” I create art. I am a photographer who posts final images straight from my camera to Flack Photo’s Facebook page. These images are true in the truest sense and fully express who I am and what I see in the most literal sense. When I take a picture of a seagull soaring over Bay Harbor, I am not speaking about elevated consciousness or self-confidence or whatever else you’ve written in my comments section; I am taking a great picture of a bird, by panning my camera along in time with this moving subject so that the bird is a relatively sharp subject but the background is blurred. Panning is a technique that can produce amazing results if you perfect it, which I have.
Some say the term “photographer” fails to accurately describe the vast majority of artists working with cameras. These people are wrong. A real photographer is able to perfectly capture the scene in front of him and share it with his online community. If he is honest and open, he will also share his ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. This technical information is the artist’s real artist statement. “Artist statements” as the liberal elite are taught to write them, in their nurseries of “higher learning,” add nothing to the photographic image, which should speak for itself.
May the light be with you!
Gustav M. Christoffersen (b. 1992, Oakland) is a space artist who creates photo-based pulp sculptures as an architectural stage for his social practice, which is concerned with the narrative of cyclical realities. Christoffersen urges us to renegotiate physical realities as being part of oppressing themes in our post-contemporary, image-based society. By choosing formal non-solutions, he creates hyper-personal moments born by means of omissions, refusal, and Elmer’s glue. He invites the viewer round and round in circles of photographic sculptural matter. He manipulates these structures in order to deconstruct socially defined spaces and their uses and post-possibilities.
Multilayered conceptualism arises in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly real reality is queried. The results are deconstructed so that meaning is soaked in possible interpretations of impossibility. With an under-conceptual approach, he creates with daily, recognizable photographic imagery an unprecedented situation in which the viewer is shown the conditioning of his or her own image space and has to reconsider their own life.
The artist’s forms do not follow logical criteria but are constructed through subjective associations and formal realities, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations by rejecting and re-rejecting seemingly objective narratives. His works directly respond to the surrounding environment and frame instances that would go unnoticed outside of his constructed context. By applying anti-abstraction techniques, he tries to approach a broad range of subjects in a multilayered way, likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes physical, and believes in the idea of function following form in an anti-work.
Indycay Ermanshay established name recognition with a once-innovative brand of self-portraiture. Her series Untitled Movie Posters (1979) pictured the artist herself in re-creations of 1940s and 1950s film noir movie posters. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs, and makeup, she enacted female clichés from film posters of stylish Hollywood crime dramas for the camera. These works reexamine women’s roles in history and contemporary society.
Pinup Girl (1998) is a series of photographs of the artist herself enacting female clichés present in 1960s pinup posters. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs and makeup, she enacted female clichés from pinup-girl posters of the 1960s. These works continually reexamine women’s roles in history and contemporary society.
Dutch Mistresses (1988) is a series of photographs of the artist herself enacting female roles from the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs, and makeup, she enacted female clichés from 17th-century Europe. These works continually reexamine women’s roles in history and contemporary society over and over and over and over and fucking over again.
Customer (2008) is a series of photographs of the artist herself dressed up like wealthy art collectors. Always in meticulous costumes, wigs, and makeup, she produced a series in which she dresses like the women who champion and patronize her work. These works give credence to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Vlad the Impaler (b. 1431, Sighişoara, Transylvania) is an artist who mainly works with photography. By employing flat formal solutions, his photography has a distinct lack of visual drama in a way that echoes his undead soul. In turn, the image approaches an objective gaze where the subject, rather than the photographer’s perspective on it, is paramount.
The Impaler’s images are flattened out, formally and dramatically, in the manner of the typologies and straight photography espoused by his teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. The Impaler’s best-known project is Mina, a series of 60 frontal, identically framed photographs of Wilhelmina Harker, the reincarnation of the artist’s centuries-dead wife, Elisabeta, staring deadpan into the camera. As a lifeless monster, he does not believe in psychological portrait photography the way his colleagues do. He is not trying to capture the character of his subject. He believes he can only show the surface; everything beyond that is up to the viewer.
Due to his interest in reincarnation, authenticity and appropriation are of recurring interest to the Impaler. He further explored these ideas in Bran Castle, a photographic collection of portraits of the artist’s childhood home and other Transylvanian castles, all taken from the same angle with the light evenly distributed, and printed in identical size. The intense and obsessive nature of the Impaler’s project mirrors the soulless order of industrial production, a phenomenon that greatly altered the 500-year-old vampire’s world and worldview. Vlad the Impaler currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida.
Biography: Jason Blank, America’s Most Prolific Postcard Photographer
Jason Blank’s postcards celebrate the wonder and invention of the landscape, drawing on everything from early pictorial photography to German Romantic painting. From local post offices to tourist information centers to airport newspaper kiosks, Blank’s grand-guignolesque sensibility deepens our complex relationship to nature. Despite a dwindling need for postcards, Blank continues to shoot San Francisco, Boston, New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Montreal, and Vancouver over and over again, with a passion both terrifying and sublime. He also has an obsessive interest in folk culture, and his predilection for “the exotic” seamlessly combines the racist traditions of early photography, Romanticism, and postcard photography. Blank, of course, also considers himself a supremely individual creator and uses a drone to shoot landmarks from a high viewpoint and transcendent common experience to reach deeper spiritual truths or something.
I first learned that I was an artist from my Aunt Sarah. She’d seen a collage I’d made for a school assignment, a self-portrait casting myself as Medusa, and proclaimed me “a natural.” Later I found photography through my brother-in-law Billy, who invited me over to take pictures of him. I captured the curve of his spine of his back, and through this