29 October 2009

Away

I will be away for two weeks starting tomorrow and I will not be updating the blog in that period. But I will return. Please return as well.

Road – Nevada Desert, Ansel Adams

28 October 2009

Untitled

NVM015036-002
Cordoba (Spain), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

27 October 2009

‘SCAPE: Evandro Teixeira

Voltar / Return
Ruins of Canudos Old Church, Evandro Teixeira

26 October 2009

Untitled

NVM014029-002 
Neves-Corvo Mines (Portugal), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

22 October 2009

FOCUS: “Father:Land” by Ara Oshagan

“My father died in June 2000.
A few years before that, he and I decided to embark on a project about Karabagh: a remote mountainous area next to Armenia. A region where the Armenians fought and won a fierce war of independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A region still with militarized borders and no political recognition. A place in transformation: the people, the land, the very way of life in political, social, existential upheaval. A place that is part of
our distant homeland.
(…)
Father:Land is a project about origins and identity. A project about a place and a people emerging out of a dark history, transforming, forging a new identity, searching for themselves and a new way of life. And also about a very personal becoming, an emergence.”
in Ara Oshagan’s website

Kashatagh region, near the border with Iran, 2006

20 October 2009

Untitled

NVM014024-002
Castro Verde (Portugal), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

19 October 2009

FOCUS: ‘Foreclosure and Abandonment’ by Eve Morgenstern

“Influenced by Walker Evans’s images of vernacular architecture in the United States and Bernd and Hilla Becher’s images of houses and industrial buildings in Germany, this project will be an extensive archival record of the unstable state of the American home today and will expand to include images from Las Vegas, Stockton, Tampa, Denver, Buffalo and Cleveland.”
in Burn Magazine

“In this particular body of work I explore the American cities of Detroit and Oakland where the architecture and stability of the home is under duress.”
in Eve Morgenstern’s website

eve_morgenstern_abandoned_house

16 October 2009

Untitled

NVM013029-002
Paris (France), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

15 October 2009

‘SCAPE: Edgar Martins


From “Accidental Theorist” series, Edgar Martins

13 October 2009

Untitled

NVM014021-002 
Pulo do Lobo (Portugal), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

12 October 2009

FOCUS: ‘Massillon’ by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French

“(…) their visual language and spirit find root in a shared responsiveness to sources in 19th-century art and  culture. As a result, Charbonneau & French, who have collaborated since 2003, have compiled an impressive body of work brimming with mystery and sensuality,
self-consciously but elegantly Gothic—stills, it would seem, from an Edgar Allan Poe film adaptation directed by Ingmar Bergman, or Fellini’s take on Lewis Carroll.
(…)
Although many of the images provide an erotic frisson, the effects are less soft-core than soft-edge, applying a present-day visual interpretation of the “romantic” to the true romanticism—erratic, obsessed, tempestuous—of the 19th century”

by Peter Frank in On View
Charbonneau and French website

11 October 2009

Untitled

NVM014020-002
Pulo do Lobo (Portugal), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

08 October 2009

EROS: Irving Penn


Gisele Bundchens, Irving Penn

Photographer Irving Penn dies, aged 92

07 October 2009

From the series: Aseptic

Aseptic   adj., 1. Free of pathogenic microorganisms; Using methods to protect against infection by pathogenic microorganisms. 2. Lacking animation or emotion.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
NVM013033-002
Paris (France), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

Previous from the same series

05 October 2009

EROS: Jan Saudek


Little Jane, Jan Saudek 1988

01 October 2009

From the series: Deus Ex Machina

In the ancient Greek dramatic theater (and later on the Roman), to enhance the ‘terrible’ effect, a deity’s statue was lowered by means of a machinery – the Deus Ex Machina. Often, this was the turnaround point, when the divinity would bring the solution to a difficulty or to a probable dead end. Still, today’s people expect their god to bring them miracles as a reward of their faith. It is their despair that keeps the machina working.

Deus ex machina comes from Latin and is literally ‘god from a machine’. The camera, made from intricate mechanisms, mirrors and optical prisms, is a perfect alchemist tool were inorganic chemistry delivers the epistemological immortality imprisoned in the gelatinous emulsion. The camera as the machina.
NVM013031-002
Paris (France), Nuno Vieira Matos, 2006 (gelatine silver print) – click to enlarge

Previous from the same series

FOCUS: “The Muddy Pastorales” by Jindřich Štreit

“When I take photographs, I am thinking about it a lot. I admit that the village excites me still. Being in France or some other country, when I am driving a car in some landscape and looking at the people in the field, I sometimes think I will go mad. This gets me going somehow. But because one is driving there for some other reason, one says to oneself. No, you must not. I am finding myself in such difficult moments quite often…Village is for me eternal subject matter. I thought over in which other villages I still could be tempted to take photographs, in Greece, Portugal… Many other themes could be named. What is important, however, is to get oneself more under the surface.”

Jindřich Štreit’s website