Eyemazing: The New Collectible Art Photography

Product Information

Anna Sansom (AS): Your work often relates to human rights. Has each of your projects always related to shedding light on a specific situation? If he were a character in a fairy tale, he would probably be called the “Cheery Eccentric”. Anton Solomoukha might indeed enjoy that. Fairy tales – Little Red Riding Hood amongst others – fascinate this voluble painter-turned-photographer whose work breathes irony and erotic fantasy. SL: I did that for myself as well. That was personal work. I enjoyed doing that. The street for me is almost like a ballet. They are all these people moving around, freely, aware of each other and unaware of each other, and twirling and swirling around… And of course you don't have to deal with anybody, you don't have to ask for permission. Although I think it's become more difficult to be a street photographer. But I did things that I liked doing. I'm going through my work now and I discover things that I never printed, that I think are maybe interesting. Sometimes I didn't have the money to print everything. And sometimes I didn't see. Sometimes a photograph needs time. Time is sometimes on the side of the photographer. What seems to be prosaic and ordinary in a given moment sometimes, with the passage of time, becomes exotic. Witkin’s work possesses a beauty that often has nothing to do with its sometime disturbing subject matter—but everything to do with the work’s claritas and formosus. The demands and attributes of the beautiful and the awful are the same. They are the twin faces of the Janus of our desires. That which is filled with beauty and that which is filled with awe—withwonder, dread, and reverence have throughouthuman history been the objects that have most powerfully filled our eyes and swayed our hearts. They are what Witkin constructs and reconstructs again and again.

Famous for her photos of beautiful women, Bettina Rheims has been one of France’s most celebrated photographers for almost four decades. understand that the issues were much more complex. I try my best to approach any given project with an open mind and to bridge the gap between “us” andLikewise, Shidomoto captures that separateness between one’s own mortality and the light that will survive it. To look at these photographic mayflies is to share in Shidomoto’s effort. We are “joyfully to see” as much as we possibly can—to embrace, if only for a moment, all those things which cannot last. I wrestle with Earnshaw’s work, having photographed the same streets, at the same time that he did with a camera, for I know now that, after 45 years, anonymity was our greatest friend, there being reciprocity between anonymity and clarity. But I also know as well that we do not bring these works forth only to be lost and forgotten to the world, that we have a responsibility towards the things we create, to insure their survival. So as artists we offer each other a hand held out, we try to save the work, that which truly enriches our lives. It is what sustains for it is our connection to the truth of things. Christ is my life,” he wrote. “I photograph the living and the dead. My work is a prayer. Photographing makes me the possessor of sanctified and secret wisdom. And for that, I will be judged, not by man—but by God.” two haunting series Moksha and Ladli. Both are an indictment of India’s patriarchal society. Moksha is about outcast widows who have found refuge in the holy city of Vrindavan, where they live in ashrams and worship the god Krishna in temples. Their dream is to reach Moksha – or “heaven” – to be liberated from the painful cycle of death and rebirth. Each portrait is Able to manipulate that subtlety in ways which animate even the inanimate, Shidomoto brings his kōga to still life and architecture. When selecting the images for this book, I found myself gripped by the most everyday visions. An ashtray, a straw, a plate, a saltshaker and napkin coalesce into the skyline of some future metropolis, elegant in its geometries and reflections. Whereas the actual cityscapes revert to something even more elemental: pure form, pure light. Ultimately, the many inspired forms of Shidomoto’s photography achieve a difficult balance. Without light, without darkness, no form exists. Shidomoto’s love for what cannot last depends on both, not matter how deeply buried, how painfully retrieved, how brief their flights of ecstasy.

cast aside. This sadness was often countered by the heartening bonds and sisterhood that the widows created amongst themselves, bolstering one other and empowering the community in a way that I hadn’t expected.HS: Some of your images seem to be pointed metaphors for the human condition, while others feel more like open-ended depictions of dreams or fantasies. Would you agree? Or do you see your work as a combination of both, or something else entirely? It is precisely in the breached boundaries of the skin in such imagery that memory continues to be felt as a wound rather than seen as contained other” SL: I did fashion photography, I did advertising… I tried to earn a living, and was not always successful! I had a studio at 156 5th Avenue for a number of years. And I worked for different people and for magazines. Some of my favourite pictures I did with Soames for Nova, which is an English magazine that I liked a lot. And the Art Director of Harper's Bazaar saw my pictures for Nova and said to me: “Why don't you do something like that for us?” So I gave her an idea a few weeks later and she had forgotten what she had told me and she said: “We can't do that! We're Harper's Bazaar!” and that was it! Sometimes I made some money. Sometimes I was very impractical. I bought prints, I bought certain things. I love the works of Bonnard and Vuillard and owned some. I also had a little collection of Japanese prints. I think that the Japanese explored many ideas long before Western artists ever did. Many of Soltau’s earliest drawn portraits are of heads either wrapped in hair or threads, or appear to be decomposing into a series of crazed webs invading and literally de-facing the women she depicts. Kathrin Schmidt’s suggestion that this opens up the possibility for Soltau of getting closer to the haptic thread, that is, of inviting touch, extends the parameters of interpretation of the work. In a Deleuzian reading, the haptic, through sensations connected to touch, enables or stimulates an affective response. In her early portraits, hair as an embodied material, reminds us doubly of the body. The body (in the form of hair) wraps, decomposes or becomes web-like. Soltau shares with us her discovery of the beginnings of a tactile visuality of the human form. Barbara Oudiz (BO): Life for you as a student and an artist in Communist Ukraine was not particularly difficult, you say. Isn’t that surprising?

What better role can photography play than that of the compassionate voyeur—allowing us to step out of our own limited lives and, at least for a moment, and pull us into someone else’s very different existence? The possibility of stimulating our understanding and compassion for another human’s condition, pushing the boundaries of our own contained world—this is ones of the most valuable roles that photography can fulfil. CM: In your panoramas, you play with multiple focal points and depth of field, thereby directing the attention of the viewer much like a film director. How did this photographic device evolve for you? What do you think it communicates? What do you hope the viewer experiences?This collision between sight and touch where suggestions of the haptic were bound into the concept of a process (the etched line that the finger traces on the plate), stimulated Soltau to work more three-dimensionally. She wanted her ‘drawing’ to be felt by the person, for the body to become central to the action, to physically ‘feel’ the thread.

Clayton Maxwell: Could you please tell us about your surrealist, fantastical series titled Rose, C'est Paris? She spoke no Chinese and RongRong no Japanese. Their initial dialogue was almost solely visual—they spoke to each other through their works. For almost two years, before Inri moved to Liulitun, their love subsisted on the sharing of images and rudimentary linguistic communication. They invented a secret language of gestures, expressions, and smatterings of English, Mandarin and Japanese, and collaborated on photography art projects. Their debut collaboration took place during Inri's first visit to China, almost ten months after they met. Naked together on the Great Wall, before the majestic silence of nature, they used a timer and let the camera bear witness. SL: Yes, you are referring to the painted photographs. I have different versions of why I started doing that; I don't know anymore which is true. I once had a print on a counter and I was painting and paint got on it and I think that's how I started to paint photographs… But these days I'm not sure if it's true or if I just made it up!From Picasso’s Mademoiselles de Avignon to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, prostitution has forever been documented in the news, art, and film. Like the best of these representations, Selling Spring peels away the stereotypes and objectification of the sex worker to reveal something deeper. When we see one of his subjects, we don’t see just a stranger, but a reminder of the common human struggle to survive. Delano says, “What interests me is the woman behind this persona created for men’s sexual appetite. She is someone’s sister, daughter, maybe someone’s mother.” At the other end of the age spectrum, Ladli focuses on young girls in orphanages, many of which have been rejected by their parents due to their gender. During his visit what stroked the artist most was not only the people he was able to meet or the partly demolished houses he could visit but rather the over-exaggerated numbers of signs of “PERMIS DE DÉMOLIR” that were placed on the houses and everywhere on the streets.