Moscow, Ohio, 1997 © Andrew Borowiec/Courtesy of Sasha Wolf Gallery, NYC

With consistent formality—disciplined use of line, frame and subtle light—Andrew Borowiec transforms the banality of the Midwest industrial landscape into compelling black and white photographs that are powerful for their quiet contemplation and topographic rendering. Along The Ohio is a masterful series of photographs, on view through January 7 at Sasha Wolf Gallery in New York City.

Market, Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania. 2003, from Tessa Bunney’s Hand to Mouth series. © Tessa Bunney

For the Holiday season, Klompching Gallery has launched it’s Winter Salon: Group Exhibit, featuring a selection of photographs by gallery artists Tessa Bunney, Antony Crossfield, Elaine Duigenan, Max de Esteban, Cornelia Hediger, Doug Keyes, Paula McCarthy, Jim Naughten, Helen Sear, and Vojtech V. Slama. Winter Salon: Group Exhibit will be on view through January 20th at Klompching Gallery in New York.

All photos © Machiel Botman/Courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York. Above: “Julia, 2007″.

An exhibition at Gitterman Gallery in New York City of Machiel Botman’s black-and-white photographs from the past ten years is concurrent with the release of his third monograph, One Tree (Nazraeli Press, 2011). A key figure in Dutch photography, Botman has always photographed as a way to understand life. He is not restrained by photographic conventions; rather, Botman utilizes a variety of exposures, depths of field and focal distances, resulting in a style that is uniquely his own. His books are equally singular. They are autobiographical and chronicle the stages in his life, but they do not follow a linear narrative.

(more…)

All photos © Ken Schles.

Ken Schles’s fourth monograph Oculus (published in the Netherlands by Noorderlicht), considers the nature of images in various guises: Images in memory and the use of the image as a construct to define our personhood or to define our world, as well as the image on the printed page. Oculus looks at the image as it functions as a metaphor in all its forms. But the investigations we see here are not idle or abstract. The root of this exploration, what gave birth to and sustained these inquiries, was a deeply personal (and somewhat troubling) set of circumstances. Inspired by the opening lines of Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory (”The cradle rocks above an abyss, but common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”), Schles made these images of sleeping children and compared them to a kind of somnambulism he was experiencing. He explains, “…the world, as I once knew it, had unraveled. I still acted as if things were as they had been. I was the sleepwalker moving through the bedrooms of these still and silent children, all tucked in their beds. Eventually, I came to realize that seeing is, in many ways, only ‘believing.’”

Perhaps it is because of this inescapable truth that we hold on as best we can to our effervescent memories—memories filled with spaces of light and dark—and full of mutating images. But wherever our fortunes reside we must ultimately negotiate our lives between ignorance and knowledge, between incoherence and significance, between, as Nabokov wrote, our “two eternities of darkness.” Schles will be signing books at the International Center of Photography in New York City on Thursday, December 15th from 6:30 to 7:30.

(more…)

© Brian Finke

New York-based editorial and fine art photographer Brian Finke photographed this image at the Annual General Meeting of Lenovo while on assignment for Fast Company. He explains,”I knew nothing about them other than the [summary] of the piece: ‘Once an unlikely rival for HP and Apple, Chinese computer maker Lenovo has grown and adapted as quickly as its homeland. Now with a savvy blend of East and West, it’s poised to be China’s first global brand’. On face value, that doesn’t have the same sex appeal as, say, a swimwear safari in Tanzania with Regis Philbin and Julie Delpy. But these gatherings of businessmen always seem to turn up fertile ground.  Something about the mass uniformity, the implicit understanding of codes and practices, the behavioral semiotics, the tribal mentality, allows for a kind of photo-anthropology thing to emerge. Like hanging with the Masai or Eskimos.  The handshakes, the practiced smiles, the learned (and understood) gestures, set against deliberately conservative, serious yet unthreatening textures of suits and upholstery: It’s always a rich vein.”