Eight Photographers


I find it a privilege as a gallery owner to be able to see an amazing amount of new work from a great many emerging artists. Not just from unsolicited e-mail promos that haunt my inbox in a daily basis, but in my many internet wanderings, prowling artist websites and chasing links that start in one country and somehow cris-cross global cyberspace and end up in a completely different place. I go there often. I hear a name, or see an image and like a detective, I search them out. Many times I skim and then go to their links and take off, sometimes I get so wrapped up in the site and the work, I stay and use the contact link.



8 is a selection of eight photographers whom I have found in such a manner. I don’t pretend to have a grand “Next Big Thing” curatorial, or a “New Direction” claim, what I have put together is an exhibition of photographers who managed to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Their work made me stop and consider and motivated my finger to click on the contact button because I had to. This exhibition is, well, a personal aesthetic and I hope you will all enjoy.



Why 2-person, 2-week shows.

I decided on four 2-person 2-week shows to showcase the individual artists work. In a group show, due to limited space, perhaps 2 or 3 images may make it to the wall. This format allows more of the individual artists works to be shown, providing a greater forum of expression and more of a feel for their work.



The opening night will feature everyone on the wall. That night, we strike the show and install the first twosome. Thus the cycle goes, a show ends on a Friday night and a new show opens the next morning.

I first saw Kyoko Hamada’s work on a commercial representatives website. Her work captured my attention for its sense of light and almost Zen like stillness. Her subjects were frozen in her frame, but at the same time its composition created flow. It was a while later, just before meeting for the first time that I found out she was the band mate of one of my represented artists and also the sister of another of my artists. It was fate we were to meet.

Tema Stauffer’s presence has been surfacing on the web, in both exhibition and blog mentions all year. Her “American Stills” series is amazing. A clean look at a fading American landscape brought to light in the form of gas stations. As evil as they are, she almost makes them look human and I sympathize for them.

The one thing we hardly see adorning the walls of a contemporary art gallery is the work of the photojournalist. That’s a shame because some of the most intoxicating work being done today is of a Social Documentary and photojournalistic manner. Jessica Dimmock is one of the bright young stars to enter into that world. For three years she shadowed the lives of several drugged-out inhabitants of a ninth floor apartment just off the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. She documented the intimate lives of these people in all their vulnerability and addictions, their joys and their downward spirals. Her book “The Ninth Floor” is provocative, emotive a must have.

Peter Van Agtmael is a war/conflict photojournalist. He covers the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan and the aftermath that befalls a “troops” when they return home. I have always had a love/hate relationship with war photographers. Their job is to ride shotgun in a moving target. To move closer, closer and still closer to capture the ugliness that is what is considered to be man’s most common injustice to man. They have to be outside the conflict to report it ethically. But how can you be outside a firefight where kids just out of high school are blown to bits in front of your camera, or are shooting at people not much older than themselves. Still, it is a photojournalists images that enact change, sway opinion and “tell the truth” about what horror really is. Peter’s images of a night raid in Iraq that turns deadly will haunt your dreams.

Alexandra Catiere’s portraits are disarming. Born in Belarus, Alexandra points her camera through the winter slush stained windows of a trolley bus in Minsk. The images, contrasty, black and white apparitions capture a people of little emotion. They are sullen and haunted, lonely and in some manner reminiscent of having just boarded a bus to an eternity of sorrow. These images are a dialogue between Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders both of whom wish to drive. They are beautiful and intimate and allude to a past, or is it a future?

Shen Wei is simply my favorite portrait photographer of the moment. He manages to meet random people on the street, or a grocery, or wherever and over the course of a few conversations gets his subjects to allow him intimate access to their lives. The portraits are beautiful in their natural ease. Not a shred of pretension in evident. They are as honest and real as his subjects. In a world of false portraiture in the face of advertising, these portraits speak of humanity and I think that is both frightening and magical and honest.

I have forgotten where I first saw Alison Brady’s work, but I am so glad it stuck in my mind. Her work is a psychological research project on photographic paper discussing madness and alienation in relation to contemporary culture. Her subjects act out ritualistic exercises to gain some sort of normalcy or dominance over their neurosis. The exaggerated emotions and actions make alarming imagery.

I was flipping through the maze of Japanese websites, strewn with symbols I wish I could read when I stumbled on Ryoko Suzuki’s Bind Series. I have to admit, it freaked me out. Suzuki had bound her face with blood soaked pigskin, pulled so tightly it contorted her face. I loved them so much, I called her and offered her representation on the spot. “Bind” is Suzuki’s declaration of independence from the “Adult” teachings and beliefs she adopted without question as a child. Her facial and body contortions are her document, what is left when the skin is removed, off camera, is her coming of age