Andrea Meislin Gallery (New York) presents the work of nine contemporary photographers. Each of these artists use a variety of modern technologies to create compelling images and explore the boundaries of constructed or staged photography.
Ilit Azoulay’s photographic process focuses on the fabrication of a completely staged visual environment. She creates a space of research and examination by sampling and scanning with a 35 mm digital camera and a macro lens. The process is both time-consuming and extremely diligent, but it is also the basic condition that enables her works to exist. Azoulay’s environment is built out of collected materials that were once a part of something larger but are now a testimony of something that is no more, objects that have lost their functionality.
Michal Chelbin documents women and men, teenage girls and boys, and new mothers as they pass their days in seven prisons throughout Ukraine and Russia. Though the title of the project is “Sailboats and Swans,” the series features stark portraits of the lives of the inmates.
Using pre-modern photographic techniques, Ofri Cnaani embraces technological failures to give her Cyanotypes rich pictorial qualities. Expanding out of her interest in live-cinema performances, Cnaani places film, silhouettes, paper cut-outs, tiny objects and broken glass over coated paper to create strikingly enigmatic scenes. Through this process, she produces unique images that occupy the space between photography and drawing.
Andy Freeberg spent time in four of Russia’s great museums photographing the “babushkas” who guard the country’s artistic treasures. These women, retired from careers as varied as dentistry and accounting, appear to take on the characteristics of the works they are guarding.
Barry Frydlender’s large-scale composites are seamlessly pieced together from multiple individual images to create remarkably detailed photographs that capture time, depth, and history. This vivid color panorama taken in Malibu following a terrific fire appears to be a photojournalistic document, yet the variant focal lengths hint at a passage of time that might involve several minutes or hours. Regardless of the subject, or where they were photographed, these modern-day history paintings avoid any notion of obvious staged tableaux.
Naomi Leshem’s Sleepers shows young people between the ages of 16 and 20 as they sleep in their beds. The subjects are from America, France, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, and Germany. Leshem set up the camera, waited until they were asleep for 90 minutes, and then photographed the sleepers in their unconscious state. They are in an “in between” state of limbo.
Angela Strassheim’s photographs are re-constructions loosely based on her conservative, Midwestern upbringing. Her work focuses on the realm of the domestic and much of it is also on religious questioning and the history of place. Subjects are drawn from the underlying incongruities of idyllic suburbia, the complicated psychology of family life, struggles with religion and the pleasures and terrors of love.
Tal Shochat creates staged and intimate portraits of trees found throughout Israel. Photographed at night with backdrops and artificial lighting, the trees are at the same time decontextualized from their natural environment. Her latest series of photographs are all about fruits found in the Bible – such as pomegranates, figs, and apples.
Sharon Ya’ari’s Jerusalem Blvd. is a pair of prints taken with a large format camera of the same scene of the same Tel Aviv apartment building. The pair, one in black and white and one in color, “subtly insinuates narrative commentary on a lived-in utopia.” The black and white version represents the European influence of the Bauhaus’s utilitarian architecture on the area while the color version shows Israeli attempts at beautification with the addition of brightly painted concrete and colored bulbs.
