Neal Johnson

Neal Johnson

Dana Stirling

Landforms | is a study of Iceland’s geothermal extraction infrastructure and its relation to the natural landscape in which it exists. The way in which the structures have been designed, whether intentionally or coincidentally, have a mass and a volume and an aesthetic that echo the natural landforms around them. These photographs explore how natural landforms and manmade landforms coexist in this unique environment while still maintaining an egalitarian and harmonious relationship towards each other. Using a 6x7 medium format camera to achieve optimal clarity and resolution for this process, Neal has been photographing Iceland for the past two years, examining this infrastructure and its relationship to the natural world. www.nealparkerjohnson.com

shesaidred

shesaidred

Dana Stirling

Mood, Memory, or Myth | My ongoing series Mood, Memory, or Myth is an exploration of the human experiences and memories of fear, anxiety, and pleasure, and the impact of growing up in a family that refuses to discuss any of that. Sex, sadness, death, and family illnesses are subjects that my family considers taboo. My family's inability to discuss these subjects openly left me without a voice. I discovered that the simple act of photographically depicting these forbidden subjects empowers me, allowing me to explore my feminine desires, my sadnesses, and to come to terms with my Mexican culture's and family's expectations of me as a female: to wed and have children. I create illusions that conjure the realms of the imagination without presenting a factual reality. Something very personal and complex, but which allows viewers to relate freely on their own terms. I use these subjects and memories to help me navigate the anxieties caused by my family’s expectations of me as a woman, and to fill the space left by my family’s silence on these taboos.

I work traditionally, shooting film, Polaroids, paper negatives, and making darkroom chromogenic prints, occasionally incorporating mixed media. Analog production allows me to insert more of myself into each print. www.shesaidred.com

Dotan Saguy

Dotan Saguy

Dana Stirling

Venice Beach | In a city inspired by Hollywood’s excesses keeping racial, ethnic and socioeconomic differences under a tight lid, the Palm tree lined Venice Beach boardwalk is an oasis of spontaneity, diversity, and bohemian lifestyle where weirdness is encouraged and the moment is all there is.
I’ve been irresistibly attracted yet intimidated by Venice Beach ever since I moved to Los Angeles from New York in 2003. After all, this “Coney Island of the West” as some used to call it is nothing less than the birthplace of the worldwide fitness movement and modern skateboarding, also greatly influential to the world of rock music, surfing and street art.


My images immortalize decisive moments of Venice Beach’s quirky sub-cultures using complex multi-layered compositions. The choice of high-contrast black and white, unusual angles and back-light infuse the images with an edgy yet dreamlike quality that “feel” like Venice Beach to me. I aim to the place the viewer at the center of Venice’s edgy, eccentric but endangered culture, now quickly being eroded by gentrification and corporate appropriation. https://www.dotansaguy.comwww.dotansaguy.com

Stephan Jahanshahi

Stephan Jahanshahi

Dana Stirling

Domestic Interior | In November 2018 I got hurt at work. I’ve always carried the majority of my identity in the things I do; playing rugby, working manual labor, taking photographs. That all came to a screeching halt and was replaced by nerve pain, inertia, and insomnia while I waited for Washington State to process my medical claim and put me on a path to eventual surgery in the hope of getting my life back.

I don’t move around enough in the day to get tired by night, so most evenings my wife goes to bed alone. These images are for her, while we both wait for me to come back to a normal life. www.stephanjahanshahi.com

Heather Binns

Heather Binns

Dana Stirling

Visiting the Brazzales | Moving to Portland, Oregon from Michigan almost 20 years ago was a leap of faith.

I had no job, no family, and no friends. Still, Portland felt right. Years after moving I discovered a family connection to the city through my maternal great-grandparents, Daniel and Marguerite Brazzale. They moved to Portland in the early 1940s and died in the city I now call home.

My great-grandparents are entombed in the Portland Memorial Mausoleum; a behemoth of a historical structure covering over 4 acres, spanning 8 floors and over 4 miles of corridors. 75,000 memorials in the form of bodies and cremated remains are interred in the Portland Memorial Mausoleum, and it was here that I went to discover more about the lives and deaths of my Portland roots; the Brazzales.

Over the past several years, I’ve visited the Mausoleum and the Brazzales numerous times. I am fascinated by the structure itself and by the emotions it stirs. I am intrigued by the way the structure mirrors American views on death and dying; mausoleums are a seemingly extreme attempt to stop the natural processes of decay. Granite tombs, sealed tightly against the years encased in a structure of steel and concrete thought to be so impervious that the Mausoleum was WWII bomb shelter. All of this, for what? For who?

In my visits to the Mausoleum I found myself drawn to the dichotomy of home like qualities of the spaces and the irony of entombment that has, across the decades, fallen into disrepair. The spaces are lavishly furnished, but with timeworn and decaying pieces. The sense of reverence is palpable, yet in all my visits, I only saw one person tending to a memorial.    Through my images, I hope to capture vignettes of melancholic beauty that speak to memory and the unknown stories of family. www.heatherbinns.net

Lee Nelson

Lee Nelson

Dana Stirling

Thirty-Six Views Of Mt. Lee and The Hollywood Sign | In the early 1800s Hokusai created “36 Views of Mount Fuji”, a series of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji, a powerful icon in Japan. The series depicts Mt. Fuji in different seasons and from many different vantage points and distances, in some prints Mt. Fuji dominates the scene and in some is a small part of the composition. Many of Hokusai’s prints juxtapose scenes of varied aspects of daily life with this powerful symbol. This power is derived not only from the graphic elements of Mt. Fuji’s physical presence but each viewer’s personal idea of what Mt. Fuji represents.

When photographing in the Los Angeles area I noticed that I was including the Hollywood Sign in images if it was in sight. When I thought about what attracted me to it I remembered Hokusai's series and how the power of his icon charged his prints.

For many the Hollywood Sign is instantly recognizable and that recognition locates an image in geography as well as implies some meaning based on the viewers assumptions of what Hollywood represents in the past and in the present. In his book “The Hollywood Sign” Leo Braudy writes, “But the Hollywood Sign still delivers, perhaps because it can be commandeered by everyone with a camera to mean what they want it to mean. Because it’s not a billboard, not flat, it’s shape is more elusive, with letters set at odd angles to each other. How you capture it in memory or on film is always a personal choice. For anyone climbing or driving the hills of Hollywood to seek the best road to the sign or the right angle on it, the sign situates you in your own experience. To photograph it or see it enhances your sense of self like seeing a movie star. Unlike fixed icons that may be viewed from different angles but don’t really change that much, the sign is a shifting icon whose viewers supply the context, framing themselves and the sign at once.” leesnelson.com

Epiphany Knedler

Epiphany Knedler

Dana Stirling

Adaptations | adaptations is a self-portrait reflecting on changes in my personal life. On top of the changes within my family, I moved 1,400 miles away from my hometown, where I had lived for the past twenty-two years. This exterior change left me with interior feelings to wrestle with. Using childhood photos from a family vacation in South Dakota, there is a focus on memory and nostalgia.

I sent postcards to myself, indicating a personal move across the country. I used matte material and wax to both secure and obscure the memory of my family before the changes. These artifacts are meant to be held and experienced, evoking melancholy. www.epiphanyknedler.com

Peter Boersma

Peter Boersma

Dana Stirling

Nieuwe Landschappen | I Morphe Mountains. Old images of mountain ranges, portraits of Che Guevara or Marilyn Monroe, photos of clouds, dresses, cars: Using my unique technique, I turn it into fictitious mountain landscapes.

I made my first collage with tape and paper in 1999. I think I've been using adhesive tape for more than ten kilometres ever since. I prefer to work with worn-out magazines, sometimes more than a century old. After both abstract and figurative periods, I now concentrate on a specific theme: mountains. Everything is possible in a mountain landscape. Weather, light, soil types, vegetation: walking through the mountains a continuous spectacle of shadows, lines and colours takes place before your eyes. Even in a collage everything is possible'.

I started by making collages of mountains based on old photographs of existing mountain ranges. New landscapes were created by combining shreds of photographs of the Dolomites and the Himalayas, for example. In the meantime I have set myself the challenge of creating mountain landscapes with completely different images as a source. Glaciers arise from white surfaces in magazines, ridges from the hairs of portrayed persons, lakes from flinters of blue paper. Everything and everyone can become a mountain'. www.hehallo.nl

Alan Ostreicher

Alan Ostreicher

Dana Stirling

Apartment 304 | These photographs are from an ongoing series of snapshots taken in and around my wife's and my apartment with a Polaroid camera and instant film over many years. I've had the idea of making images of my immediate domestic, day to day environment ever since spending a summer during college living in the Boston expressionist painter Jason Berger's art filled apartment in Brookline. He painted mainly landscapes but I had a special affinity for the work he produced in his apartment. I was amazed at how his unique way of seeing transformed the space in which I was living into abstract, playful, and frenzied lines of color and space. Robert Bechtel is another artist whose use of everyday domestic scenes in his work has influenced my approach to this project.

We've lived in this rent controlled apartment for over 20 years and although the rent is very reasonable we sometimes think about moving.

The thought of living somewhere else is a poignant reminder that although we've spent a good part of our lives here it may, at some point, be just a memory. I've made a lot of pictures of physical details of our apartment over the years, but the series mainly consists of those that depict the quiet moments of little consequence that comprise most of our time. www.alanostreicher.com

Lori Pond

Lori Pond

Dana Stirling

Menace | When danger flares, what do you do?

Since humans first experienced the fight or flight reflex, the subconscious brain has told us what, when, and whom to fear. This remains so. When faced with peril, our bodies respond with intensified adrenaline and racing heart beats. Survival depends on our instantaneous emotional response instructing us to run or stay, a millisecond before our rational self can decide.

While our brains have not changed, what we fear has. It is rarely a carnivorous beast that triggers our instinct to run. It is pictures of burning skyscrapers, reports of schoolchildren crouching behind desks to hide from bullets, or a gathering of teens in hoodies that make us tremble: Our 21st Century litany of what to fear.

But are these threats real? My series “Menace” challenges us to question what we “know.” “Menace” confronts us with frightening, darkened, wild animals that trigger the ancient instinct, while our rational mind knows we are in a safe, civilized space, viewing images.

We look longer, closer, and realize the threat was never there: these are taxidermied animals, their images captured in bright sunlit shops, manipulated later by the artist to ferocity. They frighten, but are impotent.

Menace asks us to consider if our modern fears are justified, or if our contemporary bogeymen are figments of our imagination, mere empty threats manipulated by an unseen hand.

Matthew Finley

Matthew Finley

Dana Stirling

This Too Shall Pass | This Polaroid series is a look back at my journey from pain to acceptance. Through the unreliable lens of memory, I am revisiting an emotional period of shame, fear and rejection, and later, love, desire, and home. These memories, conjured up time and time again over the years, fuzz and change, often leaving only impressions of a moment, an apparition. It’s these bygone feelings, these ghosts, that I’m trying to capture and in doing so, set them free. 

Instant film was prevalent at the time of my earliest remembrances. I can still glimpse my mother fanning a Polaroid photo of me on the steps of our mountain town church, waiting for it to develop. The circle, or looking glass, is a way through which I can see my past selves. There is also a completion to this circle, an acceptance of what was, and an understanding that those selves made me who I am today.

I share these filmy impressions in an effort to connect to others and maybe help them through their own difficulties, showing that one day they may look back on them and say, “Hello ghost, you don’t hurt me anymore.” mfinleyphoto.com

Becky Wilkes

Becky Wilkes

Dana Stirling

Ditched | Society’s health and wealth might be judged not by the magnificence and abundance of its creations but by its regard for the environment and the discards of its citizens. Until we value that which we discard, it could be said that we are rich beyond measure.

"Ditched" explores the implications of our throwaway society through the examination of debris meticulously collected for one year during the drought of 2014 to 2015 from the shoreline of Eagle Mountain Lake, near Fort Worth, TX. Following in the footsteps of the archeologist, Augustus Rivers, who first insisted that all artifacts, not the just the beautiful or unique be collected and catalogued, I photographed every item found along one mile of newly exposed lakefront. These artifacts speak to me; I seek to understand them and account for each of them.

With the abundant runoff of the Spring 2015 flooding, and subsequent barrage of debris filling my immediate landscape, I began to realize the migratory nature of trash in our waterways flowing from our drainage ditches and roadways. Eagle Mountain Lake, while only 14 square miles in size, is fed by a watershed of over 850 square miles. Unlike the trash entering our oceans, this debris is trapped inland, restrained by lakes and dams. Individually, the collages reveal the variety, quantity and rate of disintegration of the materials contained in the lakefront. Collectively, they speak to our careless abandonment post gratification. Either by accidental or intentional action, we are being inundated on a massive scale by the individual fingerprints of personal choice. www.beckywilkesphotography.com

Susan Rosenberg Jones

Susan Rosenberg Jones

Dana Stirling

Building 1 | I have lived in the NYC neighborhood of Tribeca since 1984. My apartment is a rental – the complex I live in is one of 3 high- rise towers named Independence Plaza. I live on the 39th floor of “Building 1”, the northernmost of the three 39 story towers. The three towers and attached townhouses, erected in 1974, were intended to be luxury rentals, but at that time Tribeca was mostly non-residential. There were practically no grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like to support a residential community. It was considered a “pioneer” neighborhood. The only residents were artists in legal and illegal live/work lofts.

In order to attract occupants, the complex was converted to NY state subsidized middle-income housing until 2004 when the buildings were again sold and the subsidies were removed. Some tenants were forced out, others remained, and the vacated apartments were renovated and rented to new tenants paying premium market rents. The neighborhood had changed dramatically since the mid-1970s.

When my neighbors and I first moved into our apartments, we had to qualify officially as “middle income” – we are teachers, nurses, artists, musicians, civil servants, social workers, writers. We have rented in Manhattan for years, working to pay our rent and bills and enjoy life in New York. Many of us, like myself, raised our families here. The high cost of living has made it difficult to save for retirement, and many of us don’t own any real estate that can be sold for profit. We have contributed to the diversity of our neighborhood and our city.

For the past several years I have been photographing the original and long - term tenants of Independence Plaza. I am making portraits of residents in their apartments and in the common areas of the complex. My intention is to illustrate the distinctive mix of the people and the created comfort of their residences. Every apartment may have the same parquet floors and bathroom layouts, but people have in many cases transformed the mid-1070’s layouts into real homes. There's a real bond among the original tenants; we have seen each other's kids grow up, and have shown up for their funerals and joyous celebrations. When I visit my neighbors and photograph them, I listen to their stories about the neighborhood and realize how important it is to maintain this feeling of community in our city. www.susanrosenbergjones.com/

Jo Ann Chaus

Jo Ann Chaus

Dana Stirling

The Exquisite State of Imbalance | Photography is the lens through which Jo Ann negotiates her world as a daily practice.

She is arrested by the brilliance and the darkness of the beauty before and within her, enmeshed with life’s complexities, relationships, expectations, disappointments, surprises, joys and desires, and with great curiosity and resiliency reaches and stretches herself using the deep, raw, and authentic places she accesses during the process of making her work.

These images are a selection from a series of performance driven work entitled "Conversations with Myself, The State of Exquisite Imbalance", where Jo Ann embodies assorted nineteen-fifties era women who are evaluating themselves and the roles they have performed over their lifetimes, with misplaced identities, as they search for it and discover, with courage, tenacity and perseverance, who they are.  The work is an homage to and a connection with women of all generations who struggle as wife or mother, juggling the demands of nurturing the family while finding time to nurture themselves, their desires, and their dignity. 

The work quietly alludes to the significant growth and metamorphosis, emotionally and psychologically, that is possible for all, with great reflection, consideration, and determination. www.joannchaus.com

Glenna Jennings

Glenna Jennings

Dana Stirling

At Table (2004-2019) | documents everyday spaces of expression and connection – dining rooms, kitchens, restaurants, bars and coffee tables. The series uses the messy contingency of plates and bottles and condiments to foreground human relationships performing for my lens, which navigates from a perspective that is local in depth but global in breadth. In locations including the USA, Mexico, Canada, China, Serbia and the UK, I have collected thousands of moments that capture friends, family and erstwhile strangers sharing time around food and drink in spaces where I am also an active participant.

My “tablescapes” offer subtle moments of drama and humor in which gestures, expressions and objects combine to perform as cultural artifacts and personal memories. I see the table as a space that can often transcend cultural barriers to become a place for authentic interaction. While the surface qualities that connect the photographs are largely formal – bold colors, exaggerated facial expressions, a consistent focal length - the series arose from the notion and need to forge diverse relationships outside the familial. For an only child, these photographs have come to represent an extended family that defies traditional definition.

On a broader level, the work offers a unique visual anthropology of everyday moments shared by a range of cultures, while also addressing how photographs may function in the realm of public culture as imperfect personal memories or shared histories. Ultimately, this series aims to connect, rather than solely critique, aspects of the human condition that collide and converge in a familiar, everyday place with an often untapped political potential – the table.

As an artist and educator, my work within the community often uses food culture as a means to address harder questions around social inequity. At Table presents a first-person narrative that uses the photograph as a fairly traditional, though purposefully performative, document. However, the images have been placed in the service of larger cultural conversations through exhibitions, community events, and educational activities.

My experiences in these discrete locations around the globe have resulted from my own privilege to move freely and access sustenance widely. I present spaces that fall within a fairly narrow socio-economic margin of neither extreme wealth nor destitution, while realizing this represents just a small portion of a global society where hunger is a very real issue.

My own photographed experiences, in all of their awkward beauty or chaotic authenticity, have all resulted from the hospitable acts of friends, family members, loved ones and mere acquaintances. I offer them as a small archive of the potential for radical hospitality, active togetherness, and the kindness of strangers to help alter the landscape of our polarized political climate. I offer them with the blatantly naïve but stubbornly fervent faith that sitting down together to share food and drink can change hearts, minds and worlds. www.glennajennings.com

Kathy Anne Lim

Kathy Anne Lim

Dana Stirling

Where Salt meets Ice | On a trip driving to Höfn, in south-east Iceland, our journey was defined by dramatic, ever-changing geography and unpredictable weather. Wind whistled and carved through the landscape, and we had to turn the steering wheel 11 degrees to the left to keep us travelling straight through the winter storms. Our headlights illuminated the swirling snow that filled the road ahead of us, bright against the black asphalt and dancing in synchronization with the lo-fi howl of the wind. The landscape changed around us, and I watched the grey sky begin to part in our rear-view mirror as sunbeams illuminated the edges of the clouds and we drove further into the storm.

Growing up against the backdrop of two glossy cities, Singapore and London, I found the otherworldly wilderness of Iceland captivating. Arriving in the tail-end of winter, layers of the landscape began to unfold before us as the melting snow unearthed sleeping grass and formed glacial pools of sapphire. But nature here is as brutal as it is beautiful. On Reynisdrangar beach, the frenzied, forceful winds dragged me backwards, whipping the sand around my feet and burying me into the black shore. In that out-of-control moment, I decided to surrender to this alluring yet violent place.

I decided to experiment by overlapping my photographs, these highlighted the vastness of the landscape, while also intriguing the viewer to speculate about what might beyond theimage surface. The project was a strategic attempt to examine the landscape I encountered. Informed by encounters, personal affection and experiences, this series allowed me to make sense of an emotional landscape riddled with stories. www.kathyannelim.com

Jaime Alvarez

Jaime Alvarez

Dana Stirling

Lee’s Retreat | While driving through central Virginia in 2016, a sign caught my eye. The sign was for Lee’s Retreat Highway, a self guided tour one could take to view the various locations of the final days of the Civil War. The particular route I was one also lead me to several small towns that at one time had importance as part of the general infrastructure and coal business to the region. It is also intertwined with the Civil Rights in Education Heritage trail, pointing out locations where African Americans, Native Americans and women developed the right to an education equivalent of white males. 

These small towns while exhibiting signs of decline, the ghost of a strong American Industry is still persistent. 

Burkeville VA, population of 405 (estimated) serves as the junction of the Norfolk and Western Railway and the Norfolk Southern Railway. 

Crewe VA, population of 2171 (estimated) was founded as a central steam locomotive repair depot, and named after the large railroad town of Crewe, England. The town of Crewe has faced large economic decline in the past years, but still houses a small railroad museum dedicated to the work the Norfolk Southern Railway’s history. 

Victoria VA, population of 1642 (estimated) is largely employed be the Lunenberg Correctional Center, which opened in 1995, and was founded in 1906 during the construction fo the Tidewater Railway, which later on merged to become part of the Norfolk and Western Railway which in 1997 was merged into the Norfolk Southern Railway. www.jaimephoto.com

Sandra Klein

Sandra Klein

Dana Stirling

The Embittered Heart | The series, entitled The Embittered Heart, consists of visual poems that evoke the universal emotions of pain, loss and cynicism that often come with the experience of betrayal. Although my own such experience happened many years ago, the remnants of it have in some ways remained with me and changed me so that the memories feel vivid enough still to portray them honestly.

 This ongoing series uses vintage appropriated anatomical imagery, of the heart in particular, and photographed images of cacti, succulents and roots.  I combine these visual components to portray the various responses that human beings have at the close of a relationship.  Selected images also have the addition of embroidery to add three-dimensionality.  Reflecting my background in printmaking, I am drawn to the layered image and the actual printing process in photography.  I continue to find this study of love and loss mysterious and magical. www.sandrakleinportfolio.com

Wendi Schneider

Wendi Schneider

Dana Stirling

States of Grace | In States of Grace, I illuminate beauty amidst the chaos. I’m calmed by the simplicity of a graceful line and the stillness of the suspended moment and compelled to share an impression of the serenity I find there. I capture the ephemeral movement of light on organic forms to preserve that mystical moment that stills time for me. Photographing intuitively - what I feel, as much as what I see - and informed by a background in painting and art history, I portray a personal interpretation by layering the images digitally with color and texture, to find balance between the real and the imagined.

The images are printed digitally with archival pigment ink on vellum or kozo. White gold, silver or 24k gold leaf is then applied by hand behind the image, creating a silken luminosity on the print's surface, which varies as the viewer’s position and ambient light change. Throughout history, civilizations have prized the use of precious metals for their beauty and sanctity. The leafing process suffuses the intrinsic value of the treasured subjects with the implied spirituality of the gold. Within the limited edition, the prints may differ in color or texture, and, as the effect of gilding inherently varies, each of the limited edition prints is unique. www.wendischneider.com

Ann Mitchell

Ann Mitchell

Dana Stirling

Chance Chronicles | In this series of constructed images, I have created a world that feels somewhere between a dream and a cinematic still. A world where we have a sense that the space and narrative continues beyond the frame, with echos from a past existence. The title, Chance Chronicles, comes from the process I used to create the images, starting with a randomly selected written meditation prompt. I then start writing and the writing process leads to me images…which are the basis for the work you see here.

Beginning with a warm, monochromatic palette to impart a sense of nostalgia, I use a visual language of objects that weave man-made structures into a place where nature is returning. These are spaces of transition and I like the idea that in a balance between man and nature…nature will eventually have its way with us. The objects within the frame are the characters - they embody hope, loss, life, age, strength…that is their roll in these landscapes. Visually, I’m fascinated by the narratives/dreams that come to mind when I find abandoned places, and I’m drawn to western landscapes where the sky seems to go on forever, where there’s enough space for waves of those dreams.

In creating these scenes, I work with my own imagery and that has taught me to look for scenes that are both evocative and non-specific to allow the viewer to remain in the “authenticity” of this new world. For this series I created a set of textures taken from a variety of vintage traditional processes: the glass from old proof frames, the edges of wet plates, even aging film by leaving it out in the elements. I’ve chosen to print these in hand-coated Platinum / Palladium, a 19th Century process which I love for its luminous mark of the hand.

The images are printed in hand-coated Platinum / Palladium, a 19th Century process used for its beauty and mark of the hand. I have also created a series of short (15-30 secs) animations that bring several of them to life. www.ann-mitchell.com

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