adam b. bell | photography

pretend that you're actually alive

2008-04-27T11:38:00.011-04:00

Leigh Ledare, a freshly minted Columbia MFA, has just produced a complicated and disturbingly voyeuristic book, Pretend You're Actually Alive. Published by PPP Editions, the book coincides with his solo show at Andrew Roth, who runs the press. The work is a dark collaborative exploration of Leigh's mother, their relationship, the damage of fame and victimization. As the press release states,

[PYAC] can be viewed as an archive of a mother and son’s shared, private moments amidst the desperate attempts to renew her identity as a dancer – this time working as a stripper in a club beside her parents’ apartment. Pretend You’re Actually Alive is also a mapping of Ledare’s mother’s efforts to commodify herself –initially through her precocious childhood talent, later through her overt sexuality, and eventually through the portrayal of herself as an archetypal victim – in efforts to find companionship, attention, financial security, and a benefactor before her youthful, marketable currencies expire.

Combining archival momentos and notes with frank and graphic photographs, the work continues in the intensely personal documentary tradition of Larry Clark (Ledare was the still-photo from Clark's film Ken Park), Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham and even Jim Goldberg. Coming home one holiday, Leigh visit his mom, who lived next door to his grandparents, and she answered the door naked -- dramatically announcing she was now a stripper. His mom, once a famous ballerina, was stripping at a local club and working through a series of abusive relationships in a desperate attempt to maintain and affirm her beauty and talent, and garner the attention and affection of wealthy patrons and boyfriends, who offered her the possibility of financial security.

© Leigh Ledare, All Rights Reserved.

I'm typically wary of personal photojournalistic work - because more often than not the peculiarities of the person's life (or their approach) rarely merit sustained attention. More recently, the trend for self-involved hipsters to document themselves getting drunk or cavorting about naked seems to offers little beyond the initial voyeuristic excitement. At the same time, the kind of self-destructive lifestyle and drama that fuels much similar work can also be a trap and misleading foundation that props up otherwise thin work. Ledare's work seems to avoid this danger and explores deeper issues of intimacy, the collapse and evolution of a mother and son relationship, co-dependency, performance and authorship. In many ways, the work is a performative investigation and collaboration btw Ledare and his mother about her and their relationship.

© Leigh Ledare, All Rights Reserved.

The book is quite beautiful and comes softbound in a slip-case. The book is divided into chapters with photographs mixed in with various typed and hand-written notes, archival photos, and diary entries that recount what are fictional and truthful events in Leigh and his mother's life. The show is up at Andrew Roth until mid-June and the book can be purchased there or here.

bye bye photography

2008-03-28T13:17:00.019-04:00

© Daido Moriyamo, All Rights Reserved

Sometimes I think the Japanese got it right all along - f*#k the print, long live the book. Having to contend with limited gallery opportunities, the photo book industry flourished in Japan and they developed innovative ways to push the boundaries of the printed image. This thought crossed my mind again when I went to Christie's in anticipation of their photobook auction next week. The previews don't open until next week - but I wanted to take a peek at the catalog - and see a few of the treasures like Yutaka Takanashi's Toshi-e, Towards a City, issues of Provoke and William Eggleston's Morals of Vision.

After looking at the catalog, I walked through the Contemporary Art Auction previews - which reminded me why I don't like auctions. Art work in all states of disrepair hung with a loose effort to create a vaguely meaningful dialog - after all it is a sale, not a show. There are a few photographs for sale - and with a few exceptions they looked like sad rejects cast off by their owners before they faded into oblivion. A relatively early Gursky (1993) had not only faded and developed a sickly jaundiced pallor but also looked like it was barely clinging to its diasec mount. It reminded me of the shock I felt at the Thomas Struth retrospective at the Met, where most of the prints had a noticeable magenta or yellow cast - suggesting their owners had placed them next to their windows and long hours of sunlight.

© Daido Moriyamo, All Rights Reserved

Perhaps it is the willful disregard of the "fine print" that seems refreshing in the face of over-sized megaprints. Artist's such as Daido Moriyama, Kikuji Kawada, Yutaka Takanashi and others (including American artists such as Lee Friedlander and the incredible John Gossage), have all used the book to magnificent ends. Give me a copy of Moriyama's bye bye photography (Shashin yo Sayonara) (1972) or Kawada's The Map (1965) over a sickly Gursky anyday.

© Daido Moriyamo, All Rights Reserved

Mark Steinmetz - South East

2008-03-27T11:14:00.002-04:00

Following up on his beautiful book South Central, Mark Steinmetz and Nazreali will be releasing South East in June 2008. Although I've written about Steinmetz before, he seems like one of those photographers who is consistently present (i.e., Blindspot, exhibitions etc...), but somehow eludes wider acclaim. Perhaps the fact that he works in B/W and in a more traditional social documentarian mode, has led some to dismiss the elegant and poetic beauty of his photographs and see his work as somehow less contemporary. Photographing mainly in the South - Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana - Steinmetz captures a life lived on the periphery of the American Dream, yet a life that is still touched by grace and beauty.

© Mark Steinmetz, All Rights Reserved

© Mark Steinmetz, All Rights Reserved

© Mark Steinmetz, All Rights Reserved

these birds walk

2008-03-24T20:51:00.005-04:00

© Mike Brodie, All Rights Reserved

these birds walk, the excellent series of books published by Paul Schiek, has announced the next round of books in the kin series. The next round promises an exciting mix of familiar and new names - Alec Soth, Todd Hido, Marianne Muller and Abner Nolan. They aren't taking subscriptions yet, but it should be up soon.

I still love looking at Mike Brodie's book from the first round, which featured Polaroid snapshots and portraits from his trainhoppin' adventures around the US. Jim Goldberg's book is coming out shortly and I can't wait. The series received a lot of attention when it first came out, but it is worth revisiting since the next round is coming up. While much DIY efforts can be self-aggrandizing and largely forgettable, it is nice to see a project producing exciting new work that skirts the edges of the ever expanding photo publishing world.

the idea of order

2008-03-24T20:37:00.007-04:00

© Robert Adams, All Rights Reserved

The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly. -Robert Adams

a shimmer of possibility

2008-02-01T10:23:00.002-05:00

From A-1: The Great North Road to Empty Heaven, Paul Graham has been incredibly adept at exploring and expanding the potential of social documentary practice. As an artist who has continually reinvented and pushing himself to explore the potentials of the medium, Graham's latest work, a shimmer of possibility, is an amazing contribution not only to his complex body of work, but to the medium as well. In a time when the photographic default, not only critically and institutionally, are often monumental images that blur the lines between cinema and the still-image, Graham's complex and subtle work has reinvigorated the tradition of social documentary photography.

At once sumptuous and nondescript, the gorgeous rainbow hued volumes contain sequences of such quiet grace that it would be easy to initially dismiss them as casual throw offs that any "serious" photography would have either never printed or deleted from their digital camera. While containing their own individual strengths, the real beauty comes from the ways in which the images are woven together in what the photographer has called "filmic haikus." Each book contains a short sequence of images that are connected thematically - from a book that only contains one amazing image of a decaying Camero to the complex ballet of a New Orleans street corner spread out over 60 images. Influenced by the short stories of Chekhov, each book is a gem of a short story that reveals the often complicated, disturbing, and at times beautiful, reality of America in the 21st century.

To read more about the books, check out these reviews: here and here.

© Paul Graham, All Rights Reserved

Hyena Men and Honey Collectors

2007-11-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

© Pieter Hugo, All Rights Reserved

Pieter Hugo, an incredible photographer based in South Africa, is having his first NY solo show at Yossi Milo Gallery from Nov. 29 to Jan. 12. The opening is tonight from 6-8pm. The show draws on two amazing bodies of work - Hyena Men and Honey Collectors. The Hyena Men, which was shot in Nigeria documents roaming troupes of animal charmers/performers, who use wild baboons, hyenas and snakes. The Honey Collectors was shot in Ghana and documents men, who don cassava leaves and climb the up into the rainforest canopy to collect and sell the honey. Pieter has produced a number of great documentary series on Africa and is beginning to get much deserved international recognition.

© Pieter Hugo, All Rights Reserved

Not Yet Titled

2007-11-01T15:44:00.002-04:00

In my final year of grad school, I picked up a postcard with the Susan Lipper image below and was entranced - in fact, it still sits on my bookshelf. At the time, I was working on a series of large scale diptychs and had not resolved all the issues of the work. While my work wasn't really succeeding, I was attracted to the messy, problematic inconsolability of the images. Although radically different, Lipper's work offered hope that the differences, ruptures and questions that arose from the pairing could become part of the work and enrich its meaning.

© Susan Lipper, All Rights Reserved

Lipper's series, Not Yet Titled (1999-2004), is a fascinating and thorny exploration of post-cold war angst. As she states,

Functioning as a time capsule of associations, this series is perhaps more defined by its dates than by words. The images began as a loose narrative in 1999. At the time, I found myself drawn to military and Cold War references. Equally I was seeking an unembodied vantage point, one not set in a specific geographic locale.

© Susan Lipper, All Rights Reserved

Although well-known for her book Grapevine, a portrait of rural West Virginia, her work can also be found in the excellent book Trip, which is readily available and criminally cheap. Paired with the short fiction of Frederick Barthelme, the book is a "fictional non-narrative" and follows a enigmatic road trip through the arcane corners of America. It rare to find a smart take on the exhausted road trip genre and Lipper succeeds.

Putting Back the Wall

2007-10-04T12:04:00.001-04:00

© John Gossage, All Rights Reserved

John Gossage and Loosestrife Editions have just published Putting Back the Wall, the final volume in Gossage's Berlin Series, which also includes the excellent Berlin in the Time of the Wall. Comprised of photographs from 1982-89, the book explores the psychological territory of the Berlin wall. Although documentary in the loosest sense, Gossage's poetic images "promise clarity - yet deliver only mystery or might promise invention and fiction - yet actually deliver truth."

© John Gossage, All Rights Reserved

Although the Berlin Wall is the central focus of the work, the two volumes use the wall as a touch stone to explore the forgotten and unwanted histories, the fragmented landscapes and detris that surround the wall and city. While Gossage's work began as a trip to exhibit photographs and conduct a workshop at the Werkstatt für Fotografie in Kreuzburg, it has evolved into deep engagement with the German political and social landscape.

© John Gossage, All Rights Reserved

Using the book as the primary vehicle and statement of his work, Gossage has produced a powerful and unique body of work. From The Pond to Putting Back the Wall, Gossage's work continues to explore the nature of the politicized landscape in fascinating ways. The book also includes two excellent essays by Gerry Badger and Thomas Weski. You can get a copy here and here.

On the Beach

2007-08-10T19:29:00.001-04:00

Aperture has announced its Fall line-up of new books. Over the past several years, Aperture has revived itself and increasingly published new and interesting work. As a subscriber since I was about 15, I have seen Aperture evolve, redefine, and occasionally stumble, over the past decade and was beginning to fear it would fade into photographic history and lose its continued relevance. Given the rapid change and evolution of photography over the years, the mere fact that it has lasted over 50 years, is a testament to its lasting importance.

Among the new titles are Richard Misrach's On The Beach, a reprint of Lisette Model's 1979 Aperture monograph, and new books by Richard Ross, Beate Gütschow, Matthew Sleeth, Dawoud Bey, Thomas Allen and others.

© Richard Misrach, All Rights Reserved

© Richard Misrach, All Rights Reserved

Shannon Ebner

2007-08-06T16:00:00.000-04:00

© Shannon Ebner, All Rights Reserved

Dan Torop, the photographer and co-curator behind last summer excellent show A Rabbit as King of Ghosts at Mitchell-Inness & Nash Gallery, recently wrote a great article on the incredible work of the photographer Shannon Ebner.

You can read more about her work here, here, here and here.

Somewhere/Anywhere

2007-08-06T14:21:00.001-04:00

© Michael Schmidt, All Rights Reserved

Michael Schmidt, one of Germany's preeminent photographers, has worked quietly for over twenty years documenting the social and political landscape of Germany. Well-known for his ground breaking works, Waffenruhe (1987) and EIN-HEIT (1991), Schmidt's work explores the long-term social and political scars of WWII and the division of Germany. Schmidt recently released a new book entitled Ingendwo (2006), which roughly translates as Somewhere/Anywhere. In this new work, Schmidt explores the small nondescript provincial towns of Germany. Carefully sequenced and grouped, the portraits, landscapes, architectural details of the book present, as Schmidt states, a portrait our subjective loss of “home as a place with identity.” Suffused with a sense of inconsolable emptiness and alienation, Schmidt's work presents a powerful portrait of modern Germany and contemporary life.

© Michael Schmidt, All Rights Reserved

Home says nothing to me. In any case, home is what you carry with you, inside you. You remember places because you spent the most wonderful or the most horrible time there during your childhood. But these places have become more arbitrary, less specific . . . There is no such thing as an objective category that one might call ‘home’ any more. Such things take place subjectively nowadays. - Michael Schmidt

Les Chambres Noire

2007-07-27T14:14:00.000-04:00

© Michel Campeau, All Rights Reserved

Michel Campeau's Les Chamres Noire (or Darkrooms) is a fascinating and idiosyncratic examination and tribute to the demise of the chemical darkroom. Reminiscent of Peter Fraser's work, Campeau explores the detritus strewn corners and the wonky analog contraptions of darkrooms throughout his native Canada. As Campeau writes,

As an agent in and witness of a pivotal moment in the history of art and technologies, squeezed between the dual procedures of analogical and digital recording, I find the utmost importance to invest the iconicity of the darkroom with the connotations of ruin and post-industrial debris . . . My investigation, iconoclastic and sacrilegious, scrutinizes the “surrealizing” incongruity of darkrooms and throws the spotlight on the bric-à-brac of plumbing and electricity, the ventilation-system engines, the posted iconography, the weirdness of “planets” envisioned at the bottom of chemical trays, the splattering of silver salts, the wear of equipment and the countdown of timers that defies the disappearance of the panchromatic spectre.

© Michel Campeau, All Rights Reserved

Nazraeli Press is releasing a monograph of the work - selected and edited by Martin Parr. The book is the first in a series of what promise to be excellent books edited by Parr for Nazraeli.

© Michel Campeau, All Rights Reserved

Looking at his work, I can't help but be reminded of the remark by master printer, Richard Benson, "Making art in a room in the dark is the stupidest thing imaginable." Working in the dark may be stupid, but it often yields magical results.

You can see more of his work here.

Susan Meiselas - Pandora's Box

2007-07-25T12:41:00.000-04:00

© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos, All Rights Reserved

Susan Meiselas series Pandora's Box is currently being exhibited at Cohen Amador and the opening is tonight - Wednesday July 25, 6-8 PM. Taken from her 2001 book of the same title, the series explores an upscale NYC S&M club. Created in conjunction with Nick Broomfield's documentary Fetishes, Meiselas' work explores the dark rituals and fantasies of the self-professed "Disneyland of S&M." Exposing the complex relationship between the dominatrix and masochist, the work not only reveals this secret world but also slowly entices us as voyeurs into the complex rituals of objectification and domination.

From her seminal work in Central America to her incredible work in Kurdistan, Meiselas is one of the most influential and important documentary photographers working today. As a graduate student, I had the great fortune to work for her and still treasure my time in the Magnum archive pouring over her contact sheets for Carnival Strippers. The show is definitely not to be missed and if you get a chance take a look at the incredible book.

© Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos, All Rights Reserved

Park City and San Quentin Point

2007-07-17T21:51:00.000-04:00

It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film. -Lewis Baltz

One of the lamentable consequences of the current "photo-book boom," is the increasing scarcity and disappearance of valuable photo-books into the hands of all but the wealthiest collectors. While the boom has created a great new wealth of photo-books, many of the most important contemporary or historic books are all but impossible to get your hands on, much less purchase, and disappear quietly into private libraries. As the recent work of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger illuminates, the history of photography can be read in its long tradition of the book.

As a student of photography, when I couldn't buy many photo-books, I strained the resources of my college's Inter-Library Loan system to get as many obscure and out-of-print photo-books I could get my hands on. Deeply enamored of the "New Topographics" photographers, I devoured all their books - from John Gossage's The Pond to Robert Adam's What We Bought: The New World.

In addition to the works of Adams and
Gossage, I fell in love with the books
of Lewis Baltz. Idiosyncratic and
coolly minimalist, Baltz brought an
almost European sentiment to bear
on the bleak post-industrial liminal
landscapes of American. Park City,
the future home of Sundance and
celebrity McMansions, is not only
revealed as a the backwater mining
town it once was, but we witness its
slow transformation into a utopic
western suburb. Through images of bleak gravel piles to chaotic wiring, Baltz portrays the indifferent processes and materials called to service in the name of property development.

San Quentin Point, close to Baltz's home in California, was the focus of another seminal book. Located near the Golden Gate Bridge and close to the infamous prison, Baltz exposing the rough hems of the social landscape - "where communities begin to fray." As Andy Grundberg wrote in The New York Times,

"With Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz was one of the most important, if hard to appreciate, photographers to emerge from ''New Topographics,'' the 1975 exhibition at George Eastman House in Rochester that defined a fresh attitude toward landscape photography. Rejecting sentimentality and pathos, he depicted what he called ''the new industrial parks'' with a puritanical dispassion. Here Mr. Baltz opens his work to feeling, seeing redemption through nature in the worst of manmade landscapes. The 58 black-and-white pictures document an area north of San Francisco that is famous for the prison named for it but that in these pictures appears to be nothing more than a garbage dump. Oleaginous puddles and dried mud flats frame ragged pieces of tar paper, burlap bags and tin cans. By the end of the sequence, however, the land reappears, sending up stalks of growth amid the disarray, and our sympathies are with it."

Fazal Sheikh

2007-07-14T14:07:00.000-04:00

© Fazal Sheikh, All Rights Reserved

Fazal Sheikh is an extraordinary documentary photography, who has spent almost twenty years documenting displaced and marginalized communities around the world. Beginning in the early 90's, his subjects have included refugee communities in Kenya, Afghan communities living under the Taliban and in the wake of the Soviet occupation, the indigenous people of Pantanal, Brazil, and widows and orphans of India. Spending months to years living with the communities, Sheikh combines portraits, text and oral histories to creates deeply humanistic portraits of communities struggling in the face of conflict.

© Fazal Sheikh, All Rights Reserved

© Fazal Sheikh, All Rights Reserved

Recently, Sheikh has been offering his books, in their entirety and free of charge, on-line. In the face of dwindling opportunities for long-term investigative documentary work, Sheikh's efforts to forge new venues for presenting his work and drawing attention to these communities is more than impressive. As stated on his website,

In 2001 Fazal Sheikh conceived of a series of projects that would engage an international audience, furthering their understanding of complex human rights issues around the world. The projects would take a variety of forms – books, films, exhibitions – and be disseminated as widely as possible, using means that offered an alternative to traditional publishing and distribution. As part of the ideology behind the series, where possible the projects have been offered in their entirety on-line, where they may be read free of charge. Books are also available in bookshops at a subsidized price and for sale over the Internet. Proceeds from sales are being donated to the International Humanitarian Fund (IHF) established in conjunction with the Volkart Foundation, Switzerland, for the benefit of the communitiesrepresented.

His books include A Sense of Common Ground, which examines refugee communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi; The Victor Weeps (DVD version here), which explores communities living in the aftermath of post-Soviet Taliban Afghanistan; Moksha, which looks at the lives of dispossessed widows abandoned by their families and society at large and left to live in religious ashrams in Vrindavan, India; and most recently Ladli, about the plight of young women and girls in modern India.

Sheikh, who has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, along with dozens of other awards, including a Fulbright and National Endowment for the Arts grant, will be exhibiting his most recent work this fall at Pace/MacGill.

John Szarkowski (1925-2007)

2007-07-11T21:04:00.000-04:00

John Szarkowski, the celebrated curator, critic, photographer and writer passed away this week. A tireless advocate for photography, he helped champion and legitimate photography, wrote eloquently about the medium and its practitioners, and taught us how to look at and read photographs with intelligence and wisdom.

His knowledge, wisdom and eye will be missed. Read more here.

Tacita Dean - Floh

2007-07-11T15:56:00.001-04:00

Although much has been written about the demise of analog photography, no one has explored this subtle shift as elegantly as Tacita Dean. Dean's Floh (2001) is a beautiful swan song to analog photography. As Charlotte Cotton eloquently states,

There's a rich heritage of artists assembling found photographs, but Dean does something that is very rare - she makes a departure within the genre. . . Floh silently eulogizes upon analogue photography's magic and random weirdness, they physical sensation of the photographic snap. The artistic force of Floh is bound up in this particular moment when we can still, just, tell the difference between what we discard with these fragile traces of a richly incoherent and disappearing technology, and the seamless correction of digital media. (photo-eye booklist Spring 2007)

Osamu Kanemura

2007-05-31T16:47:00.000-04:00

© Osamu Kanemura, All Rights Reserved

Osamu Kanemura's "Spider Strategy" is currently on view at Cohen Amador Gallery until June 2nd. Kanemura's book, released in 2001, is already a highly sought after collectors item, and the series was also featured in the New Photography 12 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Building on the rich tradition of street photography, Kanemura's work transforms the cramped vertiginous streets of Tokyo into an ordered yet complex puzzle of chaotic beauty. Teetering on the edge of collapse, Kanemura offers a vision of modern Tokyo that is simultaneously bewildering and alienating, but formally sublime.

Texas, NYC

2007-05-23T21:19:00.002-04:00

Jake Rowland, a great photographer and friend, who I got to know through the 2005 Art+Commerce show has a terrific online magazine - Texas, NYC - which has been up and running for a couple of months. Each issue so far has featured the work by a photographer paired with a poet. The lastest issue features the work of South African photographer, Roger Ballen, along side a poem by Paul Violi. Previous issues have featured Les Krims, Tim Davis, Dustin Wayne Harris and Richard Foreman.

Make sure you check it out and sign up for the mailing list.

Robert Bergman

2007-05-07T22:13:00.000-04:00

Robert Bergman is another photographer whose work is hard to come by and is unjustly overlooked. Besides his monography, A Kind of Rapture, his work, as far as I can tell, is never exhibited and rarely appears anywhere. There is a great article about his work in the Brooklyn Rail, hands down one of the best arts magazines in NYC or the country for that matter. In the article, Vicki Goldberg, David Levi Strauss, John Yua, Paul Mattick and Katy Siegel all talk about his work.

Jocelyn Lee and Mark Steinmetz

2007-05-06T21:46:00.000-04:00

Like most photographers, I have a long list of photographers whose works I admire. Often unjustly neglected, it is always great to see them get the recognition they deserve.

I've been aware of Jocelyn Lee's work for a long time and have been amazed she doesn't show regularly in NYC. All that has changed. She is now represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery and is having her first show there this month. The opening is next week - May 17th, 5:30 - 7:30. Unfortunately, I will be out of town, but make sure you see the show. Pace/MacGill is hands down one of the best photography galleries around and the show is guaranteed to be amazing.

Mark Steinmetz, a photographer from Tennessee, who shows with Yancey Richardson, recently released another monograph, South Central, and now has a website of his work.

In the midst of the garish photographs that dominate the medium, Steinmetz modest and evocative images pack an emotional wallop. Make sure you check out all the projects he has on his site.

JH Engström

2007-04-15T13:00:00.000-04:00

JH Engström is having his first US exhibition at Cohan and Leslie along with Ari Marcopoulos and Leigh Ledare in a group show curated by Arnd Seibert. Long overdue, Engström's work was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Prize in 2005 and he has published a number of great books, including Trying to Dance and Haunts.

Employing a variety of different cameras and an idiosyncratic antique color palette, Engström's largely autobiographical work is pervaded with a melancholy and fragile beauty that is rare.

Engineering Consent

2007-01-14T16:45:00.000-05:00

I watched Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares (PON) over a year ago and quickly discovered his earlier documentary, The Century of the Self. In the COS, Curtis explores the ways in which shifting notions of the self, influenced by Freud and his later critics, offered governments and business new tools to manipulate society and the masses. At the center of the story is Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew and the father of public relations. Rather than argue the merits of indivdual products and appeal to people's rational mind, Bernays and his sucessors learned to use the lessons of Freud regarding the unconscious and irrational mind to sell soap, war and cars.

Although incredibly powerful and persuasive when seen independently, what is remarkable about the documentaries are the ways in which COS lays the foundation for PON, reinforces the argument and showing its frightening implications for our world today. As Robert Koehler writes,

the commodifying of the self prepares the soil for the politics of self fostered by everything from depoliticized post-Lefties to Reaganite Randians, which in turn in The Power of Nightmares, provides both neo-conservatives and Islamist thinkers like Sayed Kotb material for their case that there's nothing scarier than a fat, happy, and soulless West that lives for a trip to the mall.

You can watch both series on www.archive.org. Here is a link to an excellent interview with Adam Curtis about the series.

Suellen Parker - Incurable

2007-01-09T19:28:00.000-05:00

My good friend Suellen Parker is having a show of her work "Incurable Perfection" at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (511 W. 25th Street). Suellen's work explores our narcissistic desire for perfection with sophistication, wit and intelligence. Her work was also included in the ReGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tommorrow and its great to see her work get the recognition it deserves. The opening is this Thursday (1/11) from 6-8pm - be sure to check it out.