If there is a theme which I am particularly concerned, it is the contemporary failure of love. I don’t mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love which is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by another—the response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes. The democracy of universal vulnerability.
Isabella Gardner
from Bergman’s A Kind of Rapture
From the Series Day for Night
Whitney Hubbs
Art is primarily a copy. I don’t believe in originality as much as I believe in individuality. I see a straight line of visible imagery from cave painting to the present. We have improved our copying skills through technologies and it is through these developmental implements that we see how we have evolved, the subject in its aura of originality its just a mere excuse for copying. We can trace this development because the introduction of a new medium does not destroy the existing ones, it simply forces them to adapt to a new reality. I am a very traditional artist as a draftsman as well as a photographer but the unlikely encounter of these two media is what gives my work a contemporary character.
—Vic Muniz
Jude’s photographs lead us elsewhere. They are unquestionably aesthetic within a photographic vocabulary – the richness and subtlety of tone and light, the twin seductions of fantastic detail and a baroque complexity of elements. How can we not say that these considerations enact that same transformation from namelessness to valued subject? The answer lies in an insistence on non-transcendent presence. Their being is not transformed but thoroughly enumerated in its parts. Jude’s formal structures persistently frustrate the aesthetic closure that transcendence requires.
Excerpt from The Landscape Game by Nicholas Muellner
—Ron Jude, from the series Other Nature
In Stenram’s versions of these images, the curtains are extended to partially obscure the women. The background envelopes the focal point and the foreground slips into the background. The curtain vacillates between striptease-drape and blind or shutter, reinforcing its role as a barrier between public and private.
—from the Drape Series, by Eva Stenram
Anonymous, San Francisco, 2009
It’s difficult to explain what makes someone especially interesting to me – it’s a combination of personality, spirit, and their actual, physical being. These photographs are so reductive – photographic description and detail is virtually all there is – & hopefully physical description becomes illuminating on another, psychological level. It’s important that the photograph describes a particular subject, but it also has to speak to something much larger, so that the viewer has the sense of a shared history; they’re portraits of all of us.
—Katy Grannan
Andrea Modica, from the Best Friends Portfolio
