Business Boom Bolton Feature

Business Boom Bolton Feature

 “Photography is an excellent medium to do the things you want to do; and with that I find that I can explore my own interests through people (Portraits), space (Still Life) and time (Landscape). What Bloomed For Us was a project that started at the beginning of the year. I wanted to photograph couples and move beyond the barriers that are often placed in around relationships. It incorporated all of those spoken about elements into one and played on something I find evident in all of my photographs. A way of focusing on fleeting moments. Transient Works II is a collection of photographs that is taking these fleeting moments further. 
Taking in life’s experiences is influence enough, but I am forever moved by todays leading contemporary artists. Photography from peers up to big names and iconic photographers of the past keep me thinking of other ways to explore the medium.
Having just completed a BA in Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University I now reside in London, interning for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, working as an artist, and starting up as freelance. 

The Boy, and His Room

Before the boy packed his glam bag bound for Orlando, FL for a years tanning session.  I got the chance to recreate something 70's worthy photographing Andrew Gott in his far from shy bedroom.

A look at Elina Brotherus - The New Painting

Le Printemps, 2001

Elina Brotherus, born 1972, Helsinki, Finland is an artist that I keep a close eye on, just to see what new material she is creating. For me, the work she has continued to produce over the past decade and longer have been more than exceedingly good, putting her in the forefront of contemporary artists working with photography. 

I was first exposed to Brotherus’s The New Painting (2000-2004) series, work that really does force the viewer to analyse the photograph in front them in the way you would do a painting. Brotherus’s says this about the work ‘Photography is the new painting, said my friend Edda Jonsdottir, director of i8 gallery in Reykjavik. With this somewhat provocative sentence in mind in June 2000 I start my still on going series, “The New Painting”. I use contemporary means of expression (large format colour photography), but I owe a lot to the aesthetics of classical figurative painting. With the camera I try to approach the same problems that painters have been dealing with for centuries: light, colour, composition figures, in space, projection of the three-dimensional in the two-dimensional. I find these questions fundamental in all visual arts.’ (Elina Brotherus, 2001)

Der Wanderer 3, 2003

Elina Brotherus is known for including herself as the model in her photographs. Older works focused more on the inclusion of her in the photographs, the emphasis on self-portraiture, identity and the problem with representing oneself. Again she is seen within the photograph but she describes that it now presents this person (often times her) as ‘an object of investigation, not for the inner properties but for the external ones. The person in the picture is a model, in the same sense as painters have been using models.’ She questions how figures interact with space and with each other, and how light reveals the body form.

The next extract is from Elina Brotherus’s website, where she discusses what has motivated her to produce The New Painting.

The colours of a photographic print are not given; the “correct” answer is not hidden in the negative. It is surprise how much can be done in the darkroom. Chosen the colour of the sky can be just as arbitrary as choosing among pigments of oil paint. This came like a revelation to me when working on the The New Painting. All there is, is a vague impression of “how it was” on the location, and a choice that has to be made by the artist when printing. This is why I have started to take notes, in the spirit of Bonnard, in order to remember what things looked like.

Photography, unlike painting, has a direct link to the reality. This is both its enchantment and its curse. People tend to treat photographs as documents: who is this person, or where is that place? I would prefer that we pay more attention, not only to the subject matter itself, but to how it is shown: what visual choices has the artist made, how has he/she solved certain problems, what is the structure of the image, the mood of it, how are the colours tuned? How does it affect us as viewers?

• Elina Brotherus 2006

I am attracted to the work of Elina Brotherus, for one, the images are visually pleasing, they open your eyes to what she is trying to portray, and she also understands the loss of power and control to the audience. Her work searches for the beauty in the landscape just as paintings did/do and it establishes the photograph as a valuable art form, very much like Wolfgang Tillmans valuing the photographs place within the museum. 

Der Wanderer 4, 2003

Nu Endormi, 2003

Der Wanderer 5, 2003

I was very interested in the way Brotherus worked portraiture and the focus on body form into the landscape with care on beauty and pose. When I had begun working on the work now called Transient Bodies, my motives were based on the relationship with the individual and the landscape as one, but it tried to connect the too to make this aesthetically pleasing image that opted to consider the beauty of landscape photography such as the works of Ansel Adams and the portraiture of Bill Brandt. 

Der Wanderer 2

Der Wanderer, 2003

Orage Montant, 2003

Very Low Horizon, 2001

Broken Horizon, 2001

Figure au Bord de L’eau, 2002

There is so much beauty in this photograph to read from, the beauty of the landscape, the beauty of the figure. You want to know what he is looking towards, what has brought him to this raw unmanufactured landscape. I had not seen this image before I started to work on ideas of my own, but this would have certainly inspired the work I wanted to produce. It is inspiring me right now in fact, such beauty and craft.

Baigneuse de Saturnia, 2003

All images shown here are taken from Elina Brotherus's book The New Painting, all copyright goes to the artist and publishers, if you are interested in Elina Brotherus and the work she produces visit her website here

A look at Photographer Kevin Kunishi

All photographs in this post are Kevin Kunishi’s who holds copyright to these images, you can view the rest of his work at his website here.

The grave of Benjamin Linden

I don’t remember what publication notified me of the work of Kevin Kunishi, it could of been Foam, it might have even been Vice, (in fact a google search reveals that it was Hey Hot Shot!). Now that I can recall, this photographer who studied History first 10 years prior to a MFA in Photography at San Francisco has certainly interested me a great deal. 

I begun looking at his project Los restos de la revolucion, a body of work that looks at his prolonged stay in the highlands of Northern Nicaragua, studying Sandinistas and their opposing Contra veterans.

His artist statement is as follows;

After receiving my undergraduate degree with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy in Central America, I wanted to move beyond the broad recital of policy and ideology within textbooks and explore the personal experiences of individuals directly affected by those policies. This body of work was created between the years 2009 and 2011, during a prolonged stay in the highlands of Northern Nicaragua. These photographs are from a larger series consisting of portraits of Sandinistas and their opposing Contra veterans, as well as artifacts and landscapes significant to the civil war that took place in Nicaragua during the 1980s. In 1979, after over a decade of struggle, the socialist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua overthrew the dictator, Anastasio Somoza. The Sandinistas quickly began the work of applying their social and ideological values in the hopes of creating a better Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the United States government had other plans. In the cold war environment of the 1980s, the prospect of a socialist/communist government gaining a foothold in Central America was deemed unacceptable. The CIA began financing, arming and training a clandestine rebel insurgency to destabilize the government. These anti-Sandinista guerrillas became known as Contras. Between 1980 and 1990, Nicaragua became the battleground of conflicting political ideologies; the promise of a bright future was lost as the nation descended into civil war. Although these two sides held polarized political philosophies, their survivors are united by the burden of a war-torn history. As political ideology evolves, dilutes or disappears, the horrors of war endure.

• Kevin Kunishi 

This is just a few from Los Restos de la Revolucion the full work is here

The photographs that came from Los Restos de la Revolucion told a narrative of exactly what was going on there. Visually Kunishi uses photography as a tool and is not held back in any way, producing and combining moving portraits, focused still life’s, and beautiful landscapes. I was very captivated from viewing Los Restos de la Revolucion that I almost missed out on some of his other projects and his portraits.

The portrait of Carlos, only has one actual portrait photograph, and the other two are still life photographs. I find the way he has documented this is 100% effective. A portrait is also about where a person lives, and what a person owns and their interests. It is hard to capture all of that in one image, Kevin Kunishi composes the portrait of Carlos in between a what could the place where Carlos sleeps and a photograph of a hand-made boat imitation. 

It made me think about the way I have been laying my own work out, something that is just as important as the content of the image. You want it to be at its most effective stage, because of the lost ownership of the work once handed over to the audience.


Here is Kunishi's feature in Hey Hot Shot!  

Travelogue - Print Fair Edition

Letter pressed and printed on coloured paper.

My Prints

Transient Bodies - Print Fair Edition

Letter pressed and printed on coloured paper.

My Prints