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!  

Thomas Struth

I have recently been directed toward the work of German photographer Thomas Struth. Just because my recent ideas found themselves lurking in to the psychological path of Struth’s work. I found this particularly interesting, during an interview given in 1988, Struth is asked to reply to a statement that describes his work “as political and social” : “Certainly, even if not, of course, in a direct manner. As far as my work on urban space is concerned, it is political and social in the sense I described before, of an analysis and a synthesis of our way of living in this society. But, I also think that my interest in portraiture, which I started to make 5 years ago, works in that direction, as a sort of testimony to people living in our age.”

Thomas Struth’s work is a testimony that ‘us’ photographers are researchers. This next extract is from James Lingwood’s Composure [or on being Still] text on Thomas Struth.

Thomas Struth’s photographs over the past 20 years constitute a sustained and concentrated inquiry into the ethics and aesthetics of seeing. Struth’s research is not motivated solely by an interest in what we can see - the surfaces of places, people and paintings - important though the subjects of his photographs are to him. He is equally preoccupied with the question of the way that we see. Because the way that we see, the manners and the models of seeing, are a powerful signifier or our social being, of the way that we are, with ourselves and with others; of the way that we negotiate our relations with people around us, with ‘Strangers and Friends’, to return to the title of an earlier book of Struth’s.

Taken from STILL by Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth has been that artist that I have always admired (from a distance), however it is only now that I feel it has become more relevant to me. With the work I am doing now and the project I am lining up to run straight off of it, I find my own mentality comparing to Struth’s.

Here are a few photographs from his portraits that analyse families. 

Dutch Photographers Inspire Me

If you were to say, "List your favourite photographers" chances are the first 7 names I would list would be Dutch.
There is something that connects me to their work. I become so drawn in to the beauty, the reality of their subjects.
To begin naming a few I will start with Hellen Van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, and Koos Breukel. 
I believe as my work has made the transition into the field of portraits more than anything, I became drawn to the things that tie in with me. Emotions, passions, misunderstandings, reality of everyday life, concerns. Things we have to deal with. 
Looking at the three artists I previously named, when you look at their work they take these things into account, they are able to grab that ethereal moment so delicately. 
When I think of good contemporary portraiture work, I automatically think of the Dutch. I'm not sure if it is their culture or the way photography is practiced and taught but they know how to hit the target.

Koos Breukel, Natasha Jaliuc and Arno Nollen


What I think I appreciate the most is the ability to capture real life, photography is a master of a tool in being able to create dreamy situations, and that can be a beautiful thing no matter what the subject. However, for me as a photographer second, and a human being first, I want to use my tool to express where I am in my life, what are the things touching my heart, moving my mind, causing me distress or happiness. What are these things that I have to deal with? And if I have the chance to record that, I will.

 

Rineke Dijkstra
Quite possibly my favourite photographer of today. When I listen to her talk about her work and the passion that comes from within her on the simplest subjects, I am moved. 
In the past she has forced comparisons and similarities between gender roles and age groups. 
The photographs I have included don't completely show her off but they are here for my own current research, looking into the adolescence age. On that note I will go on to Hellen Van Meene.