Marshall Scheider is originally from Portland, Oregon, and currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Marshall's work primarily focuses on American life, culture, and the changing physical and social landscape. Through images, he explores the passage of time and its link to the degradation and coinciding reconstruction of the physical manifestations of our society – a metamorphosis that Marshall finds beautifully paralleled in the natural environment.
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I Am Singing
On a personal level, through the creation of this work I search for reconciliation; to unveil personal truths regarding the paradoxical nature of my own connection to America, and in a broader sense, home: The ways in which one can be inextricably connected to the things with which one is the most at-odds. Through pedestrian or banal views of the rural or urban landscape and passing shots of strangers on the street, I attempt to construct a far reaching but cohesive document of the America I see, here and now, as well as encourage contemplation about cultural identity and connection that may transcend any particular time or place.
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To view more of Marshall's work please visit his website.
I Am Singing
On a personal level, through the creation of this work I search for reconciliation; to unveil personal truths regarding the paradoxical nature of my own connection to America, and in a broader sense, home: The ways in which one can be inextricably connected to the things with which one is the most at-odds. Through pedestrian or banal views of the rural or urban landscape and passing shots of strangers on the street, I attempt to construct a far reaching but cohesive document of the America I see, here and now, as well as encourage contemplation about cultural identity and connection that may transcend any particular time or place.
To view more of Marshall's work please visit his website.
Seperate (1)
Float
Sky Studies
Sky Studies represents the collected results of numerous experiments with light, space, and time. The sky is my subject, a seemingly limitless expanse that can easily be perceived as flat despite its extreme dimensionality. I explore the limits of spatial perception by employing a series of optical and photographic props to suggest a connection between the photographic image and the significantly complex act of seeing. Space is simplified and flattened at times, and emphasized and expanded at others. I am not particularly concerned with proven scientific facts, but instead, am influenced by illusion and a sense of wonder. While the construction of each image is minimal, the resulting space is often complex. Much like the sky itself, the understanding of the work is constantly in flux.
Pass
Suspend
Surface
Reflect
Collapse
Appear
Cycle
Seperate (2)
To view more of Kyle's work please visit his website.
First Street (Irma), 2012
South Claiborne Avenue (Glass Cut to Size), 2012
Hell's Bells / Sulfur / Honey
It is part of a collective mythology that New Orleans is a city of mystery, faith, and magic. However, the quotidian underlies the mystique. I am interested in the colorful, heavy, and humid atmosphere that collides with the mystic landscape—a landscape at once laden with history and overturned and rebuilt every day.
The quotidian of New Orleans lines up and lights up in a cosmic and timeless manner. I drive upon the city’s roads looking for locations where I feel something ethereal and tangible—classic cars, hand painted signs, graveyards and bars on the same block, tropical vegetation, and churches are all part of this glimmering mundane. My eye is mediated through a means of analog recording in a very low-tech cityscape and I am drawn to a variety of available light sources—late afternoon sunlight, street lamps, neon, overcast skies, stained-glass windows, and window displays. The noise of the city is sucked out of the frame and what is left is an observation of New Orleans’ aura.
Piety Street, 2012
South Claiborne Avenue (Cadillac), 2012
The title of this project comes from research of Louisiana Voodoo. This particular combination of ingredients creates a "cure-all" spell that can solve all one's problems. The elements are to be mixed together, put in a glass, rubbed on a black cat and then slowly sipped. Hell's Bells are poisonous (aka Datura or Jimson weed) and are commonly found in New Orleans. I’m curious about the difference between threat and safety—another relationship constantly in the back of one’s mind in an impossible city like New Orleans.
North Claiborne Avenue (The Red Door), 2012
Washington Avenue, 2012
Jefferson Street (Catfish One), 2011
Angola, 2012
Delachaise Street, 2012
Feliciana Street, 2012
Poland Avenue, 2012
Washington Avenue (Lester's Truck), 2012
To view more of Sophie's work please visit her website.
The True Gospel Preached Here
My series of color photographs entitled The True Gospel Preached Here documents the spiritual and creative work of Reverend H.D. and Margaret Dennis, a self-proclaimed preacher/artist/architect and his wife in Vicksburg, Mississippi. This elderly couple devoted more than twenty years of their lives to converting Margaret’s Grocery Store into a one-of-a-kind, nondenominational church. Their elaborate transformation of Margaret’s Grocery resulted in the creation of a major site of American folk art and architecture. In his list of the ten most significant examples of Southern architecture, noted American architect and MacArthur fellow, Samuel Mockbee, described Margaret’s Grocery: "Built by Reverend H.D. Dennis, its crude materials and methods of construction place it in an ethereal state of being and perpetual sense of beauty.”
Guided by visions from God, the Dennis’s conversion of Margaret’s Grocery was an inspired labor of love involving the construction of several towers, the creation of the Ark of the Covenant containing tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, the invention of new religious iconography and vibrant decorations. A sign at the entrance of Margaret’s Grocery announced: "Welcome Jews and Gentiles---This Church Open 24 Hours a Day.” Another sign promised: "The True Gospel Preached Here.” The towers and the exterior of the former store were covered in bands of high-gloss red, white, blue, green, yellow and pink paint. The interior walls and ceilings of the store and an old school bus were encrusted with religious artifacts, Mardi Gras beads, plastic flowers, hubcaps, Christmas lights and decorations, stuffed toy animals and all manner of discarded items. The Reverend used his church as a roadside attraction to lure visitors, a site where he would deliver fiery sermons and orations about the need to "practice living perfectly" and the ceaseless pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. He preached that all religions are one and that all races and creeds must love one another and live in harmony. The Reverend's re-telling of Bible stories incorporated unique elaborations and interpretations. In the Garden of Eden, the snake walks upright and waves a flashy tail full of diamonds, rubies, and pearls. Eve must do his bidding because women love pretty things.
As God’s appointed Spiritual Advisor to the World, Reverend Dennis’ life history was filled with stories of miracles and divine intercessions. One of the Reverend's favorite stories recounted his own birth. While giving birth, the Reverend's mother died, and the Reverend was left unattended in a deserted house. The Reverend survived this ordeal because angels came down from heaven to nurture and protect him. After three days, he was discovered by neighbors who smelled the decay of his mother's body. When the Reverend was still a baby, a "twister" touched down, picked up the Reverend and transported him to Arkansas where he was safely dropped, laughing, on to soft vegetation. Other narratives described miraculous events that protected the preacher when he served as a gunner in the South Pacific in WWII. Such occurrences convinced the Reverend of his true calling in life. Inspired by these stories, I often portray Reverend Dennis as a mystic or Old Testament prophet.
While documenting the Dennises and their work, my photographs address a number of other themes and subtexts: the Reverend and Margaret’s love of God and their love for one another, their commitment to their work, the role of spirituality in southern culture, folk art and creativity, the joys and demands of the ascetic life and the process of growing older. On a more personal level, my photographs reveal the evolution of my relationship with the Reverend and Margaret over the past eighteen years. When I first arrived in 1994, I was just one of a large number of visitors who stopped to view the primitive splendor of Margaret's Grocery. For the first few years, I must admit I was quite intimidated by the Reverend as he charged up, denounced me as a sinner and demanded repentance. As I continued to visit and photograph, however, our relationship slowly changed until the Reverend and Margaret called me their white son and I embraced them as my mother and father. My photographs are a testimony of my love, respect, and admiration.
To view more of Bruce's work please visit his website.
Vanishing Points
In the name of Manifest Destiny, westerners expanded across America claiming the land was theirs by divine right. Modernization and civilization swept across the continent “improving” the country and eradicating entire native cultures in its path. In my most recent project, Vanishing Points, ancestry of the American landscape and reflection upon traditional Western Anglo American views of the project was inspired by the battle over the use of land I explore the nature, wilderness, ownership and spirituality. That is now the Suncrest Town Center in Morgantown, WV. The Town Center was developed on a 2,000 year-old sacred indigenous burial ground and village site less than a mile from my house. I am fascinated by this simultaneous presence and absence in the landscape, the seen and unseen.
Michael Sherwin has won numerous grants and awards for his work, and has been exhibited widely, including recent shows at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, New York, SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, the Clay Center for Arts and Sciences in Charleston, WV, Pittsburgh Filmmakers Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
To view more of Michael's work please visit his website.
How Does It Feel To Be Leaving The Most Beautiful City In The World?
Since my first time in Cape Town, I have been intrigued by urban fear and, as a result, the manner in which South African society deals with this feeling. Walls, fences and CCTV cameras immediately held my attention. Once I’d become better acquainted with the country’s sociocultural climate, it was easy to see the strong links that existed between nature and architecture.
We started our collaboration in 2010 and the book form seemed immediately the right way to collect the works come from the two different media, text and image. The project engages with the perception of aesthetic of the so called "Mother City", among a racial issue in a post-apartheid era. Cape Town here is seen as Pan-African city rather than a "less African city" and is a paradigm of the South African society.
To view more of Marco's work, purchase your copy of How Does It Feel To Be Leaving The Most Beautiful City In The World?, available in our shop and visit his
The Source of Heat
I pursue contradiction and dislocation, like the misplacement of an object or the unexpected joining of two things. My pictures are like something you see out of the corner of your eye, unimportant but persistent—a gesture, a passing car, a snowball splitting into a million pieces—that is rendered significant through the act of photographing.
My visual vocabulary is about texture, weight, density--the heaviness of air, the gravity of bodies. Solid entities begin to move and kinetic entities halt to a stop. People that should be upright are on the ground; people that should be firmly on land are at sea.
These small contradictions hint at a world ever so slightly off its axis, where expectations are subverted and edges are misaligned. The resulting fissures between edges form the space in which my pictures exist. This space is not simply ambiguous but also uneasy and dark. It is a space where the unknown blooms, beckons, and engulfs us.
To view more of Sophie's work please visit her website.
Genius Loci
Genius Loci is an ongoing documentary photography project that aims to define the quintessential spirit of the Jiu Valley, Romania. While searching for this spirit, the only thing that can clearly be defined is the empty spot it left behind as it left the area and in the people who live there.
The valley has seen non-stop social and economic growth since the 1840s when coal was discovered in the area until the mid-90s when the shifting markets made them unable to sustain competitive prices on the international market. The mines started closing and the way of life that has been the norm in the area started to fade. As the economy gets worst and most of the mines are closed or in the process of closing nothing seems to come up to replace them.
The investments in tourism have dried up recently due to political reasons. Half-completed ski-lifts and hotels lie crumbling on the surrounding mountains before they ever open. In the valleys houses and mines crumble as well. The whole valley is silent. There are no sounds of industry, no distant rumble in the distance, and people seem to lie and wait for it to come back, or for something to replace it.
To view more of Gabriel's work please visit his website.
Foxhole
When camouflage fails, a silhouette betrays it. All that delineates the almost well hidden thing from its environment is a faint outline. Photography, like camouflage, is the visual product of a spatial practice: both require a presence and awareness in the material environment, and both entail a perceived transmutation of that environment. Photographs seem to extract something from it, camouflage seems to become a part of it. These photographs borrow criteria from various tactics of camouflage in both the natural and synthetic world. Terms like disruptive patterning, countershading, concealing coloration, cloaking, mimetics, and dissimulation provided frameworks for their production. Each of these terms charts a course of action, a road map from being seen to not being seen. I have followed these formulaic routes, sometimes turn for turn, but have changed their point of departure, and so too their destination. The how of disappearance remains the same, the why is more mysterious. It has become an experimental practice where failure and success are equally valid, and the only clear goal is to use the camera to catch a glimpse of something between the seen and unseen, when being is a brief equilibrium between becoming and disappearance.
To view more of Aaron's work please visit his website.
City Under One Roof
The entrance to Whittier, Alaska is a 2.6-mile tunnel through Maynard Mountain. The tunnel bares its teeth twice an hour, allowing cars in to Whittier or out, inhaling them on one side of the mountain and exhaling on the other. At night it closes, leaving the town isolated until morning.
Within the mountains that encircle the town is another enclosure: Begich Towers, a 14–story condominium that houses the majority of Whittier’s 200 residents. It is a vertical town, with walls so thin the missionary can listen in on the bartender next door. Those who don’t live in the tower—in winter, fewer than 40—live in another condominium just above the railroad tracks, in their boats or trailers, or in hotel rooms in the Anchor Inn. “A lot of people don’t stay here because they think it feels like prison,” one resident told me. “I just laugh. I tell everybody, ‘We all live in the same house, we just have separate bedrooms."
I first crossed through that tunnel three years ago. This year I spent the winter and joined the ranks of those who enter this unlikely town and find themselves unable to leave. I am not alone. Despite its challenges to access, decrepit surroundings, and potentially claustrophobic living quarters, Whittier is home to people who have made their way from across the world and built lives impossible anywhere else. The title, City Under One Roof, was a nickname for the enormous, long-abandoned Buckner Building, a remnant of Whittier’s past as a military port. I seek stories of the myriad lives that passed through Whittier’s crumbling infrastructure, from its military heyday to near-ghost town to its revival by a group of entrepreneurs and renegades. I question what creates a town—personalities, stories, buildings—what can weaken, strengthen, or destroy it.
To view more of Jen's work please visit her website.
If You Leave is an online blog / publication that is currently seeking funding to put on numerous exhibitions across Europe as well as publish a physical magazine with images from this showcase. Read more about this exciting project below.
Snapshots of a journey made by wanderers who study the mysterious yet peaceful feeling of desolation and loneliness. More concerned with the impact of a single image, rather than a body of work, photographer Laurence Von Thomas has curated this distinctive collection of images that tell their own unique story.
Since its beginnings as a personal blog in 2009, If You Leave has become one of the most followed and referenced online photography galleries, showcasing the work of more than 500 contemporary photographers from 44 countries over 6 continents to a following of 430,000 on Tumblr and with 4 volumes of the 'If You Leave' books on the shelves of independent bookstores around the world.
How it works
The First Selection: We will make an initial selection of images based on weekly open calls through Flickr and Facebook starting on June 1st and running until the submission closes on July 8th. 2 images/day will then be featured on the IYL Showcase blog.
The Second Selection: Out of this selection the Showcase Jury makes their top 3 choices. These will then be merged into the final 20 images and featured 2/day on the original If You Leave blog, starting 10 days before the exhibition opening.
Showcase Jury
The Winners: Out of those 20 images 3 prizes will be drawn: one image is selected by a panel consisting of industry professionals, a second image is chosen by the Showcase Jury and a third image is chosen through public voting.
The Prizes: A different prize for each winner ranging from: sponsored prize money, a full feature in the new IYL publication, photography goods (camera, film, studio, other deals) and an artist residency.
To support and view the project please visit the If You Leave website.
Ormet Aluminum
The Living Room
Born and Raised
Outsiders have long fictionalized the narrative surrounding Appalachia. As a resident of West Virginia I have always been aware of the views others hold of my home and they have guided me to create my own version of life in the hills. My Appalachia is a granulated depiction based on the false impressions of others, my idealizations and personal experiences. Light plays an important role in how I understand this place. The warm southern sun creates a glow that pours over the mountains, rivers and forests creating long shadows, dark recesses and gray mists that blanket the landscape.
Home Is Where The Heart Is
The Hunting Cabin
This unique quality of light is inherent to the hills and provides a catalyst to the imagination- a backdrop that becomes both magnificent and eerie. It is its own character within my story of Appalachia. The people who inhabit the photographs are my upper middle class family and friends in West Virginia. They play slightly exaggerated roles of themselves within sets I have constructed using their homes, furniture and objects. After I create my depiction of each character, I carefully assemble the images to build my concept of home. The end product is a strand of life pulled from the whole.
Floodplains, Coal Trains, and Kudzu Vines
The Daughter of Morgan Morgan
Sweet Tea and a Caged Bird
Town and Country Days
Lifetime Resident
The Hanibal Damn
The Scare Crow
Bitter Sweet
Untitled
Untitled
Smoke Stack Skyline
To view more of Aaron's work please visit his website.
One Foot in Eden / How Red the Rose
I have worked extensively in the mountains of Tennessee & the Lowcountry of South Carolina. I am interested in the landscapes and the lives the people are carving out for themselves in these rural environs. The land and inhabitants seem very different and distinct on the surface of the pictures, and they are, but what I find interesting is the longer I photograph each region and move past surface description, or the way things look, the more similar they become in terms of their collective aspirations and their interactions with the natural world.
I am equally interested in how nature is a signifier of meaning to people with very different backgrounds and philosophical belief systems. Why do we as humans tend to migrate to natural environments? Why have we blocked off lands for our enjoyment and commodification? Why do we as humans look to the natural world for answers to questions that are as old as the land itself? Is there something intrinsic in these spaces that elicits our undivided attention? Is it beauty? Is there an element of the sublime? I hope the underlying questions generated by the work teach us something about ourselves by distilling these concerns into a visual form that is universally approachable.
It is my main goal that this work is a springboard for further thought and contemplation on who we are as a people and how we recruit nature to be our comforting shoulder and adumbration of meaning pointing toward something greater than the singular self and the experiences contained within the maddening jumble of post-modern life. By wielding my camera in a deliberate yet subtle manner, paying utmost attention to framing, light, space, and metaphor, I create a complex environment where the landscape and cast of characters coalesce and vie for attention within these southern landscapes. The land becomes a stage where human life is acting out a poetic form of wild living. Even if this exchange is mediated and flawed, these photographs continually show humankind seeking (consciously and unconsciously) a meaningful connection to this land and a place to deposit their angst that is fundamentally accumulated living in the digital age.
To view more of John's work please visit his website.
Keith Yahrling, Kings Mountain, NC, 2012 
Sara Macel, Plane Over Baton, Rouge, LA, 2009 
Shawne Brown, Blue Hole, Carter County, TN 2011 
Jeff Rich, Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, TN 2010. 
Aaron Bloom, Floodplains, Coal Trains, Kudzu Vines, WV 2013 
Adam Williams, Field Transmission: Cache, FL 2014 
Alexis Lodsun, Lemon, 2014 GA.
Ashley Kauschinger, Flesh and Memory, GA 2013 
Rachel Cox, Winning Apple, GA 2013 
Brooke White, Due South, True North-Auburn, MS 2012 
Zachary McCauley, Hattiesburg, MS 2013 
Yijun Liao, Pixy, Untitled (Woman), TN 2008 
Warren Thompson, Trailer, Florida Keys, FL 2002 
Thomas Pearson, Wards, Highway 49, MS 2014 
Tatum Shaw, Cartersville, GA 2014 
Tammy Mercure, Kingsport, TN 2013 
Sylvia de Swaan, Chris & Martha, LA 1974 
Steve Bliss, Tybee Light, GA 2004 
Stephen Milner, Local and his Monte Carlo, GA 2013 
Rachel Boillot, Sherrill, AR 2012 
Pascal Amoyel, Charleston South Carolina, SC 2014 
Marcie Hancock, The Rooster Not The Hen, NC 2014 
Laine Wyatt, Restaurant 2, Marianna, FL 2007. 
Leigh Merril, The Strip,Panel 6, TX 2013 
Lara Shipley, When the Baby Came He Built Them a House, AR 2013 
Kim Llerena, Marfa, TX 2013 
Joshua Dudley Greer, Lenox, GA 2014 
Jordi Huisman, Houston Johnston In His Trailer, TX 2014 
John Hathaway, Yonges Island, SC, 2013 
Jeremy Chandler, Girl With Bulldog, FL 2009 
Jaroslaw Studencki, Untitled, from series The Conch Republic: A Cut-Rate Paradise, FL 2013. 
Jamie Carayiannis, View from the top of Black Mountain, Appalachia, VA, VA 2013 
Houston Cofield,Dirt, Tallahatchie River Bottoms, MS 2013. 
Rachel Cox, Portuguese Tumbler, GA 2013 
Elizabeth Moran, George, In Flight Suit, TN 2014 
Eliza Lamb, Guns from the series Hopewell, VA 2012 
Constanze Flamme, Troubled Water, Grandisle Angler, 2012 
Brandon Thibodeaux, 'Mississippi 662', Duncan, Mississippi, MS 2012. 
Betty Press, Pig Races, Juke Joint Festival Clarksdale, MS 2010 
Ashley Jones, Disconnected Jones Street at Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Savannah, GA, 2012
Bobbi Fabian, Untitled, MI, 2004
Chris Evans, Three Deer, TX,2013. 
Tommy Kha, Discovery, TN, 2011
Cody Cobb, South #37, LA 2011 
Camilo Ramirez, Untitled, LA, 2010
Malcolm Lightner, Final Lap, FL 2003 
Walker Pickering, Holy Ghost Revival, TX, 2007
Colin Todd, Cody, LA, 2009
Sophie Lvoff, Angola, TX, 2012
Adam Forrester, Eighth Avenue, AL, 2009
Michael Sherwin, Boat Ramp, Ohio River, Green Bottom Wildlife Management Area, WV, 2012
Travis Brown, Krippy Kreme, TN 2012. 
Caitlin Peterson, Stone Mountian, GA, 2013 
Amber Shields Store at Christmas, TX, 2006
Bruce West, The Reverend's Golden Chair, MS, 2002
Joe Leavenworth, Untitled (Native Son), GA, 2011 
Whitten Sabbatini, Cadillac, Central Avenue, MS 2013 
Aaron Canipe, Dentist Office Waiting Room, TN, 2014 
Daniel Terna, Gun shop, Fort Hood, TX 2009 
Clementine Schneidermann 
Ursula Sprecher & Julian Salinas Stephenville, TX, 2012 
Fredrick Hirschman, Mobile Advertising, Cape Coral, FL, 2013 
Maury Gortemiller, Kraft Singles, GA 2013 
Adam Neese, The Known World, TX, 2012 
Amanda Greene, Oranges, GA, 2013 
Daniel Kraus, Martha's Pictures, KY 2012. 
Sebastian Collet, Untitled, 2011,TN.
Net
Arrows
Letting My Guard Down (2013)
It took me over a year of collecting pieces from different countries that I’ve visited to come to the realization that no matter the place, people will feel the same way about everyday life; the burdens that they carry, the things that weigh them down. They are detached from their own selves, isolated, feeling trapped. There is a desire for connection, expectations that need to be fulfilled, a longing for something that’s out of reach.
Surrounded by buildings and overwhelming skylines, feeling lost in the chaos that public life creates, I cannot help but empathize with them. I’m always on the move to catch up with the frenetic rhythms of reality; yet again, I remain static. I’m constantly in search of an escape, trying to free myself from holding on to the past, to an idea, a person or a thought and yet I’m constrained, bound.
These images are a mirror of myself, not a window to the world outside. These solitary subjects are nothing but self-portraits, scattered glimmers of my soul; a wry representation of the weight that I carry, the anchor that holds me down.
Wires
Pines
Tram
Llama
Tags
Pillars
Shrine
Buoy
Doll
Napkins
To view more of Yorgos' work please visit his website.
Mom’s House
Mom’s Vacation
You Have Nothing to Worry About
You Have Nothing to Worry About is a complex and difficult body of work that can be broadly defined as documentary photography. For the last five years, I have been making photographs of my mentally ill, substance-abusing mother. Her diagnoses change frequently—from alcoholism to dissociative identity disorder—and my relationship with her has been fraught with animosity for as long as I can remember. I am fully aware that my mother thrives on being the center of attention and that, at times, our portrait sessions encourage her erratic behavior.
The photographs are simultaneously upsetting and encouraging; honest and theatrical; loving and hateful. Corresponding to my mother’s current bipolar diagnosis, conflating these seeming binary opposites is the only way to make photographs of her that are remotely valid. By turning the camera toward my mother and my relationship with her, I capture her behavior as an echo of my own emotional response. The images function like an on going conversation.
"I Fell Down and Broke My Jaw”
Hole in the Wall
Mom’s Breast Cancer Scar
Rocking Chair
Xanax from Mom
Red Wine on Mom’s Costa Rican Nightgown
Mom’s Appendectomy
Mattress
Two Weeks After Appendectomy
New Make-Up
Intravenous Fluids
All of Mom’s Prescriptions
To view more of Melissa's work please visit her website.
I've Known My Dad My Whole Life
My dad has always been there for me when I was growing up. He sacrificed a lot for me, including his own happiness at times, to make sure my life was better than his. Every since I moved away from home, it’s been hard to keep in contact. These photos are an attempt to stay close with him.
To view more of Edward's work please visit his website.
Sara Macel was recently named one of the Top 50 Photographers in Photolucida’s Critical Mass Award, received the Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and her first monograph, May the Road Rise to Meet You, has been featured in The New Yorker, Fraction Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, CPW, and Lenscratch.
Macel grew up with a travelling salesman father peddling telephone poles made out of Southern Yellow Pine. As a child, she always wondered where he went as she watched his car disappear down the driveway, and May The Road Rise To Meet You is the outcome of these early wonderings. Its sixty pages hold both real and fabricated scenes of an imagined career of her father Dennis, and a tender encapsulation of a daughter filling in the blanks of an entire life lived where she could not follow. Going back to both the places in her father’s past, and the places she imagined he could have been, the perspectives blur seamlessly from Macel to Dennis, all locations blend into the same transient milieu, and all sense of time slips away. We’re left with only a sense of a young girl putting herself into her father’s size 11 work boots, and right alongside her, we feel out the open road in its widened soles.
With Macel’s critical eye, attention to light, and included hotel paper scraps from the past, she delivers gut punching visceral sensations. Looking at these photos you can taste that metallic burn in the back of your throat on a 5 am flight; you can feel that half-second blinded by sunlight through a yawning windshield, searching to see if you’re still in the same state as when you fell asleep.
May The Road Rise To Meet You is more than a monograph: through Macel’s lens, the story of her father’s career becomes a universal shared voyage of distance in its many forms. It gives us new perspective about the male vs. female experience on the road, comments on how men are viewed by women, how parents are viewed by their children, and how inevitably, photographs can toy with memory.
Title : “May The Road Rise To Meet You”, 2013
Size : 10 x 9 in
Page Count : 67 Pages
Publisher : Daylight Books
Edition : 1250, Signed
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Kodak Anniverssary Beach Ball, 2014
Study of a Female Nude I, 2014
Maps & Territories
Maps & Territories is an elaborate exploration of the meaning of representation through a series of slightly disparate images, designed to relate to each other through the notion of free association. Borrowing elements from the history of art, photographic practice and advertising imagery, the series attempts to reveal the fragility of the mechanisms that sustain representations.
Reference Targets, 2014
Trichromatic Vision Model, 2014
Pruning, 2014
Representation, by its very definition, can’t be the thing it represents. Representations don’t merely recreate existing objects or elements of the phenomenal world; they beautify, improve upon, and universalize them. As a result, things get caught up in simulacrum, spectacle and fetish, creating a fictional world, a plastic postmodernity of illusions, appearances and images in which there is no capacity for a non-mediated relationship to reality.
Atlas, 2014
Mimicry, 2014
Palm Trees, 2014
In the contemporary world more and more things first become visible to us via the images we see of them. There is a shift towards the process of the replacement of an object by its image and representations in the form of photographs have become the main devices through which we perceive and interpret the world around us. Because of this it seems vital to face the fundamental questions about the act of representation, its influence on our perception and understanding of reality and the habitus, modalities and the productive capacity of it.
Paper Sheet, 2014
Study of a Female Nude II, 2014
Picket Fence, 2014
Suprematist Composition, 2014
Beach Balls, 2014
Untitled (Red Shoes), 2014
Untitled (Black Shoes), 2014
To view more of Holger's work please visit his website.
Pursuit of Happiness
Historically photographs have served as tangible documents or memories, usually of significant moments from our daily lives such as vacations, birthdays, weddings and other rites of passage. We tend to use photography as a way to not only document these moments, but to construct and shape them as joyful occasions worthy of remembering. The family photographer composes the scene carefully to include the most significant landmarks and events while encouraging a uniformity of smiling faces despite the disparate range of temperaments and states of mind. These constructed images serve as implanted memories, which allow us to remember past events with fondness, warmth and nostalgia for a time and state of being that never truly existed. Certainly our lives do in fact include inspiring and happy memories, but the photographs can never quite capture the essence of those moments adequately, and more importantly they purposefully attempt to mask any sign of melancholy, uncertainty or fear for the future that is often the subtext for these types of life changing. We casually ignore any disconcerting elements or emotions that might be lurking in the background as a distraction from our higher truth of the moment as we’d like to remember it.
In the 21st century that process has evolved into a more instantaneous method of validating and sharing those otherwise personal and intimate moments. If we don’t photograph it and instantly post it online we feel as if it didn’t really happen. Now, as in the past, the photograph serves not only as documentation and validation, but also as a fictional idealized version of our lives. The difference now is that we are less focused on the most significant moments from our personal history, but instead feel compelled to document and promote relatively insignificant scenes of our daily lives, such as our daily adventures in shopping, meals, and posing in front of any ephemeral landmark that crosses our path.
The photographs from this series are all taken from my daily life, and are no less fictional and deliberate than the average family photo, and equally as banal as the average instagram post. However, my intent has been to capture scenes and situations from my daily life that provoke existential dilemmas and force me to question my place within the social structure and the environment at large. Most of these photos are taken not as calculated attempts to create a body of work, and not as deliberately staged scenes, but are simply captured extemporaneously as they present themselves, usually within the context of relaxing or performing the mundane tasks of being a homeowner and father living the American Dream. Although these scenes are generally peaceful, I carefully choose my compositions to reveal the underlying sense of foreboding and angst that I often feel during my own futile attempt at the pursuit of happiness
His work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally in various venues across Europe, most recently in a three-person show at Art Laboratory Berlin, (Berlin, Germany, 2012) and two consecutive solo shows at COOP gallery (Nashville, TN, 2010-11). Recent notable accolades include a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland to create a sculptural installation (1997-8) and being selected to participate in the New York Foundation for the Arts’ MARK program (2010).
To view more of Dave's work please visit his website.