New Orleans-born and Louisville, Kentucky-based photographer Michael Sebastian puts people to sleep for a living but his photography arrests our attention with his rich use of color and his exceptional eye for composition in his meditations on the Southern suburban landscape.
Sebastian is a Southern photographer we are just getting to know, but others have noticed. He's just started a regular column on the fraction blog, here.
In 2010 alone, he was a featured photographer on One One Thousand, selected as a Critical Mass Finalist, featured on Flak Photo, chosen as a participant in the highly competitive Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews, featured in the Griffin Museum Virtual Gallery, and published in the The New York Times Magazine.
Congratulations to Michael on his work and on his well-deserved recognition. We look forward to seeing more of his work.
One of the good things about the WWW is the amount of interesting material one runs across, including especially interviews with artists.
There is, for example, a really interesting interview with Mark Steinmetz here, on American Suburb X, and with Roe Ethridge on the website of The Photographers' Gallery, here.
The interview with Roe Ethridge is interesting because it is an oral interview rather than a text interview; one learns from it a good deal about how he thinks about his work, including the relationship between his commercial work (note the LL Bean catalogue cover) and his Fine Art work.
One also notes that Roe, who grew up in Atlanta, has been out in the world long enough to lose his Southern accent.
There is a fascinating, though overly brief, documentary on Sally Mann available on PBS at the moment. Its part of their ART:21 series that deals with a range of artists who are offered by PBS as representing American art in the 21st century.
This episode is on the subject of PLACE. If you click on the above link, you can watch the entire episode, which also includes segments devoted to Richard Serra and some other folks. Mann's is the second segment and it starts about 14 minutes into the episode.
This ART: 21 episode includes conversation with Mann, and with her husband and some of her children. There is discussion of Mann's cameras, methods, artistic concerns, and the like. There is also discussion of her artistic concerns, especially their Southern roots in landscape, family, history, and opportunity.
PBS also has a web page for Mann, here, that includes more information, more filmed material, more links.
What with her show in Richmond, VA, her involvement in this project for PBS, and her upcoming talks at Harvard, Mann is having a major year in her professional life. This is good to see. and to enjoy, and to celebrate.
Catherine Fox likes Noel's cattywonkus view of the world. Now, that's a Southern word for you, except we spelled it "cattywompus" in my part of the South when I was a boy.
In any case, the review is laudatory, the work itself is first-class, and its all worth checking in on, if you are in Atlanta.
The Gallery has a show of all four photographers' work up now through May 1st, 2011, at Ambika P3 at the University of Westminster, in London. The Gallery's website has lots of good information about the Prize and about the photographers, as well as links to video interviews with each photographer.
The Deutsche Borse Prize is worth about $50, 000, a good chunk of change, which is awarded to "a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography in Europe over the previous year."
The winner will be announced toward the end of April. We will keep you posted.
O'Hagan continues, "In a follow-up statement, Steele-Perkins wrote: "I am angry that Photographers' Gallery has become a misnomer. It is not about photography or photographers, it is about a narrow thread of photographic curation that is frequently dull, and/or poorly conceived."
O'Hagan notes that other British photographers have joined with Steele-Perkings in criticizing the Gallery for its narrow focus. O'Hagan notes that the fuss is about the fact that the work of all four of the short-listed Prize photographers practice conceptual photography, which he feels is "a genre guaranteed to raise the hackles of the public – and the many photographers who value practice over theory – as much as it generates reams of theoretical jargon by its critical champions."
O'Hagan's further thoughts on conceptual photography are here. In his view, conceptual photography is photography that sets out to "interrogate the photographic medium." The controversy has gotten the attention of Joerg Colberg over on the Conscencious blog, who says that a Prize is a Prize and not worth arguing about, although he admits he is "not the biggest fan of conceptual photography, because for me, it’s usually too obvious."
We had some discussion about conceptual photography on this blog last week, about the work of Maury Gortemiller. O'Hagan's definition of conceptual photography is way off, in my view. Photography can always be said to engage in the interrogation of the photographic medium, given that photography as a new medium of artistic expression is always discovering afresh what it can do. As, mostly, a modern art form, it is part of modern art's inherent questioning and reinvention of the medium of its practice.
To me, the practice of conceptual photography is about deciding in advance the issues (concepts?) one wants to address in a photograph, as opposed to the documentary or photojournalistic tradition, in which one goes out with a camera to see what the world has to offer.
I think conceptual photography is a major discipline of photography taught in many MFA programs today, and as I said in the earlier conversations the issue for me is not conceptual photography so much as it is the way some practitioners of conceptual photography cloud their work in a jargon that obscures their photographic achievement, restricting the audience for their work to those who can penetrate the language of their Artist's Statements.
We will keep up with this controversy in England and report on any new developments.
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