Peeping Tom

A true master of photography is Dutchmen Erwin Olaf. With Anton Corbijn perhaps one of the names a Dutch-non-photography-enthusiast might know. Erwin Olaf is an artist who tries to set a mood and tell a story with his work. He isn’t out to tell his story, per se. He creates a scene in which the viewer can create his or her own story. The photographs are so wonderfully lit that a random crop would probably even produce another wonderful photograph. His latest work is called The Keyhole.

The Keyhole is showcased as a video/photo installation that, at the viewer’s own responsibility, can be watched, or be peeked at, through a keyhole. Erwin Olaf uses film and music to enhance his photographic work. And vice versa. The whole packages brings an extra dimension to this work of art. The Keyhole shows us seven individuals from their backsides. We look at them as if we have caught them doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing. The feeling one might get when sneaking a peek at something. The awareness you’ll have of doing something sneaky or even wrong, when looking at something or somebody through a keyhole.

In the video below Erwin talks about his work.

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Numbers Visualized

Some statistics are just too mind-blowingly incomprehensible to digest. Luckily there is an artist who tries to translate incomprehensible data into comprehensible works of art. His name is Chris Jordan. Chris visualizes statistics in his series “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait”. For example, he visualizes the consumption of plastic bottles in the United States every minute by using 400,000 plastic bottle caps in his artwork called Caps Seurat. And he shows us 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.

Chris isn’t pointing any fingers. He just wants to show the U.S. who they are at this moment in time. His visualizations are making it very clear that certain things in American culture, maybe even western culture, are open for reform. Visit his website to see at all of his visualizations. You can zoom in on the works of art to really dig into the statistic. Below you also find the talk he gave at TED in 2008.

Website: www.chrisjordan.com

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Foam and The New York Times Magazine

If you find yourself in Amsterdam you should really try to bring a visit to Foam. The museum that is all about photography. Go there to look at some new talents, works of the greatest photographers around or a collection of photography presented by The New York Times Magazine.

If you’re interested in the way a major magazine goes about the choices of selecting and commissioning photography, then a visit to Foam now will be a true treat. From the 23rd of April to the 30th of May Foam presents “The New York Times Magazine Photographs”. Please watch the video below for a more detailed explanation of this exposition.

Websites:
Foam Amsterdam – The New York Times Magazine
The New York Times Magazine
Foam Amsterdam

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Carefully Composed Works of Art

Photography has evolved through out the years and is getting more and more respected as an art form. Perhaps Man Ray really kicked off the conceptual kind of usage of the camera.

Still-life photographer Maurice Scheltens and visual artist Liesbeth Abbenes are artists, like Man Ray, that have a truly conceptual approach to photography. The photos they compose are created by looking at shape and color. The overall composition is the important factor in their creations. Some of their work even reminds me of paintings by Mark Rothko.

Scheltens & Abbenes take ordinary objects like hangers or chairs and manage to place them in such a way that their shapes or colors brings about something truly abstract. They make us look at the objects not for what they are but for what they can be. Shape over function. It makes us look differently towards any given object. Wonderful photographs that will look beautifully on any living room wall.

Website: www.scheltens-abbenes.com

Kunstuur (Dutch) – In Sight: Scheltens & Abbenes

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On a need to know basis

Everything we know about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is what they want us to know. And see. People who are visiting the country will get a tour along the various iconic communistic achievements and symbols. Charlie Crane, British photographer, visited North Korea to photograph different places in the capital of Pyongyang. He decided, if he wasn’t allowed to get deeper underneath the surface of this ‘Stalinist Disneyland’, he would just photograph the surface itself. Resulting in a wonderful photo series of places and people of this ever so closed-up country.

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