With their visual mastery, the works of the German photographer Andreas Gursky insist on the vast, fascinating power of the image and stand as a modern proposal for what beauty may be. Andreas Gursky’s photographs are the answer of art to ‘extreme sports’. His works grow out of hours of effort interweaving hundreds of pictures taken with the most sophisticated equipment, often from extreme positions, into one image.

Populating My Solitude (Words and Images by Miru Kim)

Over the last ten years, New York City has grown to be my favorite city. The island of Manhattan alone has a dense, mysterious network of man-made structures soaring fifteen hundred feet aboveground and digging eight hundred feet below. The five boroughs of New York are connected by more than thirty-five bridges and tunnels that make the city a miraculous feat of engineering, architecture, and design. The city has an anatomy and a psyche as complex as that of any human being.

Experiencing feelings of alienation and anxiety in the city – a city that has increasingly become more surveilled and commodified – I began to understand how many artists and authors suffered from severe bouts of depression, inertia, and isolation, which the term spleen embodies. One of the ways I escaped such feelings was to visit desolate and hidden places in the city. Every time I stepped out of the ordinary aboveground spaces that were filled with anonymous crowds, I felt regenerated and unrestrained.

When Arthur Fellig, the New York street photographer known as Weegee, moved to Los Angeles in 1947 to become a technical adviser on The Naked City, the film-noir classic named after his 1945 book of photos, he had big Hollywood dreams. Like many aspiring stars before and after, he didn’t quite find the magical landscape of the movies, and he declared that Hollywood was Newark, New Jersey, with palm trees.

Drawn from Greg Girard’s recent publication Hanoi Calling: One Thousand Years Now, this exhibition of photographs at Monte Clark Gallery in Toronto continues to stake out his role as a discerning camera eye on Asia’s developing economies.

We'd really appreciate it if Lady Gaga would cease interacting with important contemporary artists so that we could ignore her totally, but she won't stop and now, against our wishes, we have to write about her on this blog again.

In their September 2011 issue, Vogue Homme Japan is publishing images shot by hugely influential, startlingly prolific and totally perverted Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki of the ultra-starlet Lady Gaga, captured in bondage. We are not quite sure exactly what message Gaga is trying to send with these pictures to her legions of underage followers but these shots of her literally stripped-down, tied-up, and un-done are probably the first actually sexy pictures we've ever seen of her.

Detroit has been the poster child of the American recession for number of years. While many Detroit organizations and residents are taking a “do-it-yourself” approach to rebuilding their city, their work is cut out for them, particularly when it comes to fixing up abandoned buildings. Yards need to be mowed, debris collected, seeds planted and homes rebuilt.

While Detroit is undergoing a renaissance of sorts, many neighborhoods are still abandoned — some of them for over a decade, since economic troubles first hit the city. Saddened but curious at Detroit’s decline, Kevin Bauman started photographing his home town as a creative outlet in the mid-1990′s. Years later, the result is Bauman’s beautiful and haunting “100 Abandoned Houses” collection.

The current exhibit of Laurel Nakadate's work at MoMA PS1 raises more questions than it answers. This may be what this artist needs right now, considering how even the praise she has received tends to focus on the least challenging aspects of her work. For several years she made videos featuring lonely older men who started conversations with her in grocery stores and parking lots; she would agree to go home with them as long as they allowed her to film what happened, which would usually turn out to be a scenario of her choosing. In some cases this meant a pretend birthday party (we see the man eating a slice of cake and then singing to her) or a pretend music video (we watch her dance to “Oops, I Did It Again”, Britney Spears’s paean to inadvertent seduction). Ms Nakadate, who was 25 when she started to make these videos in 2000, would often film herself gyrating in flimsy camisoles while the men looked on.

Elevating the art of self-portraiture to a new level (literally), Tokyo-based photographer Hayashi Natsumi's work consists of the artist seemingly floating in midair within conventional settings in and around the Japanese city.


Titled "Today's Levitation", the series is updated daily with new photographs set in a variety of locations from a desolate street to a busy train platform. Using the aid of a simple tripod, the self-portraits are taken with a 10-second timer from a distance. All the poses are captured in mid-jump with no aid of a rigging system or photoshop.

Two years ago, artist Luis Gispert was photographing landscapes in Miami when he stumbled upon the Escalade that would change his life. Upholstered entirely in knock-off material from Takashi Murakami's 2009 campaign with Louis Vuitton, the SUV represented a subculture he never knew existed. The vehicle's owner "had no idea who Murakami was," said Gispert. "It was all very low-rent. All fake, and all home-made."

At left, Janine Gordon, Plant Your Feet on the Ground, 2000, and at right, Ryan McGinley, Levi’s advertisement, 2010

Acclaimed photographer Ryan McGinley has recently been hit with a lawsuit claiming that a number of his photos, some even used in commercial campaigns are derivative of the works of photographer Janine Gordon.

Tim Roda is a young American photographer with a large following and a jet-fueled career trajectory. Since graduating with his Masters of Fine Arts from the Univerity of Washington in 2004, he has developed his own mode of art photography that crosses into installation, costume design, and performance. The resulting stunning black and white photographs always depict himself and the other members of his young family acting out elaborate yet low-fi dramas ripped from the pages of history. His images are at once fictional narratives and family portraits.