Zeitmaschine » artists mentioned

Mark Steinmetz/ Tender views.

Zoltán Jókay — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:53:20 +0000

On Mark Steinmetz photographs it is always summer. The air is warm and stroking the skin of his protagonists. The children and youth he is taking pictures of are soft looking and friendly… images full of sensuality and kindness.

Mark Steinmetz photographs remind me of my childhood: sitting on a tree in the garden of my grandparents, always reading a book. Running barefooted over coarse gravel, swimming in the lukewarm waters of the Balaton, (the big Hungarian lake). Secretly in love with some girl, never disclosing myself to her. Warm days, summer days.

There are many facets of reality, as you can see in the works of Jodi Bieber, Tobias Zielony and now Mark Steinmetz.

The cruelty of South African childhood in the townships;
the harshness of being in transition between childhood and the rest of your life; and last but not least the cozy memories of childhood summers.

Tobias Zielony/ Twilight Zone.

Zoltán Jókay — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:50:02 +0000

image by
Tobias Zielony
Story/ No Story

In Tobias Zielony´s Story/ No Story there is a long dialog between the photographer and another guy. The two are talking about movies, and globalization, medial representation, jogging dresses, ritualized gestures and youth culture. The dialog is very long.

Zielony photographed youths all over the world. He depicts a global youth culture, name it: Los Angeles or Halle-Neustadt, it doesn’t matter. Globalization means here: outfits and gestures.

Of course there are huge cultural differences, and naturally it does matter what kind of homes those kids go back to, but Zielonys story is not about that.

The kids are there. Hanging around at all kinds of places, as youth do, as they do everywhere, they even do it at the posh and boring little suburb I am living in.

Zielony shows us something that we do recognize. The contact is established, we start to get closer, observing what we see.

Pictures like movie stills: grainy, at times somewhat blurry, the colors of the night.

Parking lots and bus stations, empty buildings, cars and roofs. Everyday moments, everyday kids, everyday scenery. Nothing is happening. A certain mood of melancholy is in the air.

Zielony managed to transfer the language of an imaginary European movie to photography. Here the language is new.

The everyday in Zielonys world is of a drab beauty, beautiful only because meant to be beautiful by the photographer. Tobias Zielony describes the youths here as being tough and fragile in the same time, he is turning them into the stars of an imaginary movie.

Being a youth means being in limbo.
Which road to go, what shall we do?

Because of the layout of Zielony s book, scans were hard to make. The photographs are sometimes slightly cropped and not as good as I would them like to be. Sorry for that.

Jodi Bieber/ Between Dogs and Wolves

Zoltán Jókay — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:43:18 +0000

image and text by
Jodi Bieber

The silence by the Ranto Twins.
I met the twins at a traditional wedding in Zeerust.
Their mother said to me
that they don´t like talking much.
I always wondered why.

Loretta Lux/ Hello emptiness.

Zoltán Jókay — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:11:35 +0000

image by
Loretta Lux

Loretta Lux´s images are beautiful, oh so beautiful.
Beautiful children in lovely, old-fashioned dresses in old-fashioned settings.
Children like dolls, empty faces in tiny little landscapes and wee little doll houses.
Her images are half paintings half photography, masterly manipulated with Photoshop.

They are supposed to remind of us of old paintings,
but those old paintings are charming, and alive,
while Loretta Lux´s images are cold and dead.

Nevertheless Loretta Lux´s images posses a poster like quality, her imagery is unique:
pretty, bloodless, dead kids, dressed in pastel, surrounded by pastel. Kids like ghosts living in a haunted house.

Hellen van Meene/ Dream a little dream with me

Zoltán Jókay — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 04:27:50 +0000

image by
Hellen van Meene

Hellen van Meene is dreaming. She is dreaming about how it could be to be young, about being vulnerable without being hurt already, she is dreaming about the beauty of youth that is not here to stay, and she is translating her dreams into dreamlike photographs. Her look is a very grownup look back into childhood.

After Donigan Cummings photographs that I hardly can bear, I needed this kind of break. Maybe we all need images like Hellen van Meene, representing a paradise lost, a paradise that may have existed but probably never has.

After my last years of working with people lost in poverty, alcoholism, craze and loneliness, now I have ended up in a senior home amassing all of the above in one building. I have realized now, that hell is on earth. So we need to dream.

Beauty is a kind of remedy. We need beauty and dreams not to escape reality but to cope with it.

Hellen van Meene´s adolescent kids are beautiful, because Helen van Meene sees the beauty in them.

Because of the smoothness of her images one could overlook their depth.
I see the fragility of life.. I see its vulnerability. I see its value.

I like what I imagine Hellen van Meene is telling me.

I wish the love Hellen van Meene is expressing in her images would be an everyday quality when dealing with kids. And with grown ups.

The output of artists is always artificial. It has to be by its nature. Only photography can create the illusion of natural truth.

Hellen van Meene´s images are breathing control. Her reality is clearly visible a staged one. Sometimes she is almost touching fashion photography. But there is more than smoothness to her images.

Donigan Cumming/ Pretty Ribbons

Zoltán Jókay — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 03:41:54 +0000

image by
Donigan Cumming

There are moments in your life you meet the piece of artwork you need then and there.
Pretty Ribbons is exactly what I needed now.

The Stage, also by Cumming, I just understand now.
Long years ago, I was fascinated by it, but it was merely it´s strangeness I was drawn too. Or was it more?

In my childhood I survived an alcoholic depressive mother who committed suicide when I was a youth. I survived because there were moments of normality; I survived because I was living in a cultivated middle class family with my own room to hide and the possibility to forget about my surroundings burying myself into books.

The last four years I was working as an unskilled social worker in a quarter for the poor, and then I was fired because management of the settlement wanted to save the money for this service. What a shame.
Since then, for more than one year now I am parenting demented people in a senior home.

I got this job, because society is avoiding spending money for competent care for its demented citizens and employs cheaper, hardly skilled people for doing what is necessary.
The better-trained male and female nurses simply don’t have the time and sometimes the personality to meet the emotional needs of the seniors they are attending. They are restricted to do the bodily care, which is hard enough, and we, the few unskilled ones, are in charge for the minds and souls of these old and feeble people. What a shame.

I was and I am confronted with alcoholism, depression, despair, craze, dementia, old age and death.

Now I scared as hell of becoming old.
I am afraid of illness and dementia.

It is hard to be confronted with all of this suffering.

But.

I am experiencing things I could not even think of before.
I am learning about life.

Life, as it is, or how it will be,
has to be seen.

Yes Donigan Cumming´s photographs from Nettie Harris are shocking.
But they are tender too. In his work I discover the tenderness I feel for the people I am caring for.

P.S I have absolutely no idealistic motives working in a senior home.
It’s all about earning money.

Vanessa Winship

Zoltán Jókay — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:46:23 +0000

from Georgia
image by
Vanessa Winship

Massimo Sordi and Stefania Rössl are curating a group exhibition called “global photography” as a part of SIFEST Photo Festival of Savignano(Italy). Vanessa Winship is one of the invited photographers.

About a week ago, Massimo Sordi sent me a list of photographers he has invited to the show mentioned above.
He wrote: “please let me know what you think…”
I don’t like to be merely polite, and I hate to be rude.

And then, how can you answer a question like this? I was looking for a solution and picked up his thread. One by one I am looking up the work of the photographers on his list, and I am posting what I am finding. An interesting experience, because it’s his and his co curator’s selection, not mine.
Some of his selections I don’t agree with, others I had to leave my point of view to discover a kind of quality I am usually not looking for.

Vanessa Winships photographs sort of hit me in the stomach and I am still feeling the pain while writing these lines.

Actually I don’t like photojournalism. I am tired of it’s conventionalized language, and I don’t care at all for images of people who, in one way of an other, are only interesting to us, because they look and live different than we do.

I am interested in what we share, not in what separates us.

So I could criticize Vanessa Winships work because she is using the aura of the old fashioned as many photographers do, traveling to the east European countries.
I could criticize her of using a conventionalized language, even in her non-journalistic images, but for what should I do that.

Many of her photographs are so full of strength, charm and beauty,
that they don’t have to be studied, analyzed or explained in any way.

They just do touch me.
The pain I feel will go away.

Visit her homepage.
Look for yourself.

Karin Apollonia Müller/ German Landscape

Zoltán Jókay — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:00:40 +0000

from German Landscape
image by
Karin Apollonia Müller

Massimo Sordi and Stefania Rössl are curating a group exhibition called “global photography” as a part of SIFEST Photo Festival of Savignano(Italy). Karin Apollonia Müller is one of the invited photographers.

Karin Apollonia Müller also was in the same photography class with me in Essen, Germany.
We had the same teachers.
A few times we had a walk together, she, her dog and me.
We haven´t seen us for years now.

There is probably no photographer on earth you can´t find on Joerg Colberg´s blog.
His statement:
“Karin Apollonia Müller was born in Heidelberg in 1963, and grew up as the daughter of a sea captain.” Elsewhere, it says about her that she “grew up on a Rhine river barge. Her father, the captain, built her a swing and she remembers swinging high above the boat, flying and floating above the landscape. This experience, of being in a place out of a place, is echoed in her work.”

Anyway, Karin Apollonia Müller found her photographic topic during her studies. Her first series she called “German Landscapes”.
Here she is documenting ancient German customs.
I like the winking romanticism in these early images of her,
later on the humans become smaller on her photographs,
and she is putting her focus on urban landscapes, landscapes devastated by humanity.

Of the later series my favorite project of her is called “timber cove”,
I just love how she is sequencing her images on her homepage.
Her topic here is not just the landscapes also how our visual perception of landscapes is working.

Mårten Lange/ The Sea

Zoltán Jókay — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 04:16:07 +0000

image by
Mårten Lange
0

Massimo Sordi and Stefania Rössl are curating a group exhibition called “global photography” as a part of SIFEST Photo Festival of Savignano(Italy). Mårten Lange is one of the invited photographers.

Amy Stein/ Domesticated

Zoltán Jókay — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 04:36:49 +0000

Watering Hole
image by
Amy Stein

Massimo Sordi and Stefania Rössl are curating a group exhibition called “global photography” as a part of SIFEST Photo Festival of Savignano(Italy). Amy Stein is one of the invited photographers.

Amy Stein:
“My photographs serve as modern dioramas of our new natural history. Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the “wild” and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild.

The photographs in this series are constructed based on real stories from local newspapers and oral histories of intentional and random interactions between humans and animals. The narratives are set in and around Matamoras, a small town in Northeast Pennsylvania that borders a state forest.”

Hmmm.
Smart words by an educated person.
Really, no irony intended here.

It is fun to look at her series.
Like watching a whodunit on TV.

Though good work, and probably highly successful,
I normally wouldn’t have posted Amy Steins photographs here.
It’s not a question of quality.

It’s a matter of my preferences.
I don’t really care for whodunits.

I like to watch love stories.
Or slow and unspectacular everyday stories.

I am more in for the seemingly boring stuff.

Mårten Lange/ Anomalies

Zoltán Jókay — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:36:08 +0000

image by
Mårten Lange

Mårten Lange:
(…)
“The meaning of a photograph has to be assembled by the viewer from various visual clues in the picture, as well as from references to the history of the medium. What I’ve tried to do in Anomalies is to remove as many clues as possible, leaving one to stare at the things themselves. Just like the stare of the camera, seeing but not understanding.

I’ve learned that an image that contains very little information takes longer time to process than one that contains a lot. I find this effect fascinating and I believe it may be unique to photography. An everyday thing like a window can become incomprehensible when isolated in a photograph. It becomes an anomaly.”

Excerpt from an interview conducted by Anya Jasbär and Daniel Augschöll ( found at: ahorn magazine.)

I don’t know if Mårten Lange’s theory is true. True or not, it is an interesting idea, and in some of his images I notice the effect he is trying to provoke.
Some of his photographs are too easy to decipher, and the process of slowing down he is describing doesn’t take effect, at least not for me.

I didn’t have enough time the last days for looking close enough at Mårten Lange’s work, now, on the second look, his work is becoming more and more interesting for me.
He has a language of his own and he is not part of the mainstream. Looking over his homepage again, the distance I first felt to his work is becoming smaller. Thats why I will bring an other posting connected to his work.

Mårten Lange also is publishing books, his and the one’s of colleagues.
The selection of books he has published shows that he has a consistent vision.
Mårten Lange knows what he is doing.

Lee Friedlander/ The Little Screens

Zoltán Jókay — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:43:27 +0000

image by
Lee Friedlander

I do admire Lee Friedlander.
And I wish to have some day the money to buy his book “The Little Screens”.

Donigan Cumming/ Life as it is.

Zoltán Jókay — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:41:40 +0000

image by
Donigan Cumming
“The Stage”

That Mr. Cummings photographs are staged is obvious and was never meant to be hidden.

His images could be tagged as overdone, unrealistic and shocking.

Additionally, normal middleclass citizens don’t know anything about what he is showing us in such a surreal manner. They don’t know anything about depressing living conditions without air to breath, without prospects for now and forever, they don’t know anything about alcoholism and craze, they don’t know about a life full of disasters and everlasting desperation.

And if they know, they don’t want to know.

Though I have no money, little success and lots of everyday troubles, I am better off than Mr. Cummings protagonists: I am educated; I have the freedom of choice and I have a voice.

Though coming from a middle class setting,
as a child I have seen and I have experienced the mood and the desperation Mr. Cummings photographs are breathing.

Mr.Cummings photographs don’t pretend to be true reflections of reality, but they do reflect reality.

In my job as an unskilled social worker,
I felt this craze Mr. Cumming is depicting.
Not just through the things I have seen,
but more so through what I have heard.

Listening to crazy, lonely, and frustrated people breathing their hatred against their neighbors into my face, I felt, as I feel now, looking at Mr. Cummings photographs.

Their fate could be yours.
Don´t forget about that.

Seydou Keïta

Zoltán Jókay — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 06:34:10 +0000

image by
Seydou Keïta

Seydou Keïta was born in 1921 in Bamako, although the exact date is unknown. He was the eldest in a family of five children. His father Bâ Tièkòró and his uncle Tièmòkò were furniture makers. Keïta developed an interest in photography when his uncle gave him a Kodak Brownie with a film with eight shots in 1935, after returning from a trip to Senegal. In the beginning Keïta worked as both a carpenter and photographer, taking first portraits of his family and friends, later of people in the neighborhood. He learned photography and how to develop from Pierre Garnier, a French photographic supply store owner, and from Mountaga Traoré, his mentor. In 1948 he set up his first studio in the family house in Bamako-Koura behind the main prison.

Quoted from Wikipedia

Sigmar Polke/ 1941-2010

Zoltán Jókay — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 04:29:12 +0000

Encountering Sigmar Polkes works art works always have been happy moments for me. His images are lighthearted and sprinkled with humor. Sigmar Polke was sampling visual clichés and trivial designs, transforming them into elegant and translucent paintings telling us little jokes. Trying to see the person behind this artwork I would love to believe that he was a cultivated humorous person with an agile mind. I hope that he had a happy life, as happy as life can be.

Mark Cohen/ Grim Street

Zoltán Jókay — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:19:21 +0000

image by
Mark Cohen
1967 headless horseman

It has been a long time that I had my first encounter with a few of Mark Cohens images in a compilation. I liked his images, and was delighted to discover that he has published as late as 2005 his first book called “Grim Street”, one of those few photo books, that stand out of the crowd.

Grim Street also contains a long conversation between the curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, a conversation that is interesting because of the things said, but also because of what is not said.

Mark Cohen was awarded twice the Guggenheim Fellowship. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. His photography is outstanding; he developed early a highly unconventional and abstract language of his own.

Still, as I understood it, he never succeeded on the art market, his two books came out late. Compared to other photographers, even lesser ones, I would call his work invisible.

There must be reasons for his, in a way, lack of success.

Mark Cohen has no formal education in photography.
His images aren’t easy to consume.
And last, but not least, he might have been not sleek enough communicating with those who are managing the art world.

Anne Wilkes Tucker: When you say, “I’m making pictures to put in the drawer,” there is a kind of determination on your part to continue with what is in your particular eye when I’m sure there were dealers saying to you, “If you’d back off a little, it’d be easier to sell them.” Were there not?

Mark Cohen: Well, no. They didn’t make any effort to sell them because they weren’t expensive enough. They were only six hundred dollars, so it didn’t matter to the dealers, or to the Marlborough Gallery or to Virginia Zabriskie either. The galleries thought that my pictures were strong. I got good reviews, but they never sold many. But that was okay. It’s still hard to sell them. For instance, I sold the headless horseman picture to somebody and he brought it back because it frightened his wife. Now, if I made landscapes or still lifes I guess that it would be easier. Or if I made pictures of Paris or New York. I don’t know.

Some advice how to become a successful art photographer:

There is art,
and there is art business.
Its all about networking.

As long you aren´t dead,
you, the artist belong to the package you are selling.

Be convinced of yourself,
then you will convince people.

Make people notice you.
Be friendly to the important people.

Produce and don´t stop producing.

Sex sells.
Adolescent girls sell.

Make your prints huge.
Assimilate the size and the aura of paintings.

Leave the boundaries of photography behind you:
make people think of you as an artist, let them forget that you are a photographer.

If nothing helps,
commit suicide.
That could help.

Garry Winogrand/ Winogrand on Women.

Zoltán Jókay — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:26:22 +0000

Winogrand on Women

Whenever I’ve seen an attractive woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her. I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.
By the term “attractive woman,” I mean a woman I react to, positively. What do I react to in a woman? I do not mean as a man getting to know a woman, but as a photographer photographing. I know it’s not just prettiness or physical dimensions. I suspect that I respond to their energies, how they stand and move their bodies and faces. In the end, the photographs are descriptions of poses or attitudes that give an idea, a hint of their energies. After all, I do not know the women in these photographs. Not their names, work, or lives.
“Women Are Beautiful” is a good title for this book because they are.

Garry Winogrand
Austin, Texas 1975

Jakob Aue Sobol/ Outside it is dark and cold.

Zoltán Jókay — Sun, 02 May 2010 04:38:27 +0000

image by
Jakob Aue Sobol
from his series “Sabine”

In Nan Goldins early photographic work,
men and women don’t match,
still they mate.
Sexual desire is categorized as the driving force in human life,
is described as dependency,
as basic trick of nature to make us search for the other.
She shows herself and other women victimized by men.
If there is any truth, Nan Goldins truth is part of it.

For Jakob Aue Sobol,
the need for each other
is based on a search for warmth and tenderness.
The need is not to be alone.
He describes everyday life,
and the moments in it,
that, however small,
make relationships, and thus life,
worthwhile to endure.
In Jakob Aue Sobols world the otherness of our fellow humans,
the otherness between men and women is an asset to cherish.

His homepage you will find here.

Nan Goldin/ Dependency

Zoltán Jókay — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:13:17 +0000

image by
Nan Goldin

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor,
Coney Island Wax Museum, 1981

As a student “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” by Nan Goldin
was one of the books important to me.

She was talking about love and pain, hopes and disappointments,
sex and desire.

Then somewhere along the road, I fell out of love with her work.

Looking at her images again,
I sense now that in her debut book
she hadn’t yet developed a consistent language,
and that some of her images
only were merely illustrating her ideas about the topic.

Photography has to tell something about a secret
without giving it away.

Still, she was the first, as far as I know,
to deal inside the world of photography
with the complicated relationship between men and women,
and her position, with all it drawbacks,
is still an outstanding one.

Lucian Freud/ Naked.

Zoltán Jókay — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:18:50 +0000

Girl With Closed Eyes
1987
Lucian Freud

Zeitmaschine » artists mentioned

Mark Steinmetz/ Tender views.

Related posts

Tobias Zielony/ Twilight Zone.

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Jodi Bieber/ Between Dogs and Wolves

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Loretta Lux/ Hello emptiness.

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Hellen van Meene/ Dream a little dream with me

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Donigan Cumming/ Pretty Ribbons

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Vanessa Winship

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Karin Apollonia Müller/ German Landscape

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Mårten Lange/ The Sea

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Amy Stein/ Domesticated

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Mårten Lange/ Anomalies

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Lee Friedlander/ The Little Screens

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Donigan Cumming/ Life as it is.

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Seydou Keïta

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Sigmar Polke/ 1941-2010

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Mark Cohen/ Grim Street

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Garry Winogrand/ Winogrand on Women.

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Jakob Aue Sobol/ Outside it is dark and cold.

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Nan Goldin/ Dependency

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Lucian Freud/ Naked.

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