Kamil Vojnar

Born in Moravia of Czechoslovakia in 1962, Kamil Vojnar studied at School of Graphic Arts in Prague (1976-1981) and left in 85 to study at Philadelphia Art Institute. Vojnar moved to New York City in 1989 where he worked for different image studios and then as a freelancer, majoring in producing images for books and CD covers, while filling photo stock agencies with more personal images. Vojnar later moved to Paris and subsequently to St. Remy de Provence in France, where he is now living and working.

Driven by pressures within, Kamil's work explores often hidden corners of the soul, where human emotions reside. He works with images to deliver his particular vision, his reaction to the contradictory world which surrounds him. To the world filled with so much beauty and so much suffering, often happening at the very same moments, within only minutes, hours, inches or miles apart. These feelings are honestly reflected in Kamil's images in intensely personal and enigmatic ways.

Angel standing all wet in the bath tub, falling man with wide-spread arms and girl lying on the grass facing the sky. Perhaps we can trace some sources from the artist's words, "we all start our lives in pure whiteness and innocence, but during the course we are being torn and crashed again and again, in small or big ways". A kind of escapism has long been embedded in Kamil Vojnar's images - and truly, beautiful as they are, the images tend to end up on the darker side of things.

"What drives my work is the contradictory world surrounding us. So much beauty and so much suffering meet and go hand in hand. But also it is the world of "elsewhere". The world from where inspiration and intuition, leading my hand, arrives.
From that space between the earth, the sky and our minds and hearts, where things happen, we don't fully understand, but without which the world would be much grayer place. I am trying to explore corners of our souls, where emotions reside. Emotions as reactions to the world outside and conflicting emotions of our most private worlds within. Because don't we cry from immense sadness, but from happiness as well? My working methods are pretty much "flying blind", because as a photographer and painter am basically self taught. Mostly oblivious to proper techniques and processes, I mix elements the way we reconstruct our last night dreams. From bits and pieces. I let intuition and materials, I am working with, to lead me to conclusions, I never really see as fully finished and I revisit my images over and over again to place them in different logic and contexts. My pictures are mostly images, digitally layered from many different photographs and textures, printed after in small editions, as a ink-jet prints on fine art paper. Or they are layered images, printed on semitransparent Thai and Japanese papers, mounted to canvas, varnished with oil and wax, sometimes painted on further with oil paints. I don't know where I am going, but I will get there." - Kamil Vojnar

Thomas Barbey

This week I would like to feature an artistic photographer whom I discovered at the Beverly Hills Affaire in the Gardens (art festival). His name is Thomas Barbey and he is from Las Vegas. I don't know much about Thomas so I will let his photographic art speak for itself.

Enjoy!

Jerry N. Uelsmann

Using multiple negatives to produce his surreal, dreamlike photographs, Jerry Uelsmann has developed a singular artistic vision which has carried him through a nearly 50 year artistic career. 

Firmly entrenched in his traditional darkroom practices, Uelsmann continues to produce magical and thought-provoking imagery without the help of modern computer-base techniques.  Uelsmann says, “There’s an element of alchemy that I sense in the darkroom that I would never ever sense in front of a computer. There’s a technological well that is behind the screen that is beyond any comprehension for me.  It’s not particularly mystical – it’s just technical.  In the darkroom it feels much more spiritual.”

Uelsmann’s works are featured in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria an Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among many others.

Brett Townshend

Looking up, captures some of the graphic forms created by the sky when framed by man-made structures. Most of these were created by stitching several fish-eye views together and then creating a new projection from the result. Unlike most uses of stitching to create panoramas, these are centered on the sky with the normal subject relegated to the role of constructing surroundings. When Townsend first started taking these he was surprised by the shapes that were formed - shapes which he had never noticed before, perhaps because we so seldom look straight up and recognize what is there - squares were expected, ovals anticipated, but never triangles, arrowheads, eyes, or even a dove. 

Paul Thulin

In light of contemporary society becoming more environmentally conscious, the mere forms of the inherited machines of industrialism stir one to consider the hidden threats continuing to pose harm to the earth’s delicate ecosystems. Our future rests in the hands of a re-imagined eco-industry that will redefine our personal relationships and expectations of the machines we engage and/or rely on a daily basis. Paul Thulin captures his version if this new reality.

Machines is a photographic series inspired to visually explore a futuristic vision of American studies scholar Leo Marx’s theory of the “machine in the garden”. The images reveal a "middle landscape"; nature existing in a seemingly contradictory state of lush untamed wilderness while under the dominion of a mechanized society. The driving narrative forces of the imagery are grand pastoral landscapes inhabited by mysterious machine "like" structures engaging a mix of characters intended to symbolize industry, the natural world, the primitive, and the cultivated.

Machines is created through a process of photographic digital assembly. Each image comprises of a fusing of multiple details from my extensive personal archive of analog and
digital photos representing the American landscape, thrift store trinkets, industrial forms, animals and people. The work is a unique photographic fiction that has gradually arisen from creatively engaging digital image editing technologies.

Maggie Taylor

Using 19th century tin-types, photographs, and images, Maggie Taylor scanned them on a flatbed scanner.  She then combines them with some other images that she photographed, acquired, or other objects that she scanned.  These images are then composed, combined, and colorized by using Adobe Photoshop program.  In a typical image composed by Taylor, there can be as many as 40-60+ layers.

Taylor received her BA degree in philosophy from Yale University and her MFA degree in photography from the University of Florida.  In 1996 and 2001 she received State of Florida Individual Artist's Fellowships.  In 2004 she won the Santa Fe Center for Photography's Project Competition.  She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband, photographer Jerry Uelsmann.

Enjoy!

Claudia Kunin

Today, I would like to introduce you to Claudia Kunin whom I found in the Modernbook Gallery. In the past, Claudia Kunin has photographed professionally for blue chip companies, but is now dedicating her time to her moody and ghostly dreamscapes. Her work offers a new mythology, with statements on earth, life, heaven, and hell. Her latest photography, "Ghost Stories" and "Holy Ghost Stories," rises out of an imagination sparked by an epiphany that led her to immerse herself in the art of such visionaries as Caravaggio and Bosch. Exceedingly accomplished in her lighting technique, as well as digital skills. Kunin shoots the models and backdrops and then assembles them in Photoshop. The final presention is an image that requires special 3-D spectacles that adds a new dimension to fine art photgraphy.

Claudia's work feels more like paintings and that is a very unique rising trend for the modern day photographer with digital manipulation skills available at their disposal. Just let these works of art speak for themselves.