Ioanna Chronopoulou (Photography)

Photographs by Ioanna Chronopoulou

dichotomy < Greek dichotomía:
The images in my ongoing project “Dichotomy” are rooted in their literal meaning. A division into two parts. A subdivision into halves or pairs. A division into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups. It’s this logical rationale that informs the pictures of the series “Dichotomy,” each set relative to the other yet wholly independent. A series of relationships we are asked to explore, to form. A subjective view of ordinary life, places and objects that are imbued with their own history. A story about Athens, but also a story for every city that is built by society and is left to fend to itself. – Ioanna Chronopoulou

---

Born in Athens in 1990, Ioanna Chronopoulou graduated from the Focus School of Art, Photography, and New Technologies in 2013. She continued her photographic studies in the research residency programs of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. She currently works as a freelance photographer, and as a Photo Editor for Kathimerini Newspaper’s Κ Magazine. You can visit her website here.

Charlotte Hooij (Photography)

Photographs by Charlotte Hooij

Charlotte Hooij took many of these photographs in Brussels, depicting the inner life of a historic, bureaucratic city. With brilliant colors and a refreshing candid formalism, her photographs of men and women in uncomfortable habitats are reminiscent of Georges Simenon’s portrayals of existentially lost northern Europeans.

From Pedigree, by Georges Simenon, translated by Robert Baldick (available from NYRB):

Now the street was empty, with just a thin drizzle to give it a touch of life. The shop-windows had disappeared one after another behind their iron curtains. The men with frozen noses who distributed coloured prospectuses at the doors of the dress shops had vanished into the darkness. The trams were rarer and made more din; the monotonous noise that could be distinguished in the background was that of the muddy waves of the Meuse breaking against the piers of the Pont des Arches.

In the streets all around, there were plenty of little cafés with frosted-glass windows and cream curtains, but Désiré never set foot in a café except on Sunday morning, at eleven o’clock, and then always at the Renaissance.

He was already scanning the windows inquiringly. He did not think about eating. He kept taking his watch out of his pocket and now and then he would start talking to himself.

At ten o’clock, he was the only person left on the pavement. He had scarcely so much as frowned on seeing some gendarmes’ helmets over in the direction of the Place Saint-Lambert.

Twice he had climbed the stairs, and strained his ears to catch some noise; twice he had fled, frightened, sick at heart.

“Excuse me…”

The policeman at the corner of the street, standing underneath a big dummy clock with its hands fixed, had nothing to do.

“Could you tell me the right time?”

Then with a strained, apologetic smile:

“Time seems to go so slowly when one’s waiting…”

---

Charlotte Hooij is a photographer and a student at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels, Belgium. Follow her work on her website and on Instagram.

Lido (Photography)

Lido

by Allegra Martin

Allegra Martin took this series of deliciously lethargic, sun-bleached photographs in 2013 and 2014 in northern Italy. The images are part of her photographic research, which was commissioned by Osservatorio Fotografico (a photography research group based in Ravenna) for the project “Where We Live.” Osservatorio Fotografico launched this project in 2009; its goal was to build a visual archive of the city of Ravenna. 

Martin’s corner of Ravenna was Lido Adriano, a seaside town a few miles away from Ravenna. It is a town full of condominiums, Martin reports, “where you meet lives, stories, and destinies.” As she was photographing, she felt as though she was in search of something, and that something eluded her.

The spirit of this town, however, did not elude her. Her photographs truly seem to embody this little seaside town, this little condominium, these bored little old Italian men and women. Martin’s focus on place is phenomenal, lending her work a unique intimacy, creating an entire psycho-geography of this ignored locale.

---

Allegra Martin was born in Vittorio Veneto and she currently lives in Milan, Italy. She graduated from the Venice Institute of Architecture in Venice. In 2015 she took part in the photographic research project “The Third Island,” and in 2012 she participated in "Welfare Spaces." Her photographs are currently on display at “On New Italian Photography” curated by Fantom at Viasaterna Gallery in Milan. Visit her website here.

Photographs by Allegra Martin are featured as part of the collective exhibition LACUNA/AE. Identity and Modern Architecture in Venice. The exhibit will be open from May 28 to August 28, 2016, at Venice’s Torre Massimiliana, on Sant’Erasmo island.

More Italian photography from the Spurl Editions blog: “Villaggio Laguna” by Francesca Gardini

Spider Monkeys (photography)

Spider Monkeys

by Aneta Bartos

From “The Spider” by Hanns Heinz Ewers

Sunday, March 13

This morning I watched a tiny drama while the servant was tidying my room. I was strolling in the corridor when I paused before a small window in which a large garden spider had her web. 

Madame Dubonnet will not have it removed because she believes spiders bring luck, and she's had enough misfortunes in her house lately. Today, I saw a much smaller spider, a male, moving across the strong threads towards the middle of the web, but when his movements alerted the female, he drew back shyly to the edge of the web from which he made a second attempt to cross it. Finally, the female in the middle appeared attentive to his wooing, and stopped moving. The male tugged at a strand gently, then more strongly till the whole web shook. The female stayed motionless. The male moved quickly forward and the female received him quietly, calmly, giving herself over completely to his embraces. For a long minute, they hung together motionless at the center of the huge web.

Then I saw the male slowly extricating himself, one leg over the other. It was as if he wanted tactfully to leave his companion alone in the dream of love, but as he started away, the female, overwhelmed by a wild life, was after him, hunting him ruthlessly. The male let himself drop from a thread; the female followed, and for a while the lovers hung there, imitating a piece of art. Then they fell to the window-sill where the male, summoning all his strength, tried again to escape. Too late. The female already had him in her powerful grip, and was carrying him back to the center of the web. There, the place that had just served as the couch for their lascivious embraces took on quite another aspect. The lover wriggled, trying to escape from the female's wild embrace, but she was too much for him. It was not long before she had wrapped him completely in her thread, and he was helpless. Then she dug her sharp pincers into his body, and sucked full draughts of her young lover's blood. Finally, she detached herself from the pitiful and unrecognizable shell of his body and threw it out of her web.

So that is what love is like among these creatures. Well for me that I am not a spider.

---

Aneta Bartos was born in Poland and moved to New York City, where she attended The School of Visual Arts. You can visit her website here. Most recently her work was shown at the ADAA Fair at the Park Avenue Armory with Henry Street Settlement. In 2015 her work was exhibited at Photo London 2015 with Kasher Potamkin Gallery. Earlier that year she participated in the show Pheromone Hotbox at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, and In Your Dreams curated by Marina T. Schindler as part of Spring/Break Art Show Fair 2015. In early 2013 she exhibited her project titled Boys in a solo show at the Carlton Arms Hotel, New York, curated by Jon Feinstein. Recent group exhibitions include Contemporary Practice at The New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester; Women at Suzie Gallery, Tel Aviv; Gilded Forest at Kasher Potamkin Gallery, New York; 31 Women in Art Photography, Hasted Kraeutler, New York. In 2012 Aneta was commissioned by Neville Wakefield to create an installation for the grand opening of ACME Restaurant in New York. In 2010 her collaboration 4Sale was shown in New York, Moscow and Poznan, Poland. Aneta's work has been reviewed and featured in New York Magazine, Interview Magazine, Photograph Magazine, T Magazine, Time Out, Artinfo, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters Daily, The Huffington Post and Artforum.com among others. 

Podcast: John Brian King in New Books Network

The photographer Lorena Turner spoke with John Brian King about his recent and not-so-recent artistic work in a podcast for New Books Network. They discuss everything from Nude Reagan and LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 to King’s cryptically titled series “Hospital.” Seriously, King’s scathing description of Ronald Reagan is not to be missed, plus King brings up one of his sources of inspiration for Nude Reagan that anyone who is reading this page is sure to love: J. G. Ballard’s short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.”

INCIDENCE OF ORGASMS IN FANTASIES OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH RONALD REAGAN. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with “Reagan” proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.

Villaggio Laguna (Photography)

Villaggio Laguna

by Francesca Gardini

As part of an upcoming exhibition, Francesca Gardini, along with 16 other photographers, documented formerly industrial areas of Venice, Italy, that have since been redeveloped into residential complexes. Gardini took on Villaggio Laguna, a district that is as far from Thomas Mann’s Venice as anything could be, to show the interplay between this district’s past and its new, transformed self (the “real” Venice still looks a hell of a lot better than the “real” Los Angeles). Gardini’s photographs of this neighborhood, focusing on its architectural history and inhabitants,  are utterly gimmick-free: beautiful, simple, composed, and almost addictive. They are reminiscent of Guido Guidi’s photographs (which are gorgeously collected in the book Veramente). Guidi was in fact Gardini’s professor at IUAV, the Venice Institute of Architecture, and continues to be her mentor. The way Gardini captures people, in this series as well as in her other work, is also remarkable – her subjects appear to be just passing through, or bored, waiting for the city’s next transformation.

Nulla si crea, nulla si distrugge, tutto si trasforma. – Francesca Gardini

---

Villaggio Laguna, by Francesca Gardini, will be featured as part of the collective exhibition LACUNA/AE. Identity and Modern Architecture in Venice. The exhibit will be open from May 28 to August 28, 2016, at Venice’s Torre Massimiliana, on Sant’Erasmo island.

Francesca Gardini was born in Lugo and grew up in Ravenna, Italy. She graduated from the Venice Institute of Architecture. In 2010 she took part in a photographic research project, “Get to things get to places,” in the largest complex of rock drawings in Europe, Valle Camonica (Le cose e il paesaggio, a+mbookstore, Milano), and she has been selected for the Citizenship.Giovane fotografia at FotografiaEuropea012, ReggioEmilia. Her portraits have been shown at the Fotografia.Festival Internazionale di Roma, 2014. Visit her website here, and follow her on Instagram here.

Snow and Rose (Photography)

Snow and Rose & Other Tales

by Marianna Rothen

If Playboy Magazine had been taken over by an aberrant feminist collective for a month in 1978, and this collective had seen Altman’s 3 Women and Polanski’s Repulsion one too many times, the resultant photographs might look a little like Marianna Rothen’s work, which is to say: fantastic. Rothen’s photographs are funny, alluring, and utterly distinctive. She achieves her milky colors and fading, monochromatic look by combining digital and instant-film processes. Thanks to this, her images really do seem of the era. She was influenced by films from the 1960s and ’70s, both obscure and classic, especially “the pauses in between dialog or shots, how each frame was like an image with just enough clues to elude at the plot, the personalities of the women: always tormented but always in control.” Rothen’s images are those odd, unsettling pauses, which now seem to have disappeared from our hyper-speed visual language, but not from our collective memories.

---

Marianna Rothen was born in Canada and lives in New York City. After becoming a model at age 15, Marianna spent several years traveling, working, and documenting the experience through photographs. Rothen now focuses her photography on female characters within the scope of a nostalgic dystopia. Combined with decrepit interiors, wilderness, and seductive subjects, Rothen’s photographs emanate overtones of mystery and dissatisfaction that become part of a larger narrative. Since 2007 her work has been exhibited internationally and in 2014 her first book, Snow and Rose & other tales, was released with b.frank books. Marianna is currently completing a new series of photographs, Shadows in Paradise. Visit her website here.

 

Spurl Editions Recommends:

Marianna Rothen’s Snow and Rose & other tales

John Brian King’s Nude Reagan

Oslo by Maren Morstad (Photography)

OSLO

by MAREN MORSTAD

Maren Morstad’s photographs of Oslo are desolate and elegant: in them, Norway’s uninviting-yet-beautiful natural spaces become a sort of backdrop to tired dwellings and anonymous people. It's a wonderful vision of Oslo, which here seems sleepy and indolent (thought it most likely is not). Morstad’s vibrant colors have a familiar cinematic appeal, which gives these photographs the qualities of half-remembered movies, of daydreams.

“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.” – Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours

---

Maren Morstad is a creative artist born in Scandinavia, educated at Hyper Island, and after almost a decade of working in London and New York City, now back to her hometown of Oslo. While she is personally quite interested in living a minimalist life, she has a maximalist approach to her work process and feels most content when doing photography and being creative. Follow her work on Instagram and on her website.

In the Midst of Things (photography)

IN THE MIDST OF THINGS

by SARAH HIATT

Sarah Hiatt’s series examines childhood and adolescence in all its uncomfortable bleakness. The children’s faces are intense; their house and neighborhood aggressively normal. Hiatt is different from the many photographers who choose to simply accentuate the eccentricities of a home or a family setting: for those photographers, it is as though an ugly wallpaper and a loud blazer is enough to make a nondescript couple fascinating. But everything that is interesting and strange about this family—whoever they are, wherever they live—seems to come from within them. In the Midst of Things is a work in progress, which you can (and should!) check out here.

---

Sarah Hiatt is a 28-year-old Southwest Missouri native residing in Chicago, Illinois. She is currently a candidate in the MFA Photography program at Columbia College Chicago. Her work centers around childhood and the transition into adolescence, when we become psychologically and physically aware. Her photographs have been in numerous national and international exhibitions. Visit her website at www.sarah-hiatt.com.

Photographer John Brian King Releases Short Film

MODEL TEST

A Short Film by John Brian King

model – n. One that serves as the subject for an artist, especially a person employed to pose for a painter, sculptor, or photographer.
test – n. A procedure for critical evaluation; a means of determining the presence, quality, or truth of something; a trial.

“LAX” makes the Sunday paper edition of the LA Times

LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 made the Sunday paper edition of the LA Times’ Arts & Books! Pick up a copy or read it online for a fascinating article by Carolina A. Miranda, featuring an interview with photographer John Brian King.

Available now. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

An Interview with John Brian King, a Playlist, and More

The photographer chatted with Impose Magazine writer Matt Draper about his book LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84. The article features other photographs taken by John Brian King in the 1980s (including photographs of Disneyland and the band Public Image Ltd/PiL), as well as a playlist of what the photographer was listening to at that time.

That, and a few choice quotes, like…

“Los Angeles in 1980 was the year Dorothy Stratten was murdered and Kim Kardashian was born – and I know which celebrity I prefer.”

Available now. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

“LAX” Featured in Slate (with an interview!)

Slate writer Jordan G. Teicher interviewed John Brian King via e-mail about his photography book LAX. The resultant article, which appeared in Behold: Photo Blog on Slate on November 30, is a fascinating look into King's aesthetic and photographic process.

John Brian King was 18 when he first started making photos at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). It was 1980, and only a year earlier he’d purchased his first photography book by Weegee, who is famous for his flash-heavy, black-and-white photos of urban life. The influence is clear in King’s series, “LAX,” which appears, along with another series, “LA,” in LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84, published by Spurl this month.  

“I think the photographs in my book stand out as documents of a disappeared time—for me and my subjects—and a visual commentary of how I perceived humanity in my youth,” King said via email.

“I loved photographing these travelers arriving at the airport, brutally assaulted by this sea of ugliness, attempting to cope. I wanted to show, through the stark art of black-and-white photography, the dry vulnerability and humor of these people.”

Available now. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

The Weary And Harried Travelers Of LAX In The Early 1980s

Photographer John Brian King spoke to Danny Jensen of LAist about what drew him to LAX and what has changed since he took these photos. The interview is accompanied by a slideshow of images from the book. Plus, in even more awesome news, LAX is now available at Skylight Books in Los Feliz.

Looking back on the photos, what has changed about LAX and Los Angeles in general over the years in your opinion?

LAX back then was always in a constant state of controlled anarchy; now it is just controlled, fixed and rigid. Having been to many other airports since I photographed “LAX,” I now try to avoid flying through LAX at all costs; I currently live in Palm Springs, which has a genius open-air airport designed by the noted mid-century modern architect Donald Wexler (who also is the architect of my house).

To me, Los Angeles has become banal, corporate, dysfunctional, and aesthetically inert. When I took the photographs, it was the era of punk rock shows at the Whiskey, “Repo Man” being filmed in my neighborhood, and performance art by Mike Kelley at LACE—an atmosphere that I thrived in.

Available now. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

L.A. By Night – Interview with John Brian King

LAX was featured in Amadeus, an arts and culture magazine based in LA, with text by Taylor Wojick. The article includes an interview with photographer John Brian King. Here's a little excerpt.

Observational documentation and archival footage is what allows my generation to gain a better understanding of the past, through an unbiased visual narrative. What sort of impact do you think these photographs will have in 60 or even 100 years?

John Brian King: To my mind, there is no such thing as an “unbiased visual narrative.” Even cameras that are technically “unmanned” – bank surveillance cameras, police dash cams, Google Maps cameras – create their own biased narratives by the very nature of the people who control them.

A hundred years from now, I hope my photographs will be viewed as another tiny blip of aesthetic evidence of humanity’s absurdity and possible decline. I would be haunting someone from my grave if my photographs were curated by a nostalgic academic who was only interested in recontextualizing them into a horrible miasma akin to “Humans of New York” or “The Family of Man.”

Available now. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Flashback: Los Angeles Airport in the 1980s

LAX was featured in the fabulous AnOther Magazine, with text by Maisie Skidmore and – if we may be so bold – a terrific slideshow of images.

"I don’t want to be nasty," Karl Lagerfeld told Susannah Frankel shortly before the beginning of Chanel’s S/S16 airport extravaganza at Paris Fashion Week, “but of course in an airport, with the bus tours, it’s not the same as an airport as it was in the past, with first class, when travelling was something people dressed for.” It’s an incisive observation, as it is Lagerfeld’s wont to make, but of course he has a point. “We live in another world,” he summarises, and it's this world, in which airports are no longer the domain of the rich and famous, which is the subject of a new book of photographs by John Brian King, entitled LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84.

Releasing November 2, 2015. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

From Airport to City: Moody Photos of 1980s Los Angeles at Night

LAX was featured in Flavorwire over the weekend, with a terrific write-up by Alison Nastasi and a slideshow of John Brian King’s photographs.

You’re probably already familiar with the work of photographer John Brian King. He’s designed the film titles for dozens of movies, including Boogie Nights, The Ring, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and Lilo & Stitch. King also directed a movie called Redlands, set in the California city. But it was over 30 years ago that King first had his eye on the Golden State. 

His photographs, focused on the harried travelers bustling in and out of the Los Angeles International Airport and the gritty streets of Los Angeles at night, haven’t seen the light of day since the ‘80s. Those black-and-white negatives have finally reemerged in a new book published by Spurl Editions, LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84, available on November 2. 

The photographer’s monograph tells a parallel story that ushers us from airport to city — the chaos of the LAX lobby to the Sunset Strip, revealing images of a metropolis that has since vanished.

Releasing November 2, 2015. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

“LAX” Featured in KCET’s Artbound

KCET’s Artbound features photographs from John Brian King’s LAX, as well as the photographer's afterword. 

Releasing November 2, 2015. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

“LAX” Featured in We Heart

“John Brian King's confrontational style ignites the tension at early '80s LAX…” writes Rob Wilkes of We Heart, a journal that combines in-depth stories with design-led news from all areas of contemporary culture. He goes on:

There’s a palpable sensation of restless tension that seems to permeate the atmosphere at airports, and the bigger and busier the terminal, the more that tension is felt. There’s simply too many people all trying to do the same thing in too little space. The stop-start queueing, the frantic dashes for a far-flung gate, or just as often the long, boring wait to be called. Lost baggage, cancelled flights, forgotten passports, screaming kids, travellers both nervous and the exhausted, bursts of joyous excitement — emotion at every step.

Even in the days before the stringent anti-terror security measures, airports were a pretty fraught experience. Back in the early ’80s, brash young photographer John Brian King threw himself into the potential powder keg that was Los Angeles International Airport with flash blazing — deliberately intrusive and often unwelcome — to see what might combust. Aside from the human drama, King was also drawn to the fabric of the building itself, and the detritus and damage left behind by the transit of so many people. Born and raised near LAX, King was fascinated by flight from a young age; his childhood home was on a street called Flight, he went to a school named after Orville Wright, and his father was an engineer on both the B-52 bomber and the space programme. He shot his airport images while a teenager before leaving for art school, later returning to take up a night-time survey of Los Angeles’ streets for a second series.

The negatives remained in a box for 30 years as King abandoned photography for writing and filmmaking, but the two series are now seeing the light of day together in this photobook. LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980-84 by John Brian King is published by Spurl Editions, and due for release in November.

Releasing November 2, 2015. 24 cm x 22 cm softcover, shrink-wrapped, 132 pages (117 black & white photos), limited edition of 750 copies, afterword by the photographer in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.