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Born in 1991, Natalie O’Moore grew up in the suburbs of Pennsylvania before returning to New York, the place where she was born, to attend New York University. She is graduating with a degree in Photography from the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies. She has since exhibited her work in group shows in Berlin, Germany at the Berlinische Gallerie and in New York. Recently, she exhibited a series of photographs entitled, Under the Neon Lights, which was shown in the Gallatin Arts Festival. She is currently working on a personal documentary project entitled We, Ourself & I that explores the idea of subjectivity within photography. 

Visit her website at: www.natalieomoore.com 

Follow her tumblr at:  www.natalieomoore.tumblr.com

Calling All Photographers!

This year, the New York Photo Festival will take place from May 16^th to May 20^th with a new and exciting initiative:  The New York Photo Festival Invitational! Photographers are invited to submit their work for prizes and the chance to have their photographs and multimedia pieces exhibited at the festival. This is a great opportunity to promote your work so go on and share your vision!

The theme for the contest is: the art/doc matrix: where do fine art and documentary photography meet? 

http://nyph.at/blog

Deadline: this Thursday, April 19^th.

-Elena Kendall

Parody of the Artist as a stereotype, caricature of the documentary genre, a questioning of public commissions…Pierrick Sorin, French videographer, breaks all the rules in his piece “Nantes: Projets d’Artistes”.

Commissioned by Nantes in the year 2000, “Projets d’Artistes” was originally intended to advertise the cultural wonders of the city, as well as to celebrate the new technological advances that came with the turning of the millennium. However, following his burlesque style, Sorin created a fake reportage featuring seven international artists and their big projects, which were so absurd that the documentary put the city in a tricky situation. It would seem that either the city was aware of the spoof and approved a vain portrayal of Nantes to support Sorin’s artistic beliefs –which I highly doubt- or it was a mere instrument for the artist to mock the idea of public commissions.

Thus British artist Ricky Pierson transforms the inhabitants of the city into holograms at the tramway station. The Hungarian Rôsk Nieprick uses the latest nanotechnology to make a levitating water fountain, and the German Krisp Röniker creates a rainbow that “magically” appears in the sky whenever the phone conversations of the people in Nantes seem happy.

Ricky Pierson and his tramway holograms.

Rôsk Nieprick and her floating fountain.

Krisp Röniker and her creepy rainbow that spies on people’s conversations.

But it turns out that all these fancy artists are no other than Pierrick Sorin himself, playing the role of fictitious characters whose disguises keep degrading as the reportage goes on.

Finally, Sorin appears as himself with the most controversial project of all: a series of naked statues representing him are situated facing the rails of the local tramway. When the train passes by, they create a sort of animation for the passenger, who through the window sees the statue come to life, and change sex (from masculine to feminine genitalia). 

Pierrick Sorin and his nude transformation.

It is this final transformation that tips the viewer and reveals the ultimate farce. The fact that the real Pierrick Sorin documents himself explaining his “animated transformation” –and thus by extension deconstructing the frame within a frame setting of the entire documentary- calls into question the public’s perception of art, and its scope, as well as the status of images and video in general. 

You can watch the French version (only one I could find) here.

- Elena Kendall

From left to right: Face to Face, Scene of Crime ©Thomas Bachler

Smile, Point, and Shoot. Literally.

It is no coincidence that the verb “shoot” is used when in reference to taking pictures. Somehow, the action of shooting a gun and a camera is similar: the photographer chooses its target, focuses, and captures an image. He can miss a fleeting moment the same way a shooter would miss a flying pheasant. And much like with a gun, there is also a sense of power that comes from maneuvering a camera.

Thomas Bachler takes the idea of photoshooting to another level. In his series Scenes of Crime, the viewer can observe that the photographs are all pierced by gun holes. That is because the German photographer captures his images with a gun. The process is creative, but actually quite simple. Once he has chosen his framing, Bachler positions a box in front of the “scene” and shoots a hole into it, thus transforming the box into a pin-hole camera. This allows enough light inside the cube, which Bachler covers with light-sensitive chemicals, to record a negative. The result is a blurry, black and white image of a place that becomes the evidence for a crime scene.

However, Bachler does not stop at shooting places. During the exhibition of his work, the lucky visitors had the opportunity to experience his process first hand. Bachler invited his guests to sit in front of his camera box and shoot at it –and therefore at themselves. The suicidal aspect of his experiment reshapes the context of the photographic experience as a whole, and one enters his exhibitions reborn with a much more piercing eye. 

-Elena Kendall

FEATURED ARTIST & GALLERY SUBMISSIONS have been extended for our FALL 2012 issue! The gallery theme is Rituals. Head over to the ISO website to read about the requirements and submit your images! All submissions are now due by March 25th.

We look forward to seeing your work!

Love,
The ISO Staff

New York City ca. 1959 © Leon Levinstein and Kenisha WI 2003 © Brian Ulrich

Tomorrow Tuesday, March 6^th between 6:00pm and 8:00pm, the Aperture Foundation is holding the opening reception for its new show SHARED VISION: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography. The exhibition presents two hundred photographs including work by Ansel Adams, Leon Levinstein, Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe among many other renowned artists. In addition to the reception, and as part of New York’s annual contemporary art fair The Armory Show, the Armory Collection Brunch will hold a special walk through the exhibition with both collectors Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Fall at 11:00 am, on Saturday, March 10^th.

The walk will be followed by a book signing from Aperture artists, including Brian Ulrich, who’s work was just featured in our newest issue of ISO Magazine, A New Landscape. Here is a little excerpt from the article, written by Perri Hofmann:

“ Is This Place Great of What? Brian Ulrich’s first monograph (Aperture 2011) attempts to address the complexities of American consumerism through photographs. Ulrich began his project at the “really weird and somewhat great moment |when| all these social rules broke down” following the terrorist attacks of September 11^th. Subsequently, the Bush administration encouraged consumer spending as a patriotic act. This directed Ulrich’s gaze to homogenized spaces of consumption across the country and culminated in there extensive interconnected photographic projects: Retail, Thrift and Dark Stores…”

To read the rest of the article, make sure to get a copy of the magazine at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts!

-Elena Kendall

Gallery Information:

Aperture Gallery and Bookstore

547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor 

Between 10th and 11th Avenues

New York, New York

As I was watching all the celebrities stroll down the red carpet at the Oscars, I could not help but remember a comment photographer Martine Frank said about one of Marc Riboud’s pictures taken more than 50 years ago:

What’s interesting in this photo is that it puts the whole idea of photographic talent into question because in the end all these photographers find themselves in the same place, at the same moment, under the same light, before the same subject, and one could say that they all want to make the same photo. Yet, even so, among these hundreds of photos perhaps there will be one or two good ones. 

Every year there is an intense amount of effort put into photographing all of these famous stars at the Oscars ceremony to show their dress, their jewelry, their escort. However, as Frank points out, all the photographers are there to get the same shot. Here are three pictures of Angelina Jolie at the ceremony, photographed by different photographers. The similarity is flagrant.

-Elena Kendall