This week’s pick is Parisian photographer Pauline Hisbacq and today we’re particularly taken by her 2011 series called, Holden. See some our favorites here and see it in it’s entirety there.

First, I read the story.
Then, I’ve been in New-York, looking for him.
Finally, I found Holden.

Travail réalisé lors d’une résidence à New-York, au cours de l’été 2011.
Libre adaptation du roman L’attrape-coeur de JD Salinger.
Edition en cours de réalisation.

-Pauline Hisbacq

This week we feature the work of photographer Michelle Groskopf.

Michelle Groskopf is a street photographer dividing her time between Los Angeles, New York and Toronto. She has made a practice of shooting the world around her almost daily for the past 20 years. She is the AV editor for The New Inquiry. Of her work she explains, “my photographs compulsively reveal strangers in solitary moments, families huddled together as if in small clans, daily narratives unfolding at the side of the road, the joy of the everyday.”

View more after the jump, and make sure to visit Michelle Groskopf’s own website.

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This week we feature the work of Carlos Lowenstein from his latest series The Distant Sound Of A Dog Barking.

“Chicago has a network of alleys that cut through its grid of neighborhoods.  It’s a bit of a maze and a strange place in that it’s a public space that isn’t really meant to be seen.  I feel drawn to these public places where people feel no one is watching.  All kinds of interesting visuals are left behind.  I sometimes think of them as spaces that have let their guard down.

Over the course of a year, I went on long walks through the alleys and took pictures. I found this space had a calming effect on me.  I was struck by how quiet it got as I went deeper into a neighborhood.  I could hear wind chimes hanging in back porches and the gentle hum of the rest of the city. At times, after photographing in the alleys for several hours the physical sameness of the place could become disorienting.” – Carlos Lowenstein

Carlos Lowenstein was born in Caracas, Venezuela. He studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has worked as a film editor for the last ten years.  He is represented for commercial work by the editing shop The Whitehouse.  Carlos’ photography was published for the first time in the February 2012 issue of Abe’s Penny.

Check out more after the jump! You can also peruse more on his own lovely website here.

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This week we bring you a selection of work by photographer Rebecca Peters, from her series titled, Lollipops, Cotton Candy, and Rotten Teeth: Cavities Will Not Deter My Joy.

“This series consists of photographs taken during a year of living in New York. I had been photographing for about nine months, but could not afford to process the film. When I finally did, I realized that hardly any of the photographs were actually taken in New York. It became clear that I was somehow unable to make new work in a place that had become so hard for me to thrive in. The series is about the need to escape from New York in order to continue creating. Somehow, it was a hindrance and a motivation, horrific and wonderful.” -Rebecca Peters

Bio

Rebecca A. Peters received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and Art History from Bethel University, St. Paul, MN. She was a 2010 recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant awarded through the Minnesota State Arts Board. Currently Peters is an MFA candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

2:30-3:30pm

BREAKING WITH HOMOGENEITY

Participants: Litia Perta, Malin Arnell, A.K. Burns, Åsa Elzen, Clark Solack, Hanna Wilde

How can we name and use identity categories to promote a more heterogeneous and more equal art scene? Litia Perta, Faculty at the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, will moderate a conversation with Hanna Wilde, Director of the Swedish headquartered Högkvarteret; as well as Åsa Elzen and Malin Arnell of the Swedish-based Yes! Association; Clark Solack: curator, writer and co-editor of RANDY; A.K. Burns: artist and co-editor of RANDY; to talk about the transatlantic queer and feminist communities that underpin their practices; as well as the stakes, struggles and successes in each instance.

Pier 94: the Wall Street Journal Media Lounge
12th ave. at west 55th street

In conjunction with VOLTA NY, The Armory Show hosts Open Forum, a thought-provoking series of conversations and panels featuring top collectors, curators and museum directors. The 2012 edition will be organized by curator Amanda Parmer.

This year’s OPEN FORUM presents discussions between New York and Nordic based artists, art historians, curators, critics, directors and dealers. The talks will draw on the distinctions and affinities between the socially engaged artistic, curatorial, writing and administrative practices of the two geographic regions. All talks will take place in The Wall Street Journal Media Lounge on Pier 94 or at the VOLTA NY 7W Talks Lounge (location indicated in program).

FOR MORE INFO: www.thearmoryshow.com/programming/open_forum.html

This week we bring you work by photographer Giacomo Brunelli.

“I have been working on The Animals series since 2005. When I was a child I used to spend time playing with animals and I think that is why I push the lens often to its closest point of focus, almost touching the subject and forcing flight or fight from the animal, which is when I then record its reaction.

All the animals I photograph are found in the backyards, small villages, fields, and farms and I call the way I work ‘animal-focused street photography.’

Once I see an animal that I want to photograph, I try to ignore it then I run after it which usually gains a response; sometimes I just stare at it and see what happens. Their reactions are different, sometimes they are curious about the camera and sometimes they get scared about the noise of the shutter. When I am dealing with dead animals I pick them up from the ground and place them where I think the setting works. In this case my interaction with the animal is a way to give purpose to something that it no longer has.

The images are all shot on a 35mm Japanese camera, Miranda Sensomat, made in the ’60s with a removable viewfinder, allowing waist level composition or shooting with the camera set on ground.

The prints are self-printed in the darkroom and come with rounded corners and black edges. The flim is a Kodak Tri-x 400 and the best time to capture my subjects is in the morning, using both direct light when the sun is out or diffused light on a cloudy day.” -Giacomo Brunelli

To see more of Giacomo’s work, visit his website by clicking here.

Bio

Giacomo Brunelli (b. Perugia, Italy, 1977) graduated with a degree in International Communications in 2002. His series on animals has been exhibited widely with shows at The Photographers’Gallery, London (Uk), Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris (France), Noorderlicht Photofestival (The Netherlands), BlueSky Gallery, Portland (Usa), Griffin Museum, Boston (Usa), Daegu PhotoBiennal (South Korea), Angkor PhotoFestival (Cambodia), Format Festival, Derby (Uk), Robert Morat Galerie, Hamburg (Germany), The New Art Gallery Walsall (Uk), Arden & Anstruther Petworth (Uk), Galleria Belvedere Milan (Italy), Fotofestiwal Lodz (Poland) and Boutographies, Montepellier (France).

The work has won the Sony World Photography Award, the Gran Prix Lodz, Poland, the B&W magazine Spotlight and the Magenta Foundation “Flash Forward 2009”. It has also been featured widely in the art and photography press including The Guardian (Uk) Eyemazing (Holland) B&W Magazine (Usa), Creative Review (Uk), Foto&Video (Russia), Images Magazine (France) Photographie (Germany), Katalog (Denmark), AdBusters (Canada), FOTO (Sweden) and FOTOGRAFI (Norway).

His work is in the collection of Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Portland Art Museum and at The New Art Gallery Walsall,Uk. “The Animals”, his first monograph, was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2008. He is represented by Galerie Camera Obscura in Paris and by The Photographers’Gallery in London.

This week we are highlighting the work of artist Samantha Contis.  We are particularly drawn to her series titled Edgewood from which select photos were included in our New York Photo Festival exhibition, “New York Did It To Me”.

Edgewood documents a single American city park. In looking at the park’s visitors and its changing landscape, Contis makes pictures that explore perceptions of race, class, culture, and the environment.  Drawing on a long painterly tradition rooted in the pastoral, Contis’ photographs reveal a new urban landscape.

Samantha Contis was born in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2008, she completed her MFA in photography at Yale School of Art, having received her BFA at New York University. In recent years, she has contributed compelling photo essays to the New York Times and Time Magazine. Contis has also been selected for various exhibitions in prominent institutions including The Kitchen,  X Initiative and Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.  Most recently Contis has shown at Workspace in Los Angeles. She lives and works in New York.

To see more work by Samantha Contis, please visit her website.

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Starting today(!), each week we will be presenting a photographer, and a selection of their work, who we think is doing something worthy of a nod from Capricious! Most of these will be culled from our abundance of magazine submissions. We receive thousands of images and while not all of them wind up in the pages of Capricious, a great many of them deserve attention.

Today we are highlighting the work of artist Leigh Davis. The series of hers that really caught our collective eye is titled, “Residence” and was shot between 2002-2004. Of the series Davis explains, “Residence is a project conducted at a residence hall for women located within the YWCA of Brooklyn. For two years I worked within this community, visiting the individual rooms of twenty-five women. I developed a process, with a focus on forming relationships that resulted in a series of photographs. These images of intimate spaces capture the dialectic between engagement and voyeurism that has been fundamental to my practice.”

Leigh Davis was born in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2006, she completed her MFA in photography at Concordia University (Montreal). Davis has been included in various important exhibitions including The Center for Urban Pedagogy’s, “City Without a Ghetto” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. She has received funding for her collaborative projects throughout New York from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Puffin Foundation. Davis’ photographic work has been published in various publications including, The New York Times Magazine. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

The images here are our current favorites but visit Davis’ website to see more.

An Evening with A. K. Burns and A. L. Steiner

Monday, March 12, 2012, 7:00 p.m.

Theater 2 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2), T2

Community Action Center, a recent MoMA acquisition, is a picaresque, exuberant, and explicit filmic account of happily consensual, and often public, sexual encounters among a group of adventurous women. The filmmakers—A. L. Steiner, an artist known for her photo-collages and her involvement with the band Chicks on Speed and the curatorial group Ridykelous; and A. K. Burns, a multidisciplinary artist and cofounder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)—have created a non-narrative, transgressive document of a group of friends who act upon, and into, one another. The dialogue-free film features an original musical score as scintillating as its lush and lascivious images.

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