Creative Thresholds

by David Giovannetti

My name is David Giovannetti and I live in a small town in Italy, called Corinaldo. I am not the son of an artist, nor did I attend art school, but still boast a curriculum that goes beyond any academic teaching: the tales of the adventures of my father, an Italian who emigrated to the United States to try his luck.

Thanks to his absurd stories, sometimes fantastic, my childhood flourished with wonder and curiosity about the world. Through fantasizing about his stories, I found the way to express myself through imagination which was sparked through art, specifically photography.

The path to turn this passion into a full-time job is long and arduous but I’m giving it my all to achieve this.

Website: https://davidgiovannettiphotography.wordpress.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DavidGiovannettiPhotography

Email: david.giovannetti@outlook.com

By Michel Verhoef

My photography  tries to communicate emotion. Some of my images may be classified as art photography, while some may be seen as a documentary or a crossover between both. I usually want to capture an emotion within our daily lives that is laying a bit deeper, or very deep, or a just-below-the-surface.

You may see my love for the old-style photographers in my work: the Bressons, the Friedlanders, the Parrs or even a Norman Rockwell could be hidden in there. Just to name a few. The Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf is also a great inspiration.

Essentially I want to keep the scene as original as possible without changing it by copying or adding in information from other pictures. The basic mood of a picture has to be already in the picture through the real-life content of the scene. I just need to enhance my images by dodging and burning to emphasize the feeling and to guide the viewer’s eye. Every picture needs to tell a story, preferably through an interaction between people or between people and their environment. In most cases my subjects are people who demand a quick response from the camera’s shutter and sometimes a lot of patience is required to get people used to that lingering-guy-with-a-camera.

Child in time

Hot but stylish

Immigration

Dorana Alberti

But I want to stay

Garçon s’il vous plait

Everlasting pose

Strings

Beach confession

Happy days are here again

One child policy

Oxygen

It takes two

Tango mirrored

Tango

Michel Verhoef was born in Germany and immigrated to the Netherlands at age nine. His father was a Dutch jazz musician and his mother a German housewife. Verhoef started at about that young age to make his first pictures with a Brownie that he got from his mother. From her he inherited his feeling for the visual art photography. It has always, though, stayed a hobby besides his actual job as a housing engineer.

Website: http://michel-verhoef.artistwebsites.com/

Michel’s Recommended/Interesting Links:

Magnum Photos–The Changing of a Myth

Berlin — Erwin Olaf (video)

by PK Donson

Backyard

Carpetbaggers

Diva

Erp!

Hung the Moon

Lost

Musical Swamp

Personality

Reflection

Rhino in the House

Sleeping Elk

Super Cow

Swan Walk

Untitled

Untitled

PK Donson (1954 Anniston, AL)

PK’s work investigates the pixels by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society. She creates intense personal moments masterly created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round.

PK’s whimsical photos directly respond to the surrounding environment and she uses everyday experiences as a starting point. Often these framed instances would go unnoticed in their original context.

By applying abstraction, she approaches a wide scale of subjects in a multi-layered way and likes to involve the viewer in a way that is sometimes emotional. The results are deconstructed to the extent the meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.

Her works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, cliches and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic
appearance of an image, with a conceptual approach. PK makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky. At other times, they seem typical by-products of American super abundance and marketing.

PK currently lives and works in Davidson, NC.

Facebook: PK Donson
Google Plus: +PK Donson
Website: www.pksphotos.com
Email: pdonson@gmail.com

by Christopher Hutchinson

http://www.odditycentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Richard-Prince-Instagram.jpg

This essay is not about questioning the validity of whether or not Richard Prince is an artist; it rather examines Prince’s methodology in order to question to his “genius.” Prince has been a controversial figure since the re-photography in his most famous cowboy series. “In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society’s desires.”- http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.272

Process

Prince finds an image he likes, comments on it, makes a screen-grab with his iPhone, and sends the file — via email — to an assistant. From here, the file is cropped, printed as is, stretched, and presto: It’s art. Or stuff that’s driving others crazy for a variety of reasons.-Jerry Saltz http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/richard-prince-instagram-pervert-troll-genius.html

Price’s process has been validated for decades now through mandatory art school reading such as Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author and Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The issue here is the fact that the process itself is dated and offers no new insight responsible to this moment, except for the deliberate commercial use of iPhones and Instagram. What Prince’s process reveals is the nihilistic limits of Western art practice. Its constant reduction limited by rules provided previously. How is this new work more significant than the work he did in the 70’s? It’s sad really. Here we have an artist that is so tied his methodology that he relies on technology to give it relevancy. Adding technology alone, to any medium, will not magically make the artwork good.

Medium

Prince’s work has successfully affirmed the old belief that photography and the camera is a tool that cannot create art; it can only do its job- to reproduce. As a failed painter he has executed the tenet held so dear to painters in relation to photography. The debasing of photography is more important to Prince than copyright infringement and authenticity.

Prince calls his enlarged “screen-grabs” paintings and Jerry Saltz affirms this by comparing the out of focus enlarged photo to Lichtenstein’s intention with his Ben-day dots.   The problem with this is Prince’s intention. Lichtenstein’s work used that style to conjure a nostalgia that his artwork required. Prince’s use of the canvas, with ink-jet ink, is transforming the ephemeral life of Instagram posts to permanent nostalgic objects. The argument that Prince is using new technology is void when placed in a gallery on a canvas. It is no longer Instagram; it is tradition.

Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern, London[33]) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein

Artifacts

Prince’s work at best is a tableau attempting to be a simulacra/simulation of real life representing a scene from history. The Instagram pieces are a simulation of art. Prince’s simulation only succeeds as an artifact-evidence of internet culture. What would be the point of critiquing artifacts?-They are merely tools.

Christopher Hutchinson is an accomplished Jamaican conceptual artist, professor and contributor to the art community as a writer, critic and founder of the nonprofit Smoke School of Art. He is a Professor of Art at Atlanta Metropolitan State College and has been featured as a lecturer including prestigious engagements at University of Alabama and the Auburn Avenue Research Library. For two decades, Chris has been a practicing artist. His works have been exhibited in internationally recognized institutions including City College New York (CUNY) and featured at the world’s leading international galleries such as Art Basel Miami. He has always had an innate passion for creating spaces where Africans and people of African descent contribute to an inclusive contemporary dialogue—ever evolving, not reflexive but pioneering. This requires challenging the rubric of the canon of art history, a systemic space of exclusion for the Other: women and non-Whites, and where necessary he rewrites it. He received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from Savannah College of Art & Design, Atlanta and his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama.

by Josephine

Night Birds

Wind Lovers

Distance

What’s up?/In the Churchyard

Heat

Gallery Goers

Josephine is a German-based artist and photographer.

Following her studies in Munich and Salzburg she was mainly working as a interior designer and textile artist with a love for collages and paintings.

During years of travelling she discovered her passion for photography.

Today the camera is her daily companion.

She does her individual art projects by using digital processing creating image composings and expressive colour looks.

Josephine´s work prefers exploring the theme of moods and tensions in modern urban life and the various relationships between humankind and powerful nature.

In May 2013 she started to share her work on her blog lemanshots.wordpress.com.

by Virginie Colline

Image by Mizulys, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mizulys/

sunset on the beach
he shakes the cornucopia
no more coconuts

summer seeds raining
from the watermelon sky
she lets down her hair

bananafish dream
his hand is edging crabwise
towards her tanned skin

come and taste honey
any strange inflorescence
you want me to bee

Virginie Colline lives and writes in Paris. Her poems have appeared in The Scrambler, Prune Juice, The Mainichi, Frostwriting, Prick of the Spindle, Mouse Tales Press, StepAway Magazine, BRICKrhetoric, Overpass Books, Dagda Publishing, Poethead, Silver Birch Press, The Bangalore Review, and Yes, Poetry, among others.

by Alessandro Ciapanna

These photographs were taken in a train cemetery on the outskirts of Uyuni, a small city in the south of Bolivia. This series is entitled “Asi Es La Vida,” from graffiti scrawled on one of the rusting locomotives.

Artist: Alessandro Ciapanna

I throw myself passionately at life. And life often smiles back. When that happens, I like to have my camera ready.

In what is a perennially ongoing process, I have developed a sense of what works, photographically. I can sometimes perceive when a situation has the quid I like to call the “wow factor”. I have honed my ear to the sound of a ball bouncing or a child laughing. Because these are telltale signs that something wonderful is taking place. It is a miracle, happening, unscripted. And sometimes – if you develop and trust your serendipity – it’s happening right around the corner. It’s something universal, and fleeting. Therefore all the more wonderful. All the more worth capturing. This is what I most like to photograph. Some call it life.

Website: ciapannaphoto

By Ashley Lily Scarlett and Richard Guest

Since 20th December 2014, Ashley Lily Scarlett (in Sydney, Australia) and Richard Guest (in London, UK) have been having a conversation in pictures. They each take it in turn to post an image as a response to the other’s previous post. There is no set schedule; the blog follows the rhythm of a conversation. Some days there is nothing new, on others a flurry of questions, answers, jokes, and echoes, back and forth, on and on until…

Here is part of their dialogue.

4^th February 2015, London

5^th February 2015, Sydney

5th February 2015, London

6^th February 2015, Sydney

5^th February 2015, London

6^th February 2015, Sydney

6^th February 2015, London

7^th February 2015, Sydney

6^th February 2015, London

7^th February 2015, Sydney

7^th February 2015, London

8^th February 2015, Sydney

8^th February 2015, London

9^th February 2015, Sydney

The dialogue continues:  https://betweenscarlettandguest.wordpress.com/

Ashley Lily Scarlett is an artist, who lives and works in Sydney. She uses a Nokia camera phone to shoot and edit her images.

by Moni Smith

Pinhole photography is, essentially, an in-depth study in exposure. The only thing you have control over is exposure time. A pinhole camera is simply a box with a tiny hole to let in light. It is photography in its very basic form. Since the aperture on pinhole cameras is so small it allows for very long exposures in daylight. These long exposures are what fascinates me about this type of photography. A lot can happen in the seconds that tick away while an exposure is being made.

blowin’ in the wind

I Am Amsterdam

Lemonade Nachos and Cold Drinks

Pinholers Enjoying Jenever

River Watching

Self Portrait In a Hotel Room Mirror

Self With Pears

The Truth Is Behind The Kale and Yogurt

The Witches Castle

During the day, Moni Smith is a Children’s Librarian who lives in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. When she is not wearing her librarian hat she likes to wander around with one of her many pinhole cameras to see what she can capture on film.

by Cecilia McDowell

Hampstead Heath: nearly 800 bucolic acres of parkland within London’s city limits, a city home to over 8 million people.

Though they are much cultivated and maintained now, these are lands that were mentioned in the Domesday Book (c. 1086AD), and upon which still stands a Bronze Age barrow (c. 2000-3000BC). Certainly, there have been major human-made changes – the now-famous bathing ponds were first dug as reservoirs in the 17th and 18th centuries – but this ancient park is tended with such an artist’s eye as to still feel pastoral. It is a public space in one of the world’s largest cities, a space that receives millions of visitors per year, and yet it is possible to sit under a tree in splendid silence for hours without seeing another living person. There is an undeniable magic in this place, regardless of your definition of the word, and even more so at dusk and dawn; at midsummer; at the edge of dappled shadows, ‘through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.’

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

–John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 1819

Artist: Cecilia McDowell 

Introvert.  Artist.  Inveterate reader.
Curious.  Traveller.  Consulting palate.

Media links:

www.ceciliamcdowell.com

instagram.com/ceciliamcdowell

coming soon – accidentalalchemist.co.uk