Linda Lundgren

Posted: August 22nd, 2010 | Author: Yanda | Filed under: Photography | No Comments »

Rineke Dijkstra (born 1959) is a Dutch photographer.
Dijkstra concentrates on single portraits, and usually works in series, looking at groups such as adolescents, clubbers, and soldiers. Her subjects are often shown standing, facing the camera, against a minimal background. This compositional style is perhaps most notable in her well-known beach portraits, which generally feature one or more adolescents against a seascape. This style is again seen in her work on pregnant women.

Excerpt from http://acidolatte.blogspot.com/2010/06/rineke-dijkstra.html?zx=fa93042df8a8bf5a

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In Bloom by Amira Fritz

Posted: August 4th, 2010 | Author: Yanda | Filed under: Photography | 1 Comment »

http://www.amirafritz.de/
via http://albanadamsview.blogspot.com/2010/06/in-bloom-amira-fritz.html
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New Culture Movement by Han Bing

Posted: July 19th, 2010 | Author: Yanda | Filed under: Photography | No Comments »

In Han Bing’s “New Culture Movement” series, laborer, families, and even school children, stand in front of half-constructed homes, construction sites, and schoolyards, bricks hefted in hand like little red books. Although repudiated by the “upwardly mobile” urban society as “backward,” the lowly brick is still the best most rural families can expect. With their painfully limited means, rural families must often decide between a marriage home or higher education for their son (daughters rarely get either)—signaling the rise of a new culture of construction at the expense of education, a fixation on private possession, an almost desperate attempt to cordon off a private space to call one’s own, and the perhaps illusory dream of becoming part of the propertied class in a “society of modest prosperity” that denies their claims of membership—betraying the distance between the official fantasies of China’s modernity and the majority’s experience of it.

During the 80s, brick constructions were a national symbol of modernity, a promise of a new life, and a society of modest prosperity (xiaokang shehui). But just as rural China was beginning to move from homes of straw, mud and stone, into homes of brick, bricks were declared outdated, and backward. The new standard became the steel, concrete and glass high-rise, unreachably expensive for the rural poor, and a reminder of their increasing marginalization.

http://xpia.com/showcaase/a7a_black/series.asp?aa_series_id=234&member_id=24195
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The Walking the Cabbage Project by Han Bing

Posted: July 19th, 2010 | Author: Yanda | Filed under: Photography | No Comments »

In the Walking the Cabbage (2000-2009) series of social intervention performance, video and photography works, Han Bing walks a Chinese cabbage on a leash in public places, inverting an ordinary practice to provoke debate and critical thinking. Walking the Cabbage is a playful twist on a serious subject—the way our everyday practices serve to constitute “normalcy” and our identities are often constituted by the act of claiming objects as our possessions. A quintessentially Chinese symbol of sustenance and comfort for poor Chinese turned upside down, Han Bing’s cabbage on a leash offers a visual interrogation of contemporary social values. If a full stock of cabbage for the winter was once a symbol of material well-being in China, nowadays the nouveau riche have cast aside modest (monotonous) winters of cabbage in favor of ostentatious gluttony in fancy restaurants where waste signifies status. They flaunt “name brand” pooches, demonstrating how they no longer rely on the lowly cabbage, and can not only fatten themselves to obesity, but also pamper a pedigreed pet. Yet, for the poor and struggling, the realities of cabbage as a subsistence bottom line have not changed—what’s changed is the value structure that dictates what—and who—is valuable or worthless in Chinese society. Han Bing’s social intervention performance art practice has been conducted in a vast array in public spaces and quotidian social settings ranging from tiny rural villages to cosmopolitan metropolises across the globe; from flourishing downtown bastions of the white-collar consumer elite to the agricultural fields of the salt-of-the-earth rural laborers; from the Great Wall to the Mississippi River; from Miami Beach to the Champs Elysees; from Harajuku to Haight-Ashbury; from Tiananmen to Times Square.
http://xpia.com/showcaase/a7a_black/subseries.asp?aa_id=683&aa_series_id=49&member_id=24195
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Urban Amber by Han Bing

Posted: July 19th, 2010 | Author: Yanda | Filed under: Photography | No Comments »

In Urban Amber, Han Bing’s visual interventions also raise questions about the paradoxes of desire. Desire for Han Bing is an irreducibly bifurcated modality, that is, it has powerful manifestations and effects that can be both beautiful and poisonous. In his conceptual photography series of single-exposure images, Urban Amber, this paradox takes on a different form. The spectre of glamorous high-rises, those icons of middle-class China’s dreams of home and a better life, are juxtaposed to the rundown, temporary dwellings of the urban poor living in their shadows. These fantasy high-rises appear resplendent and dream-like until you realize that their inverted images are reflected in Beijing’s ubiquitous, industrial-waste and garbage-infested “stinky rivers.” Like amber, these rivers capture the sediment of the times, showing us through a mirror darkly, the underbelly of China’s fantasy of modernity.
http://xpia.com/showcaase/a7a_black/menu.asp?member_id=24195
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