Light Work Annual 2012: Ohm Phanphiroj

Underage #4, 2010, Ohm Phanphiroj

Ohm Phanphiroj’s recent photographic work focuses on underage prostitution in Bangkok, Southeast Asia’s “City of Angels.” His project Underage draws attention to an overlooked group in the discussion of prostitution in Thailand–local boys…Most of the boys confront the camera from the center of the frame in a stance of little-boy bravado…Some of the subjects turn away from the camera conveying a sense of introspection and sadness. No matter the pose or expression, their youthfulness is haunting.

–Jennifer Pearson Ymashiro, Director of honors and a lecturer in the Department of Art at Miami University Hamilton

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

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Light Work Annual 2012: Sherry Millner

Through the simple and profound gesture of literally tearing up photos–snapshots of family vacations and daily life–Sherry Millner reveals hidden complexities of photography as, in her hands, the photographic image is cast free, no longer domesticated and fixed within a conventional habitus. Shards of images combined in a collage-like compositional matrix resonate in a different rhetorical register, pluralizing reference…Here, one absence stands for another, marked by the tear.

–Thomas Zummer, scholar, artist, and curator

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Light Work Annual 2012: Calla Thompson

Untitled (sign 1), 2011, Calla Thompson

Calla Thompson has achieved something quite remarkable in her Asylum series. With the seemingly simple, yet decidedly deliberate, decision of creating her photomontages within the tondo format, she has managed to conflate these two major aspects of pictorial configuration. The desire to bridge contradictions is not only apparent in Thompson’s formal choices but also in the title for her series as well as her subject matter. She wants “asylum” to be understood in its multiple and contradictory meanings, as a safe haven, refuge or sanctuary in a “Storm without end” on the one hand, and as an institution or place where one is held against one’s will on the other.

– Andrea Inselmann, curator

Read the rest of the essay in Contact Sheet 167: The Light Work Annual 2012.

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Light Work Annual 2012: Jen Davis

Untitled No. 16, 2005, Jen Davis

…Davis, over and over again, suspends time, makes the presence of the camera disappear, and leaves us with her variously charged observations of one individual momentarily alone with herself in the world. The mundane is here raised to the level of various small dramas. We are reminded in looking at these pictures of how the physical presence of this one woman looking intently at herself mirrors the ways in which so many women look at themselves and see not the photoshopped representations of commercial culture, but something more dimensional, complex, and far more engaging.

– Dawoud Bey, artist and writer

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Light Work Annual 2012: Dana Popa

The pictures have few clues, just shadows and light, and the unsettling quality of the color in the images. In the peeling concrete walls and the shabby materials, in the absence of anything that seems to belong to anyone, there is the silence of space that hides what happens there. The facts are not exactly hidden from us, but it is hard to look at them all the time or even very often, particularly the statistics.

– Wendy Watriss, curator, writer, photographer, author, and co-founder and artistic director of FotoFest International

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Light Work Annual 2012: Cui Fei

Tracing the Origin VIII, 2010, Cui Fei

Much like breath itself, Cui Fei’s work rises and falls between two and three dimensions. Large wall-hung paper works recall ancient scrolls. Other work is sculptural in itself or its presentation–sheets of paper laid over low platforms or cascading down steps or written directly on the floor. Photographic processes let some projects flatten the image while others billow with shape and shadow.

– Nancy Keefe Rhodes

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Light Work Annual 2012: Shane Lavalette

Will with Banjo, 2011, Shane Lavalette

Shane Lavalette’s pictures are visually straightforward, obsessively clear, and devoted to the metaphysical idea that direct observation can be beamed through a lens to a viewer. They are quiet pictures that build to a boisterous whole. They speak from the endlessly renewed place of the photographic expeditioner who loves the world and knows it’s a well that never runs dry.

– Tim Davis, photographer, video artist, writer, and musician

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Light Work Annual 2012: Andrew Miksys

Miksys builds his Byelorussian itinerary as a conceptual maneuver, following the ideological formulas of mass celebrations of Soviet history in expectation of finding memories of the present. He shows us the hollowness of history–the aftermath of the ersatz Soviet celebrations–and three generations of women.

– Laimonas Briedis, author of Vilnius: City of Strangers

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Light Work Annual 2012: Amy Elkins

14/38 (Not the Man I Once Was), 2009, Amy Elkins

In each cell an inmate eats, sleeps and pretty much exists for 22½ hours a day. The other 1½ hours you are allowed alone in a small concrete yard with cement walls of about 20 feet high and on top is a metal grate—and through that grate you are offered the only piece of the outside world for anyone that is placed in this environment. The blue sky, unless of course it’s raining.

Freddy, 36, California

The degree of isolation [Amy Elkins‘] subjects experience is extreme. Of the prisoners that she has written to over the past several years, most have spent their time in a solitary 6 x 9 foot cell. Letters speak of a life where loss is equaled only by the endless time before them…unless the sentence of death is carried out.

— Bill Sullivan, Artist

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Light Work Annual 2012: Michael Tummings

Norfolk Boy I, 2010, Michael Tummings

A formal portrait of a youth follows the most distinguished conventions of old master portraiture. He stands in the foreground, facing forward, and is shown full-length. Myriad details define social standing and skills, notably the pair of pheasants dangling from each hand like attributes of old. In the light, cool tonality of its palette as well as the precise composition, this photograph evokes one of the most famous figure paintings of the eighteenth century, Watteau’s Giles. Regardless of whether that allusion was intentional, what is remarkable is the gravitas Michael Tummings provides to his subjects. Here in the cold morning light of eastern England a ritual as old as time helps usher this boy into manhood.

— Elizabeth A. Brown, former chief curator of the Henry Art Gallery

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