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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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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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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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