Lishui Photo - Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena's name is everywhere these days. Just announced yesterday, he is on the list for PhotoLucida's Critical Mass top 50. Today he was slated as a book finalist from CM50. An International Discovery at FotoFest in Houston , Alejandro has been highlighted on Joerg Colberg's blog, Conscientious, PDN online, Lenscratch, a participant in Review Santa Fe, and the list goes on and on. He is also joining Taj Forer in Lishui China to showcase his work on Suburbia. I am excited to see how is work is viewed there. What will be the response to the social and economic similarities of expansion and population growth, how it affects their surroundings, and how fundamentally changed the environment becomes....

Here is Taj Forer's statement about Alejandro -

Alejandro Cartagena's 'Suburbia Mexicana' is both aesthetically beautiful and politically, socially and environmentally poignant. The work is timely, deeply personal yet globally relevant. Cartagena's engagement of the real challenges the viewer to contemplate the timeless theme of how we dwell as a society (or collection thereof) with the natural environment. The fast-paced development examined by Cartagena through his photographs is not unlike many blossoming urban and suburban development projects currently found throughout China. The cultural challenges facing communities affected by such government-sponsored development initiatives is uncannily similar throughout the world. By focusing on his hometown of Monterrey, Mexico, Cartagena turns his lens on the complex and nuanced global phenomenon most commonly referred to as "progress." His vivid, straightforward, large-scale color photographs afford the viewer a moment to pause, experience and reflect upon the complicated and far-reaching implications of development. From issues of resource management to changing cultural values, Cartagena's photographs delve into the newness and unknown realities of Mexico's suburban expansion.

Lishui Photo - Mark Tompkins

Mark Tompkins work, Dialogues, will be on view in China this month as part of the Lishui Festival. Strong black and white images with text, Tompkins images tell stories and keep us engaged in the images.

about the series DIALOGUES -

By creating dialogues between image and text, this body of work takes on the age-old challenge of depicting multiple perspectives on a subject in a single composition. These conversations address the mystery and irony of the strong story lines that scribe through our lives, often uninvited; story lines on time and death, love and fear, work and play, god and meaning. Each composition organically expands the storyline of the image with the text, and so generates an unusually multifaceted narrative while still leaving plenty of room for the viewer to personalize it – to experience it from their own set of evoked memories, dreams and ideas.

Lishui Photo - Steven Strom

Steve Strom has had some great success this year, between shows, his new book, and now a trip to showcase his beautiful work in China. His day job as an astronomer keeps him a visionary, finding needles in haystacks, looking at broad perspectives to find the tiniest fragment of being. HIs work takes on the stunning desert landscape, finding life and patterns in the empty space most pass over as desolate and void. His work will be a colorful open discussion of landscape and abstraction. I am looking forward to having a bit of the desert with me in China.

here is more on his series -

Images in the portfolio, Earth Forms attempt to capture what is nearly beyond the camera’s grasp: a desert land

shaped by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of color and form – its history reimagined in light that at once penetrates and sculpts.

For the poet Joy Harjo, “the(se) photographs are not separate from the land or larger than it. Rather, they

gracefully and respectfully exist inside it. Breathe with it. The camera is used to see with a circular viewpoint which becomes apparent even though the borders of the images remain rectangular. The land in these photographs is a beautiful force, in the way the Navajo mean the word beautiful, an all-encompassing word, like those for land and sky, that has to do with living well, dreaming well, in a way that is complementary to all life.”

I bring to this landscape the sensibilities of an astronomer who has lived in the desert for almost 20 years, and in whom the desert has lived for more than 30. My tools are simple: a 35mm SLR or 4x5 view camera, and long focal length lenses whose power to compress vast desert spaces can create an illusion of intimacy, of comprehension: inviting viewers to look deeply into what light and earth together form.

Lishui Photo - Jessica Kaufman

My path has crossed with Jessica's on many photo review occasions, from Houston to Portland, and her work has always stood out. She was asked by the Lishui Festival to show her lovely work in China, and I am happy to highlight her work here. Her series, Panopticon, is well crafted, luscious, silver prints of open spaces.

Here is Jessica's statement on Panopticon -

No one

bears witness for the

witness.

–Paul Celan

I approached this series as I have all others: with the intention to investigate, or call attention to, how

identity shifts and changes when catalyzed by experience, and more dramatically, trauma. For this

project, I again was drawn to the landscape as muse, but uncharacteristically chose one loaded with

meaning, burdened with a history so cumbersome that I initially was afraid to pursue it.

The title of this series, Panopticon, refers to an 18th century circular prison model that allows for

secret surveillance of all prisoner activity through natural illumination. The subject matter is the

grounds of Nazi concentration camps. Far from being documentary in nature, these photographs are

decontextualized excerpts through which I sought to dispose of most recognizable clues to the

specific places, and focus on the surrounding, and surviving, environments in order to recast them as

sites for new meaning. The resulting images, mutated through a technical process that relies on decay

as an operative force, do suggest trauma, but don’t require a reaction that encompasses a response to

iconic horror. Instead, I make this work in the hope of inspiring a dialogue between the viewer and

imagery that fuses indeterminate disturbance with transcendent beauty.