What's New

New Artist: David O’Connor’s ‘Topiaries’. Spend an hour with David O'Connor's photographs and you'll wonder how you ever looked at topiary and didn't see a surrealist work of art waiting to happen. Under O'Connor's gaze, the obelisks, pyramids, and spirals of these sculpted gardens along the Eastern seaboard become the things that dreams are made of. "I've always been attracted to the more light spirited surreal artists like Ives Tanguy and Paul Delvaux," he says. Tanguy's alien, ethereal landscapes are echoed in O'Connor's images, which make use of infrared film for its phantasmagoric effect.

New Portfolio: Mendoza’s ‘The Garden’. The garden has been called many things: a form of autobiography, a restoration of the five senses, a signifier of wealth and possession, and a collaboration between nature and art, to name just a few. Above all, though, a garden demands an audience, and it has found a vigilant one in Tony Mendoza. This community garden in Grandview Heights, Ohio, where Mendoza's wife has a plot, bears little resemblance to the ordered English gardens of Henry James novels. But that has as much to do with Mendoza's worm's eye view as it does with the gardeners' seeding and weeding philosophy.

New Portfolio: Rosenthal’s ‘Not Dark Yet’. Though the series is called Not Yet Dark, Ken Rosenthal’s enigmatic photographs are, in fact, rather dark, both literally and figuratively. The Tucson-based photographer, who worked for a time as Arnold Newman’s printer, uses bleach and selective toning to create prints that are filled with shadow and ambiguity. His initial subjects – clouds over a corn field, wildflowers, a flock of birds in flight – are lovely and perfectly innocent, but an undercurrent of anxiety runs through all of the photographs.

New Portfolio: Gudnason’s ‘Allure’. Like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Helmut Newton before him, Torkil Gudnason blurs the line between fashion and art. After all, art and commerce share a desire to hold our attention. Whether he's creating an homage to cubism, shooting post-Nagel Bali Girls, or orchestrating a darkly humorous series called "Fruit Punch," the images make you stop and look--or rather, stop and want. And more often than not, what you want isn't the fashion object presented, but the image itself.

Watanabe’s New Portfolio,‘Bunraku’. Hiroshi Watanabe has traveled the world making portraits of people - actors, children, workers, psychiatric patients. But among his most compelling portrait series is one that focuses on a group of characters who are not, technically, people. The Bunraku puppets that Watanabe has photographed, however, have acquired a mythological status in the town of Kaware in Ena County, Japan, where they were created generations ago. And in Watanabe's remarkable photographs, they look astonishingly lifelike and powerful.

New Artist: Ken Rosenthal’s ‘The Water’. Ken Rosenthal’s photographs bring to mind a variety of collective memories and associations. Motherhood, the salty sea air, and summer days gone by come to mind in images of a woman standing in the surf, or a girl swimming in a pool. Others have a whiff of old-fashioned glamour. They all reflect a shared cultural iconography of femininity, and a memory of carefree innocence that, while based as much in fiction as fact, is still worth preserving.

Chair & Exhibition. Throughout history, the chair has connoted status and authority, from tribal leaders' tree stumps to royal thrones to the Aeron chairs that became synonymous with '90s dot-com excess. Small wonder, then, that it has been placed on its own pedestal, inspiring the likes of Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Philippe Starck. Every Monday from May through October, Meter, in conjunction with the design blog ApartmentTherapy.com will feature a new image in this virtual exhibition.

New Artist: Ion Zupcu, ‘Works on Paper’. "As a still life photographer you have control over everything," says Ion Zupcu. "Nothing moves.” Take a still life photographer bent on minimalism, as Zupcu was when he set out to capture the essence of paper, and you get a series of images that tell you both everything and nothing about what the photographer was thinking. "People don't have time to stop and discuss the way they feel about shapes, styles, and objects they see," he explains. "So my images are a conversation with myself, a diary of what I see."

New Portfolio: Gudnason's ‘Sleepwalker’. "It's eerily quiet," Torkil Gudnason says of Montauk, where he shot these images, originally for Russian Elle. He was inspired to seek out this location by William Eggleston's images of brand new shopping malls in the South and construction sites in Vegas--all versions of a suburbia where no one's home. Gudnason bathes his models in an eerie blue light, lending the images both a cinematic and a foreboding quality. "Something's about to happen," he says. The models are austere and out of place; one is almost tempted to offer them directions.

New Portfolio: Eric Slayton ‘Glass Eyes’. At first glance, the photographs in Eric Slayton’s series, “Glass Eyes” appear to be nature studies, shots of animals taken in the wilds of Africa or Greenland. But there’s something suspiciously formal about them, a posed quality despite the blurring around the edges that creates the impression of motion. You soon realize that they are photographs of dioramas, all from the Museum of Natural History in New York: the gazelle and zebras, the ostrich and falcon are all frozen in time, mid-stride or mid-flight.

PHOTO L.A. Jan. 20-23, 2005 We hope you can visit us at Photo L.A. 2005, the 14th Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Booth #57. We will be showing the work of Hiroshi Watanabe, Brian Kosoff, Eric Slayton, Kent Barker, Bill Schwab and others.This years Preview reception will benefit the Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

New Artist: Ryan Zoghlin ‘Airshow’. More than a decade ago, Ryan Zoghlin began taking photographs at an annual air show in Chicago. Initially, he was drawn to the show as a “happening,” an event that drew big crowds of people. But the more he photographed, the more he became interested the airplanes themselves, and in the graphic elements that resulted from their maneuvers. As though an impermanent communication that must be deciphered before it fades.

New Portfolio: Kosoff ‘Landscapes 3’. "I am not a religious man," says Brian Kosoff, "but there is something so spiritual for me about trekking out to the dunes of Death Valley before the sun comes up, when the stars are still in the sky and there's no noise accept the sound of sand blowing. As the sun hits the dunes they start to come alive.” Though Kosoff says divine inspiration does not factor into his artistic process, these tranquil photographs of sand, rocks and water seem to describe a higher state of enlightenment.

Riverkeeper Benefit Photography Auction Over $250,000 was raised at this years Riverkeeper Benefit Auction held November 16th, 2004 in NYC. This has become one of the finest arrays of photographic works available anywhere. We are thrilled that so many Meter photographers generously donated their work to help protect the Hudson River, surrounding areas, and the New York City water supply, including William Abranowicz, Mark Arbeit, Don Freeman, Hans Gissinger, Torkil Gudnason, George Holz, Pedro Isztin, Brian Kosoff, Sheila Metzner, Eric Slayton, James Smolka, Lloyd Ziff and Ryan Zoghlin.

New Portfolio: Hiroshi Watanabe ‘Places’. Hiroshi Watanabe is an inveterate traveler, but he doesn’t take “travel” photos in any conventional sense of the word. What he takes, rather, are deftly composed, unassuming pictures that home in on a whimsical detail, or a quiet moment. Whether his images show soap bubbles floating gently along the Santa Monica Pier or a statue of a cupid, peering around the corner of a building in Tokyo, they reveal an artist with light touch and a gift for finding something revelatory in the details most of us overlook.

New Artist: Bill Schwab. Bill Schwab’s ethereal, dreamlike photographs—a fog-shrouded bridge, a fountain seen at dusk, reeds reflected in the smooth surface of a pond—are paeans to solitude. Given the quiet, meditative quality of the pictures, it’s not surprising that Schwab prefers to photograph at dusk or at dawn, and often in inclement weather, when he’s bound to be alone. What might be surprising is that many of the photographs are taken in and around his native city of Detroit, a place not generally associated with the almost pastoral views found in his images.

New Artist: Hiroshi Watanabe ‘Portraits’. Portraits are always, on some level, about masks, about self-presentation and composing yourself in front of the camera. “But this has become difficult,” says Hiroshi Watanabi, “since most people are well-educated about photography and know how to pose.” That said, Watanabi’s portraits, taken of people from all over the world, seem to get beyond that pose, to reflect something of the essence of each person.

New Portfolio: Mark Arbeit ‘Out of Focus’. Mark Arbeit's "Out of Focus" series is a result of his participation in an experimental photography group called "The Cauldron." His chosen subjects were focus and the female nude: "The most elementary photography technique, the most studied subject in art," Arbeit says.

New Artist: William Abranowicz ‘Greece’. William Abranowicz began taking photographs on the Greek islands more than a decade ago. “It has this incredibly searing light,” he says. “Everything there is just stripped down to its most essential form.” Abranowicz captures the spirit of the place in beautifully composed black-and-while images of simple, elemental subjects: a book, its pages fluttering in the breeze; a cigarette; four glasses on a ledge. He makes us look more closely these basic things, or else look at them in a different way.

New Portfolio: Gerard Lange ‘Etudes’. Gerard Lange has sometimes been criticized for making his images too beautiful, but the suggestion of surveillance in these pinhole images takes the edge off of pretty. "I wanted to play with the contrast of good and evil," Lange says. "Beauty versus a predator-like gaze." He is thus a benevolent spy; the photographs mostly hint at serenity and routine and do not evoke a feeling of intrusion. The images are simple, silent, still -- as if they were being viewed through soundproof glass.

New Artist: Gerard Lange Gérard Lange has always been fascinated by Goya's elephant etch. "He had obviously never seen a photograph of one, so what he drew was based on stories, rumor, other people's sketches -- it's a fantastical elephant." In the age of Google, we are no longer afforded the luxury of relying on our imaginations, but Lange's photographs recall a time when people were forced to fill in the blanks, as it were.

New Photographs: Fauna & Flora For the dreamlike series, "Flora and Fauna", Eric Slayton went in search of places, shapes, and living creatures that he describes as “flotsam of the changing tides in a world that moves faster and faster.” Slayton concentrated on plants and animals that to him represent an existence outside of mainstream culture. The series celebrates ordinary moments that when carefully observed become poetry.

New Artist: Jennifer Shaw The Tchoupitoulas Street corridor in New Orleans is an urban limbo –- a five-mile stretch along the Mississippi that is strewn with both relics of industry past and hints of gentrification to come. The boarded-up screen doors and teetering piles of planks in Jennifer Shaw's photographs might not seem iconic to the casual passerby, but her intimate portraits embellish them with meaning. Once photographed, they become signifiers of a city in flux.

Pedro Isztin: New 'in situ' portfolio Born to a Colombian mother and a Hungarian father, Pedro Isztin has lived his life between Latin America, the United States and Canada, his birthplace. Pedro Isztin continues his exploration of his roots and his humanity in an additional portfolio to his ‘in situ’ series. In this series, "in situ," Latin for "in its place," Isztin explores the connection between people and their environments in various regions of the Americas.

New Portfolio: Just Loomis 'Backstage' It's been twenty years since Just Loomis last photographed backstage at fashion shows in Paris, Milan and New York. Returning to the world of fashion meant coming to terms with his own pursuit of the glamorous. "Before it felt a little superficial, like perhaps there were more important things to photograph," he says. In this series, Loomis has learned to redefine glamour by the way he portrays it -- as a documentarian rather than a fashion photographer.

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