Nan Goldin. The Hug, New York City. 1980. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2008. The Museum of Modern Art. Purchase. © 2010 Nan Goldin

Sometimes, after I encounter a great work of art, I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. And that’s a good thing—the work touches and evokes something deep inside that lingers for months, even years. I had this experience when I first saw Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a 45-minute slide show of some 700 color pictures set to a soundtrack. Read more

Carter Mull. Los Angeles Times, Monday February 23, 2009. 2009. Chromogenic process print, 49 x 37" (124.5 x 94 cm). Collection Dr. Dana Beth Ardi, New York. Courtesy Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. © 2009 Carter Mull

Carter Mull‘s work in New Photography 2009 is full of vibrant color and patterns. Beyond the surface is a body of work that explores language, our relationship to images in an image-saturated world, and the spectre of the death of print media and chemical photography. In the following Q&A, Carter talks to me in detail about his work.

Eva Respini: How did you become interested in the Los Angeles Times as the starting point for the body of work on view in New Photography 2009?

Carter Mull: Initially, I was drawn to a question about the psychological impact of an image. Journalism and the media had been in the background of my thinking for a number of years—and I was curious about the question of how one responds to an image of distant trauma, contextualized within the framework of the local newspaper. Also, the very material—the literal placement of advertising next to news—was an intriguing reality.

ER: The title for this series is Triggers for Everyday Fiction, and you refer to these photographs as “triggers” and “responses.”  I like thinking about the relationship between the pictures as a kind of call and response. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

CM: The project began about two years ago with the initial program of considering a media site, in this case the Los Angeles Times, as a point of departure. I wanted to treat the lead image of the paper as a generator of sorts—and the output of the works as a whole as somehow governed by the grammar of the idea. The terms you refer to work as a nomenclature to designate points within the body of work. At the moment, I think about the images taken together as a series of passages—and as an active cognitive process. Read more

Like many of the works in New Photography 2009, Sara VanDerBeek’s photographs are made entirely in the studio. She collects pictures from various sources, including art history books, archives, magazines, and newspapers, and incorporates them into sculptures that are made only to be photographed. After Sara photographs her sculptures, they are immediately dismantled, and her picture is the only remaining evidence of the temporary structure.

Read more

“Oh! No mor­tal could sup­port the hor­ror of that coun­te­nance. A mummy again endued with ani­ma­tion could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on her while unfin­ished; she was ugly then, but when those mus­cles and joints were ren­dered capa­ble of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have con­ceived.” —excerpt from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Daniel Gordon‘s photographs elicit attraction and repulsion. They are irresistibly vibrant and tactile, but also surreal and grotesque. His works are not what  they appear to be at first glance. They look like collages, but upon further inspection the photographs reveal themselves to be pictures of sculptures.  The female figures in the photographs are cobbled together from found images on the Inter­net that the artist prints out and con­structs into three-dimensional tableaus.  The sculptures are photographed and then immediately disassembled so that the artist can use the body parts for new works. The works are made alive and exist only through the act of photography. Read more

I think it’s a really vital moment for photography right now. Over the past few years, a number of artists have re-opened the discussion on the nature of photography, investigating the materials and processes of the medium itself. Of course, this recent examination is part of a long lineage of experimentation in photography, seen in the work of artistic giants such as László Moholy-Nagy (included in MoMA’s current Bauhaus exhibition) as well as in more recent experimentation by artists such as James Welling. Walead Beshty is active in many of these discussions, as both a writer on the subject and an artist addressing the basic processes of photography. Read more

Vik Muniz. Action Photo, after Hans Namuth from Pictures of Chocolate. 1997. Chromogenic color print. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund. © The Estate of Hans Namuth and Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Vik Muniz is one of the smartest and funniest artists that I have had the pleasure of working with. Last year, as part of the Artist’s Choice exhibition series, Muniz curated a show drawn from the Museum’s collection, and I worked closely with him to realize the project, titled Rebus. Muniz’s installation was one of the most memorable exhibitions from the series, and it gave me insight into the artist’s working process. This collaboration resulted from a long and ongoing relationship—since Muniz first exhibited his work at MoMA in 1997 in New Photography 13, the Museum has been showing and collecting his photographs. MoMA has recently added to the collection a key picture by Muniz, Action Photo, after Hans Namuth from Pictures of Chocolate, and we hope to continue our exploration and appreciation of this leading artist’s work. Read more

Leslie Hewitt has a way with space. When I first saw her work (the series Riffs on Real Time at the Studio Museum Harlem), I liked how the pictorial space in the pictures was flattened, calling my attention to the photograph’s surface. Of course, we all know that photographs are two-dimensional, but they can be pretty convincing windows into a seemingly real world. In her work, Leslie counters this illusion by creating pictures wherein space is collapsed, compressed, or disoriented. I was not surprised to learn that she is also a sculptor, which can be seen in her methodical approach to image-making. Read more

New Photography is one of my favorite shows to organize.  Generally, it means working with artists of my own generation, and introducing work that I really believe in to a larger audience.  New Photography is about new ideas and new ways of working, and this year’s installment of the exhibition series (which has been around since 1985) is no different.  While in previous years we have highlighted work of artists that are not artistically related, this year, I decided to take a thematic approach and bring together the works of artists that participate in the lively debate on the nature of photography in the twenty-first century.  This new approach to the exhibition series is an experiment, which is very much in the spirit of the work in the show. Read more