Amy Stein photographed roadside motorists across the country in this series of flat tires and engine trouble, titled Stranded.  It’s interesting how much they shift in tone, one moment summoning pity, then suggesting a relieving solitude, or in another instance, depicting eye-rolling frustration.  Stein is pulled between capturing portraits of these encountered strangers and taking in the open landscape that dwarfs each car and passenger into anonymity.

[Mother trying to look after son at 31 mph on Rodeo Road
in Los Angeles at 10:28 a.m. on a Tuesday in February 1997]

I keep encountering Andrew Bush’s photographs in various corners of the internet.  His series Vector Portraits is instantly arresting, a beautiful sort of update of Walker Evans’ celebrated Many Are Called (quietly snapped images of the anonymous subway riders of the mid-twentieth century).  Evans thought himself an “apologetic voyeur.”  The images are cockeyed but exceedingly earnest, and are a joy to view. (A nice review of the Evans book, here.)

Andrew Bush is also depicting commuters, but in this age of highways and SUVs, he turns to the motorists of America’s roadways and peers into their windows to get a glimpse.  Everything changes at this speed.  Though the subjects are rarely any more aware of the camera, so it seems, than Evans’ often-dozing or lost-in-thought subway passengers, the process hardly seems subtle.  A flash brilliantly picks out the profiles of each of his subjects — it’s the blast of light that allows the viewer access to this otherwise sealed and private space.  Bush states that each portrait was taken at 50 to 70 mph — the background is thrust into blur, while each car is quite carefully framed (seemingly antithetical to making decisions at such speed).  In the end, Bush gets caught by the subject’s eye more than once. Moving alongside at equal velocity is the same as standing still, and its not such a private space after all.

[Woman rolling to a stoplight at Wilshire Boulevard and Lafayette Park Place
in Hollywood at 2:38-­2:39 p.m. on January 18, 1997]

[Bountiful] Photograph by Richard Stultz

In California photographer Richard Stultz’t series of shopping aisle imagery, Choices, well, the subject matter is hardly novel.  Product photography is everywhere, and artists have reflected on consumerism quite extensively.  Nevertheless, I sort of can’t get enough of his superbly executed contributions.  There is certainly the spirit of Gursky in these works, but I’d argue there’s a bit more tongue-in-cheek attention given to the barrage of branding, as in the particularly great Bountiful.

Stultz writes about Choices: “Beyond the astounding quantity and selection, retail displays are often visually interesting with striking design elements, color, and repetitive patterns. But as we shop and try to find the perfect product, we often don’t see the perverse beauty of these choices. These photographs describe what often passes without recognition; they capture our retail reality in a design context.”

I found Richard Stultz through Flak Photo.

Peruse more Choices on Stultz’s website.

[Faces] Photograph by Richard Stultz

I’m fairly conflicted as to how I feel about the high-gloss painterly/photographic work of Jill Greenberg; I can’t quite put my finger on why.

Her series-turned-bestseller Monkey Portraits is what first put her on my radar (and I assume put her in many a spotlight).  My overall reaction was one of skepticism and general distaste — there was something just awfully cutesy and gift-book/stocking-stuffer about those funny-looking monkeys, even if there was something rather evocative in an individual image.  The technique is quite proficient, that is difficult to argue.  And Greenberg’s story as to where these pictures started — a chance photo of a monkey that was part of a commercial shoot, isolated on the white backdrop– is rather interesting.  She thought to herself, “Oh, this looks like something I’ve never seen before—a studio portrait of a monkey.”

That said, I think I was particularly frustrated when I discovered how little the nature and technique differs when she’s shooting magazine ads and celebrity portraits.  Her commercial work is viewable on her website, the wincing-ly and self-seriously branded manipulator.com (each page boasts, Jill Greenberg: The Manipulator). (Okay, I suppose I should note that I’m aware I write this commentary on a website called [Good Eye, Meriwether .com], and suspect that the dryness and humble self-doubt that I intend to be intoned along with the self-congratulatory nature of the literal website address is lost on most.)  There is an indistinguishable glossiness throughout… no clear differentiation of intent.  Her glowing air-brushing-in-the-21st-century trademark is very cool, appropriate for selling magazines, but if the intent is to just make cool pictures, of celebs and (sure, why not?) monkeys too, I’m not sure why I should care after three or four.

So why do I love her bear portraits so?

The series is called Ursine, and I’m not sure — am I just impressed with myself that I know what “ursine” means?  Like Monkey Portraits, I suppose many of these could appear on a cute dorm room poster, but I still feel there’s a tone of seriousness here which I can’t be bothered to seek out in the monkey pics.  That the bears are fairly nondescript and monochromatic, I’d argue that there’s more of a need to look a little closer.  The level of detail in Greenberg’s images is quite revealing.  And as she implies in the following interview excerpt, there are mixed responses to the character of bears: cuddly, grizzly, teddy, deadly, and so on.

“What’s interesting about the bears is that they’re trained to stand up and growl and look really scary and menacing, but when they’re doing it they’re totally silent. They’re just silently acting like scary grizzly bears. When I was shooting the bears, I was surprised that they’d often pose like cuddly teddy bears. I thought that was really cute and I liked the dichotomy between the two ways the bears could be. Their faces are so mushy. They can look like a growling bear at one moment and then a cuddly bear a moment later.” Excerpt from The Morning News; Interview by Rosecrans Baldwin.