| There are more women working in the contemporary photography world than ever before. Their methods and subjects run the gamut of artistic possibility, but what unites them is the passion and effort they devote to creating extraordinary bodies of work. Women in Photography, a new online venue created by Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips, is a showcase of their work. It is a resource for photographers, editors, curators, gallery owners, and viewers alike to discover and enjoy the work of female artists. By mixing the work of emerging photographers with artists who have already achieved high levels of success within the fine art and commercial worlds, the project is designed to open a visual dialogue and create a venue to share work and ideas. |  |
Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips are the co-curators of wipnyc.org.
Robin Schwartz, Tower. Courtesy of Women in Photography.
There are more women working in the contemporary photography world than ever before. Their methods and subjects run the gamut of artistic possibility, but what unites them is the passion and effort they devote to creating extraordinary bodies of work. Women in Photography, a new online venue created by Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips, is a showcase of their work. It is a resource for photographers, editors, curators, gallery owners, and viewers alike to discover and enjoy the work of female artists. By mixing the work of emerging photographers with artists who have already achieved high levels of success within the fine art and commercial worlds, the project is designed to open a visual dialogue and create a venue to share work and ideas.
With Women in Photography, Elkins and Phillips hope to subvert the competitive and difficult nature of fine art and commercial photography. While they realize that not every female photographer faces or feels the same challenges, they acknowledge that the problems exist on a larger scale. The statistics are there. Despite the abundance of talented female photographers out there, the scale tips heavily in favor of male photographers in both the fine art and commercial fields. Rather than a cry for help or a stifled whimper about the art world being unfair towards women, the site is a proactive venture designed to draw attention to the multitude of talented female photographers and their unique visions.
With their recent launch in June of 2008, WIPNYC has already shown a tremendous amount of diversity and talent from both emerging and established artists. From their debut showcase of Elinor Carucci, whose intimate and diaristic photographs take a closer look at relationships to oneself and one’s family, they have gone on to show work by Sally Gall, Sarah Sudhoff, Ellen Renard, Lisa Kereszi and Naomi Harris. The choices and methods these photographers use are impressively unique, from Sarah Sudhoff’s beautiful and painful look at female reproductive cancer, to the technicolor world of Lisa Kereszi’s burlesque dancers and strip clubs, to Naomi Harris’ close up look at swinger parties around America.
Their current line up of artists is equally impressive in scope. Artists featured in September and October include Erika Larsen, Allesandra Sanguinetti, Victoria Sambunaris and Robin Schwartz.
Erika Larsen began documenting the world of hunter’s in 2003. Through this process she has created a strange, profound, and probing record of humankind’s relationship to animals and nature. Her work shows incredible sensitivity both for her subjects, the landscape and the animals within them. In her own words she describes her work, “The death brought by man to animals reveals our lives to be one small, yet important link in an ongoing cycle of life and death.” Her newest body of work, Young Blood, looks at the lives of children who learn to hunt with their parents. Rather than creating a portrait of children engaging in violence, the direct and sometimes unsettling images show the strong and complex family bonds that have existed for generations in some parts of America, where hunting is seen as familiar a family activity as any other. Larsen’s solo show was exhibited at the Redux Gallery in New York City earlier this year.
Alessandra Sanguinetti works and lives in both Buenos Aires and New York City. For her showcase on WIPNYC she is sharing images from a new body of work, The life that Came. In this work, Sanguinetti continues to follow the two young cousins featured in her previous body of work, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda, a show that was met with great critical success in 2004. Sanguinetti began photographing them at the ages of nine and ten in 1999, when the girls were full of imagination, fantasy and play, while in the midst of facing the fears of transitioning out of childhood together. The Life That Came further explores the complex and sometimes tenuous relationships between the girls now, as they are exiting childhood. The work will be on display as her third solo show at Yossi Milo in New York from September 4–October 18, 2008.
Victoria Sambunaris, a graduate of the Yale School of Art, continues her work where Robert Adams and the New Topographers left off. Her process leads her into the great expanse of the west, or what’s left of it. While much of Adams’ early work focused on humankind’s destruction of the natural landscape with strip malls and tract housing, Sambunaris instead focuses on the remaining empty expanses. Under the giant rock formations in her pictures, one occasionally glimpses a small group of houses or an impossibly endless train snaking away in the distance. The images are starkly beautiful, yet the evidence of our impact on the landscape is clear. Her solo show of Yet all Remains was recently featured at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York.
Robin Schwartz has been turning her camera to her daughter Amelia since birth. Amelia’s World, a photographic journey exploring interspecies relationships between her young daughter and the many different animals in her life, shares an invented world of fantasy and fable with the viewer. Schwartz explains, “I photograph myself with animals through Amelia. I am an only child who has an only child. Amelia is my muse. Collaborating with her, I am able to go any place in time.” Schwartz’ photographs become evidence of shared dreams between her daughter, the animals they share an environment with and herself, where the line between human and animal overlaps. Schwartz resides, works and teaches in New Jersey. Amelia’s World, edited by Tim Barber, will be published by The Aperture Foundation October of 2008.
