In 1995 Larry Clark released Kids, a startling movie about the reckless lives of skateboarders and their circle of teenagers in New York City. Magdalena Wosinska, then 13, remembers being influenced and disturbed by the film as a skateboarder in Arizona. At the time, her days were spent skating in 118° weather. After meeting Harold Hunter, Anthony Korea, and Todd Jordan, who were a part of Clark’s infamous film, Wosinska picked up a camera to document her friends, and began her life as a photographer and musician. While on tour as the guitarist with Green & Wood, a band she started six years ago with renowned skateboarder Ethan Fowler, Wosinska has created an intimate body of work that has an honest attitude, much like the artist herself.

“I love what I shoot, it’s my real life, it’s my breath. I couldn’t ask for anything more” Wosinska tells PLANET. Perhaps this is what enables her to breathe life into ad campaigns for street-approved brands like Converse sneakers. Although Wosinska’s background is unusual and a bit wild, her personality is infused with professionalism. Still, she insists on using simple point-and-shoot cameras, maintaining spontaneity. “Just give me a camera and let me shoot,” she says.

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March 11th, 2011 was an unforgettable day for those who witnessed their homes, their schools, and their neighborhoods get swallowed by a massive tsunami. All things familiar disappeared in just a few minutes, leaving people in utter shock. In the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi prefecture, 50% of its surface area was flooded, damaging more than 4,000 buildings. Lying in the mountains of debris were years and years of personal photographs, physical archives of memories that were once taken for granted.

Two months after the quake, research students of the Japan Society for Socio-Information Studies. traveled to Yamamoto and began to collect these photographs and albums. The “Salvage Memory Project” quickly caught the attention of professional archivists and photographers through Twitter and other social media sites, and they offered to help. The task was extremely cumbersome and tedious. The volunteers discovered 750,000 photographs, which were cleaned and put into Google’s image archive service Picasa. With Picasa’s technology, the Salvage Memory Project was able to create a system in which photographs could be searched by either facial recognition or keyword. As a result, out of 750,000 photographs recovered, 19,200 were returned to their owners.

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During a recent conversation with PLANET about his book Ghost Country, Jordan Sullivan mentioned that his first show as curator will be on view at Clic Gallery in Soho opening March 28th. The show, titled The Wild & The Innocent, is an exploration of the human body juxtaposed with natural landscapes, composed of imagery from 30 emerging artists and their personal archive. The work seeks to rethink and reframe our relationship with the environment, and explore the duality between the infinite and the finite. The Wild & The Innocent is also a celebration of our relationship with natural life and its awesome beauty. Although humans can be separated from nature, such a separation causes anxiety in most and drastically reduces the experience of life.

PLANET spoke with Sullivan about the show, which will feature artists Skye Parrot, Collin LaFleche, and Kohey Kanno among others.

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Born with an inquisitive passion for science, Daniel Kukla documented 12 zoos across the U.S. and Europe, capturing a synthetic peculiarity we often take for granted. Captive Landscapes, unravels the artificial habitats of zoos– spaces which are normally hardly paid attention to. Taking inspiration from his experience working in the natural history department of a museum and his most cherished companion, his pet octopus, Kukla’s work has been shown at the Milk Underground show last autumn and has recently completed a series of work that explores a phenomenon that is a direct result of global warming, known as post-glacial rebound.

What was intriguing to you about artificial landscapes?
I’ve long been fascinated by the educational and research mission of zoos and yet equally frustrated. After visiting countless zoos I began to notice the common of manufacturing theatrical environments for the enclosures and the all too familiar experience of expecting to see the inhabitant, but being confronted by a seemingly empty habitat. I began to photograph these enclosures devoid of the animal or with it on the periphery. Without the distraction of the inhabitant we see the dressed-up concrete and metal surroundings for exactly what they are.

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Richard Renaldi has had quite a career. His first book Figure and Ground was published by the Aperture Foundation and since then he has been included in shows at the ICP and the Yossi Milo gallery. Naturally an extrovert and fascinated by people– “I’m the youngest of five from an Italian-American family,” he tells PLANET– Renaldi has documented a vast and colorful array of subjects from sexual minorities to civilians from small suburban towns such as Fall River, Massachusetts.
     Renaldi’s work is consistently from a poignant and respectful perspective and is often humanistically humorous. Bus Travelers likewise embodies these trademark characteristics that is prominent in Renaldi’s work. These attributes are not only results of Renaldi’s character but also due to his choice of medium. Working with a large-format 8 x 10 camera, also Richard Avedon’s choice of medium for creating In The American West, the slow and meticulous process of photographing the subjects require the cooperation and patience of both the photographer and subject.

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Ghost Country is a haunting and romantic collection of images, collages and prose by Jordan Sullivan and jewelry designer Pamela Love. The book is a Memento Mori, containing 55 images with phrases such as, “Paradise is a deadman’s town”, painstakingly tracing a past that is lost and a future no where to be found. The book was born organically during a trip to New Mexico where Love was researching silver mines. Sullivan tells PLANET the two found similarity in Love’s jewelry and Sullivan’s work which naturally led them to create Ghost Country. He reflects on the process of editing and says, “It was as if seeing the past and the future at once. I realized so much of them had to do with love and death and this sort of broken portrait of America started coming together.”
     Surprisingly, Sullivan was originally a painter and the only photographs he had been exposed to as a child consisted of photographs from National Geographic and “a few pornographic shots stolen by a friend”. Now an artist in his own right, Sullivan’s solo show combining sculpture, collage and photography titled, A Room Forever will open at UTRECT/NOW IDeA gallery in Tokyo this April. Also a curator, his first group show titled, The Wild & The Innocent, will be on view next month at Clic Gallery in NYC featuring Agnes Thor, Todd Jordan, and Brea Souders among others.

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Husband and wife Neil Krug and Joni Harbeck have given birth to a poignant ballad of imagery that incorporates both psychedelia and spirituality. Pulp Art Book is an examination of societal life during the 1960’s and 70’s as well as a stylistic homage to B movies and Spaghetti Westerns. Krug has drawn attention in recent years for his commercial work with the likes of Ladytron, The Horrors, and Devendra Barnhart, while model Joni Harbeck has been a muse to many and is the heroine of the print trilogy. We asked the two Kansas natives to share what Pulp Art Book is all about. 


Tell us about Pulp Art Book: Volume Two. Is there a specific story line?

Volume Two introduces a bunch of new characters and vignettes that we’ve been working on for years. It also follows the same format as the previous volume in size and similar in page count. We’ve always wanted the books to sit nicely together as a collection. 
     When Joni and I put together the themes for the shoots we almost always incorporate a storyline, even if it’s loose one. For us, it makes the experience of viewing the material more enjoyable for the collector. That being said, sometimes we just shoot something that has no meaning whatsoever, so it depends on our mood, too.

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Creating a benchmark in the history of documentary photography, Doug Rickard uncovers marginalized sections of the U.S. where promises of the American dream have ended as mere illusion. Appropriately titled A New American Picture, the captivating images reproduced from Google Maps’ Street View portray the lives of Americans in which unemployment is excruciatingly high and the standard of living is shockingly low. Beyond its initial function of mapping America, Google Maps inadvertently reveals the dire situation of the 99%. 
     A stark contrast to Robert Frank’s lonesome yet bustling America in the late 1950’s, the figures in Rickard’s work are in destitute conditions. You won’t find the young and the beautiful smoking cigarettes or couples cuddling in slick Buicks on these streets. Since Frank documented the country post-World War II, photographers have traveled the nation to preserve its idiosyncrasies. Rickard, on the other hand, documents the nation’s most underprivileged areas from the comfort of his own home. Carefully choosing angles on Street View, Rickard composed all images by photographing his computer screen with a digital SLR camera. Inevitably, Rickard’s work raises issues on surveillance, privacy, and the increasingly intrusive world the advancement of technology has created. This discussion, just like the use of Street View for art, has organically surfaced beyond Rickard’s original intention. With these fascinating images, Rickard has changed the history of documenting America and simultaneously captured the zeitgeist of our nation today.

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Transplant New Yorker Christopher Bush started photography through a short-lived love affair with physics and astronomy. Since then he has created a seductive body of work featuring raw imagery of some of the most exciting faces gracing the fashion today. Devoted to the process of analog photography, Christopher tells us he feels it’s a necessity for a photograph to exist physically. “Good photographs are not made in your head — not even fashion ones,” he says. Inspired by music, nighttime, and tension, his work reminds us what an exciting city New York still is.

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Many may be familiar with photographer Marcelo Gomes for his mood-evoking fashion, lifestyle and portrait work. However few have seen much of his equally moving personal imagery, such as the series here on the ocean, where Gomes’ love for nature and style converge in perfect harmony. It’s not surprising then, to hear Gomes state his passion for texture and light and his inspiration in works by Takashi Homma, Wolfgang Tillmans and Mark Borthwick. We’re pleased to present this exclusive selection that Marcelo put together for PLANET.

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