“I never like to shoot what’s shown to me – I only use that as a guideline” remarks photographer and advertising graphic designer Tejal Patni about his style of work. Patni’s high fashion editorials expose a dark surreal reality reminiscent of Tim Burton’s taste for gothic allure. Utilizing teams of stylists, set designers, makeup artists and photo retouchers Tejal’s photography blurs the lines of conventional photographer remixing fantasy and high fashion in a way that make’s one stop and question “ Hey, how’d he do that?” Splash, a fashion retailer from Dubai took notice, commissioning the young indian photographer to create the images to accompany the limited edition 2011 calendar for their international website. To help him articulate his gothic fairytales, Patni partnered with New York photographer Kirstan Hermans, who specializes in theatre costumes. The result in a nearly monochromatic future with some seriously dark undertones; a spectacular vision of a post-apocalyptic theatricality.
(more…)

Drawing on Brazil’s Portuguese heritage, the holiday “Three Kings Day” is held annually on the sixth of January. Signifying the end of Christmas festivities, it is celebrated to commemorate the day when the three wise men are said to have delivered their gifts to the baby Jesus. The holiday includes a religious feast colorfully known as “the Mass of the Rooster,” as well as customary dance, jester and vocal performances that warmly embrace Brazil’s diverse culture and community. Native to the country, photographer Gui Christ was inspirited by the tradition and took advantage of the opportunity to shoot local individuals enjoying the festivities. Giant Jester masks and nativity scenes, each picture is a personal vignette, a window into Brazil’s rich cultural and religious customs. Gui Christ’s photographs exhibited at the Sugar Factory Amsterdam last fall, however his work is infused with a timeless quality; capturing the moment and the history of Brazil’s unique legacy.
(more…)

Painter and Designer Jim Darling has a fresh take on the view from an airplane window. His six paintings, display the classic airplane window complete with pull down shade, rendered in a classic trompe d’oeil technique of the old masters. However within the window are wonderfully abstracted scenes capture the essence of patchy farmlands, nighttime aerials of lit cities and skylines. Darling’s graphic design background includes work with MTV, Coor’s light and Cambell’s Chicken noodle soup, each picture strongly rooted in his ability to draw. His illustrative mastery and graphic have pulled together in these fun oil on wood panels. The airplane series is part of a larger collection exhibited at Open Space in Beacon NY. Other paintings in the collection are themed with aircraft flight, and include a few humorous yet artful caricatures of passengers. Jim Darling definitely has created a spirited way of looking at the world.
(more…)

Cities have a power that’s highly impressionistic. More often than not, what we remember best about the ones we’ve visited isn’t the famous monuments but the mood of particular neighborhoods and streets.Sze Tsung Leong’s series of photographs “Cities,” on display now at Yossi Milo Gallery, consists of big, bird’s-eye views of different cities around the globe. In capturing the organization, architecture and geography of each metropolis, they go a long way to convey the character of these places.
     Most of Leong’s photographs don’t fall into easy postcard views. They’re elegantly composed but richly textured and shadowed so that they have an impressive tactility. And they have a greater depth and angle of vision, so that they take in broader stretches than a typical cityscape. It’s a point of view that reveals some of the historic and technological forces that have shaped each place. In Ghent the low, twisting streets around the Medieval Cathedral give way to square blocks with modern commercial buildings. And in Cairo satellite antenna sprout from the debris-strewn roofs of dusty concrete apartment buildings.

Click for Slideshow
(more…)

We live in an age in which technology brings news to us in an instant, live images flood in from so many points of view – a satellite, a helicopter and on the ground from the mobile device of someone fleeing for his or her life. Watching the footage of last week’s horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I can’t help but think about my own ability to survive in an imminent situation. And as the heartbreaking aftermath of this disaster unfolds, it is all too clear that there is something very peculiar about our relationship with nature and the future.
     Steven Brahms’ ongoing investigation Survival Project prods at the very basic idea that sits in our minds – we cannot control mother nature. In carefully composed scenarios, Brahms’ images play out themes of doom and paranoia light-heartedly as if realizing his boyhood Lord of the Flies fantasies. The Evasion Series repeats the action of long-haired Asian men running in various terrains. Though we can not be too sure of what these men are running from, the sense of urgency becomes real as images from last week’s disaster will stay in our minds forever.

The Survival Project opens at 3rd Ward Gallery in Brooklyn on March 18th. Brahms’ work can be seen at: www.stevenbrahms.com

Click for Slideshow

The late Fritz Goro inventor of macro photography saw his goal as “making visible the world that lies between the microscope and the naked eye.” Turning to photography after the Nazi’s forced him out of Germany, Fritz Goro started a career with LIFE Magazine, shooting scientific photoessays and was the magazine’s scientific and medical specialist for twenty-seven years. Fritz Goro photographed many scientific breakthroughs and discoveries including the creation of penicillin as well as the separation of the isotopes of uranium and plutonium that made the atomic bomb. Chairman of the board of Scientific American, then science editor at Life Mr. Gerard Piel said of Goro, ”it was his artistry and ingenuity that made photographs of abstractions, of the big ideas from the genetic code to plate tectonics.” Fritz Goro’s legacy lives on in the beautiful geometric black and white images of America’s biggest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century.
(more…)

Photographer Bharat Sikka finds the still moments in the storm where new dust is just beginning to settle over old dust. Hardly recognizable as India — without the celebrated warm saturated hues of oranges, magentas and ambers — Sikka shows this side of the world in the bluest of grays. In his previous PLANET contribution, Seeing in Between, he gave us slowly calculated views of the changing physical terrain of India that comes along with economic development. Deeper down this road, Matter is articulated in somewhat quicker gestures as a record of calm in chaos. From an ominous still life of crinkled plastic to a portrait of a face silhouetted by hair, we see that Sikka’s connection to the looming changes is emotional. Matter will be up until March 19th at Nature Morte Gallery in Berlin. Sikka will continue to add images to the site mattershow.com throughout the year.
(more…)

New York has always been a photographer’s city. The dynamic skyscrapers, the green spaces, the vibrant hustle of immigrant communities thrown together, has inspired a wide variety of photographers over the centuries. Some have been interested in the city as a focal point for social unease (Jacob Riis, Eugene Richards); others have been more concerned with capturing its beauty (Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott).
     Visit any bookstore in the city, and you’re likely to find more than a few photography books on New York. There are books on specific subcultures, like Full Bleed: New York City Skateboard Photography, and beautiful historical survey photography books, like Reuel Golden’s New York: Portrait of a City. Until now, though, there hasn’t been a significant anthology of contemporary art photographers’ views of the city. That omission is addressed in New York A Photographer’s City (Rizzoli), a hefty coffee table book that features work by over 100 photographers.
(more…)

Like some kind of demented artistic genius with a sick sense of humor, Canada continues to confound in the best possible way. Opening February 25th, the wily gallery plays gleeful host to OHWOW’s second installment of Dadarhea, a collaborative, bourgeois-denouncing video work (and paintings) by a select group of equally demented artists. Animation, musical performance, green screen, and improv unite in what promises to be the most heinous, and illogically good time you’ve had all year. Many of last year’s artists have returned for round two: Devin Flynn, Jim Drain, Melissa Brown, Brian Belott, Fran Spiegel, Takeshi Murata, Joe Grillo, Marie Lorenz, Laura Grant, Naomi Fischer, Ara Peterson, Michael Williams, Jessie Gold, Billy Grant and Alison Kuo are all repeat Dadarhea offenders. According to Canada’s website, the collective group of artists are joined in a pact to “explore, laugh, splat, maximize, question, flap, drop, trough, dangle and generally go too far in the name of curiosity without actually killing a cat.”

Dadarhea runs from February 25-March 20 at Canada in New York.
(more…)

Image Courtesy of Robert Flottemesch. (Click for slideshow)

While the people of Egypt are anticipating a bold new future for their country, thanks to the powerful protests by demonstrators in recent weeks, an American artist has been recognized for his exciting plan to bring future-minded energy of a different sort to the Middle East.
Robert Flottemesch and his team of collaborators received the Land Art Generator Initiative’s grand prize last month for the design of Lunar Cubit, a blueprint for a 50-meter-tall solar paneled pyramid surrounded by eight 22-meter-tall pyramids, each of which represents a different phase of the lunar calendar. The intended construction site is five kilometers from Abu Dhabi’s international airport in the United Arab Emirates, the host country of the World Future Energy Summit, where the prize was presented. Flottemesch accepted the award with his landscape designer Johanna Ballhaus, his artistic consultant Jen DeNike, and Adrian De Luca, who helped develop the project’s data monitoring system.
Making use of the design template left by the ancient Egyptians was a longstanding goal of Flottemesch’s. “Ever since I visited the pyramids when I was much younger, the mystery that has surrounded them and the scope of the engineering has been something that I find quite significant,” he tells PLANET.
(more…)