I think Bego Antón is one of my all-time favorite photography artists. Every time I see new work by her, I feel so charmed. Each of her photographs is composed and executed perfectly, and no matter the content (butterfly watchers, dead animals in the snow), there’s such an air of loveliness. If there’s not a smack of tragedy or some other complex meaning, there’s definitely humor, and that’s what really draws me to the series Everybody Loves to ChaChaCha. Truly, it’s not often that photography projects involving animals bring me nothing but joy, but these pictures just make me so happy.

From the artist’s statement: This is the story of women and men who dance with their dogs; and of dogs who dance with their humans. Musical Canine Freestyle is a choreographed performance in which a dog and a human move to music together. They choose a song they both like and a costume that matches the lyrics. They dance in unison, as dancing partners. They weave, jump, bow, spin, roll, walk backwards, forward or move diagonally. And sometimes, the bond between them is so strong that they enter the pink bubble, a dimension where they become one being and the rest of the world disappears.

Visit artist's site: begoanton.com

When I was in middle school, I visited Yellowstone National Park for the first (and, so far, only) time. Even having grown up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I remember being blown away by all the wildlife my family and I saw. I shot several rolls of film on my little point-and-shoot camera, some of my first. It was a really formative experience for me as a young person interested in animals and photography.

When I saw Corbett Toomsen’s series Trophies, I instantly thought back to that trip, and not only because of the subject matter. The images have a playful and whimsical tone, as if the animals are about to be animated stop-motion-style. They remind me of being a child. The pictures seem unreal, and in a way, they are. The series, and in particular its process, makes me think about what constitutes a “real” experience with animals and nature, both in a country where nature is so controlled and in a time when taking and sharing photos is a way to prove you were indeed somewhere, you did indeed experience it.

From the artist’s statement: We take snapshots of the moments in our lives, and these images have personal value. The cultural value of the snapshot is that, collectively, they serve as a genuine recording of society from within. “Trophies” is my contribution. However, with this work, the photographs do not intend to serve as a recording of society from within, but as a reflection of the ways photography contributes to our experiences today. They investigate the personal process of embarking on a journey through impersonal sources, and represent an abbreviated sampling of a common cultural practice.

Imagery frames our expectations of things. But today, in an image-flooded world, the process of viewing imagery of places has also become a suitable replacement for the actual experience. “Trophies” is a series of constructed snapshots of a journey through the American West, specifically of places I have not visited. The project relies on mass-media imagery, both in print and digital formats. Days spent searching and gathering, one word at a time. And even more days driving on Google Street View, touring the back highways and National Parks fifty yards at a time – click, zoom! Stop!, click, zoom! Stop!, click, zoom! Stop! for hours on end – looking at the scenery the road and the sky. It inspired a search for documentaries about American history and National Parks and made me aware of the television programs I watch, sometimes photographing them to add to the archive. Each day I arrived in my studio, and immediately left – consumed by the familiar imagery of places unfamiliar, gathering as I traveled.

A powerful aspect of travel photography is its inherent ability to urge one ‘to experience,’ firsthand, but more so it urges one to make his/her own copy. From the gathering I re-enact the days traveling, construct places along the journey that I did not experience, rather merely visited; surrounded by sand and rocks and water and paint, surrounded by the tools that carved mountains from plaster, and the tiny paper animals captured along the journey. I am surrounded by artificial trees and die cast metal buses and glue. With flashlights and rags in hand, I am surrounded by the constant whirl of the projector, hunting the ideal image, and the missed opportunities. Within the darkness of my studio, the model lit just right, I transcend, if only for an instance, from this space I occupy to that place locked in the viewfinder, documenting the journey as journeys are so often documented – as a trophy of my experience.

Visit artist's site: corbetttoomsen.com

Found via: Lenscratch

When I saw this post’s featured image, Camper Landscape, Yosemite National Park, California, in a post on Feature Shoot about the winners of Ken Allen Studios’ spring photo contest (from last June), I knew that artist Daniel Mirer and I had something in common. I love the giant photographic murals covering the camper vehicles you see all over the West these days, and whenever I spot one, I try to line up the image with something in the landscape. I immediately reacted to Mirer’s photo, and visited his website looking for a series of similar images. I was so pleased to find Indifferent West, a project containing more than 70 photographs about the sentimental, cliche, kitsch qualities of representations of the American West.

From the artist’s statement: “Indifferent West” is a photographic and video series that investigates the personification of a North American identity. The American West and its touristic architectural locations are linked to a contemporary landscape as metaphors. Through this project, I photograph the found and sentimental representations of the mythic frontier of the American West. The images are of touristic sites; places that are of the familiar and cliché but also create a picturesque image of an Americana landscape. Through the institutions that perpetuate the mythic models through tourism, the results are that the American West is an idea that has become a vast site for elements of kitsch about a space intersecting with the comic and history ripe for consumption.

These photographs represent private entertainment industries for tourism projecting the notions of the exotification of the romantic, untamed, hostile wilderness, seeming lifeless and void, which becomes wrapped in mythology attending to what is called the American West. The “West” had become a place where the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man, and the Noble Savage were invented and where they continue to reside in the collective cultural unconscious of the American cultural identity. The western landscape is re-contextualized from reality and is indifferent to historical facts establishing an American psyche of the make-believe, which has become a self-referent notion of ambiguity.

Visit artist's site: danielmirer.com

Early last month, I attended a wonderful talk by the Oregon Historical Society in partnership with the Audubon Society of Portland, “Hunting Birds with a Camera: How William Finley and Herman T. Bohlman Used Photography to Save Oregon’s Birds,” of “On the Road with Finley and Bohlman: Portland.” The presentation was a retrospective on the work of early twentieth century nature photographers William Finley, Irene Finley, and Herman T. Bohlman, whose photographs and tireless dedication to education captivated the public and resulted in the protection of public lands across Oregon and the first laws to protect wild birds in Oregon.

Scaling trees, fording rivers, and braving Oregon’s most rugged landscapes, the team went to almost any lengths to capture Oregon’s birds on film. It was so fun to see not only the incredible wildlife photographs made but images of the photographs in the making, of Finley and Bohlman knee-deep in swamps or high up in trees, and of birds perched in the hands or on the shoulders of the photographers and the people around them. The scenes captured are almost unbelievable; depicted are certainly not the typical situations in which we can find ourselves with birds and animals in America today.

Finley and Bohlman left behind an astounding legacy of natural history photography and writing, land protection, and grassroots advocacy. More than 6,000 photographic images and 8,600 pages of documents – nearly 50 years of work (1899-1946) – are being released online from the collections of the Oregon Historical Society and Oregon State University. The Reuniting Finley and Bohlman collection on the Oregon Historical Society’s Digital Collections website is where the images featured here come from. I have spent hours going through the currently 3,565 (copyright-free, high resolution) images presented there, marveling at all kinds of gorgeous photos of animals in the West. Of course, I am drawn to pictures of dead animals, hunted and presumably found as carcasses and skeletons, but also curious images of humans and animals interacting in amazing, storybook-like ways.

Sources: Oregon Historical Society; Audubon Society of Portland

Like Miska Draskoczy’s work a couple of weeks ago, Mattias Amnäs’s photography had me thinking about my roots in photography. For my first project in a color photography class my sophomore year of college, I created pictures of “color boundaries,” spots that showed divisions in fields of color amongst the urban buildings in my new-to-me city. My images included a lot of fences, walls, telephone lines – and often funny sights in quirky Baltimore, not dissimilar from the geometric hedges and satellite dishes of Amnäs’s series, Scotland.

When Amnäs contacted me, he introduced his pictures from his trip “to the Scottish highlands, Glasgow and Edinburgh, were [he] documented the interaction of sheep, waste, nature and traffic cones.” Based on this text, I had to know more. Amnäs told me, “In early May, I went for a road tip in Scotland. It was my first trip to the UK and I brought my Pentax 6×7 from 1969 on my shoulder, along with 20 rolls of film. I was mesmerized by Scotland’s nature and architecture. Along the roads in Glasgow, you could see a city filled with quick fixes, buildings with facades that hadn’t been cleaned for decades, so much character. Along the roads in the Highlands, you could see all the litter of tourism, sheep everywhere, and the overwhelming usage of traffic cones. Something about it made it feel so surreal, almost like stepping in to a David Lynch film set.”

From the artist’s statement: I’m a graphic designer and photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. I like exploring the visual languages of ar­chi­tec­ture, landscape and the interactions between people and their surroundings. I consider myself a documentary photographer rather then a conceptual series photographer. I don’t like to tell the viewer what the photograph is about, I want them to look at it and build their own story.

Visit artist's site: mattiasamnas.com