Filter Photo Festival, now in its 5th year, decided to pilot a program for local high school students. They selected 4 students to participate in the portfolio reviews.
It was an honor to be asked to review, along with Michael Zajakowski, photo editor for the Chicago Tribune. There is nothing I like better than mentoring, so of course I said yes.
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| Chicago High School for the Arts photo students at Filter Photo Review |
I am still thinking about the work I reviewed. I was so impressed with the portfolios and the presentations, and would like to share some of the exciting work that is being produced at The Chicago High School for the Arts. Their teacher is Whitney Bradshaw, a very talented Chicago photographer and former curator of the LaSalle Bank photographic collection.
The Drum Roll.....
Bruce Bennett
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| Untitled; 17 x 22 Digital print, 2012 |
"I am working on a black and white photographic series of people in their domestic environments as well as outside in their communities.
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| Ignorance; 17 x 22 Digital print, 2013 |
I carefully employ several different light sources to suggest emotion or convey deeper meaning in the images."
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| Untitled; 17 x 22 Digital print, 2013 |
Anthony Aguirre
"These photos belong to a series of work that is a collective study of the architecture in Chicago. The city of Chicago features prominent buildings in a variety of styles by many important architects – which are noted for their originality rather than their antiquity.
By documenting these spaces, I am capturing the beauty of these decaying structures and embedding them into this city’s grand history before they have completely diminished. My photos are an ode to their work and the city’s bygone public buildings and workplaces that have seemingly gone unnoticed over the years."
Gabby Ochoa
"My work uses light and technology in an experimental environment to ask questions about perception, abstraction, and the variable importance of representation.
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| "Incondite I" 2013 |
Incondite captures incidental abstraction of otherwise representational subjects and presents the image out of context in order to ask if something that is broken can be accepted as an aesthetic whole.
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| "Parhelions # 4" 2013 |
Parhelions warps perception in a series of simple light experiments with reflection and refraction. Whereas photography is typically an indexical medium, Parhelionsaims to represent nothing but the image itself. So what happens to work that does not adhere to the index?
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| "Sleepover" 2013 |
Photography, in that indexicality, has created a plethora of contemporary Artifacts. A photograph captures a moment in time, and unlike our minds and bodies, a photo will typically not erode and cease to exist (especially in the case of digital photography and the internet). Artifacts is subjecting photos to the same erosion the memories they represent undergo while leaving their "labels" intact. When the image is entirely or partially deteriorated, how do we make sense of the "label" in relation to the visual information/lack thereof?"
Jesus Pena
The work shown here is from 3, distinctly different, ongoing photographic series. In the first, I attempt to Glorify the BMX Lifestyle.
The second is an exercise in Levitation
and the third is from my Dark Cinematic Photo study."
