As Featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010 Graziani (1971) is a photographer like no other. His series adhere to non Euclidean rules of associations and constructions of meaning. They are distorted encyclopedias – hyper-elliptical narrations. For a writer working with an artist like this means plotting a veritable coastline of connections and references, ideas and…
As Featured on Fantom 02 / Winter 2010 For some people, their only sexual release is through pornography and good luck to them. I find it interesting to see what turns other people on. Yesterday’s smut is today’s erotica… it was like that with Bettie Page. At first glance all of these photos by…
The work presented here began in Turin while Simon Starling was finishing his previous project for our gallery. In that period, a few days after a conversation he had with Pierpaolo Falone on Manik Bagh and Eckart Muthesius, in an apartment in Turin he accidentally came across the double portrait of the Maharajah and Maharani…
As featured in Eye To Eye on Fantom Issue 03 / Spring 2010 A number of years ago I became fascinated by the story of the Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph. While his bombings were of course despicable (along with Olympic Park he bombed an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub), I’m oddly enchanted by Rudolph’s…
As featured on Fantom 05 / Winter 2012 There are many ways this series could elicit reactions from its viewers: perplexing, in the form of a cocked brow or furrowed forehead; confusion, as necks crane closer and closer to the images, clearly looking for something; or perhaps boredom. The subjects of her photos, after all, could…
As featured in Pop-Up on Fantom 06 / Winter 2011 Irina Polin (1971) is a Russian-born, Switzerland-based artist, and the protagonist of this issue’s Pop-Up section. She studied in Moscow at The Arts College Named After the Memory of Year 1905 and the School of Art and Design in Lucerne. She is the recipient…
As featured on Fantom 03 / Spring 2011 Her work is a mix of performance, sculpture, photography, Pop and Surrealism. Her process usually starts when she finds beautiful bugs in her garden or things like vegetables, flowers and other organic materials at the market. These are the basic subjects for the installations she prepares and…
As featured on Fantom 03 / Spring 2011 Looking at the work of Reza Aramesh, one inevitably thinks that all styles and approaches to documentary photography have radically changed in relationship with the arts and other media. Aramesh’s perfectly executed translations of images taken from the news, merge the opposite ends of the photographic spectrum,…
As featured on Fantom 02 / Winter 2010 As a child, Alexi-Meskhishvili would dismantle every toy that was given to her. Nowadays, she is still doing the same thing – but images have replaced the toys. “The tension between what is revealed and what is obstructed is an inherent puzzle of photography which I…
As featured in Eye To Eye on Fantom 05 / Autumn 2010 Guido Guidi was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1941. He started to photograph in the 50s and is one of the most renowned European ‘topographical’ photographers. His work is focused mainly on the geographical, historical, political, architectural, individual and social aspects of the landscape.…
As featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010 Olivo Barbieri (Italy, 1954) investigates the intersections of reality and its perception through a single lens. The series Flippers, 1977-78, featured here was the starting point of his observations over the uncertainty of the world’s surface, which then continued with an extended research on artificial illumination (that…
As featured on Fantom 04 / Summer 2010 In Unbranded, Hank Willis Thomas’s largest and best known series to date, the artist selected two advertisements each year from 1968 to 2008, removing all logos and text in order to uncover what was really being sold: the representation of African-Americans, for consumption by the constituent public.…
For his first Fantom incursion into photography collections, critic and curator Francesco Zanot visited artist Linda Fregni Nagler’s peculiar selection of old tintypes, magic lantern glass slides, gelatin prints and more… The 9 images presented hereafter were chosen and extensively captioned by both; technically, symbolically, historically, emotionally and carefully. HIDDEN MOTHER. The presentation of the subject In this old tintype, behind a typical portrait of a baby we see the outline of an individual hiding underneath a dark cloth. The function of this individual corresponds to the function of every photograph: it introduces the spectator to what has to be…
As Featured in Reportage on Fantom First Issue / Summer 2009 The weather was the most effective form of crowd control. 1,8 million arrived in the predawn hours on the National Mall and snuggled closely together, tucked in sleeping bags, blankets and makeshift windbreaks made from piles of cardboard trash. At 10 a.m. the Smithsonian opened…
As featured on Fantom 01 / Autumn 2009 “One of the things I look for in the women I work with is a unique, sometimes unexpected interpretation of what it means to be a woman. I love photographing powerful women who possess their own particular strength and charisma and I like to think that…