“Animal Logic: Photography and Installation by Richard Barnes presents a mid-career survey of the work of acclaimed New York and San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes. Barnes’s work looks critically at both the natural world and the ways in which we attempt to institutionalize and classify nature within museums.” (from the Cranbrook Art Museum website).

Richard Barnes statement about this series is… coming soon.

Artist statement :

“In my work I have long been concerned with collection, curation and display and in the transition of objects from their original site to the museum and what happens to them along the way in the process. The passage of time affects meaning, adding value to an artifact in some cases and taking it away in others. Plaster casts of the stone tools in this installation heading towards a kind of extinction through the act of being de-accessioned are displayed beneath a photograph of a recently excavated prehistoric skeletal whale in the process of being cast. I am interested in these connections and disconnections.” (read more by visiting the whole series)

About Richard Barnes:

“Richard Barnes divides his time between commissioned work and personal projects. He looks at architecture as artifact and, placing it within the context of archaeology, challenges our conceptions of the way we inhabit and represent the built environment. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Harvard Photographic Archive. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize for 2005-06.” (read a whole lote more)

From the exhibition “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans”. Read more about it.

See the same photo over at the Online Archive of California (host of the Dorothea Lange Collection, 1919-1965).

“Included in the museum’s archive are approximately 2,500 prints and over 2,000 negatives by Lange dated from 1935 to 1939 when she worked for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and the Farm Security Administration (FSA). […] In the summer of 1935, Lange transferred from SERA to the newly formed Resettlement Administration (RA), established in May 1935 by the executive order of Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. The RA.s mandate was to ease the nation.s rural poverty through programs that included low-interest loans to farmers, land-renewal projects, and the resettlement and rehabilitation of the rural poor. Lange was hired as the only photographer investigator to work for the western regional office in Berkeley and on national assignments as designated. Concurrently, Taylor was appointed as a regional labor advisor in the same office. Together they were responsible for a five-state region including California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico , and Utah.” (more).

“Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.” (learn more about Dorothea Lange on Wikipedia).

Browse over 2500 of Adam’s photographs over at the Center for Creative Photography hosted by the University of Arizona Libraries.

Previously on Skandalon

“Raymond Depardon (b. 6 July 1942, Villefranche-sur-Saône, France) is a French photographer, photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. In 1966, Depardon co-founded the photojournalism agency Gamma. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979. Depardon is also the author of several documentary shorts and feature films notably including 1974, une partie de campagne, on the 1974 presidential campaign of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Reporters (1981) and New York, N.Y. (1986), both winners of the César Award for best short documentary, La captive du Désert (1990), nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and Délits flagrants (1994) which won awards for best feature documentary at the César Awards, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Joris Ivens award) and the Vancouver International Film Festival.” (wikipedia)

Raymond Depardon at Magnum Photos.

Artist’s statement:

“This photography project looked at childrens’ dream jobs, projecting the current employment problems onto one of the few timeless themes throughout childrens’ fantasies; Superheroes.”

Previously on Skandalon

The photo comes from the official website of Yellowstone National Park : visit the “Visitor Activities” section of the Yellowstone Digital File Slide to find more.

Image above taken from the Boobytraps series (2008):

“The last series, Boobytraps, is not photographic in nature, but has every thing to do with spread ing ter ror and cre at ing an atmosphere of invisible menace that sur­rounds us everywhere and could hit any of us any time. Taken from two US Army field manuals they show soldiers how to construct boobytraps out of literally every­thing available in the world of every day objects, including pipes, beds, couches and chocolates.” (read more)

Artist’s statement about his Boobytraps series:

“I have taken these images from two books “Boobytraps” (1965) and “Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques - References” (1966). These are two “Army Field Manuals” of the US Army. In these books, soldiers are taught to construct boobytraps out of literally everything available. The key point of these two books is not how to detect these exploding traps but how to construct them.

The basic idea of building a trap out of - let´s say - a tea kettle is to spread terror. If a simple tea kettle might be a bomb that could kill or maim me what is there left to trust. Everything might be a bomb and therefore, in the head of the potential victim,everything IS a trap.”

See the whole Boobytraps series. The complete catalog can be dowloaded in PDF (Texts German, 3.12MB). Here is Simon Menner official website.

About Mr. Deane:

“Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from respectively Ger­many and Holland. It is named in after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the 20th century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds one selfconfronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the prob­able. Here, every man has to decide for him self what he holds to be true and what not.” (read more)

Artist’s statement:

“On a quiet winter night, I looked out a window. I could see a building far away, the windows where illuminated, and I could vaguely make out people inside their apartments. When I imagined what they might be doing, my mind fluttered between wild fantasies and mundane clichés. I was curious to compare my expectations to the reality of their lives. After months of continuous observation in different parts of the city I collected hundreds of photographs of strange, comical, and often haunting moments. At times, I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of human nature when it was not guarded, not self-conscious and completely uninhibited. This provided me with a stage where it was possible to observe myself in the most secret and vulnerable moments of others.” (read more).

See more press coverage for this specific series.