#anewnothing

Cameron Crone- he focuses on the everyday things people ignore or often consider trash. The way he captures's them makes you wonder about the story behind what happened. I particularly like the picture of the pool of cigarettes. Make you wonder who smokes there, if they do it regularly or if it was over a course of one night that they all accumulated.

Emily Margaret Madison- uses a lot of reflective material for her art. I also like that her whole piece sticks to one color pallette. It's intentional but still very free and artistic.

Gary Green- I love the set of pictures that just focus on ice. There are two pictures of huge perfectly sculpted ice cubes. They are red and blue- playing along with heat and coolness. It's a very simple concept but the image is iconic.

My favorite correspondence was the one between Ben Alper and Nat Ward, which has been happening since September 2014. It seems most correspondence pairs choose a different element from each received photo to match in the next sent photo – whether that element be light, color, shape, texture, content, or framing.

Between these first two images was a common theme of light and reflection, and between the next two was a theme of magenta and green color.

The visual elements didn't have to perfectly match either – these two shared a common idea of contrast, but with the idea of inverted colors.

These next two shared a fuzzy texture between the root of the plant and the fibers of the string.

Consecutive photographs didn't necessarily interact in only one element, either. The first two here were both in black and white, and they shared repeating geometric motifs. The next two that followed also had color and geometry as common threads, but the last one had a color gradient while the first one was still black and white. They both still shared square/tiling geometry.

Much of the dialogue from A New Nothing revolves around a common theme, motif, or subject, and at times utilizes abstractions of shapes or colors. A few of the photographic dialogues I looked through also borrowed compositional elements from their previous pictures, such as the following pair of pictures from Curtis Hamilton and Timothy Briner, where the subjects share extremely similar poses.

Left: T.B. - 5/1/17, Right: C.H. - 3/14/17

There are also dialogues which almost appear to be an actual conversation happening between two people, such as the following pair from W. M. Hunt and Efrem Zelony-Mindell. The first photograph shows a person displaying the shirtless body of a muscled figure and the response is a picture of another person displaying a sign reading, "I HATE EVERY BODY."

Left: W.M.H. - 1/23/18 (Still from Die Hard with a Vengeance, 1995)

Right: E.Z.M. - 1/9/18 (Rory W H Hamovit, 2017)

That being said, the picture dialogues that appealed to me the most were the ones between Catherine Canac-Marquis and Laurence Hervieux-Gosselin, some of which are shown below. They represented both a playful dialogue, where the picture of a horse is followed by a picture of someone riding a mechanical bull, and also of a conversation framed by color abstractions and motifs. A picture of a sunset (purple at the top fading into yellow) is succeeded by similarly colored apartments (blue on top, yellow on bottom, with artificial light mirroring the natural lighting of the first image). The picture of a vibrant pink-leafed plant in a clear water jar on a beige background is accompanied by a picture of a pale pink sunset, sand, and ocean waves. Although the connection between the photographs is not as clear as it is in some of the other picture pairs I have seen, I appreciate the abstraction of color and subject in these images.

Top: C.C.M. - 9/28/20

Bottom: L.H.G - 11/16/20

Left: L.H.G. - 6/21/20, Right: C.C.M - 6/21/20

After looking through several chains in A New Nothing, probably my favorite has to be the pairing of Aaron Turner and Sonja Thomsen. Their chain started back in July of 2020, and it began with a simple photo of some prismatic sun reflections on the ground. The reflections were rather geometrical, and this combination of geometric shapes and prismatic colors stayed consistent in most photos the two would exchange. Something about keeping on with this established theme and focusing especially on primitive shapes, sun rays, and colors made for a very coherent chain of photos to scroll through, each one more innovative than the last. Some of them are ideas for photos I would never even conceive outside of the context set up by the photos, it really shows how a system like this can find really creative photographic perspectives.

After viewing several entries in A New Nothing, I was particularly interested in the photos between Jimmy Fountain and Lindsay Metivier.

Overall, both photographers used visual strategies such as shadows and highlights which then helped distinguish the subject of the photos. For example, in all of the photos, there is dark backdrop with a significant source of light that creates highlights which then easily stand out against the rest of the image as shown in the image below. The dialogue and interplay between the photos then arises from these highlights that are set against otherwise relatively similar backdrops and scenes. In a similar manner, the contrast between vibrant colors and a bland background similarly serves to highlight the subject in each of these photos.

The images are in dialogue often through a perspective change. Generally, this involves one image consisting of a subject. Then, in the next image, the subject is either no longer depicted or depicted in a new frame such that it isn’t necessarily obvious or guaranteed the viewer is looking at the same scene, but nevertheless a similar one.

For example, in the first two images shown below, the first image consists of leaves shown directly into the light, and thus is easily set up as the subject of the first photo. In addition, the vibrant green color illuminated by the light against the otherwise dark background similarly attracts the eye to the foliage. Then, in the next image, the leaves are not directly shown. Rather, the shadows of the leaves are shown, providing a different perspective to the subject in the first photo.

Similarly, in the photos shown below, the first image depicts a single plane of a building with windows that light up against the otherwise dark image of the house. Then, in the second image, multiple planes of a house which similarly is defined by its bright windows are shown. Thus, in the first image, it is possibly difficult to judge the scale or situate the subject or building in a scene given that most of the image only depicts one plane of the building. In the second image, which also depicts a building, thus provides a change of perspective by taking a step back and showing multiple planes in fullness.

Looking through the conversations on the site of A New Nothing, the dominating visual strategies of connecting one photo to the next are by drawing parallels in subject, color, shapes, tone, and/or action. In particular, the conversation between Aaron Turner and Sonja Thomsen focused on mostly answering one another in a dialogue of shapes, form, and pattern.

In this set of four pictures, Turner and Thomsen dialogued with the appearance of the triangle in many different forms, settings, density, and configurations. I really like the innate obvious continuity between the photos that just hits the observer unconsciously when presented together but otherwise tell very much drastically different stories of different things in different setting.

Again, in this set of two, there is the obvious continuity of the curved parallelogram, but otherwise the photos have very different voices.