of recurring interest to the Impaler. He further explored these ideas in Bran Castle, a photographic collection of portraits of the artist’s childhood home and other Transylvanian castles, all taken from the same angle with the light evenly distributed, and printed in identical size. The intense and obsessive nature of the Impaler’s project mirrors the soulless order of industrial production, a phenomenon that greatly altered the 500-year-old vampire’s world and worldview. Vlad the Impaler currently lives and works in Tampa, Florida.
Biography: Jason Blank, America’s Most Prolific Postcard Photographer
Jason Blank’s postcards celebrate the wonder and invention of the landscape, drawing on everything from early pictorial photography to German Romantic painting. From local post offices to tourist information centers to airport newspaper kiosks, Blank’s grand-guignolesque sensibility deepens our complex relationship to nature. Despite a dwindling need for postcards, Blank continues to shoot San Francisco, Boston, New Orleans, New York, Chicago, Montreal, and Vancouver over and over again, with a passion both terrifying and sublime. He also has an obsessive interest in folk culture, and his predilection for “the exotic” seamlessly combines the racist traditions of early photography, Romanticism, and postcard photography. Blank, of course, also considers himself a supremely individual creator and uses a drone to shoot landmarks from a high viewpoint and transcendent common experience to reach deeper spiritual truths or something.
I first learned that I was an artist from my Aunt Sarah. She’d seen a collage I’d made for a school assignment, a self-portrait casting myself as Medusa, and proclaimed me “a natural.” Later I found photography through my brother-in-law Billy, who invited me over to take pictures of him. I captured the curve of his spine of his back, and through this gesture somehow revealed his vulnerable character while foreshadowing our future together.
While studying art at LAC-Arts College, I focused primarily on my family and home life. I was born and raised above the funeral parlor that my late father and brothers owned and operated, so my daily life was rich with content. For example, a plumbing issue once caused blood to erupt in our house, and I was able to capture the aftermath, visualizing the strange nature of our lives and relationship to death.
As a college student, I, of course, briefly experimented with lesbianism, with my friend Edie. While this relationship was short-lived, it did bring me back to portraiture. This led me to my biggest artistic breakthrough, portraits achieved by shooting and printing images of individual subjects, ripping those prints up and then reassembling them into masks to be worn by the original subject. The resulting images combine photography, collage, and sculpture while referring to the concept of the death mask.
While I am unclear on what work I made, after moving to New York, I’m glad to here that I will marry my ex-boyfriend Ted, after returning to California in 2025, and even happier to know that I will die of old age, surrounded by friends and loved ones, to the tune of Sia’s “Breathe Me.”
A few questions to ask yourself while viewing my video art:
1. Does it matter that I didn’t start watching this at the beginning?
2. Why do I have to wear headphones to hear the audio?
3. Why is it so cold in here?
4. Why are all the lights on?
5. Why is this bench so uncomfortable?
6. How much more is there?
7. How will I know when it’s over?
8. Is it appropriate for me to just stop watching now?
9. Why can’t they just show this in a theater?
10. Why can’t they just show this at Alamo Drafthouse, so I can order beer and fries?
Oliver Curry is one of the most respected photographers working today. He forged his reputation as a photojournalist through decades of powerful black-and-white images of social and ecological disaster. Whether he’s documenting refugees or vast barren landscapes, he knows exactly how to grab the essence of a moment so that when one sees his images, one is involuntarily drawn into them. These highly resolved and beautifully rendered photographs depict the effects of war, drought, and famine in developing nations from a comfortably safe distance. They successfully purport to teach us the disastrous effects of war, poverty, and disease, without implicating us or suggesting a call to action. From the Lost Boys of Sudan to displaced Syrian refugees in government-run camps in Turkey, Curry has turned suffering people into beautiful objects of easy consumption. In doing so, he has challenged our perception of documentary-led photographic conventions as useful or relevant.
As the availability of editorial photography jobs for magazines and newspapers has waned, Curry has turned to the gallery as a showplace for such documentation of post-tragedy life. Contemporary art photography now presents a market for the consequences of political and human upheaval. This is because under Curry’s skillful gaze, the camera has the power to turn human suffering into collectible objects that art enthusiasts would like to buy and own. Relocating his work to a smaller audience was not only a financial decision for Curry but also an ethical one, because “concerned photography” has done at least as much to deaden our conscience as to arouse it. The more photographs of suffering we see, the less shocked we are. Curry’s counter-photojournalistic aftermath photography now reaches a discreet audience, where it can do the least amount of damage for the highest monetary return.
The Seattle Camera Club for High Modern Real Estate Photography
Photography has never been more important to selling real estate than it is today. The markets are heating up again, and demand for real estate creates demand for photography. Highlight your listing during a 12-hour session with one of New York’s finest high modernist architectural photographers! We here at CCHMREP believe the camera artist should find, not invent, his subjects, so additional lighting will not be used to enhance your listings. Buyers should see your home as it truly is. There is no need to even tidy your home before we arrive. In documenting your space, your photographer will attempt to render things as objectively as he finds them, true to European modernist form.
The creative achievement of our camera artists lies in their perfect photographic depiction. All our photographers shoot black-and-white, large-format film, with no affectations or painterly photographic effects. Your artist will select the perfect camera view, focal length, and exposure time for your listing.
