Photography

"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!

Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.

Unable to locate the grave of Letine—leader of a 19th century acrobatic cycling troupe (and buried locally)—I went home and wondered.

And then I made this film.

Equal parts experimental animation, stylised domestic drama, and autobiography accompanied by reflections on mortality, filmmaking, and magic. Plus more.

— Paul Tarragó

A woman sets out to photograph moments of intimacy. On an Internet dating site she writes: 'I'm looking for people who would like to be photographed in public revealing something of themselves...' What I'm Looking For, a 15-minute high definition video, documents this adventure; the connections formed at this intersection between virtual and actual public space. The video is a rumination on the nature of photography and the persistence of vision. It is a short tale of desire and control.

"This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher. Farocki's admiration for Straub was so great that he said of Between Two Wars, Perhaps I only made this film to earn Straub's recognition."  In this observation-driven film, Farocki documents the fulfillment of his wish. The film shows Farocki, under Straub's direction, rehearsing for his role as Delamarche in the film Klassenverhältnisse (1983). Anyone who has seen Farocki's documentary of the shoot will never forget these short scenes.

Alfredo Jaar is a politically motivated artist whose work includes installation, photography and film.  Born in Chile and now living in the U.S., Jaar’s socio-critical installations explore global political issues, frequently focusing on the Third World and the relationship between consumption and power.  A 1988 installation in a subway station in New York involved dramatic photographs of impoverished gold miners n Brazil interspersed with quotations of current gold prices, drawing an unexpected parallel between the material desires that motivate people in both poverty-stricken Br

"how looking at what has become the skeletons of photographs is a visual lecture on aesthetic pleasure or emotion. and how being, almost entirely denied of this pleasure, or having the pleasure merely suggested induces a viewer to ruminate on the act of viewing and that of wanting to view. and maybe it is evolution which causes this anxiety and art form."

A domestic portrait rendered at miniature scale, Dust Studies brushes along the edge of what can be seen. Staying close to the ground to collect what gathers there, the film looks deeply for everyday things and finds them drifting in the pleasant, meandering headwaters of a young child's language.

Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.

Nocturne is a 5-minute film shot entirely at night in deserted streets of London. The film attempts to find images of the city that reveal the presence of the past, or the presence of the dead, hinting at a concealed history. The deserted streets around the east end of London and Docklands reflect an echoic city filled with shadows. Nocturne is composed of long static viewpoints, each shot slowly unfolding in time as though by looking long enough the city's secrets will be revealed.

Animated Contingencies is an animated documentary that looks at how sketches take the place of photography in courtroom settings. Andrews focuses on how two different representations, a photograph and a courtroom sketch, capture the moment Moses Wright, Emmett Till's uncle, pointed out Till's murders while on the witness stand at their trial. The work then examines the authority of photographic evidence and how animated representations can provide both visibility and anonymity in testimony and other contexts.

Sharon Lockhart is a photographer and filmmaker. Her photographic and filmic works interrogate the inversion of the static image as cinematic and the manipulation of the moving image into a static/stop-motion frame. Her work also contemplates how we perceive our own real-time realities.

"Looking at Pictures is adapted from a lecture I gave on my photography in 2018 in which sequences of photographs were projected while I offered brief statements related to the images being shown. In a gallery exhibition of photographs the following year, I adapted the lecture into a single-channel video with my commentary, which was projected in an adjoining darkened gallery. My words, which appear in the video as brief captions, are based on writings I did around the time I took the pictures or when reflecting on them later." 

This 12-minute video by Tom Palazzolo and Chicago writer Jack Helbig tells the story of the recently discovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier. Though she was unknown in her lifetime, her extensive body of work is rewriting the history of post-World War II American street photography. The video, told from the point of view of Maier herself, recounts her life and work, from her childhood in France to her move to NYC in 1951 and subsequent relocation to Chicago, where the majority of her work was done.

Although trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall has been working on his expansive photographic light boxes of staged scenes for more than 25 years. Using back-lit, photographic transparencies typically used for advertising display, Wall subverts their commercial association by filling them with quotidian objects.

At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.

The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.