L'envol du Pere Noel ©Estelle Dougier
©Estelle Dougier
©Estelle Dougier
©Estelle Dougier
©Estelle Dougier
Estelle Dougier and her photograph of a small red plane on the windowsill (L’envol du Pere Noel) were selected for the juried exhibition “Nostalgia” at the Vermont PhotoPlace Gallery. That photograph, as well as the other images above, are from the series “Backyard.” About this body of work Estelle writes “[t]hese photographs were taken in the attic of an old house in the French countryside. Entering an attic is like ‘falling into nostalgia.’ In this small and confined space under the dust and spider webs, … dog-eared books, forgotten toys, abandoned furniture, and torn open boxes are resting. They are proof of time passing by and memories of vanished moments. This attic is like a childhood backyard, a memory album in three dimensions.” Estelle Dougier’s photograph is the cover image for the Nostalgia exhibition catalog.
Estelle Dougier is a fine-art photographer born in Paris. Her work has been exhibited in France, the U.K., the United States, Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria and Belgium. She was selected as a finalist for Critical Mass 2009. Her website is www.estelledougier.com.
"Contact Sheets" © Parsley Steinweiss
The voting for Critical Mass 2009 technically wrapped up today and I was pleased to be one of the reviewers this year. I took my time and looked through work from the selected 175 photographers over the last few weeks. It has been both exhausting and amazing. One photographer on my “Wow” list was Parsley Steinweiss and her “Stacks” series.
About her work, she states, “I have always found it natural to look at things from a close perspective. By cropping my subjects closely I become intimate with them and also abstract them. By this treatment, familiar subjects become unrecognizable and require new investigation. The shape-shifting ambiguity made possible by the photographic lens resonates with my general sense of a world unseen by the naked eye, a world of possibilities. As a general theme I am interested in patterns of growth. Over the past couple of months I have been stacking things and taking photographs of the various accumulations. The photographs catalog documents that surround me: books, papers, magazines, journals, sketchpads and photographs. In “Contact Sheets” I have stacked hundreds of photographic contact sheets and prints that I have created over the past ten years. The result is a series of lines, each representing a print that I have made, a sedimentary record of creative growth.”
Jen Bekman’s 20×200 Wednesday edition last week featured Parsley Steinweiss and her “Contact Sheets” photograph. You can own an 8″x10″ print, in an edition of 200, for just $20! Just click here.