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The Center for Photography at Woodstock's annual juried exhibition, Photography Now 2009, presents the newest voices in photography spanning the globe! Juror Charlotte Cotton selected eight photographers from over 320 applicants, whose work crosses boundaries, charts new territory, and exemplifies what is new and now in photography in 2009! 

The artists in Photography Now 2009 come from across the nation and around the world: from California to New York and from the West Indies to Japan. Many have also recently completed degrees in photography making them some of the freshest faces to the medium. Photographer Alex Aristei is a recent graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and currently resides in North Hollywood, CA. In Aristei’s view a good photographs hold s a sense of "romantic realism". His images of assorted moments feel part cinematic, part personal documentary, and part happenstance. 

Also completing a degree in photography, having earned an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA, Clint Baclawski will be exhibiting his photographic light boxes whose physicality and presence transform the experience of viewing a photograph, which he views as being a passive experience in our image-filled world. 

Shane Lavalette's work comes from his series Slí na Borine, which he created during a residency at Burren College of Art, County Claire, Ireland. His mix of portrait and landscape photographs were made along a walking trail, named in the Gaelic language: Sli na Boirne (The Burren Way), which stretches 27 miles though the heart of Burren, one of Ireland's most unique landscapes. Shane Lavalette completed his BFA at Tufts University in partnership with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in May 2009. He currently resides in Cambridge, MA. 

Yijun Liao was born in Shanghai, China and now resides in Brooklyn, NY. Liao recently completed her MFA in photography from the University of Memphis. The photographs of her series Stills from Unseen Films are the result of her imaginative musings. Some of her film stills are inspired by particular film titles, while others are purely imaginary cinematic imagery depicting a main character lost in a moment. 

Photography Now 2009 will also feature the photographs of Betsy Seder of Irvine, CA. Her series Time and Space Died Yesterday references Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Eclisse (1962). Antonioni’s film explores the cityscape of EUR, a suburb of Rome that was first established by Mussolini as the site of the never-realized 1942 World's Fair and the seat of a future fascist empire and later revisited by Futurist architects in search of a Utopian design. Seder's still images create a setting for a new imagined narrative in which visions of modernism, utopia, and dystopia overlap. 

Lacey Terrell, of Los Angeles, CA, works as a still photographer on movie sets, a job that has inspired her series offSET, from which several selected works will be featured in Photography Now 2009. The photographs of offSET examine authentic moments found within the constructed realities of film sets, revealing what Terrell describes as the space where the “artifice of movie making and the 'real' intermingle."

Stacey Tyrell's family is from the island of Nevis in the West Indies. After spending her childhood there, she joined the exodus of emigration to wealthier countries. Now living in Brooklyn, NY, Tyrell still periodically returns to the place of her youth. The photographs of her series Chattel chronicle her feeling of displacement during these visits as she faces the changes in family and friends, the landscape, and the culture of the West Indies. 

Toshihiro Yashiro, of Yamagata City, Japan, will exhibit several prints from his Kaitenkai Project. Photographed in various public locations such as schools and museums, the long exposures of the Kaitenkai photographs feature participants spinning in colored garments in these spaces. Yashiro explains that during the experience of Kaitenkai, "the human body either is assimilated with the place, or becomes a foreign thing." 

Photography Now 2009 demonstrates the variety of approaches to the photographic medium taken by some of today’s newest images makers! With her selections, 2009 juror Charlotte Cotton has defined photography’s ability to bridge dimensions, connect disparate worlds, and blur the lines between created truths and real fictions. 


About the Juror:
Charlotte Cotton is Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Previously, she was Head of Programming at The Photographers' Gallery in London and Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1992 to 2004) and Head of Programming at the Photographers' Gallery in London (2004-5). She has curated many exhibitions of historical and contemporary photography including, Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs (2000), Out of Japan (2002), Stepping In and Out: Contemporary Documentary Photography (2003) and Guy Bourdin (2003). Charlotte is the author and editor of publications such as Imperfect Beauty (2000), Then Things Went Quiet (2003), Guy Bourdin (2003) and The Photograph as Contemporary Art (2005). Currently she is preparing for two touring exhibitions for LACMA for 2009 - Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan and New Topographics. 


PHOTOGRAPHY 2009 will be on view in CPW’s main gallery from June 10 through July 26, 2009. 

The opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 13th from 5-7pm.

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