Alberto Carneiro

Installation by the artist Alberto Carneiro for CGAC, exhibition year 2001.

Rimaldas Viksraitis

GRIMACES OF THE WEARY VILLAGE

“Rimaldas Viksraitis is a Lithuanian photographer who works in and around the villages where he lives, and photographs a way of life that is fast disappearing. In his world, any apparent dysfunctionality, propelled by liberal drinking of home brew, appears to be an asset because people seem to be having such a great time. He goes to parties, he sits and drinks and talks with his subjects. Their lives are not overcome by the gadgets of modern day life, which so often eradicate any meaningful communications between families. You can tell he is enjoying himself and at ease with his subjects. Viksraitis's sitters also seem to enjoy taking off their clothes. I assume this helped by the home brew and rather warm temperatures, or perhaps they are all having frequent sex?

Against this backdrop, numerous animals seem to be part of daily life. They surreally pop up everywhere; they too seem to fit in effortlessly. They share the family's domesticity with the greatest of ease. 

The resulting images, displayed (or published) here are slightly insane and wonderfully surreal. They are quite compelling, and if I spoke Lithuanian, I would love to join in the party. However as this will never happen, Viksraitis provides us with a ring side seat, with all the emotion, the drink and the ensuing madness.”

Martin Parr, November 2008

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" Walker Evans & James Agee

Sharecropper’s family, Hale County, Alabama, 1935. Walker Evans

Floyd Burroughs, cotton sharecropper, 1936.

Charles and his father Floyd Burroughs, 1936.

Allie Mae Burroughs, 1936.

Bud and Williams Fields, Hale County, Alabama, 1936.

Floyd Burroughs and his daughter, 1936.

A Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama, 1936.

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House. In the summer of 1936, while still working for the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans's photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Noting a similarity to the Beals' book, the critic Janet Malcolm, in her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, has pointed out the contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans's photographs of sharecroppers.

Alec Soth

Alec Soth (born 1969, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American photographer notable for "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image.
More info at: http://alecsoth.com/photography/

Hayao Miyazaki

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿 Miyazaki Hayao, born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese manga artist and prominent film director and animator of many popular anime feature films. Miyazaki's films often incorporate recurrent themes, such as humanity's relationship to nature and technology, and the difficulty of maintaining a pacifist ethic. Some of the best films of this director are: