Brad Harris Timothy Hogan Henry Leutwyler Giles Revell Martin Schoeller Mark Zibert

Personal examines the personal photographic explorations of six artists who work in multiple realms of contemporary photography. The exhibition discusses the elements of style and vision and how an artist, be it a fine artist or a commercial artist, or those that blur the lines, create work for their own personal expression. Personal coincides with the New York Photo Festival which takes place in DUMBO May 13-17.

Martin Schoeller’s recognizable close-up portrait style was published as his first monograph, Close Up, in 2005 by teNeues. His most recent book Female Body Builders was just released by Pond Press. Deeply influenced by August Sander’s countless portraits of the poor, the working class and the bourgeoisie as well as by Bernd and Hilla Becher, he brings a formal objectivity to his unique portraits. His Piraha series exhibited here, portraits of the Piraha tribe in the rain forest of Brazil, is a personal project, and part of an ongoing body of work. Schoeller has been a contributing photographer for The New Yorker since 1999.

Brad Harris’s photographs move between document and exploration. In his Swimming Hole series, he photographed the lives of a group of carefree teenagers, simply hanging out, capturing the fleeting moments of a summer afternoon. The images are a beautiful look into our own youth, when a summer day could linger and the world was only the immediate domain of time spent with friends.

Timothy Hogan is an advertising photographer with a unique vision and approach to his work. His photographs are beautiful, clean, visually stunning explorations of light and shadow in its relationship to any subject or object he is shooting. For this exhibition, Tim worked on several personal projects and settled on one series based on the slow burn of clothing. He shows the remnants and burned fragments leaving an impression of the original.

Henry Leutwyler, a well-known portrait and diverse editorial photographer, turns his camera away from the actual subject and narrows in on the artifacts of the infamous. Michael Jackson’s sequin glove, or Elvis Presley’s bullet-holed TV. The objects are symbolic, if not iconic stand-ins, often providing more insight to a subject’s persona and cultural status, than an actual portrait. These images are part of an on-going series and this is the first time they are being exhibited.

Mark Zibert, is a dynamic advertising and editorial photographer. His work is highly conceptualized yet, clean and visually minimalist utilizing form and line to create movement. In his selection, Zibert brings a stunning, minimal image of a woman drenched in black oil. The image’s stark whites and deep blacks allude to the essence of the photographic image, while the form itself, chaotic and unpredictable.

Lastly, Giles Revell does it all, equally navigating each genre with precision. The themes that bind Revell’s work are structure and form. Revell deconstructs his subjects and presents them in their base graphic elements, often abstracted. His insect pieces, made up of hundreds of collaged images amplify the unseen structure of each insect and are unusually beautiful in line and form. Giles was able to do this work with a grant from the National History Museum in London and took a year to complete this series. These pieces are in the permanent collection of the National History Museum and the V&A in London.