Iryna Sysko – Designer Fabien Baron
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Iryna Sysko – Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency exhibition is a personal narrative of her life, in pictures, which she shares with us. All the events are happening around Boston, New York, London, Chicago, Berlin and more in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. Her subjects and herself are captured in intimate moments of love, lost and abuse. According to her “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” In addition, she received Edward MacDowell Medal for an outstanding contribution to American culture and the arts.
The first part of the exhibition starts with the row of pictures that aren’t lined up, but placed in an organized chaos. It gives you an idea that the pictures will portray a struggle for intimacy and understanding between friends, family, and lovers. Right next to it is a glass display of her personal photos, from her picture and brief biography, her parents, friends and intimate pictures of her lovers. Not only the pictures show you the way American culture was during the 70’s and 80’s, but you get to know the artist on a personal level. She showed the sides of her life that weren’t all “rainbows and butterflies,” she shared her deepest, darkest secrets, such as abuse in a relationship.
The second part of the exhibition was a slide show of people that Nan was close with, that was accompanied by different sound traces. Her subjects were captured in their natural state, such as smoking, half dressed, using drugs or in intimate positions. The sound matched the pictures which made it more real, more raw. You could either feel the intensity of the moment or try and see why that, particular, sound was chosen. In some way the background music made the pictures look more alive.
Iryna Sysko – Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott was an American photographer, during 1940’s, best know for her black and white photography of New York City architecture and Science. She received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, two years prior her death, in 1989.
One of her most famous projects was called “Changing New York,” which she started after returning from Europe. She saw America with a “fresh and enriched perspective” and began to photograph the rapidly evolving urban landscape of the city. Her captivating photographs of new bridges and skyscrapers, replacing older structures, as well as the juxtaposition of evolving modes of transportation with those of the past and crowded street scenes evoke an exciting combination of realism. You could imagine yourself standing in the streets and absorbing the streets “feeling.” Through her project I could feel the changes that were happening in the city by the way she portrayed her subjects in the pictures.
In 1939, she began experimenting with scientific imagery and capturing the movement of physics, mathematics and chemistry in her dramatic black-and-white photos, and called her project “Documenting Science.” As her photographs illustrate the latest technology, which makes them modern, however the principles they show came before her period, which makes them timeless. In this project the photographer is trying to take us both backward and forward in time. Abbott pictures depict a spellbinding pattern of colliding and overlapping circular forms. If you stare long enough you start to see faces or other forms in the picture. In her project, I got the feeling of being tricked, when I first looked at the picture I saw one thing and few moments later I saw something else. It was interesting trying to figure out what she was trying to show or how she took the picture without reading the captions. The project gave the feeling of mystery and blurred the lines between facts and fiction. Other photos show multiple exposures of items moving through space, an enlarged view of penicillin mold, and beams of light passing through a prism.