Olaf Martens

Olaf Martens is interested in staging his pictures like a theatre play. In his often humorously constructed images, Martens combines a take on fashion, documentary, conceptual, social, even animal photography, art historical and socio-political references. His work cannot be categorised but is a combination of what can be termed a kind of post - modern eclecticism. Marten's view of the feminine takes on a very particular, interesting turn in his work and is the central theme around which all else revolves.
Martens undermines the seemingly homogenous facade of the photographic. His works is characterised by uniting contrary details, and refiguring them in a very unique and hybrid manner. This leaves many questions to the viewer, not apparent on first glance.
The theme of the outside and the outsider has been a recurring theme in Marten's work from the very beginning. His images are most often taken in dis-used factories, the outskirts of cities, and in new and up-coming cities like Russia, Czechoslovakia, Turkey and East Germany.
Similar to David Lynch's imagery, Martens uses recurring roles and types usually those of outsiders to society. Cleaning women, dwarfs, seamstresses, overly fat women, strippers, dancers, transvestites are of particular fascination to him. They inhabit the opposite end of the spectrum and Martens ironically combines them with seemingly flawless models. Yet, here the model appears in latex, gas masks, workers' outfits and high heels, adding another hybrid layer to his work.
Olaf Martens studied photography at the highly renowned Leipzig Academy for "Graphik und Buchkunst". His contemporaries are the well-known "Leipzig School" with artists such as Neo Rauch, Tim Eitel or Tilo Baumgartel. His work has been exhibited in many museum group exhibitions on contemporary German photography as well as in solo exhibitions at the Kunst Museum, Bonn, Grassi Museum, Leipzig, Moscow House of photography, Leopold Museum, Vienna, German Historical Museum in Berlin, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. He has exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally. His work is included in collections such as the FC Gundlach Collection and the Sammlung Goetz, Munich. via

homepage
pics after the click are NSFW

Read more...

SUKA OFF

SUKA OFF is a Poland based artist collective existing since 1995. They have been creating work across visual theatre, performance art, club action, installation, photography, video art and music visuals. Their work has been presented in theatres, art galleries, clubs and festivals in most European countries, as well as in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Japan. They remain completely independent and not supported by any public institution due to the character and content of their work.

The members of SUKA OFF are Piotr Wegrzynski (founder, visual artist, performer) and Sylvia Lajbig (classical philologist, performer). SUKA OFF is constantly supported by other artists collaborating on individual projects. Among them are Hellen Burrough, Maciej Dziaczko and Tomasz Wiracki.

homepage / flickr / vimeo

pics after the click are NSFW

Read more...

Eliot Lee Hazel

homepage

Read more...

Jacob Aue Sobol

Jacob was born in Denmark, in 1976 and grew up in Brøndby Strand in the suburbs south of Copenhagen. He lived as an exchange student in Strathroy, Canada from 1994-95 and as a hunter and fisherman in Tiniteqilaaq, Greenland from 2000-2002. In Spring 2006 he moved to Tokyo, staying there 18 months before returning to Denmark in August 2008. He now lives and works in Copenhagen.

After studying at the European Film College, Jacob was admitted to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography in 1998. There he developed a unique, expressive style of black-and-white photography, which he has since refined and further developed.

In the autumn of 1999 he went to live in the settlement Tiniteqilaaq on the East Coast of Greenland. Over the next three years he lived mainly in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter but also photographing. The resultant book Sabine was published in 2004 and the work was nominated for the 2005 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

In the summer of 2005 Jacob traveled with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girl’s first journey to the ocean. The following year he returned by himself to the mountains of Guatemala where he met the indigenous family Gomez-Brito. He stayed with them for a month to tell the story of their everyday life. The series won the First Prize Award, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo 2006.

In 2006 he moved to Tokyo and during the next two years he created the images from his resent book I, Tokyo. The book was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2008 and published by Actes Sud (France), Apeiron (Greece), Dewi Lewis Publishing (Great Britain), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain), Peliti Associati (Italy) and Mets & Schilt (The Netherlands)

homepage
Pics after the click are a bit NSFW

Read more...

Mikaylah Bowman

flickr

Read more...

Joel-Peter Witkin / L'image indélébile / Vile Bodies

Read more...

John Wadsworth

homepage

Read more...

aeric meredith-goujon

Aeric Meredith-Goujon was raised in southern Indiana but has been a New Yorker for the past decade and a half. In 1999 he received an MFA from Pratt Institute and his photographic interests include fashion, erotic portraiture, music and dance. Aeric lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. F/

homepage / daily pics
some photos after the click are extremely NSFW

Read more...

Nobuyoshi Araki

Araki, Nobuyoshi (b. 1940), Japanese photographer and multimedia artist, born and resident in Tokyo. A prolific producer of photo books (over 100), by the close of the 20th century Araki had become Japan's most famous photographer. He began his personal work during off hours from his job at the advertising agency Dentsu. In 1964 he received the Taiyo Prize (founded that year) for the series Satchin and his Brother Mabo. The year 1971 saw the appearance of his privately published Sentimental Journey, an intimate record of his marriage to and honeymoon with his wife Yoko (who died in 1990). He went freelance in 1972, and throughout the 1970s self-published numerous xeroxed photo albums. He is best known for his nudes and explicit sexual images, often involving bondage. Shown by major museums, these works have stimulated debate and sometimes brought clashes with the authorities in Japan and abroad. But his oeuvre also comprises flower studies, landscapes, and portraits. ‘Erotos’, a word invented by Araki combining eros (love) and thanatos (death), defines the major theme in his work. In Japan, he is commonly called ‘Ararchy’ (Araki/anarchy), a term also coined by himself. Declaring that every photograph is intimate, a kind of ‘I-photograph’, he also makes ‘false series’, putting false dates on photo prints which disrupt our definitions of reality and fiction.

— Madeleine Hill Vedel

No introduction needed, I busted my balls uploading all these photos so there are probably double pics here and there, I'll fix that later.
Aslo, if any of you have some pics or entire book scans that are not here please send an e-mail (belowthefog666[at]gmail.com) and I'll put them here.
posts after the click are obviously nsfw.

Read more...

Ken-Ichi Murata

Ken-Ichi Murata still lives and works there.His art is a sensational new discovery.
The pretty Japanese girls in his hand-colored black-and-white photographs transport us into the erotic fantasy worlds of a Japanese artist who is inspired by thousand-year-old traditions and sexual rites.
Murata enchants us with nymph-like princesses and half-nude girls in kimonos. Here are stimulating role play and exotic charm in their purest form.
Murata began displaying his art photography at a public exhibition in Tokyo in 1996. It was a huge success and was the first glimpse the work got into the amazing dream world of this most amazing artist. Other exhibitions and press coverage soon followed. (mondobizzaro)

pics after the click are NSFW

Read more...

History of American Indians

Read more...

Daikichi Amano / Genki and the Art of Eel Porn

In his photographs, Daikichi Amano (b.1973 in Japan), enfant terrible of Hokusai, does not shun even the most impossible types ofembraces.
In his monstrous orgies—elaborate and disturbingly sensual encounters of otherworldly beauty that flirts with the abject—angel-faced women frolic with snakes and earthworms, elegantly contorted and interlaced eels slipping into every orifice of the human body. Live toads are sucked-on gluttonously, cockroaches, larvae and other invertebrates embrace, interweave, absorb and suck on each other until they lock into a hybrid body moving as one under the waves of a new kind of irresistible sensuality. Each animal possesses its own secret beauty – Amano has made it his calling to reveal their graces: smooth undulating eels, shiny and transparent octopuses arranged in precious and enthralling compositions. Despite being disturbing to the point of nausea, Daikichi Amano’s works are celebrated internationally. He composes new kinds of tableaux with the bodies of actresses, animals and insects, translates his nightmares and visions into frozen images, portraits of an almost surreal beauty. Amano pursues this photographic enquiry into the bizarre realms of erotic imagination with an obsessive and perfectionist eye for detail, inspired by the Dutch still-lives painters as well as Japanese mythology and the great Ukiyo-E woodcut masters of the Edo period and in particular the erotic Shunga prints.
Textures, surfaces and bodies weave themselves into abstract compositions in his photographs, with flesh, scales and skin taking on the colours of jewels. The abject becomes sublime. This is Amano’s great talent: to reevaluate death not as sterile horror, but as an aesthetic resurrection. He takes up the ancient idea of beauty as ineluctably doomed to wilt, condemned to eventually disappear and thereby aligns himself as an artist in a thousand-year-old poetic tradition that sings of all things fleeting and ephemeral. (via)

BUY DAIKICHI AMANO | HUMAN NATURE HERE (23 x 31 cm, 128 pages, Hard Cover)

Read more...

ANTI

Read more...

Federico Erra

Read more...