Evan Baden

All images © Evan Baden

Congratulations to Evan Baden who was June´s winner of theprintspace photography competition - portrait theme. After spending a long time reviewing all the entries the judges managed to narrow down the finalists and eventually agree that Evan Baden´s series The Illuminati merited the top slot. Speaking about the project, he says:

"In Westernized cultures today, there is a generation that is growing up without the knowledge of what it is to be disconnected. The world in which we are growing up is always on. We are continuously plugged in, and linked up. We take this technology for granted. Not because we are ungrateful, but because we simply don’t know a world without it. From our earliest memories, there has always been a way to connect with others whether it is Myspace, Facebook, cell phones, email, or instant messenger. And now, with the Internet, instant messaging, and email in our pocket, right there with our phones, we can always feel as if we are part of a greater whole. These devices grace us with the ability to instantly connect to others, and at the same time, they isolate us from those with whom we are connected. They allow for great freedom, yet so often, we are chained to them. They have become part of who we are and how we identify ourselves. These devices ordain us with a wealth of knowledge and communication that would have been unbelievable a generation ago. More and more, we are bathed in a silent, soft, and heavenly blue glow. It is as if we carry divinity in our pockets and purses."

Born in 1985, Baden attended the College of Visual Arts. In 2007, he graduated with a BFA in Photography. Since then, he has exhibited work in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. His work has been added to the collections of the Walker Art Center, Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. In November of 2008, he was named as one of the five Jerome Fellows for the 2008-2009 year. He received $10,000 to continue and make new work. The work that he is currently making will be exhibited at the MCAD Gallery in October of 2009.

GROUP SHOW Open Call for Photography

3rd Ward is pleased to announce its first ever GROUP SHOW Open Call for Photography. This call culminates in an AMAZING group exhibition of the top 25 submissions - PLUS - one photographer will be awarded $500 & a 3rd Ward bike!

This is YOUR chance!

The Group Show at 3rd Ward

A Search for the Best Emerging Photographers!

Photography has been reinventing itself since its inception. From daguerreotypes to glass negatives, instant Polaroid film to unlimited digital shots, images are our reflections, our fantasies and our teachers. This competition is a search for the best new work from emerging photographers.

One photographer will be awarded $500 & a 3rd Ward bike and the top 25 photographers will receive:

A group show in 3rd Ward's gallery
A feature in 3rd Ward's Quarterly Publication
1-month Basic Membership at 3rd Ward with access to our four photo studios
NYC wide exposure - post cards, flyers, press!

The following judges will be joining this call :

Peter van Agtmael, Magnum Photographer

Sean Fader, Photographer, FIT Professor & Solo Show Artist

Amani Olu, Co-founder & Executive Director of Humble Arts Foundation

Submit Now!

Accepting Submissions Through August 7, 2009, 11:59.

David Plummer

All images © David Plummer

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Emily Dickinson, Pain has an Element of Blank (1924)

I found this work David Plummer sent me particulary interesting. As sensitive a portrayal it is of its subject, it really got me thinking about the politics of representation and, by natural extension, the relationship between the sitter and shooter in general, which is essential to portraiture. There are always ethical questions to consider. Do all parties consent to being photographed? Does everyone understand how their image will be used? Can one truly capture an unbiased and honest picture, let alone someone´s true identity?

Read about how David wrestles with these issues here in his artist statement:

"Feast of Losses is an ongoing series that documents David Pembroke, who in 2003 was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a rare brain disease that causes nerve endings at the base of the brain to die. There is no effective treatment or cure and like other neurodegenerative diseases, PSP gets worse over time.

These portraits offer us a psychologically direct approach through the use of different colour backgrounds, chosen by David Pembroke on a daily basis to help express his emotions after he lost the ability to use his facial muscles due to PSP.

The effect is an increased intimacy to the subject matter and continuous interaction of metaphor by focusing on David’s emotional and physical changes over time. As a result David Pembroke shows us the cycles of renewal and decay, gives us the facts and presents the possibilities of surprising transformations."

David Plummer, born in 1984, is from Cardiff, Wales graduated from the University of Wales: Newport with a BA First Class Honours in Documentary Photography. In 2009, he was awarded the Reginald Salisbury Photography Award to help fund an ongoing body of work (http://davidplummer.wordpress.com/) in the Southern Hills of Hebron in the disputed West Bank of Israel, home to two thousand Palestinians, farmers and shepherds often referred to as Cave Dwellers. 

Charles Bédué

All images © Charles Bédué

I was immediately sucked in when Parisian born, Shanghai based photographer Charles Bédué slid these images my way, the crux of which can just about be extracted from his artist statement:

"I need to walk. First the pulse is physical, then it becomse spiritual when I escape from reality by improving my ability to see beyond. Reality is always magical, it is hard to forget. The true world is too thin to be seen, but I can feel the spirit of things, which is the thinnest matter existing, vibrating everywhere. Nothing is dead around me, it is just a question of scale. Sometimes I see humans (me included) and animals as objects, sometimes objects become alive. When the light is diffused and shadows disappear, it is easier to feel the unity of the world. Now for me, it is the time of disillusion - then will come the reconstruction."

Unfortunately, Charles does not have a website but I think it is worth taking note of this name because I can guarentee you will be seeing a lot more from him in the future.

Peter Puklus

All images © Peter Puklus

Photographer Peter Puklus recently submitted some work - an undeniably beautiful series of images whose cosmopolitan flourishes bring about a magical reordering of the commonplace. Zuzana Lapitková, curator, Central European House of Photography, Bratislava, Slovakia writes of his imagery:

"Peter Puklus is an example of a modern documentary author. Questions of an involved or not involved view, an approach based on revealing beauty, or rather importance of daily, even banal things – all that was solved by documentary photographers before.

The generation of Puklus and his peers can now focus on the complexity of documentary work. For Peter Puklus, everything around can be a subject. A single picture or one medium is not enough to capture it, though. The Intimacy series contains several chapters systematically researching different aspects of this topic– a man as a source of the intimacy feeling, an inhabited interior, still-lifes as traces of living. However, this almost scientific approach does not stop here.

Many of these photographs were made on the basis of drawings and are accompanied by videos with the same subject, from the same interiors, with the same characters. The whole series gains even deeper insight in the topic and literally one more dimension."

Peter Puklus is a fine art/editorial photographer living and working in Budapest, Hungary. He is finishing his DLA (Doctor of Liberal Arts) studies in photography at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest. His works has been published recently in The Room design and fashion magazine. He recently showed his series entitled Intimacy - No Title at Fotofestiwal 2009, Lodz, Poland and has participated in different group shows through Europe.

Ben Alper

All images © Ben Alper

Ben Alper e-mailed me the other day to share some work from his project The Family Dig. He wrote:

"The Family Dig is a body of work explores my heritage through an examination of familial artifacts and contemporary portraits. The images in this series speak to the joy, melancholy, nostalgia and impermanence that encompass and define most familial heritages. Ultimately, my efforts to preserve my own family’s history can be seen as an attempt to immortalize this ancestry before it slips away like a faded memory. It is my hope that contrasting these relics with images of my family as they are today, will speak to heritage as a tradition that is fluid and ongoing, as a history that not only exists in the past, but also prevails in present".

Ben Alper lives in Cambridge, MA and is currently pursuing his BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. He is a founding member of The Exposure Project, a photo collective designed to facilitate and nurture collaboration across the medium. With this group, Ben has helped self-publish three photo journals, has put on various group exhibitions and, most recently, co-curated Graphic Intersections, a collaborative project loosely based on the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. In addition, Ben’s work has been featured in Humble Arts Foundation’s Group Show, the Photographic Resource Center’s Northeast Exposure Online and F-Stop Magazine and Wassenaar Magazine. He was recently featured in the new online photography magazine Ahorn Magazine.

New partnership with Troika Editions!

©Bill Jackson






















© Victoria Hall

I am delighted to announce the new partnership between Troika Editions and 1000 Words.

To produce the level of professionalism and depth of content with which you have come to expect takes time and money and in answer to our recent call for donations and in recognition of the work 1000 Words does Troika Editions has set up a special offer for the valued friends of 1000 Words. For all prints purchased during July 2009 by 1000 Words readers, Troika Editions will donate to 1000 Words part of the profits on the purchases of their limited edition prints.

As an additional thank you for helping support 1000 Words, Troika Editions will also give free shipping on purchases made through this offer during July 2009.

Launched in Spring 2009, Troika Editions is an online space dedicated to promoting British and European photographers, giving them the opportunity to sell their work to a wider audience at affordable prices. Every week Troika Editions publish exclusive limited edition prints from their list of hand picked artists. Offered in three sizes, in three edition runs and at just three prices and with prices starting at £35, Troika Edition’s mandate is to make art available for everyone.

For more information about Troika Editions please contact Bridget via email info@troikaeditions.co.uk or by phone on 020 783 2330.

To quote the offer url use www.troikaeditions.co.uk/1000words

Here are some more beautiful prints that are on offer at Troika Editions:















© Emma Critchley


















© Matthew Booth















© Jon Spencer


















© Polly Braden and David Campany

Graeme Vaughan

All images ©Graeme Vaughan

I was introduced to Graeme Vaughan when he was down in London for Seba´s private view at HOST shortly after finishing his Fd. a in Contemporary Photography from Mid Cheshire College. We got talking and he kindly showed me his little gem of a project, Warsaw - a notebook, an ongoing series about spaces within the Polish city of which he says:

"Without reference to maps, or books – people in cities become my tour guides to unfamiliar places. The work is made by following strangers as they go about their everyday lives. No-one is followed for long, not long enough for me to become concerned with them as an individual. They act as a set of city dwellers and users who define their city and show it to me. In this work we are taken away from usual tourist routes, and sites, we are led off the surface of tourist maps and guides. In the modern spectacle of the city, this notebook is a product of observations."

Vaughan studied a B.Sc. Applied Psychology / Sociology between 1988-1992 and then completed an M.A. Social Work Practice in 1994 before finally turning to photography.

He first worked as a research assistant for the offender profiling research unit. Exploring relationship between environments and behaviour. As a Probation Officer, he says he took up photography as way of exploring places. During recent photography education, he has developed a community arts practice and this current work on city spaces.

These include The Dwellings, an Arts Council funded project exploring Victoria Square in Manchester, the oldest municipal housing scheme in the UK and Identity, for which he worked with Manchester City Council Adult Social Care users, exploring their lives and places that mean most to them.

Documenting Disappearance: Algeria, state terrorism and the photographic image.

As an appendix to the recently published article on Omar D in 1000 Words #5 here is an associated video that has been downloaded from HumanRightsTV. It is taken form the conference called `Documenting Disappearance: Algeria, state terrorism and the photographic image´ that was held at the London School of Economics back in May 2008.

Taking as its starting point Omar D's book of photographs, Devoir de memoire/A Biography of Disappearance, Algeria 1992-, commissioned and edited by Autograph ABP, this event examines what happens when the apparatus of a state is turned on its own citizens. It asks how we can disseminate the truth about events that are officially denied or obfuscated by the legal system, how to lobby for the application of UN resolutions on forced disappearances and whether human rights organisations can overcome pot-colonial and economic interests. Can imagery be more potent than text in bringing human rights issues into public knowledge? Can we talk of a politics of aesthetics in the context of subjects who have been stripped of their civil existence? How can the invisible be made visible?

Here´s Tom O Mara, editor of Devoir de memoire/A Biography of Disappearance, Algeria 1992-, speaking on behalf of Omar D:

1000 Words Photography Magazine #5

©Will Steacy

Dear friends and colleagues,

The special summer edition of 1000 Words Photography Magazine-The Contemporary Portrait is online now at www.1000wordsmag.com

Featured photographers include: Will Steacy, Boo Ritson, Dryden Goodwin, Tierney Gearon, Omar D, Jen Davis, Doug DuBois, Roger Ballen, Emma Critchley and William Eggleston.

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new partnership between 1000 Words Photography Magazine and Troika Editions. In answer to our recent call for donations and funding support, Troika Editions have generously agreed to donate to 1000 Words Photography Magazine part of the profits on purchases of their limited editions made during July 2009. To find out how to participate in this special offer please click here.

1000 Words Photography Magazine also has five signed copies of Donovan Wylie's Maze which are on offer at the discounted rate of 15% exclusively for our readers, courtesy of Steidl. Please email tim@1000wordsmag.com for more details.

*The regular price is £57.50 / $82.00 / €65.00

1000 thanks to all the artists and writers, and to Santiago Taccetti at CCCH Creative Studio, Barcelona for their wonderful contributions to this project.

Have a great summer, and see you at Les Recontres d'Arles!

Best wishes,

Tim Clark
Editor in chief/Director