Ben Huff.

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

[…] These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Full gallery. Chris Jordan.

Christian Patterson.

Thorsten Fleisch [via Metafilter]

Daniel Augschöll also publishes Ahorn Magazine with Anya Jasbar.

Peter Fraser. Portland: Nazraeli Press, 2006.

Michael Bracewell on Peter Fraser:

It would make sense for him to be an artist within the lineage of post-impressionism – in other words, absorbed within the complexities of seeing, then dismantling and reassembling his impressions, the better to express their innermost qualities.

And yet Fraser reverses this process, it seems: it is as though he returns – in one sharp, clear, jump-cut of vision – the impressionistic intensities of his subject’s presence (its most profound, philosophical ‘being-there’-ness) to their ultra-figurative state. He turns the logic of impressionism inside out, reversing its Proustian algebra of contemplation through an acute sharpening of focus.

[…]

Rather, there is a sense of immediacy in Fraser’s vision – a tension between wonder and witness, encounter and reverie, the taut poetry of which appears to articulate the complete philosophical and physical existence of his subjects. Under such scrutiny, the banal becomes exotic, engendering an elevated aesthetic which Fraser’s significant use of colour maintains at the heighest pitch of visual refinement.

In his recent work, Fraser has photographed what might be compared to Shakespeare’s “deeds that no name” – phenomena which seem to be the result of an activity, but what the purpose of that action might have been remains unknown. So here is Fraser’s picture of a clumsily folded paper dart, come to rest in a scattering of broken glass; and here are shards of pre-stressed masonry, as dramatic in their way as geological specimens, and the delicate head of a dandelion caught in what looks like a spillage of sump oil. Everywhere, it seems, is the consequence of nameless activity – the loose ends of conditionality, where the discarded or accidental effects of process are left where they occurred. In one sense, these phenomena might be compared to the doodling in the margins of an exercise book; in another, they are a form of litter. They appear abject, worthless, and in their expendability their substance becomes exposed.

From “Eventually, Everything, Connects” by Gerry Badger:

A broad defining concern might be indicated by the word ‘science.’ And the overarching rubric, as with many contemporary photographers and photographic artists, might be described as the poetics of the ordinary. This, of course, is a defining theme of modern art, one of the ways indeed, in which we might denote art as ‘modern.’ With Fraser this concern takes him down a particular path. His take on the everyday is informed generally by an interest in science, and specifically by an enquiry into the nature of materials. The ‘poetics of the ordinary’ becomes, in Fraser’s hands, ‘the poetics of materials.’

[…]

In Platonic metaphysics, we have the notion of the Forms and the things they in-Form, that is to say the manner of connection between appearances and their realities. But there is a class of things that are without-Form – formless. In Plato’s dialogue Parmenides, ‘hair or mud or dirt or any other trivial and undignified objects’ are mentioned. They are the ‘lowest bound’ of objects, defined as ‘formless chaos.’ The middle bound is ‘things of this world’, and the upper bound consists of ‘things of value.’

[…]

Inevitably, materials change their state or bound, and both box and glass fragment have degenerated from being ‘things of this world’ to the ‘formless chaos’ bound. The glass may even have been considered a ‘thing of value.’ Fraser of course has already explored this in previous series, but here the disparate nature of the things to which he has attended, asking us to draw broader connections, make PETER FRASER not only more difficult but a more ambitious piece of work, along ‘universe in a grain of sand’ lines. In these Chinese boxes of connections, Fraser might be said to be proposing a model or metaphor for the world, its past, present and future, by tapping into a small part of the cycle that will reach closure eons into the future – formlessness to form to a new formlessness.

If one looks at Fraser’s inventory of things, one finds that some are natural, some man-made. Some are cheap and mass produced, others are lovingly man-made. Some are in use, some have been discarded. Some are new, some are old. Some have form, some are formless. In short, one could take each object and assign a Platonic value. Here is formless chaos, there a thing of value and so on. But Fraser is not looking to assign value, quite the opposite. Here, he is closer to the philosophy of Heraclitus, most widely known for his doctrine that ‘all flows’ (panta chorei). All things are in flux, and the formless will become form, and vice versa. Fraser rather, is seeking to challenge the notion of hierarchies, and look – in a metaphorical sense – for the underlying forces that bind all materials together.

Peter Fraser.

Click on the images or here for the video.

Also by Mr. Malkin: Everything I Know About Hyman Victor, and the promising trailer for Mother’s History of Birds.

Slack, Mike. OK OK OK. New York: J&L Books, 2002.

Mike Slack. J&L Books.

For this project I used a graphics editor built into an early arcade game to convert spam emails I had recieved into a virtual landscape. By reconfiguring the graphics editor interface to accept keystrokes as input, I was able to build these landscapes solely by transcribing spam messages and compiling them. For this piece I specifically chose spam messages that promised me a more meaningful life, increased happiness, and a greater sense of self-worth.

Daniel Everett [via i heart photograph]

Allison Grant is a recent MFA graduate from Columbia College in Chicago.

Her thesis project, Unsoiled, consists of “images [that] are reconstructions based on my recollections of iconic nature as I have seen in pictures, advertisements, films and other cultural representations.”

Through a process of imitating and altering these images, I am able to reposition their meaning. Nature is often imagined as a distant ideal: a conception that supposes a separation between wilderness and human constructs. By using materials and appropriated images that reference the ways in which we try to control nature, or imagine it to be, my photographs obscure the romantic simplicity of this perceived division.

Read the complete statement here. Ms. Grant also has a blog.