Maurizio Anzeri

Who would have thought there was a way to make String Art interesting and relevant in this day and age? There was an era in the Seventies when nearly every house had some sort of geometric wall-hanging made from string or thread - endless repeated lines overlaid on fabric panels. Thankfully, they seemed to disappear from walls around the mid-Eighties as tastes changed. Italian artist Maurizio Anzeri uses this retro technique in his work, painstakingly embroidering intricate shapes over found vintage photographs, creating haunting and disturbing 'portraits'. The vintage prints only add to the other-worldliness of the images.

Talking about his work, Anzeri says "Photographs from the 40s and 50s have a totally different quality from photos we’re used to today. We don’t recognise them as photographs now, they really look like watercolours or drawings. I’ve been collecting old photographs for a long time. A few years ago I was doing ink drawings with them and out of curiosity I stitched into one. I work a lot with threads and hand stitching, and the link to photography was a natural progression. I put tracing paper over the photo and draw on the face until it develops. Sometimes the image comes straight away, suggested by a detail on a dress or in the background, but with the majority of them I spend a lot of time drawing. Once the drawing is done, I pierce the photo with a set of needle-like tools I invented and take the paper away; the holes are obsessively paced at the same distance to convey an idea of geometry. When I begin the stitching something else happens, drawing will never do what thread will."

The way Anzeri re-appropriates vintage photos is not dissimilar to John Stezaker's work, and there are echoes (but none of the torment) of the singular vision of Francis Bacon with the weird distortion and blur of the subjects, but he has found an interesting way of making a photograph - something usually associated with numbered print-runs and editions - into a singular, fascinating object.

Priscilla, 1940, 2008

Edward, 1943, 2009

Title unknown

Title unknown

Zelda, 1941, 2009

Round Midnight, 2009

Title unknown

Penny, 2009

Giovanni, 2009

Title unknown

All images © Maurizio Anzeri

Lucas Foglia

New Year, new talent:

Having only graduated from Yale last year, Lucas Foglia's work is ridiculously confident and mature for someone who's only twenty seven. Foglia has realised two serious projects, Re-Wilding and Between Mountain And Mines, which look at two different types of rural American life. Re-Wilding follows people who've made a conscious effort to leave the modern world, and quit towns and cities to live a more pastoral existence off the grid in parts of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. His shots, beautifully composed, show amazing scenes of this modern rural life, from women learning to shoot rifles, to kids milking cows, to dead animals lying slain in the woods. Riveting, moving and sometimes sinister, Re-Wilding is a great achievement. The photographs feel part-documentary, part Crewdson-esque complicated set up, and the viewer is not entirely sure if what they are seeing is true. Foglia says this of his working process: "I take candid photographs, but often ask my subjects to hold still or alter their actions for the sake of a better visual image. I also work collaboratively with my subjects to recreate events that I have observed, occasionally re-photographing and compositing different images. My process of making images varies; what matters to me is the form and content of the final image"

Between Mountains And Mines explores communities based in Wyoming in one of the largest areas of undeveloped land in the Unites States. Foglia once more captures some images of real beauty in a harsh environment, showing an understanding eye for his subjects who have chosen to live somewhere where wilderness and the indutrial world meet.

There's many parallels in both series, showing intrepid types who have chosen a more difficult but perhaps more rewarding way of living today. Foglia has found fertile subject matter in these modern day pioneers, and it will be interesting to see where he turns his camera next.

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Between Mines And Mountains series

From the Between Mines And Mountains series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Between Mines And Mountains series

From the Between Mines And Mountains series

From the Between Mines And Mountains series

From the Re-Wilding series

From the Re-Wilding series

All images © Lucas Foglia

Mike Mandel

In 1975 photographer Mike Mandel embarked on a rather brilliant project: to satirise the then-new phenomenon of the fine art photography community being consumed by the larger art world and commercial culture in general. To do this he travelled around America with a bunch of baseball paraphernalia - caps, gloves, bats, masks and more - and photographed as many of his colleagues as he could persuade, kitted-out and posing as baseball players. He then produced trading cards of these Baseballer-Photographers, complete with stats on the reverse of the cards, and sold them in packs complete with a stick of gum through galleries and museums throughout the country. The stats listed - along with more conventional details like weight and height - categories such as 'favourite camera' and 'favourite film'.

Mandel got some real heavyweights to participate in this project - legends like Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Harry Callahan, Ed Ruscha, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Minor White, Lewis Baltz and Duane Michals are all 'at bat' - and the resulting series is unexpected, hilarious and also very cool.

Ironically, whilst Mandel set out to satirise the commercialisation of fine art photography, these cards - especially a complete set - are now extremely rare and sought-after collectors' items in their own right.

A couple of years after this project, Mandel went on to cement his reputation as a conceptual force in photography when he created Evidence with Larry Sultan, one of the seminal art photography projects of the Twentieth Century.

All images © Mike Mandel

Patrick Hruby

Patrick Hruby's saturated silkscreens are a weird blend of the occult and the psychedelic, looking like the visions of a shaman with deft Illustrator skills. Based in LA, Hruby's work centres around natural forms, plants, creatures and faces, in sometimes-sickly acid colours, often overprinted to rich effect. They feel like a modern take on California psychedelia, with some similarity to the work of the Mission School artists, especially Clare Rojas.

Hruby has done commercial work for clients such as Urban Outfitters - creating a typeface for them - and also has a line of retro-looking tableware, but its when he lets the darker side of his imagination run wild that he seems to create his most interesting work.

Eye Of The Forest

Twins

Tiger Trifecta

Cheshire Plant

Spider

Portrait Of My Father As A Falcon

Ice Flower

Fish-Of-The-Sea

All images © Patrick Hruby

Phillip Low

Vancouver-born, London-schooled, Manhattan-based; Phillip Low is an artist who creates beautiful, simple geometric forms from acrylic which you feel compelled to handle, hold to the light and admire.

Trained as a fashion stylist, and a graduate of the redoubtable St Martin's School of Art, Low pulled together various creative ideas he had been exploring - accessories, plastics, fine art - and started producing these handmade, mesmerising pieces. Working with live perspex and acrylic, he carefully handcrafts the forms so that they glow and radiate different colours when viewed from different angles. These are objects that demand and reward interaction.

Available from Maryam Nassir Zadeh in New York, Low has also produced a series of limited prints of a few of photographer Uday Kak's stiking images of the trapezoids.

Sculptures © Phillip Low, photography © Uday Kak

Turf Feinz

Four members of the legendary Turf Feinz crew from Oakland moving, dancing, twisting...turfing...in the rain.

Watch in full-screen in awe.

Film © YAK Films