Return to Hidden in Plain Sight
Bustamante records the subtle and often overlooked poetry that exists in everyday life and ordinary places. He photographs all over the world but never identifies locations and is inspired by such universally banal subjects as vacant lots, rows of parked cars, billboards, and façades of apartment buildings. This untitled work from his series Something Is Missing records a surprisingly beautiful scene that he discovered on the street. Bustamante collects and preserves found sculptures with the aid of his camera, perhaps as an extension of his work as a sculptor. More than documents, the resulting photographs are like vivid memories—slightly melancholic evocations of ephemeral moments.
In 1973 Walker Evans began to work with the innovative Polaroid SX-70 camera and was given an unlimited supply of film by its manufacturer. The virtues of this camera, introduced in 1972, perfectly fit Evans's search for a concise yet poetic vision of the world: its instant prints were for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse. During the last two years of his life, Evans made more than 2,600 pictures with the SX-70, revisiting many of the subjects that had preoccupied him throughout his career: faces, signs and lettering, domestic interiors, vernacular architecture, and urban detritus. The streamlined simplicity of the SX-70 stripped photography down to its bare essentials: seeing and choosing. "It reduces everything," Evans said, "to your brains and taste."
For the past twenty years, Faigenbaum has been using his camera to capture traces of the past as it survives in the present. He has photographed the families of Italian nobility in Rome, worshipers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and inhabitants of post-Communist Prague and of a waterfront neighborhood in Barcelona. This photograph of a stringless antique lute in the window of a musical instrument shop belongs to a series devoted to Paris's seventeenth arrondissement. The lute, an instrument often depicted in medieval and Renaissance paintings, has an eerie presence here, its ocular sound holes giving it an uncanny, portraitlike appearance.
Daniel Faust has a longstanding interest in the cultural meanings of display. In 1980 he began photographing natural-history museum dioramas and historical figures in wax museums. Since then, he has documented myriad places in which culture and history are packaged and put on display: museums of science and technology, theme parks, world's fairs, churches and synagogues, and commercial storefronts. His use of flash intensifies the frozen, airless quality of these arrangements of objects, giving them a haunting sense of artificiality.
Lewis Koch, an artist based in Madison, Wisconsin, makes photographs, assemblages, and installations, often incorporating words or symbols found on signs, on the sides of buildings, or in more unexpected places. He made this photograph in northern India in the cafeteria of a Tibetan Buddhist children's refuge, where a young monk had solved a math problem on a tabletop using tsampa, a dough made of roasted barley flour and tea.
In 2003 Orozco traveled to the remote city of Timbuktu to explore the production, uses, and meaning of ceramics in West African culture. There, he stumbled upon an old but still active cemetery where the terracotta grave markers scattered in the sand seemed to resonate with his own site-specific installations. With his unfailing eye for color and form, he found a vantage point from which the spherical pots, placed at the head of graves as markers and as receptacles for offerings of food and water, appear to be part of the natural landscape.
Webb is a pioneer of color photojournalism. He began his career documenting small-town life in the American South in black and white and switched to color film in 1978, inspired in part by the colors he saw during his travels in Mexico and Haiti. A member of the Magnum photo agency since 1976, Webb works with an openness to chance encounters central to the tradition of street photography pioneered by Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson.
"I only know how to approach a place by walking," Webb has said. "For what does a street photographer do but walk and watch and wait and talk, and then watch and wait some more, trying to remain confident that the unexpected, the unknown, or the secret heart of the known awaits just around the corner."