Photographers open to new ideas, take chances and unwilling to play it safe, Part 2

1. Collier Schorr has been returning to Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, for nearly two decades. The artist’s ongoing relationship with this provincial southern town comprises sometimes staged, sometimes documentary images that explore the intimacies of daily life with an aesthetic that can be at once bucolic, political, sentimental, and erotic. With work that is both edgy and ambiguous, Schorr generates a sense of place and a cultural inheritance that is both observed and manipulated, presenting history as both concrete and constructed. 

Opium - 2005

Smoke Ring - 1999

2. Antoine d'Agata's personal domain is the night where his dual role is that of observer and participant. With his attraction to depravity, pain, and abuse, d'Agata's images of prostitutes, junkies and outcasts deal with fear of the unknown and the basic instinct of survival that defines human existence. The work is a vortex to the heart of sensual experience with a fragile balance between intelligence and madness, rage and love, beauty and horror. D'Agata's practice is in direct opposition to much contemporary art which he sees as impregnated with the ideologies of capitalist production.

3. Martha Rosler,  since the late 1960s, has produced seminal works in the fields of photography, performance, video, installation, critical writing, and theory. Committed to an art that engages a public beyond the confines of the art world, Rosler investigates how socio-economic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. With a focus on the public sphere as well as daily life, the work often addresses women's experience. Rosler explores the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism.