Hannah Minzloff – Photo-based artist

Feb 24 Valley Sustainability Showcase

2012-02-16T14:37:00.001-04:00

Concertina Book Cover © Hannah Minzloff 2012

To promote Ribbon to the Future, I'll be setting up a booth next Friday for the Valley Sustainability Showcase at the Wolfville Farmers Market from 2:30pm-5pm.

This event brings together vendors from the Wolfville, Kentville and Windsor markets as well as a showcase supporting community resiliency and sustainable initiatives currently active in Nova Scotia. Local politicians, business persons and educational faculty from Acadia will be present at this exhibition of the Annapolis Valley’s dynamism.

Sponsor Ribbon to the Future by pre-purchasing a framed 16x20 signed print and/or a hand-made concertina book.

Drop by the booth to find out more.

Trying out new techniques...

2011-08-11T16:43:00.001-03:00

Ribbon to the Future is a modern day exploration of the evolution of the landscape and the communities linked by Route 1 through the Annapolis Valley to the Minas Basin. I am collaborating on this project with my friend and fellow photo-based artist Dick Groot.

Dick and I are looking at the future of the Annapolis Valley through innovative initiatives in sustainable food production, transportation, energy, community and youth engagement.

You can read more about this exciting project here www.ribbontothefuture.ca.

I'm starting to manipulate the images early for this project–a process I usually begin once a final selection of images has been made–as I feel it will help me frame images more precisely when I'm in the field with my camera. Here's a look at what I'm working on this week. There are lots of layers in these images, texture, noise, maps, blurring, text and sharpening.

Tell me what you think!

Spring Inspiration

2011-05-05T15:36:00.008-03:00

I've got some great inspiration to leap into spring with: two diverse artist's work to admire and to share with you.

Jeremy Cowart
Of particular interest to me is Jeremy Cowart's Illustration series (watch how he makes them on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/jeremycowart#p/u/1/XsVbh2MFveY). I've recently begun drawing and want to incorporate that into my photographs -I've been wondering exactly how to do that. I decided right away I needed to experiment with a self-portrait. Here is the result of yesterday afternoon's work - what do you think?

Having spent 5 weeks in Haiti as a young woman of 19 during a period of recovery from the Duvalier Papa Doc/BabyDoc regime I was very moved by Jeremy's work in Haiti after the earthquake. The attitude of the Haitian people then was very similar to now. They and their land had been devastated by corrupt leadership, which I feel is mirrored by the after effects of the earthquake. Do have a look at Jeremy's images capturing the Haitian people's thoughts and emotions as they gather energy to rebuild their lives.

Isa Leshko
What Isa Leshko says about shooting with a Holga is exactly how I feel about my art practice:

"Holga images thumb their nose at the conventions of photography. They're dark. They're blurry. They fade around the edges. But I love them precisely because of the these flaws. These images are mot intended to accurately record exactly how my subject looked. Instead, they depict how I felt when I clicked the shutter. This camera is about spontaneity and rule-breaking. It's liberating to make images that are beautifully imperfect."

I've been using a Diana camera -sister to the Holga- for years, for the same love of liberation from technology. Ironically, I recently went digital (Oh how perfect the images are, too perfect for me actually!) and decided to experiment with a Lensbaby in order to emulate a Diana/Holga effect. I LOVE this lens. Here is a recent favourite image from a series I'm working on in the Annapolis Valley.

Thanks so much to my friends Cathy and David who introduced me to Jeremy and Isa's work this week.

RoadWorks - capturing natural tableaux created by road crews at work

2010-12-09T11:02:00.016-04:00

Thanks to funding from Nova Scotia Tourism, Culture and Heritage, I'm working on a new project entitled RoadWorks – a photographic exploration of the natural mise en scenes created by road construction crews at work on the urban infrastructure in Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), Nova Scotia.

This is a really exciting project that has taken me all over HRM this summer in search of slowed up traffic and "Speed fines double in work areas" signs. The folks building and repairing our roads, contrary to common thought, do work very hard - I've been watching them closely.

I met a wonderful array of men and women this summer, some very young, some in their 70's with no desire to retire. People who have travelled the world to help build roads and even railroads by trucking gravel or smoothing out pavement.

I've used a digital SLR for this work as I wanted to be able to both keep up with the movement of the workers and manipulate the images in photoshop. I'd love to hear what you think of the work in progress, and so you can see where I began and where this is going, I'm including a few before/after images.

In my mind's eye I see this being a public art or gallery installation of human to small architectural scale. Wouldn't it be amazing to install it right on Alderney Drive during Nocturne - art at night in October 2011?

Digital madness - lost everything?!

2010-09-23T14:51:00.003-03:00

Just after Christmas I accidentally deleted my entire digital photo archive (ACK!). Thanks to Myke at Mac East, many files were recovered including some interesting glitches!

Underground - a photo essay of subway transit

2010-04-23T12:17:00.012-03:00

The exhibition is a study of underground transit systems by Hannah Minzloff, a photographer who lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, a city without subways.

UNDERGROUND premiered in Toronto at the CONTACT festival in May 2008 where it was shown on a working TTC subway car. 60,000 TTC riders viewed the exhibition during this time.

Commuters travel by subway simultaneously in urban centres around the globe, consciously retreating into their own worlds, alone but together with strangers, while passing at speed through a network of subterranean tunnels. UNDERGROUND links these moments and explores the intimacy and universality of this communal experience.

The exhibition UNDERGROUND consists of panoramic B&W photographs — shot in 2007 — of underground transit systems in North America and Europe including Toronto, Montreal, London, Paris, Munich and Barcelona. The images are displayed in the advertising spaces on a working Halifax Metro Transit bus. In addition to the on-site exhibition, there is a web site with images, audio tracks and a discussion forum.

Please click here to view a slide show of the images in the exhibition.