harlan erskine — photography/blog

The cover of Harvard Business Review, September 2011 featuring Jen Stark’s Burst, 12 x 12 x 3 inches, hand-cut paper, 2007. Photograph by Harlan Erskine, 2007.

Recently my photo of Jen Stark’s paper sculpture graced the cover of  Harvard Business Review. Stark was their featured artist for the September 2011 issue and 3 of my pictures of her work were included.

Because of all the interest in the work I have made of Jen Stark’s fantastic and complex paper sculptures – I have made a new “objects” section on my website. Take a look at these pictures of Jen Stark’s work here.

In addition I put up some product work I made for a luxury boutique clothing and fashion store in Miami. The images are of SCO Fragrance, SCO scent, Kol Picnic and Baxter of California products.

enjoy.

I’m super excited, The World Park, a project I worked on last Summer was recently recognized in Communication Arts – 2011 Interactive Annual. It was a blast to work on read all about it below.

From CA:

OK, I admit it. I have been slacking on this blog. Its time to kick it back into gear. I have a bunch of work to talk about as well as the usual thoughts, art news and goings on. There are a lot of reports about the demise of blogging towards Twitter, Facebook and other sites. But there is always a place for longer for statements and essays on the web that are outside traditional websites.

I’m looking to start a tumblr and then link it into this site so there will be a more consistant stream of images feeding through here. Sort of like a visual diary. Does anyone have tips on how to do that?

thanks.

ok, I’m trying to migrate. This is a bit of a learning process so you may see some hacked pages in the next few days.

I have been working hard updating my site. Most of my images are now 25% larger. I have also edited some of the work and added several new sections.

New piece in Imaginary Wars series, The Invaders.

harlan erskine, The Invaders, 20 x 37 inches, 2009

This new piece is included along with two others in the upcoming exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center (PRC) at boston university: EXPOSURE: The 15th Annual PRC Juried Exhibition.

New Section: Beijing Olympics, China at a crossroads

After shooting the “I’m a PC” Microsoft campaign, I traveled to China to experience the Olympic games in Beijing. I was amazed with the visual ecstasy of Beijing and the blossoming of Chinese culture and power. I was also struck by the many contradictions and mysteries that were rapidly evolving right as they were hosting the Summer Games. The images that are up on my site are only a sampling of the larger body of work. More will be added soon.

New Section: architecture, midtown past midnight

During the first year of grad school, I set out photographing the structures of midtown New York. This project carried me through the year. I must have ventured out to photograph close to 20 times. I arrived in midtown around midnight and shot for several hours. The lobbies of these structures are contrived to communicate the marriage of space and structure.

I often get asked what blogs someone should read as an introduction to the art photography blogsphere. Until recently, that involved explaining google reader and then sharing with them a handful of blogs links. Now, there is a new solution. I just send them to this one website, The Photography Post: “The most current discussions on the state of photography.”

Almost a month ago on March 23rd we has a nice #artphotochat Tweet Chat with Rachel Hulin and the editors of The Photography Post (follow them on Twitter here: @thphtgrphypst and Hulin here: @thehulin). It was a pleasure to host them. The chat generated a lot of good discussion. I hope they can join in again soon.

Jorg M. Colberg’s blog Conscientious, which is one of the most well trafficked and consistently updated with original content has been dramatically updated. I really like the new look. Its like going from a amateur to a professional. Great job on the information architecture as well. The blog is now divided into two main sections: Conscientious, for the average and smaller thoughts and posts and Conscientious Extended , for longer form blog posts. So, go now kick in the tires and get some art photography reading on.

Props go out to the site designer and developer, Tim Gasperak.

I’m in the process of refreshing various areas of my website. Some are required by Blogger discontinuing their FTP and some of the changes I have been meaning to do for sometime. Updating my links is one of those.

Check out these amazing artist / bloggers I have added to my links section and blog sidebar below. Please contact me if I am missing you.

art + photography blogs
what’s the jackanory?
hee jin kang
heading east
we can’t paint blog
magnum photos blog
mrs. deane
wan.der.lust.ag.ra.phy
a photo editor
digressions
dade doskow
prison photography
ocular octopus

artist + photographers
raul gutierrez
daniel anthony st. george 2nd
johanna heldebro
daniel shea
annick rosenfield
craig stokle
john stanley
aaron storck arts

Well, Its taken me long enough to get it all up. But I have finally got most my my past commercial work up onto my site. I posted work I did for the Nike Dunk 25th Anniversary Zine called “Be True.” A great project commemorating the history of this iconic shoe I contributed to with Crispin Porter + Bogusky last year. I posted some shots of the zine and the portrait work I made of students from St. Johns and BET host, Terrence J who interviewed the students.

Recently, I also posted older commercial work for Volkswagen’s Carbon Neutral Project. I shot a ton of images of trees in a 55 ft lift above the tree canopy in Miami. The images were then painstakingly composited into the image below.

And finally some time ago I posted the shots from the first out door campaign that I worked on that was in time square. The Work was for the Anti-Smoking project, truth. I shot this on 8×10 chrome – which ended up being cheeper then a P45 rental.

Last night, I hammered out some new HTML pages with outtakes from last year’s Microsoft shoot. I can’t believe last year at this time I was finishing up a wild spurt of traveling for this project. I wrote a little bit about the project at the beginning of the year in this post: website update: Microsoft, I’m a PC.

Below, are a few outtakes that I have gathered together that were just posted to my website here. I might post some more but these fill in a few areas that are burned into my memory. Places and people that were not chosen to be in the final edit. This set is in reverse chronological order beginning with the afternoon shoot in Johannesburg, South Africa.

©2008 harlan erskine, Teacher, Kliptown Youth Project, Johannesburg, South Africa

After shooting early in the morning in Cape Town the crew bus ran everyone to the airport for the 2 hour flight to Johannesburg. Where we were met with a local crew and whisked from the airport to the township of Kilptown and their community center the Kliptown Youth Program. This Community center is part of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, so they had lots of computers for the kids to work and learn with. enjoy.

©2008 harlan erskine, Student, Kliptown Youth Project, Johannesburg, South Africa

©2008 harlan erskine, Ranger, Priviate Game Reserve, South Africa

The image above was taken at Aquila Private Game Reserve and Safari – an amazing place where the animals they have taken in to help heal and keep safe have a massive amount of space to roam free. Truly amazing to see elephants, lions, rhinos and countless other animals in this setting.

©2008 harlan erskine, Phil Walsh, Butcher, London

©2008 harlan erskine, Monica Hamilton-Richard, Lawyer, London