There’s a great new talent in our midst. Though he’s currently enrolled as a sophomore at Seattle University, one look at young photographer Antonio Ysursa‘s work, and it’s pretty clear he’s an old soul. His intimate portraits and haunting landscapes – some can stop you right in your tracks -capture the myriad fleeting and beautiful dimensions of youth.

Describing his approach, Ysursa says, “I’m inspired by my subjects and my home. Whether it be my sisters, cousins, close friends, the maple tree in my backyard, or the hazy summer light. But it’s mostly the people I love who bring me the most inspiration.”

Asked who his photography heroes are, Ysursa responds (not so surprisingly, given his subject matter and aesthetic) : “Hands down, Sally Mann. She has changed the way I approach my subjects and the way I think. Her work has made me more conscious of what I am actually doing with my photography. Before I was simply taking ‘pretty’ pictures, but now I am realizing that it is much more of a personal narrative. She is unafraid in her approach and I aspire to be that way. I’m also very inspired by Ryan McGinley, Richard Avedon, Gregory Colbert, Nick Brandt. I’ve recently become a fan of Keith Carter and Margaret M de Lange.”

So how did Ysursa’s love affair with photography begin? “Ever since I can remember,” he says, “my mother took snapshots of the family with an old pentax, so I think this had a way of triggering my interest in the medium. In the eighth grade, I purchased my first point and shoot camera. I did not know what I was getting myself into, but I instantly fell in love. In high school, I bought my first DSLR, and it sort of spiraled from there. My passion for photography began once I understood it could be used as a form of art.”

*Above: “Gleam of Fires,” inspired by a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “We live in the flicker.” According to Ysursa, “I found those words very moving and powerful for some reason. We hang these lights on the porch over the summertime. The set up for this was very primitive: I hung the lights from a broomstick and had my sister hold them above my cousin’s head.”

*Above: “The Unknown World.” Says Ysursa, “This image has come to mean a lot to me. It is a portrait of my cousin Sophia who, since the photograph was taken, has dealt with various brain tumors. The images has become symbolic to me on many levels. For instance, her vision was affected after the removal of her first tumor. Ironically, the revealed eye in this image is the one that was less affected of the two.”

*Above: “Cocoon.” “This is simply a photograph of my cousin in a hammock; there is nothing too special about it. But my family has spent a lot of time in that hammock, so I figured I would photograph him in it,” says Ysursa.

*Above two photographs from the “Windstorm” series.

*Above: “Boy with a Lamb.” Says Ysursa, “This was … inspired by an Irving Penn photograph. I have grown up on a very small farm, and sheep have always been in my life. Every winter lambs are born, and I wanted to do something with that. On one hand, this is simply an image of my cousin holding a lamb. But it’s funny because meaning often emerges after I take the image. I can’t help but see this series as something representative of innocence.”

*Above: “Light and Lashes” “I took this photograph while we were camping,” Ysursa explains. “My cousin found a toad, so I wanted to shoot him with it. I placed him in front of a tree, under this soft sunlight; I took a few shots and the shadows were bothering me so I had him move. It wasn’t until months later that I looked back at this folder and decided to edit this photograph, which was an outtake. I wish I had worked more under this light, because I ended up really like its effect.”

*Above: “Into the Rabbit Hole”

*Above: “Maria’s Little Warrior”

*Above three photographs from the series, “Death of Something,” which Ysursa sees as a turning point in his work thus far. “I took this sequence of images the day before my sister turned thirteen. Conceptually, the images mean a lot to me, as they mark the beginning of where I think my photography will diverge. I photograph my family, and loved ones, but specifically my younger sisters and cousins. They are growing older, and I want to take images that tell of their youth and departure from childhood.”

*All images courtesy of Antonio Ysursa.

Brooklyn-based photographer Bill Wadman – the mastermind behind 365portraits.com, a portrait series completed each day during 2007 – has a playful new series called “Drabbles.” Marking a departure from his more traditional portraiture work, “Drabbles” call to mind film stills, his subjects and settings leaving plenty of room for viewers’ interpretations. As Wadman says, “You get to make up the story in your head.”

Explaining the story behind the “Drabbles” series, Wadman says, “Most of the work I do is more traditional portraiture, so I wanted to try something more deliberate, more constructed. Less about the people and more about the final image. When I’m between personal projects, I tend to experiment in a few different directions and then hopefully stumble upon something that piques my interest. So late last summer I was up in Connecticut for the weekend and took some pictures set in the back of my late father’s old Chevy, which was sitting in a garage.” Here’s the pic:

He goes on, “I liked the way it looked and felt. More like film still and less like a portrait. So I setup rules for myself. They had to be landscape (wider than tall), all with the same 28mm lens, all had to use some additional lighting (not just available), none of the subjects would be looking at the camera.”

“I put out a call for subjects … most of them are strangers or distant friends of people who knew my work and such. They’re musicians, and office workers, and furniture builders, and baristas, and every other thing you can imagine. All taken in NYC. Many in Park Slope, where I live.”

“Most of the time, there wasn’t a clear idea going into it, just sort of came as we worked, which made it fun. I think the connection between them all, besides them being technically similar in look and angle of view and such, is that each kind makes you say, ‘What’s going on here?’ or, rather, ‘What just happened or is about to happen?’ And most of them are not explicit, so they lend themselves to interpretation by the viewer. You get to make up the story in your head.”

Below are a few great shots from the resulting “Drabbles” series. To see the complete collection, check out williamwadman.com/drabbles/.

*above: Ivy Ermert

*above: Brent Whitson

*above: Helena Fitzgerald

*above: Chris Berger

*above: Carolina Mardones

*above: Portia Evans

*above: Frank Basile

About Bill Wadman:
Brooklynite Bill Wadman’s editorial portrait work has been featured in TIME, BusinessWeek, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Improper Bostonian, POZ, and others. Subjects he’s had the pleasure of working with include Buzz Aldrin, Malcolm Gladwell, Imogen Heap, Tucker Carlson, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Burke, and Mo Rocca.

Educated as a musician, it was only after a decade as an Art Director in the advertising industry that he picked up a camera. Notoriously obsessive and rarely satisfied, Bill drinks out of a 500ml beaker, prefers Windows to Mac, and perhaps most ironically, does not like getting his picture taken as a general rule of thumb.

*All images courtesy of Bill Wadman.

Let me be honest here: Sally Mann is my favorite photographer. I lived in Lexington, VA (Mann’s hometown) for about a year when I was 14, and that was it. That’s when I fell in love with photography – mostly due to Sally Mann’s work.

So, that said, when I heard Sally Mann was debuting a new series of work at the Gagosian Gallery in September, I was incredibly excited. With “Proud Flesh,” photographer Sally Mann turns her camera away from her earlier subjects – childhood, adolescence, life and death, landscape, history – and considers the relationship between husband and wife, turning the tables on the traditionally male artist-dominated lover studies, with a series dedicated to her husband of almost 40 years, Larry Mann.

Mrs. Mann describes their relationship as “love at first sight.” Of note, Mr. Mann – a once strikingly powerful man, who, as told in one story, was capable of independently lifting a heavy stone three men together could not – was diagnosed in 1994 with muscular dystrophy, an incurable disease that has weakened his muscle tissue.

There has always been a palpable honesty to Mann’s work – sometimes haunting, often beautiful, sometimes intimidating, other times heartbreaking. Take, for example, the photographs she took of her children years ago for 1990′s “Immediate Family” (some of the most powerful portraits I’ve ever seen – see images below). These provoked controversy for their unflinching look at childhood in its entirety – curious, passionate, proud, peaceful, and, yes, sexual beings. Mrs. Mann does not shy away from the truth – she openly embraces it. And “Proud Flesh” is no exception.

As she describes it in a recent essay, “Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between photographer and subject, even forty years into it. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is, how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another. These new images, we both knew, would come at his.”

“It is a testament to Larry’s tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures that I did. The gods might reasonably have slapped this particular lantern out of my raised hand, for before me lay a man as naked and vulnerable as any wretch strung across the mythical, vulture-topped rock. At our ages, we are past the prime of life, given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark god-like nobility, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. That he was so willing is both heartbreaking and terrifying at once.”

WIth “Proud Flesh,” some of the ideas and emotions Mann’s focused on in past work converge: sexuality, strength and weakness, vulnerability and, so importantly, trust. Larry Mann is her husband and lover, yes, which provides a rich, new dimension; he’s also a man weakened by illness. This element cannot be ignored, and presents a different level of intimacy in Mann’s work.

Sally Mann writes,”Most of the pictures I take are of the things I love, the things that fascinate and compel me, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to look at or take … I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.”

“And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove too far away from the light to do him any good on a cold winter afternoon, that Larry and I began this work of exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, and to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, two fingers of bourbon, the smell of the ether, the two of us—still in love, still at work.”

“Proud Flesh” opens September 15th at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. Aperture is releasing a book of the same title in coordination.
All images courtesy of Gagosian.
For more info, visit Gagosian.com

For several images from Mann’s “Immediate Family” series, check out:

Plus, see a clip from “What Remains,” the 2006 documentary focused on Mann’s series of the same title:

And for an interesting interview with Sally Mann on Charlie Rose: