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Daily Dispatches: Nairobi is an innovative exploration through photojournalism of a fast-evolving 21st-century African city, unfolding day by day in real time.

Writer Mike Pflanz and photographer Brendan Bannon will spend each day in April documenting stories from the city, creating a "compelling, informative and surprising portrait of the city, and the lives lived by those who call it home." Pflanz and Bannon have a combined 12 years of experience working in Nairobi, which they describe as "emblematic of the developing world's perilous rush to urbanize."

Each day, the images and reports will be sent to supporting Universities—Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College, Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University, and Bakersfield College—where they will be presented in an exhibition that is updated daily so that students will be able to experience photojournalism in real-time, and to spend more time reflecting on the images and stories. "The students and others passing by will be confronted by a version of Africa that they don't see everyday."

Daily Dispatches: Nairobi challenges the stereotypical imagery of Africa that is often portrayed by newspapers and traditional photojournalism. "I worked for the past five years for a variety of newspapers and magazines," writes Bannon, "each of which has its own expectations for images, its own sense of what a story from Africa should look like. If you are doing a story from a refugee camp, for example, editors expect an image of deep squalor….In too many minds Africa exists as the land of lions and safaris and mud huts, or a locus of suffering, HIV, poverty and chaos."

By freeing themselves from these editorial constraints, Pflanz and Bannon are able to focus on a wider variety of stories—so far they have covered the Kenya Derby; Shujaaz.fm — a group of hipsters, artists and designers that uses a comic book, radio show and other media to address the issues of Kenyan youth; and have profiled a variety of small businesses in the slums and the people who run them. Ultimately, by treating its subjects as equals, whose "motivations, worries and passions are not so removed" from the viewers seeing the blog, the project creates not only a richer and more nuanced depiction of Nairobi, but a more respectful one as well.

Keep up with the project on the Daily Dispatches: Nairobi blog and Facebook page, where viewers are encouraged to comment on images, ask questions and suggest stories that they would like to see.

Conceptual artist/filmmaker/photographer Stan Douglas presents a new body of work that was created in 2010, but made to appear like it might have been made in the 1950's. Douglas and crew shot black-and-white digital images, which were printed with a Lightjet onto traditional silver-gelatin fiber paper, of actors in situations that one might have found in a mid-Twentieth centrury newspaper, catalog or company's files. They are a bit off, though, in a good way, and point to a possibility that something may be askew: a terrifying clown with juggled ball in mid-air, a set of Chinese linking rings that might (or might not) reveal the magician's trick, a "whatsit?" jumble of old-time wires and buttons in a wooden drawer - entitled just "Machine, 1948." With a wink and a nod to Weegee, the show takes you back in time, but keeps you hovering there, everywhere and nowhere all at once.

The press release says that "Douglas has assumed the role of a fictional, anonymous photographer to create a series of images hypothetically produced between 1945-1951. To do so, he constructed a veritable “midcentury studio” using authentic equipment as well as actors to produce carefully staged, black-and-white photographs that painstakingly emulate the period’s obsession with drama, “caught-in-the-moment” crime-scenes, curious and exotic artifacts, magicians, fashion, dance, gambling, and technology."

A fully illustrated catalogue, edited by Tommy Simoens, will be published by Ludion Press on the occasion of the show, featuring an introduction to Midcentury Studio by the artist and essays by Christopher Phillips and Pablo Sigg.

"Midcentury Studio"

David Zwirner Gallery, at both 525 and 533 West 19th Street, NYC

Through April 23, 2011

www.davidzwirner.com

In early 2010, photographer Alejandro Cartagena was awarded the 2009 Critical Mass Book Award for his project, Suburbia Mexicana. Mr. Cartagena’s monograph, an upshot of this award, is now available for purchase from the Daylight store. The book, which was published in partnership between Daylight Books and Photolucida, includes an introduction by the Curator of MoCP, Karen Irvine, as well as text by Mexican photographer, Gerardo Montiel Klint, and an interview conducted by Lisa Uddin. The photographs in the book have a purposeful geographic focus—the city of Monterrey, Mexico. By investigating life and landscape within the limits of Monterrey, the photographs from the book also manage to infer not just regional, but universal, human and environmental concerns. Read Mr. Cartagena’s recent interview with Daylight below.

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Interview by Trent Davis Bailey

Photographs by Alejandro Cartagena (All images from the the project, Suburbia Mexicana.)

Daylight: Let’s begin by discussing Suburbia Mexicana. I’m particularly interested in how you have thematically segmented your four-year project into parts. Those being Fragmented Cities, Lost Rivers, The Other Distance, Urban Holes, and People of Suburbia. Were all of these parts aforethought or did you start with one idea and allow the others to evolve with time?

Alejandro Cartagena: The first images were just explorations of the landscape around Monterrey. I was very interested in looking at land as a cultural and aesthetic space. I wasn’t particularly sure that my work would be fixed on the actual housing developments or the landscape they were inserted in. I think a big change came when I received a grant to pursue the work and I had to concentrate on a specific aspect of the expanding Mexican suburbs. I did a bunch of research on what was happening around these housing developments and when I came across a map with locations of more than 100 of them, I decided to focus on that—a meticulous documentation of these new "Fragmented Cities." After one year of photographing I became interested in the historical background of representations of such constructions. It seemed appropriate to think this way as it would push me towards rethinking how I could propose a dialectic view of past patterns of suburbanization and the contemporary consequences spawned from them. That is mostly how the rest of the works came about—a search for causes and effects of suburbia.

D: As you just noted, your photographs depict urbanization and development within Monterrey, Mexico, which reflects how rapid growth has impacted the region’s natural resources. While your focus is geographically narrow, there is a sense of a universal statement with these photographs. Is that your intention?

AC: Definitely. I was actually tempted to "expand" the work to all Mexico, still one country, but it was unnecessary. I am convinced that we (photographers) can now produce work locally and still think of it as a global issue. I also took into the work connotations of the history of landscape photography, aesthetically and conceptually, and created with this an explicit dialogue with broader issues about the way we have used land in western culture.

D: What do you feel is the role of a photographer examining the deficiencies of urban policy and expansion versus, say, a journalist writing about it?

AC: The journalist is still very much tied to facts. I can still start from facts but explore other relationships that are more intuitive or subjective. I would like my work to be perceived as a comment that opens up relationships that are speculative and factual at the same time. The journalist might not want open-ended reporting.

D: In using photography to comment upon municipal concerns, what do you hope others will take away by looking at your work?

AC: It is very hard to say I want a specific response from my viewers. I can tell you my work has many preoccupations, as you mention, that deal with the abuse of land, the construction of culture through space, corruption and its manifestations in the landscape, social injustice and division through private property, et cetera. I still feel art should be a balance of subjectivity and a political stance from the artist.

D: Speaking of politics, city planning is a topic that can often be fraught with pessimism, yet your photographs don’t feel overtly disapproving. While many of the images show telltale signs of faulty development, you still find beauty — and occasionally a strange, unnerving sense of order — within the urban environments in which you photograph. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell whether aesthetics or concept is more influential, or if they somehow influence each other. What do you feel is the balance between the two with your work?

AC: I want my images to portray an aesthetic sensibility that enables the work to be seen as a dynamic dialectical conflict. I can’t only judge this phenomenon as negative or positive—it actually sits very much on both sides depending on whom you talk to. My new work is actually a very personal approach to the "Mexican dream" of home-ownership, which is behind the Suburbia Mexicana work. There are always new ways on how to approach urban planning. I am still very much excited about how I can still grow my work to more complex readings of the city, the suburbs and their inhabitants. There is still much to be said about these issues.

D: In relation to art history, many of your cityscapes recall the sprawling and mountainous paintings by the Hudson River School, as well as the prominent skies of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. This is fitting considering both groups of painters were often depicting settlements, much like you do with your photographs in Suburbia Mexicana. What artists, writers, and thinkers have influenced and informed your work the most?

AC: A dialogue with the past is something that interests me very much, and so I am constantly trying to include things in my work that can broaden both the aesthetics of the image and the understanding of it. Lately I have been reading texts related to Visual studies—Brian Holmes, Ángel Rama, [and] Jose Luis Brea. I also look into texts by David Harvey and other social theorists.

I am also influenced by photo books. The newest ones on my desk are Robert Adams’ Denver, Trevor Paglen’s Invisible, John Gossage’s The Pond, Larry Towell’s The World from My Front Porch, Joachim Brohm’s Ohio, and a few others.

D: …and what’s next for Alejandro Cartagena?

AC: Continue the several projects I have been working on since 2009 and hopefully finish one of them by summer. Finish my Masters degree. Start a new project I’ve wanted to start and have fun with all of it.

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For more information about Alejandro and his work, visit: http://alejandrocartegena.com

The Cape Farewell project, created in 2001 by artist David Buckland, is a multidisciplinary project that brings together leading artists, writers, scientists, educators, and media in an ongoing attempt to instigate a cultural response to climate change. At the core of its mission is to create stories and art with a narrative of how climate change is impacting the wilderness and mankind, based on the notion that artists can engage the public through creative insight and vision: "The arts are a core part of the Cape Farewell project: one salient image, a novel or song can speak louder than volumes of scientific data and engage the public's imagination in an immediate way."

Their current exhibition, U-n-f-o-l-d, is a delightful mixture of fiction and non-fiction; the photography and other artwork in the installation treads the waters between documentary and fine art, embracing both the subjective, personal response and the traditional role of documentary to bring about social change.

This week marks Katy Grannan's East Coast debut of her first foray into the moving image: The Believers, a three-channel video installation that stars three performers who Grannan has been working with over time. A twin show around the corner will feature a series of color photographs, Boulevard, made with a medium-format digital camera often in the harsh hot light of the California sun. The subjects are characters she meets on the street, those fated to the mostly untrafficked sidewalk in a land full of dreams and dreamers otherwise safely tucked away in their cars. The shows open later this week at 6 p.m. on April 1st , and are on view through the 30th at Salon 94 Freeman's and Salon 94 Bowery, both on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at One Freeman's Alley and 243 Bowery, respectively. The galleries are open Tuesday afternoons, and Wednesdays through Saturdays, regular gallery hours. http://www.salon94.com/exhibitions/81/index.htm#current Stay tuned, as there is much more to report once this writer has seen the shows in a few weeks...