I think it’s high time I continued with my favourite 20 photographers from Critical Mass. First up, let’s talk about Susan Worsham. I’ve loved her work for a couple of years now, since she won an award in Blurb’s Photography Book Now competition. She submitted new work to CM, By the Grace of God, which looks promising, but I think she still has some work to do (editing at least for sure – she has 73 images on her site alone in that body of work.). Some Fox Trails in Virginia, her other body of work is just so beautiful… the colours, the light, and all that fruit. (These are images from By the Grace of God.)

I love her work so much that I even made homage to her image, “Fruit.” I was really hoping she would win the CM book award so I would get a book of her work, but sadly the finalists were just announced and she’s not one of them. I’ll say it again: sometimes democracy really sucks. Go look at all her beautiful beautiful pictures. And then you can read this lovely interview with her from last week.

I love the way Beth Lilly plays with our ideas of mental illness, memory, veracity and dreams. She opens with this image.

(You probably can’t read the text at this size, but it says, “My earliest memory is finding my cousin’s birthday presents hidden in a closet. Later, I asked my mom why she’d wrapped them in black paper. She said it had never happened – that it must have been a dream. Maybe, but she has schizophrenia so I’m not sure I can believe her.”

To me, this opens up a whole can of worms about truth and whether we can ever know it or whether photographs can ever show it. The fact that she’s photographed the very thing that may or may not have ever existed tells us we can’t trust anything about her or this project. And I love that. The rest of the series recreates dreams and memories in a super compelling way.

See? It kind of gives me chills. Her Oracle series is equally compelling. She takes phone calls from strangers asking important questions. When the phone rings, she takes three photos very quickly, then finds out the question she just answered. (I hope I have that right.) Check it out.

While I’m on the memory theme, I should probably mention Yelena Zhavoronkova. It was this orange in the blue mesh bag that first caught my eye. It was like a puzzle and I couldn’t stop looking at it, trying to figure out what it was about, what was going on. There is a clear reverence for the objects, with the careful lighting, that I know something important is happening. But what?

Memories in Red is a series of still lifes incorporating Zhavoronkova’s red school tie from growing up in Russia and other objects from her family. When I went to her website, the photos are accompanied by text, sometimes lots of biographical information about her family and the significance of the objects and photographs. I have to say, I think the images are stronger on their own or with just a sentence to give an opening. When they have all kinds of information, the image is reduced to an illustration. Plus, if I already know everything about the stuff in the photograph, then I’m not going to look at it for long. I mean, if I made the photographs and it was about my parents who were gone, I would want to savour and share every detail about them. But still… I guess I’m just glad my first experience of this work was without the captions.