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5 Amazing Photos Of The Week Part 3

Contributed by Martha Chaudhry May 29, 2015

This week’s selections seem to defy any single unifying theme. It is difficult to see where Todd Heisler’s wrenching Memorial Day photograph of a pregnant widow lying by the coffin of her fallen soldier husband resonates with Antonella Arismendi’s cyber-age, spiritual fashion photographs. Perhaps, this week’s five amazing photos come together at the intersection of heartbreak and identity.

Migration is on my mind these days, as the plight of migrants in Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean confronts us daily in the news, putting into perspective the first world problems that we tend to grumble about. The transience of identity as people flee persecution and poverty contrasts harshly in the photos below with the fluidity of persona achievable in the digital age.

Particularly fascinating for me this week are images of the work from Richard Prince’s new exhibition called New Portraits at the Gagosian Gallery, in Madison Avenue, New York. Prince notoriously pushes the boundaries of authorship and art by shamelessly appropriating other people’s work, altering it slightly and selling it for tens of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars. His new show at Gagosian appropriates instagram photos from others, and without notification, compensation or consent, hangs them as his own high art. To comply with Fair Use laws, he has altered the comments below the original instagram photos. I identify with his proclivity to make use of existing images: I do so myself in my series called SeeThrough Daily, in which I shoot still lifes of images printed back-to-back in newspapers

My work process with clients often includes harvesting images from their own archives as well. I recognize that their photographs contain important visual legacies, journals of their experiences that I could never hope to capture in a single static portrait. Archival photos can be salvaged and ‘rehabilitated’. They can be integrated into content for especially engaging interactions online, or as components of bespoke personal art pieces commissioned by families and others.



This 5 Amazing Photos series itself appropriates photos from the continuous glut of images that confront us, re-interprets them through my own filter and puts them along with my thoughts into the world as new content.

Published in Beautifuldecay | Photo by Antonella Arismendi

Published in New York Times | Photo by Todd Heisler

Published in New York Times | Photo from AFP – Getty Images photo/JANUAR

Published in New York Times | Photo by Vadim Ghirda, Associated Press

Published in smh | Real Photo from Instagram by Doe Deere

Visit Martha Chaudhry Photography page to find out more about Martha's work.



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Martha Chaudhry

Martha’s portrait photographs and family art commissions have won accolades and multiple awards. Twenty years a commercial photographer in the Asia Pacific, her contemporary approach to business and family photography is rooted in storytelling and sought by clients throughout the region. As an artist, Martha’s raw material is mined from the existing global archive of images. Her most recent work explores the 1896 early photographs that illustrate the first edition of the International Cloud Atlas. Martha combines her skills in photography and fine art practice to create custom works of family fine art for clients incorporating their own photographic archives meaninfully into the work. Beyond family portraiture, these pieces interweave the journeys and vital stories of families or business entities, resulting in showpieces of deeply meaningful and personal nature. On these commissioned works, Martha collaborates with others in the creative industry on design and installation, to ensure a gallery-worthy art piece that assumes pride of place in a home or office. Martha holds a Master of Fine Arts (MAFA) from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (Goldsmith’s London), holds licentiate qualifications with the Master Photographer’s Association (MPA) in the U.K., and trained as a photographer in the US, UK, Canada, Spain and Singapore. Her studio Martha Chaudhry Photography was founded in 1997. Martha has participated in many group exhibitions in Singapore, China and Hong Kong over the past twenty years. Martha believes her talents and work can be harnessed to assist others, and bring awareness to issues of social justice. Over the years she has used her professional skills to accomplish deep work in Cambodia in particular, as well as Singapore and Pakistan. In 2011 Martha was featured in Channel NewsAsia’s documentary series Asia Exposed 2, where her portrait and storytelling skills were employed to draw attention to the travesty of child sex trafficking in southeast Asia.

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