Brandt, who has long described himself as “a little bit messy and experimental,” produces large-scale photographs that hail back to the more labor-intensive processes of 19th-century photography’s origins, often incorporating the physical matter of the subject itself in the pursuit of conflating subject and material.
Ruud van Empel’s striking large-format photomontages apply painterly precision and detail to a medium often derided in contemporary fine art photography — the digital composite. His youthful subjects and lush settings do not exist outside of van Empel’s Photoshop workspace, where the artist utilizes his own photographs of models in different settings and a large collection of images he has collected over time to create complex portraits of startling realism, marked by a tinge of the uncanny.
