WINk Magazine

WINk magazine is a unique photography publication that strives to showcase "the most striking, innovative and moving images" they can find. They recently featured the photography of Doug Fogelson on their blog. Read the review below or online.

Doug Fogelson’s Multiple Exposures

In inspiration on August 19, 2009 at 12:53 pm

Doug Fogelson refers to his recent work in the book The Time After as “soft activism.” By employing multiple exposures, he creates images that are illusory, contradictory and startling. His intention is to convey the complex human relationship to nature, underlining the reverence for the natural form. By layering images of individuals, clouds, sky, ocean, deserts and architecture, he explores the relationship of cyclical time, of people to their natural as well as artificial environment and, ultimately, the transience of human existence.

In an interview with Photo District News, Fogelson claims that his work is “about different time signatures…seasonal time, cosmic time and human time, and within each of the exposures, where they’re overlapped, you’ve got different time signatures as well.”

The innovative technique of in-camera overlapping was something that began to fascinate Fogelson early on as he explored non traditional processes. Inspired by the styles of individuals such as Harry Callahan and Barbara Crane, Fogelson began experimenting with a medium-format rangefinder camera equipped with a winder that is disconnected from the shutter, hence allowing him to control the aperture and shutter speed. Layering images in different locations, with different vantage points, creates a unique sense of motion and transience that gives his photography the “soft activism” that he intends.

Though his message is intrinsically linked with that of environmental concern, Fogelson’s work sets itself apart in that it doesn’t expose the devastating effects of mankind on the planet but rather sets the spotlight on the purity of nature. Particularly through the technique of double exposure, Fogelson hopes to make his audience “suspend disbelief [and see] that they’re not just seeing a flat thing, but looking at, remembering, or feeling the subject.” He hopes that by juxtaposing the urban with the natural as well as accompanying the images with the writings in The Time After he will be able to convey the “larger perspective” of human destruction.

—Polina Myagkov

Photo District News features Doug Fogelson

Photo District News (PDN) recently interviewed F40 Director, Doug Fogelson, about his unique photographic process and his new book, The Time After. Read the interview and view the photo gallery on the website.


Human Nature: Doug Fogelson's Overlapping Exposure Process

“The planet must echo with our ghosts, and all the things we did and wanted still to do.”
—Eiren Caffall, from The Time After

Earlier this year photographer Doug Fogelson released The Time After, a book that considers humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world through an exploration of lifecycles and time signatures, which he visualizes using overlapping exposures created in-camera. His process yields complex images in which the subjects—people, urban architecture, street scenes, plant life, clouds, deserts and oceans, photographed in different locations around the world—intermingle and interact.

Fogelson worked with Tim Hartford to edit and design the book in a way that adds another layer of reference to Fogelson’s temporal and environmental themes: The book begins with multiple-exposure views of the sky and clouds, then turns to the urban environment before moving into the natural world, finally ascending back into the night sky, suggesting the passage of time—from day to night, from the birth to potential death of civilization. Environmental writer Derrick Jensen, writer and musician Eiren Caffall, and art historian Bridgette R. McCullough Alexander contributed texts that further explore the themes of humanity’s relationship with nature.

PDN recently spoke with Fogelson about his unique photographic process and how it helped him create what he calls a piece of “soft activism.”

PDN: The book’s title and its content suggest a reference to the fleeting existence of humanity. Is that the intention?

Doug Fogelson: It is. It’s about different time signatures; you’ve got seasonal time, cosmic time and human time, and then within each of the exposures, where they’re overlapped, you’ve got different time signatures as well. When I do the overlapping process it may take ten minutes to shoot one image or it may take an hour, where I’m waiting for traffic lights to change. It could be an intercontinental flight where I’m taking pictures out the window waiting for some interesting clouds to come by. There are different time signatures in the shots themselves. But I try to be really careful in lining up the shot; though there may be an hour in the image it all seems to be the same instant.

...Read the rest of the interview here.

ARTFORUM Critic's Pick

Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture has just been selected as a Critic's Pick on Artforum.com. Read the review by Claudine Ise below or click here to see it on the website.


This expansive survey curated by Doug Fogelson of the Chicago-based independent publisher Front Forty Press convincingly argues that the apocalyptic impulse still looms large in the contemporary imagination. Complementing a handsomely designed hardbound volume published late last year, the exhibition of thirty-four local and international artists is eclectic in its approach, encompassing both the mythic and the kitsch aspects of doomsday thought along with its more subtle and idiosyncratic variations. Inevitably, perhaps, the show’s imagery tends to coalesce around crumbling urban wastelands, ecologically devastated landscapes, and combusting or exploding phenomena––a literalism deftly offset by the inclusion of hypnotic, Op-inflected abstract works that convey transcendent states of euphoria. There’s also a healthy sprinkling of eroticism, for what good is an apocalypse without a little end-time bliss?

Yet for every painting that employs mushroom clouds or an orgasmically cocked head, there’s something else that veers off in a less predictable direction. In David Opdyke’s drawing Undisclosed Location, 2007, eerily detached power nodes—air ducts inexplicably protruding from the ground like submarine periscopes—chart a winding path toward an empty horizon. Even works that inspire bemusement elsewhere fit right in: The sentimentalized aerial embrace of a nude couple in John Pranica’s Autumn, 2007, has probably never looked as convincing as it does here. Located at the back of the exhibition, a listening station that features experimental music pipes sound-based expressions of the show’s themes directly into the viewer’s head, where the most potent visions of apocalypse and rapture ultimately reside.

— Claudine Ise