Eleven
This is Dek Unu Magazine. In Esperanto, dek unu means "eleven." Eleven images from a single artist. Eleven artists in eleven solo issues in each publication year. Dek Unu publishes the work of a new artist-photographer in each issue. The artist's work and words are featured in individual focus as the sole purpose for each issue of the magazine. Unlike other arts and letters magazines which might look for work from a variety of artists to support an editorial staff's theme, at Dek Unu, theme and imagery are always each artist's own.
Photographs of artists are an interesting sub-genre of portraiture. Sometimes, their portraits surprise for being non-descript — the famous photo of Breton, Dali, and those other surrealists in suits and ties looks much like a meeting of salesmen with no hint of the space travelers they were. But, more often, particularly when artists photograph other artists, there’s something uniquely revealing. The famous Avedon photo of Lee Friedlander highlights Friedlander’s “street” persona and his stunningly pale eyes – the eyes that found art in TV screens, road signs, and his own shadow. The Judy Dater environmental portrait of Imogen Cunningham “discovering” the naked Twinka behind a tree is a classic example of high-creatives’ imagining a portrait as performance art. The best photos of artists by artists picture the sitter, the photographer, the creative dialog between them, and hint at the mysterious process by which artists decide what “works.”
Unless noted, all images
©Artur Bolzhurov
This month, artist-photographer Artur Bolzhurov shares images from a years-long series of “psychological portraits” of artists — painters, photographers, a sculptor — from his native Kyrgyzstan. Mocking the idea of the conventional, flattering portrait, but undertaken with the same technical care and commitment as Bolzhurov’s commercial studio work, these character studies have a very sharp edge. Each of these portraits lives on the border between humorous and disconcerting; each revels in irony. Think of them as passport photos, useful for somewhat turbulent flights to fantasyland, where it’s the artists who make all the rules. Some are fun and funny – there’s a military officer with an alligator on his shoulder. Some are dark and disturbing — there’s a military officer with an alligator on his shoulder! All are provocative, all are both foreign and familiar. All of them confirm George Braque’s point, “In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.”