zingmagazine Project and deja zing Review

Coming soon in zingmagazine #24, a found-image grid project, and now online on zingmagazine.com , a thoughtful review by Prairwa Leerasanthanah of “Drinking,” a project from issue #9:

“Oblique is a word that describes her work, and obliquely, you get to the heart of it the other way around, indirectly,” writes Devon Dikeou on contemporary New York-based photographer Lisa Kereszi.

In zingmagazine #9, published in 1999, Kereszi contributes an editorial composed of black-and-white film photographs conveying just that. The photographs present a vague and candid scene of young adults engaging in the eponymously named title of her works, “Drinking”. But unlike party photos of today, scattered on social media platforms, showing hammered individuals fully conscious of their portrayal about to be frozen, shared, and digested by many at the click of the camera, the individuals in “Drinking” seem to be blissfully unaware of the shooter. This allows Kereszi, as the photographer, to probe into the scene and eloquently extract the experience of being there with her own aesthetic.

The subjects are anonymous; they could be anyone. Yet, they are eerily familiar, for Kereszi captures them intimately: from one end of the table, allowing us the perspective of sitting there, or in between two subjects seemingly in debate, as if we were included in the conversation. We can project the memory of a Friday night once lived into any of these photographs—the experience of nostalgia is bold in these photographs. But what is really going on? What is the context in which these people are placed in? Why are they gathered together in this instance? Are they the photographer’s friends? Read More

Posted on 23 August 2015