#5 T.G. Tarnowski

"Out of Business Store Window"

http://ttarnowski.net/large-view/all/166048-19--/Photography.html

http://ttarnowski.net/home

While searching online for some new contemporary nature photographers I recently stumbled upon an artist with an interesting concept. T. G. Tarnowski is an artist who likes to document accumulating absences. In reading the home page of Tarnowski's website there is an article written by a New York Times writer that describes Tarnowski's work. It talks about how we all have places in our lives that we pass through. Things grow and change and yet we still remember them like they were when they were part of our lives. The article talks about a corner Korean Market that had closed and the writer had a hard time dealing with the change. The writer walked passed it even when it was boarded up and could still imagine where everything was in the store they used to go in there for. The article talks about how all of us carry footprints of vanishing places such as old apartments that we used to live in, Restaurants that went out of business and other such places. The point in this article that I find most interesting and that has a very good concept is when the writer talks about these vanishing places and says basically that these are " places we knew almost by intuition until they vanished leaving behind only the strange sense of knowing our way around a world that can no longer be found."

T.G. Tarnowski's work is very interesting. He doesn't have much of an artist statement online but from what I can tell from looking at his work he likes to deal with the concept of vanishing places. The image I chose for this artist that was my favorite is called "Out of Business Store Window". This one is the most appealing to me of all the photos in his gallery because it speaks the most to me about vanishing places and what was once there that is now gone. You can tell that a lot of people were once part of the history of this business by the multiple pieces of tape that are still left on the window. That means that many people must have come and posted advertisements and other things in this businesses window and that people in this town must have come to this store looking for information on things. I love that this photograph is so simplistic but yet it tells many different stories.