Dean Sameshima Art

Scout Tufankjian: President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama Inauguration Night, 2009 Chromogenic print, 2009, signed and numbered 1/25 on a label from Danziger Projects, NY. 20 x 24 in. (sheet), 22 x 29 in. (frame). Provenance: A Contemporary Vision: Works from the Melva Bucksbaum Collection Sold to Benefit Art for Access at Bennington College Scout Tufankjian is an Armenian-American photojournalist and author based in Brooklyn, New York. She is well known for her photos of American President Barack Obama during his campaign leading up to his presidency. She is also known for her photojournalism work on the Armenian diaspora. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts to an Armenian-American father, Allan, a lawyer, and an Irish-American mother, Betty. She grew up in the south shore towns of Whitman and Scituate, both in Massachusetts. As a child she was separated from the Armenian community in Massachusetts. Her knowledge of the her Armenian heritage came from reading magazines and newspapers that she found at her grandparents home. She started shooting photographs in Northern Ireland at age 18. She attended and earned a B.A. in Political Science and Government from Yale University in 2000. She speaks English and Arabic. From 2006 to 2008 she covered Senator Barack Obama's campaign for President of the United States, and was the only independent journalist to follow him from the run up to his announcing his candidacy through his victory on election night. Tufankjian took more than 12,000 photographs throughout the campaign. She released a book featuring a selection of the photographs titled Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign in December 2008, which sold out its initial 55,000 copy run a month before it was released. In 2010 she went to cover the Haiti Earthquake and its aftermath. From 2011 to 2012 Tufankjian went to Egypt to photograph The Egyptian Revolution. From this time she has Photos categorized as The Egyptian Revaluation, The Detainees, Along the Barricades, Endgame, The Egyptian Elections and Egypt's Salafi Community. In August 2012, Tufankjian took a photo of Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama hugging each other. The photo was taken in Dubuque, IA in Aug15th. Instead of focusing on the Obamas as political figures, Tufankjian focused on them as a couple. The Obama campaign staff sent this picture out on the official Obama Facebook and Twitter accounts the night of the election, 6 Nov. 2012. This picture became the most liked photo on Facebook and most retweeted tweet in history. In 2015 Tufankjian published in commemoration of the Centennial of the Armenian genocide, There is only the Earth: Images for Armenian Diaspora. Tufankjian took 6 years and traveled to 5 different continents gathering stories and photos of the Arminian people who were killed and displaced from their homes by the Turkish Ottoman government between 1915 and 1923. Tufankjian traveled to Ethiopia, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, France, United States, Hong Kong, and Canada in search of Armenian communities, photographing Armenian lives around the world. In showing how the Armenian people survived Tufankjian's photos capture everyday life, the from religious to the romantic to the familial. Works Images from the Middle East (2006) Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign (2008) Haiti 2010 The Haitian Earthquake, A Tale of Two Camps Egypt 2011-2012: A Year of Revaluation There Is Only the Earth: Images from the Armenian Diaspora Project, Melcher Media, 2015. A photojournalist's study of the Armenian diaspora on its 100th anniversary Commissioned work: The HALO Trust: 100 Women in Demining (2017) Ongoing Projects Karabakh: 2002-2020 Danziger Gallery is a leading photography dealer. they have shown Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson, Alice Mann...

Museum quality fine art print of Lady Gaga by photographer Markus Klinko. Shot in 2009 in London for 35th anniversary of Hello Kitty. This print is availabl...

Goldfinch is part of the In Flight collection, a series of portraits of the wild birds taken in the gardens of Mark Harvey's home in Norfolk, England. What could be more eye catchin...

Red Roses (Oxana's 30th Birthday) - 2007 from the 29 Palms, CA project 24x29cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label with ...

Trailer Park Sunset - 2007 20x24cm, Edition of 10. Archival C-Print print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory # 4791. Not mounted. The w...

I don't like it (Till Death do us Part) - 2008 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. A...

Blue Tit is part of the In Flight collection, a series of portraits of the wild birds taken in the gardens of Mark Harvey's home in Norfolk, England. Turning on the wind, this juven...

Rendering Memories II (The Girl Behind the White Picket Fence) - 2013 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Signature label and certificate. Artist Inventory #13388. Not mounted. Offered is a piece from the movie: The Girl Behind the White Picket Fence. Written and directed by Stefanie Schneider A tale told with blemished and expired Polaroid film about the hopes and dreams of a newly orphaned girl after losing her parents who lived in the Californian desert in an old travel trailer. -filmed with Polaroid film stock and Super-8 footage, overlaid with poetic voice-over monologue - this feature film creates a dynamic kaleidoscope of words and pictures, a dreamy tale that channels Terrence Malick, Gus Van Sant, and pages torn from a lonely girl's journal. (Palms Springs life magazine / Caroline Ryder) Stefanie Schneider By Caroline Ryder Travel up a bumpy dirt road in Morongo Valley, the trail strewn with rocks, and you’ll come upon a gigantic 1950s trailer in pristine condition, ringed by a white picket fence, with cottontail rabbits hopping among neat little rose bushes that bloom in spite of the broiling desert heat. Inside the trailer are period accents—a vintage radio, vintage fridge, little crocheted doilies, and dusty gilt-framed photographs. It’s a surreal home-sweet-home, an Americana fantasy as imagined by German artist and experimental filmmaker Stefanie Schneider whose work is so inspired by the desert landscape, she made it her home in 2005. “There’s a completely different light here than in Germany, a beautiful light,” says Schneider, whose property in Morongo is dotted with vintage trailers. They surround her midcentury home and serve as sets for her photoshoots or as guest lodgings for her friends from Hollywood and Berlin. “But what I really love about the desert is the desolation,” she continues. “The sense of hope for something that might or might not come. It’s easy to see our dreams projected in the desert.” Famed for shooting trailer park chic fine art photographs exclusively on vintage Polaroid film, Schneider recently completed her most ambitious project to date—a feature film made entirely of Polaroid stills (4000 images in total), the story set around her magnificent 1950s trailer. The film, called “The Girl Behind The White Picket Fence” tells the story of a broken-hearted girl who lives in the trailer. Her name is Heather, and she is played by model Heather Megan Christie, girlfriend of actor Joaquin Phoenix, and former partner of Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, with whom she has a son. Heather stars opposite Kyle Larson (who plays ‘Hank’), a real-life gypsy fisherman who catches crab in Alaska when he’s not surfing in Southern California. Neither of the two had ever acted before, and never in the history of movie-making has a director shot a film entirely on Polaroid film. “There was great difficulty shooting a film this way,” says Schneider, who, with her long straight hair, wide innocent eyes, and thick-framed glasses, conjures an art-house Gretel. “If I had used a regular camera I would have had 36 exposures per minute, much faster and easier than using the old Polaroid camera which takes a long time to shoot one frame. Also, sometimes it doesn’t shoot at the exact moment you think it’s going to—but that’s really great because then you miss the perfect moment…and often those are the best shots.” Individually, the Polaroid photographs that comprise 29 PALMS, CA stand alone, but together and in sequence, filmed with super 8 and 16mm film stock and overlaid with poetic voice-over monologues, they create a dynamic kaleidoscope of words and pictures, a dreamy tale that channels Terrence Malick. Gus Van Sant, and pages torn from a lonely girl’s journal. The idea to shoot a movie in this way came about in 2004 when Schneider was working with leading German director Mark Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) on his film Stay. She had met Forster at director Wim Wender’s birthday party in Hollywood. A few years later, Forster asked Schneider to shoot Polaroids of scenes from Stay as he filmed; he used those photographs for dream and memory sequences in the movie. For the first time, Schneider saw her Polaroids strung together in sequence, moving with rhythm like a flipbook, in the context of a story. When Forster urged her to consider making a feature film using that technique, the seed of 29 PALMS, CA was sown. She mentioned the idea to her good friend German actor Udo Kier, who also gave the idea a big thumbs up, and agreed to play the part of a mysterious shaman in the film. Thanks to her strong reputation in the art world and her Hollywood connections, getting talented people on board was the easy part (for a while, Charlotte Gainsbourg was pegged to play the starring role, although she pulled out two weeks before shooting commenced because she was pregnant and not fit to travel to the desert.) The hard part was finding the perfect trailer—and bringing it to the desert. “This trailer almost killed us,” says Schneider’s partner Lance Waterman, who lives and works with Schneider in Morongo Valley. After finding it on eBay, the couple drove to Utah to pick it up, the plan being to tow it all the way back to the high desert themselves. Bad idea. “We were driving down a hill with this enormous trailer behind us when we realized that if we wanted to stop, there would be no way to do so without the trailer crushing us,” says Waterman. Adds Schneider: “Lance was even giving me instructions on how to jump out of the truck if we needed to.” Thankfully the road leveled and as soon as they were able to slow down and pull over, they called a professional towing company, which transported the trailer the remaining distance to Morongo Valley. Filming took place in Spring 2011 and 2012. Schneider recently submitted the film to major film festivals in Europe and the US, and it will be broadcast in 2013 by leading German television channel, Arte. While Schneider may come from a long tradition of photographers-turned-filmmakers—Stanley Kubrick started out as a photographer, as did Ken Russell (Tommy, Women in Love) and Larry Clark, who was a controversial fine art photographer before directing smash hit Kids—she does not see her future in Hollywood, directing blockbusters. Not necessarily. “I don’t think I want to make more films,” she says. “The actors were saying they would love to work with me again, and were asking if I would like to make other movies. But being on movie sets is far too stressful, and at least with this, I was in complete power of what was going on creatively. That said, if this gets a lot of acclaims…we can always think again. One should never say never.” Film features original soundtrack with songs by Adam Weiss, Daisy McCrackin, Billy Harvey, Sophie Huber, Zoe Bicat, Max Sharam, Cheyenne Randall...

Max - Oxana's 30th Birthday (29 Palms, CA) - 2007 30x30cm, sold out Edition of 5, Artist Proof 2/2, Lambda Print, based on the Polaroid, Certificate and signed in front, artist I...

Vanishing (Oxana's 30th Birthday) - 2007, from the 29 Palms, CA project - 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label an...

The magpie is considered one of the world's most intelligent animals and a naturally curious bird. In East Asian cultures it is a symbol of good luck and fortune. From afar, they app...

'Max in front of Motel' (29 Palms, CA) - 1999, 20x20cm, Sold out Edition of 5, Artist Proof 2/2, Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid Certificate and Signature label artist Inv...