Yes, we know it's been a couple weeks since we had one of our Recommends features on the blog. EMERGE is sorry. Things have been busy busy busy and our worldwide network of influential and creative geniuses were slow getting back to us.

Luckily photographer, filmmaker, and all around fabulous guy Sean Dack has come through with a super-detailed list of photographers who are blowing his mind of late. Dack, a graduate of Columbia University's masters program in fine arts, is a successful artist working in a variety of formats, from music videos (Korn, Lopazz) to photography and sound installation. He is represented in New York by the influential Daniel Reich Gallery and in LA by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Additionally he has worked on high profile projects in collaboration with Liam Gillick, including the fitting rooms for the Dior Homme boutique in Shanghai.

Here are few photographers whose work inspires and impresses Sean with some commentary from Dack himself:

Markus Amm
Amm doesn't work strictly in photography, also working in painting, sculpture, drawing and installation. However all his work evokes a knowledge of early modernist sensibilities.
His photographs are essentially rayograms a la Man Ray. However, where Man Ray was experimenting with and exposing recognizable objects onto photographic paper, Amm's photographs are almost completely abstract. Light, for lights sake. They become sculptural and architectural whilst remaining two dimensional. They are something uniquely analog in our ever-intensifying digital culture.

Michael Vahrenwald
Vahrenwald, a recent graduate of Yale's esteemed graduate photography program, captures the inherent psychology of the contemporary American landscape. He hovers between the actual physical world and that of a more interiorized mental space. Some of his more intriguing images are of the flattened (read: "landscaped") outerlying spaces surrounding suburban "big box" stores. In essence, what you see is not what is in the image. A brutal man-made light that is illuminating the organic environment surrounding these centers of late capitalism.

Tim Davis
Davis's work is historically linked to what is predominantly an American, post-war aesthetic. Photographers like William Eggleston, Gary Winogrand and Stephen Shore heightened color photography to a new level within the fine art discourse, and Davis is part of a new generation of image-makers encompassing landscape, social critique, and unexpected glimpses of the everyday. However, there is an undercurrent, or more specifically an "undertow" within the work that marks the difference from the previous generation. There is the larger structure of "power" within the work, a specific political bent. Objects and juxtapositions reveal that perhaps we are less in control of our destiny than we think we are.

Jason Nocito
I had to include one "commercial" or fashion photographer in this list, so I picked fellow New Yorker Jason Nocito. Nocito's work has a looseness that is not seen very often in the world of fashion or editorial. He is neither the sterile, cumbersome studio photographer, nor is he the off the cuff point and shooter a la Terry Richardson, Jurgen Teller, etc. His work sways back in forth from an almost bleary eyed sunkissed haze of a style, to that of a dilated hypercolor where everything is in superfocus. It can seem "street" and "pastoral" all within one project. Fantasy and reality blended as one.

It appears you don't have Flash installed.