Baby Mohawk Doll, 2005 - Adam Bartos

Adam Bartos is known for images with intense, saturated colors depicting ordinary scenes that exude a quiet calm and often a tinge of melancholy. Though he is drawn to places with symbolic significance that almost have come to embody their own clichés—New York City, Los Angeles, Paris—Bartos photographs his subjects from a consistent, disinterested distance that reveals truths beyond the trope. His work examines things and places as they really are and not for what they represent. The resulting photographs speak to the movement of time and things forgotten. Bartos has published several of his photographic series in books. Among them, International Territory: The United Nations, 1945—95, published in 1995, illustrates the effects of time on the United Nations building in New York. In 2001, he published Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, photographs of the "obsolescent future" of the Soviet space program. Yard Sale Photographs, 2009, exemplifies Bartos's attraction to objects with an aura of the relic.