Florian Maier-Aichen, Idris Khan, Brandon Lattu, Stephen Gill, Dan Holdsworth, Bettina von Zwehl

Photography 2005 reveals a dynamic range of artistic practices.  Some of the photographers are digital virtuosos working on the frontier of the medium in order to move it forward conceptually. Others exploit the original strengths of photography in capturing the flicker of an emotional moment or a collision of themes in the street.  Either way, the range of their combined work points to the triumph of photography - its increasing versatility, its continued importance as an art form essential to contemporary debate and even its pre-eminence not just in documenting the 'real world' but in tackling themes of time, space and the sublime.

Florian Maier-Aichen's (b. 1973) works are as much paintings as photographs.  He starts with large-format pictures of landscapes at their most awe-inspiring, then enhances and perfects them to the point where the viewer is mesmerized and perplexed by the play of artifice and abstraction, reality and fantasy.  Maier-Aichen has an MFA from UCLA. He lives and works in Cologne and Los Angeles. His work is in public collections including Walker Art Centre, Denver Art Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Idris Khan (b. 1978) creates multi-layered photographs, often of appropriated art and books, in a way that both augments the aura of the original and reveals the idiosyncratic trace of his own hand.  Khan's work explores the history of photography and literature, the beauty of repetition and the anxieties of authorship.  He has an MA from the Royal College of Art and lives in London. His work will be shown at the Saatchi Gallery in 2005.  

Brandon Lattu (b. 1970) constructed the photographs in this exhibition out of hundreds of negatives.  By these means, he creates a dazzling and uncanny sense of architectural space that comments on the world of advertising and consumer culture as well as the history of perspective and spectacle.  Lattu holds an MFA from UCLA.  He teaches at UC Riverside and lives in Los Angeles . A book of Lattu's work will be published by Leo Köenig in early 2005.

Stephen Gill (b. 1971) is an obsessive and rigorously pure documentarist.  He makes "photo studies" of experiences and occurrences that are so common that they usually pass below the level of our consciousness.  In so doing, he reveals the complex social world of the simple and everyday.  An autodidact, Gill lives and mostly photographs in London. In 2004 he had a solo show at Recontres d'Arles Photography Festival.  

Dan Holdsworth (b. 1974) has an infatuation with sensory deprivation.  For him, beauty is often characterised by a conspicuous absence - light in the case of his nocturnes, warmth in the case of his Iceland works and sound in his pictures of industrial acoustic chambers.  Holdsworth studied photography at the London College of Printing and lives in London. His work was included in the touring exhibition A Bigger Splash: British Art from the Tate 1960 to 2003.

Bettina von Zwehl's (b. 1971) work explores the visual minutia of people's psychological states in meticulously controlled aesthetic conditions.  An innovative form of portraiture, her work offers an intimate depiction of the co-existing strength and fragility of the self.  Von Zwehl has an MA from the Royal College of Art. She is German born and lives in London. She has a solo exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery from 10 December to 9 January 2005.