Crossposted from 12ozProphet

Robbie Cooper 2008 Jessica Hardy, Tekken, Dark Ressurection

I just learned via @swissmiss about a really great body of work created by NY based photographer and video artist Robbie Cooper along with Andrew Wiggins (camera man) and Charly Smith (First AD).

Immersion is a project that records video of people “through the screen” as they play games, use the internet and watch TV. In 2009 they will be working with the Media Center at Bournemouth University, on an 18 month study called “War and Leisure”, of teenagers and war in the media. Using the Facial Action Coding System, developed by Paul Ekman, we’ll be analysing the reactions of teenagers to war in video games, movies, news footage, documentaries and online video. Outside of this study they are also filming people consuming a range of media- everything from the shopping channel, porn, sports, to programming created for babies.

Watch the video on The New York Times Video Library

update:

Game Boys by Shauna Frischkorn. on right Matthew (Playing SSX2) on left Todd (playing Test Drive) C-Prints 40 x 30 inches

Annie Ok just pointed out to me the portrait series titled Game Boys dating back to 2003 by Shauna Frischkorn. It’s too bad the NY times did not cover this photographers work back then or even now.

From http://www.shaunafrischkorn.com

Game Boys is an ongoing portrait series of young men engaged in a familiar pastime–they are playing video games. For the past three years, I have been photographing video game players who come to my studio, sit in the dark, and play for hours while I quietly watch and shoot. The studio setting lends a theatrical quality to this commonplace activity. Sometimes, I watch the game to see a particularly interesting sequence, but mostly I just watch the game players. I seek to explore the popular culture phenomenon of video games by examining the “gamers” who play them. Because my work is rooted in the tradition of portrait photography, I look beyond the hype surrounding video games and focus on the players themselves. Traditionally, the belief has been that a portrait could tell us a great deal about a subject: a window into a person’s inner character could be found through facial expressions. Although the expressions on my subjects may appear to be passive, the gamers in these photographs are actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split-second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.