The inspiration behind Turkish artist Burak Arikan’s series, Bored-er, came directly out of his travels abroad: “Like most people who travel, I am sick of the visa controls, security checks, and all that constructed paranoia” surrounding a nation’s borders.
The photographs were created by simply pressing a camera against a computer screen. “With world flags on the computer screen and the camera moved too close to it, we are reminded of the problem—physically distinct but politically blurry borders between nations.” Yet the photographic result is an artistic blur of richly saturated colors and shapes that somehow appear warm and satisfying.
Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.
In her tender and strikingly understated series The Mourners, Melbourne-based photographer Georgia Metaxas allows us insight into a world of ritual, culture, memory and loss. In remembrance of those they have lost, the women in these images wear black for the rest of their lives ‘as a sign of perpetual mourning’.
Through the repeating of this ritual, or the continuance of death if you will, the mourners pledge to defy forgetting, de-alienating death and instead turning it into something inevitably linked to the everyday. The portraits poignantly comment on the relationship between memory, photography, and death—one always intertwined with the other.
This post was contributed by photographer Katrin Koenning.
We recently talked to Netherlands-based photographer Lonneke Van Der Palen about his unique style and approach to photography.
What project best represents your photography?
“I’d say that my series Souvenir: memories of a journey never made is the best example. This project was informed by a very personal point of view, and while working on it I didn’t have to conform to anyone else’s opinions. The iconic approach, to both people and objects within the series often poses as an example for me when I work on new projects. You could say that all my work can be linked in one way or another, to Souvenir.”
Your style is really cohesive, how do you manage to keep a personal and recognizable vision also in commissioned works?
“I think that the creative process of an artist is connected to personal tastes and a personal vision. I feel this should always be reflected in one’s work. That way, no matter how different one commissioned series is from another, you will always be able to recognize a certain personal edge to everything one makes.
“In my case this is strongly dependent on certain choices I make. I feel like I have found a way to approach objects that is very much my own. I also have a very particular way of working with colors and light within my projects. That personal edge is what clients are looking for when they enlist me.”
I like that Souvenir feels like I’m looking at a place that isn’t anywhere. Tell me more about the project.
“The series is the result of a staged journey inspired by the ultimate clichés among travel photography. The posing in stunning landscapes, sunsets, wildlife, exotic food, the indigenous population: they almost become icons.
“By recreating these images, photography enables me to visit distant worlds and gather souvenirs of a journey that has never been made. Why buy expensive flight tickets, when I can accomplish the same with my imagination? Using a camera, I don’t have to leave my house to experiences life’s visual marvels.”
This post was contributed by photographer Martina Giammaria.
David Burdeny’s graphic Drift series began while he was studying for a degree in architecture in Canada. Inspired by Mark Rothko’s multiform paintings, the series began as a study in landscape and space, using seasonal color and the horizon as the basis of the project. The initial shots were taken near his home in Winnipeg, Canada, but extended across the oceans to England, France and Japan.
The photographs are all of bodies of water, shot with film. The ‘blur’ effect is created directly in-camera using a Roundshot panoramic camera that modified the film internally while the body remained motionless. This technique created a horizontal ‘smearing’ of any stationary objects in the frame, similar to the effect a photo-finish camera has in sporting events. Burdeny found that shooting in areas with strong lighting and heavy contrast produced the best results. The final images are essentially digital prints, but as Burdeny says, although the effect could be created in Photoshop, he prefers to create the blur in-camera, which he believes creates a softer, yet stronger effect.
Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.
Dusseldorf-based photographer Andreas Gefeller created his Japan Series based on an invitation by Japan EU Fest. The organization invites 2-3 European photographers to Japan each year. Gefeller photographed the artfully abstract series of utility poles similar to past work, which explored themes on the relationship between man and nature.
The series consists of two parts—one taken during daylight on cloudy days, another taken in the evenings using only light from passing cars, street lights and house windows. Using long exposures to achieve a desired effect, the lighting illuminates the intricate details of each pole, so that each becomes its own separate, sculptural piece, removed from it’s original background and function. “I see the poles as a metaphor for networks and the flow of data, the proliferating cables represent technologies that are difficult to control,” Gefeller says. “The Japan Series is also about man’s relation to nature; nature turns into man-made technologies that grow without control. The cables remind us of a jungle, beautiful and threatening at the same time.”
Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.
I couldn’t resist featuring owner of New York boutique Maryam Nassir Zadeh,Uday Kak’s luscious photographs of Lucite sculptures. The multi-colored creations are made by New York artist Philip Low. Kak photographs them on simple colored backgrounds to highlight their transparent, jewel-like brilliance. Prints of the sculptures are available at Maryam Nassir Zadeh.
Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Carolyn Rauch is the Deputy Director of Photography at Newsweek.
We are on a search for the spiritually significant, the magic in every day. What will we find that’s worth passing down? What will we conjure?—Scott Alario
Photographer Scott Alario is based in Providence, Rhode Island. His series What We Conjure was made with an 8×10 view camera, and adds to the great lineage of photographers like Emmet Gowin and Nicholas Nixon who have documented those most dear to them. Alario explores his role as a father by making these pictures, occasionally appearing in them himself.
Alario has written a poem that serves as a fitting accompaniment to the images.
I don’t believe that the universe had a beginning, and nor will it have an end.
Both beginnings and ends speak of time, and time is a construct that will fail when our ability to communicate it does.
Energy moves in circles, time’s last moment stands closely to its first.
So how can it be said that we came to be, or came to be wondering about such things as the beginning of it all?
I saw you gain consciousness. It happened.
One day you weren’t, and then you were.
It was something about the sheen in your eyes, lasers:
that day they pierced me.
That’s how it must have been. One day there was just consciousness.
I like to think it was a family, all together at once, urgently, or it could have been a slowly building sense, an awareness growing a mutually shared question, or an endless list of questions.
We will live our lives wondering, and won’t ever know.
In wondering is joy, and wondering together is an ecstatic experience that makes the going in circles part seem worth it.
Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Matthew Leifheit is an independent writer, curator, and photographer based in New York City.
Marginal Waters, shot by American photographer Doug Ischar in 1985, documents one of the most visible urban gay beaches in North America—on the Belmont Rocks in the city of Chicago—during the height of the AIDS crisis. The images are multi-layered, they “depict a seemingly edenic world of toned, sun-bathed bodies, behind which lurk the spectres of AIDS and reaction.”
Undertow, a three part exhibition featuring Ischar’s Marginal Waters, his installation work of the 1990s, and his recent experimental films, is currently on view at Gallery 44 in Toronto, as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. It runs through June 15, 2013.
I wanted to investigate the icons we associate with girls to discuss why we assign these symbols in the first place. I wanted to place familiar things like horses, dolphins, and the color-soaked creations of Lisa Frank into the small bouts of real estate girls can make their own growing up. That’s why there’s a lot of locker school supply action going on—it’s thinking about the tools we’ve been given to express ourselves and how they look in different environments.—Elizabeth Renstrom
While she wouldn’t call them autobiographical, Brooklyn-based Elizabeth Renstrom’s photographs in Lisa Frank Blues are a captivating testament to her experiences as a preadolescent girl in the 1990s and early Y2ks. Renstrom’s tableaux of sticker-adorned cell phones and all things pastel are a glimpse into the complex machine of girly, pre-teen pop culture. Press-on nails, JTT, and Lisa Frank pencils gave girls in the 90s a way to relate to one another—a medley of sentimentality and cult-value.
This post was contributed by photographer Lisa Gonzalez.
When I first tried on her gray wig, the latex makeup, and her clothes, I gazed at the mirror for a long time. My initial reaction was to chuckle, but I started feeling a little uneasy soon after. The wrinkled face staring back at me resembled my own with thirty-plus years added to it. When I smiled, she smiled back at me. When I pouted, she pouted too.
It was the first time I had met her, but she was simultaneously someone I already knew quite well and someone I knew nothing about. It has been a year and half since I started photographing Kikuchiyo-san and I have gotten used to dressing up as her. However, when I think of what could happen if we ran into each other in a crowded train station or during a walk in the park, I get uneasy imagining her say, “I used to be you.”—Kyoko Hamada
Brooklyn-based photographer Kyoko Hamada steps out of her comfort zone in her latest series I Used to be You. Her work often consists of ordinary people and objects that she stages into quiet moments that explore various metaphors, but this time around Hamada turns the camera on herself to capture Kikuchiyo-san, the future version of herself. The series was born after Hamada spent time volunteering as a visitor to various seniors in NYC. When she discovered that none of the seniors she was working with were interested in being photographed, she decided to experiment on herself. The project turned into an exploration of aging, memory, and the different phases of life.
Feature Shoot Contributing Editor Julia Sabot is the Associate Photo Editor at Dwell.
