March 2010

Phillip Toledano was born in London to a French Moroccan mother, and an American father. He believes that photographs should be like unfinished sentences. There should always be space for questions. Phillip’s work is socio-political, and varies in medium, from photography, to installation. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Wallpaper, The London Times, The Independent Magazine, Le Monde, and Interview magazine, amongst others. Of this project, Days With My Father, he writes, ‘My Mum died suddenly on September 4th, 2006. After she died, I realized how much she’d been shielding me from my father’s mental state. He didn’t have alzheimer’s, but he had no short-term memory, and was often lost. I took him to the funeral, but when we got home, he’d keep asking me every 15 minutes where my mother was. I had to explain over and over again, that she had died. This was shocking news to him. Why had no-one told him? Why hadn’t I taken him to the funeral? Why hadn’t he visited her in the hospital? He had no memory of these events. After a while, I realized I couldn’t keep telling him that his wife had died. He didn’t remember, and it was killing both of us, to constantly re-live her death. I decided to tell him she’d gone to Paris, to take care of her brother, who was sick. ‘Days with my father’ is a journal. A record of our relationship, and the time we spent over the last three years (2006-2009)’. This book, Days With My Father, will be available through Chronicle Books in May 2010.

Photo by JJ Sulin

Photo by Colby Bird

Photo by Mark Tucker

Photo by Amy Stevens

Photo by Gina Zacharias

Photo by Alva Bernadine

Susanna Majuri is a Finnish fine art photographer. She graduated from the Turku Arts Academy in 2004 and has an M.A. in photography from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. She has had exhibitions in New York, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Poland, Germany and France. She has won the photography prize Gras Savoye Award in Arles, France 2005 and is part of the photographic movement Helsinki School. Of her work she says,’My challenge is to see the reality in a non-traditional light. When I am shooting pictures, I have a premonition that something strange is about to happen. I follow the logic of colors, when I combine places, people and objects. To me the most important quality of photography is the capability to convey emotions’.

Didier Massard was born and raised in Paris where he received his Baccalaureate degree in art and archaeology from the University of Paris in 1975. For twenty-five years he executed commercial work as a still photographer for clients in the world of fashion and cosmetics including Chanel, Hermes, and many others. After the completion his series Imaginary Journeys, executed over almost ten years, his career was launched and he now works exclusively on his personal projects. His series are conceived from his imagination while drawing from our collective romantic and touristic notions of nationality and place. His exotic locales created in his studio have evoked Ireland, China, India, Holland the cliffs of Normandy. Massard works slowly, completing only two or three images a year, and ruminates that “each image is the completion of an inner imaginary journey.” He is represented by Julie Saul Gallery in New York.

Lottie Davies was born in Guildford, UK, in 1971. After a degree in philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland, she moved back to England to learn the photographic trade as an assistant in London, where she has been based for the past fourteen years. Lottie’s unique style has been employed in a variety of contexts, including newspapers, glossy magazines, books and advertising. Her fine art work is concerned with stories and personal histories, the tales and myths we use to structure our lives: memories, life-stories, beliefs. She employs a deliberate reworking of our visual vocabulary, playing on our notions of nostalgia, visual conventions and subconscious ‘looking habits’, with the intention of evoking a sense of narrative and movement.

Isabelle Bonjean was born in 1965 in Paris, where she lives, works and raises her three daughters. Her photography covers a variety of domains including still life, jewelry, beauty and cosmetics, conceptual photography and interiors. Isabelle’s work can be defined as avant-garde, modern and refined. She contributes extensively to publications such as Vogue Gioiello, Surface, Wallpaper, L’Officiel, V, Citizen K, Gloss, Vogue Nippon and Departures among others and has shot campaigns for Boucheron, Cartier, Chaumet, Helena Rubinstein, Lancôme, Perriet-Jouët, Louis Vuitton, Shiseido, Nokia, Chanel and Swarovski. In the last years, Isabelle has also broken into film commercials and directed a well-known advertisement for Playstation. Throughout her career, Isabelle has been successful enough to win awards such as a Silver Medal for Society of Publication Designers, a Jasmin Award for beauty photography and was chosen by Tag Heuer for the United Nations Fund Dedicated to Women exhibition.

Photo by Marnix Goossens

Photo by Koray Kantarcioglu

Photo by Yiannis Katsaris

Photo by Bieke Depoorter

Photo by Jodi Bieber

Photo by Kirill Golovchenko

Photo by Kirill Golovchenko

Michael Wolf was born in Munich, Germany. He grew up in the USA and studied at UC Berkley and at the University of Essen in Germany. He has been living and working as a photographer and author in China for ten years.  In 2007, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, in collaboration with the U.S. Equities Realty artist-in-residence program commissioned Wolf to photograph Chicago’s cityscape which has undergone massive development. Wolf concentrated on documenting the central downtown area and this series, The Transparent City, is the result.

Satomi Shirai was born in Tokyo and received a B.A. at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. She worked as a freelance photographer until moving to New York in 2004. She is now pursuing an M.F.A. at City University of New York, Hunter College. Of her work she says, ‘Since I started semi-immigrant life, I have experienced two worlds, with two different cultures and systems: that of Tokyo/Japan and that of New York. I came to perceive things in both of these worlds by comparing each one. In my work, the presence of certain objects questions my memories, and my understanding, or lack thereof, of the world I inhabit. I enjoy exploring environmental portraits with photography. I use architectural spaces and arrange a sitter’s personal items that can tell more about his or her life, interests, identity, and so forth. I hope to document the sitter’s state of mind with his or her facial expression and gestures in his or her living space, and try to create an experience of a moment that is in between everyday life and the extraordinary’.

Via BOOOOOOOM!