August 2011

Kramer O’Neill is a Brooklyn-based photographer, animator and editor. He was the 2010 Photo Urbanism Fellow at Design Trust for Public Space; excerpts from that series, Same Time Every Day, are now on display in the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. His first book, Pictures of People and Things 1, was published this summer, and his second, Till Human Voices Wake Us, a series of beach and underwater photographs, will be released in Autumn. He is a founding member of the strange.rs photo collective.

This series, Till Human Voices Wake Us, is a meditation on the joy of being in the water, and how that joy contrasts with the overwhelming power of the ocean. He writes: ‘We give ourselves up to these forces that will someday destroy us, feeling that they are our playthings. The fun is the thrill of a unique sensation: that of surrendering to a power beyond our own, of acknowledging our mortality while cheating death for a fleeting moment’.

João Canziani was born in Lima, Peru. He spent his youth avoiding team sports and drawing elaborate blueprints for things like minivans that turned into submarines. João found the perfect amalgam of art and engineering when he inherited his father’s old Pentax. At the age of 15, the family moved to Vancouver, and João used his camera to document the strange new landscape and get close to girls. After completing a degree in Psychology in Canada, he studied photography at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, executing slick, highly-lit fashion shoots. But it was his intensely personal images he shot in Lima that first attracted magazines such as the Fader and Travel & Leisure to his work, earning João recognition as one of PDN’s 30 in 2005.

Of this work, Canadian Cafe Bar, he writes: ‘For a few Peruvian “soles” the girls of Canadian Café Bar will talk to you, flirt with you, make you feel special. This is how it works: You buy them a drink and they’ll sit with you. Buy them a few and they’ll spend the whole night with you. But they won’t sleep with you, although some men have tried, and probably gotten away with it.

‘I met one of the girls after stumbling upon a “sexy calendar” photo shoot she was posing for at a beach in Lima. I asked her if I could shoot her sometime. She said, sure. I naively thought she would be eager to do it. Instead it took a bit of negotiating. I had to pay her. She took it seriously though, and offered to do whatever I wanted while we were together.

‘She worked at the bar for the same reason she posed for me, to pay for her school. Most of these girls didn’t do it for pleasure, but out of necessity: To survive in the big city after moving here from the Amazon, for instance; or to feed a child out of wedlock. These women came from humble origins, unlike the girls I grew up with before I moved away.

‘I left Lima, Peru when I was barely a teenager. My latent curiosity for the opposite sex to be satisfied somewhere new. These portraits are an attempt to revisit this curiosity. I too wanted to see how it felt to be in the company of these women, by making a connection through the act of photography. I discovered this brought me closer to a place I call my home’.

This work will be exhibited at La Petite Mort Gallery in Ottawa in September, 2011.

Wesley S. Cummings was raised in the environs of South Georgia where much of the inspiration for his photographs comes from. He currently resides in Atlanta, GA where he continues to document the ever-changing regions that remind him of his childhood.

Erik Naumann is a Fine Arts Photography student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His work is rooted in cultural documentary, and looks at the social and cultural contexts affecting representation and identity. This series has been selected as a winner of the Magenta Flash Forward 2011 emerging photographers festival to be exhibited in Toronto in the Fall.

Of this series, he writes:’In the summer of 2010 I spent two months studying in Beijing, and before I left I’d read a blog post about matching t-shirts and outfits for couples that were popular in Korea and becoming more popular in China. I thought it was kind of interesting and fun. When I arrived in Beijing I started to photograph a few of the couples and the more I did this, the more interested I became in the subject until it started to occupy the majority of my photographs. I started to notice other instances of clothing coordination in uniformed workers, high school kids and even tour groups wearing matching hats, and it seemed to me that it was all related in some way’.

Daniel Patrick Lilley is a portrait and editorial photographer located on the south coast of England. He is currently studying commercial photography at the Arts Institute, Bournemouth. This is a selection from his Wrestlers series.

Davi Russo was born in Manhattan and currently lives and works in New York. He studied film at the School of Visual Arts, and is currently working as a director and photographer. Of his work he writes: ’A camera is my excuse to meet, look, and collaborate with other people. Images are like letters that I collect, and eventually try to form words, phrases and sentences. The photographs in this book were created in a haze. These images are a series of short exchanges. Some happened immediately and some needed to be put aside until later understood’. Russo has just released his second self-published photography book, Turns. The exhibition and book signing will be at Munch Gallery in New York on September 15.

Erik Madigan Heck is a New York–based photographer who, though not yet 30 years of age, has worked with some of the most exclusive names in fashion, including Ann Demeulemeester and Valentino. Erik looks at fashion photography as an opportunity to explore various photographic genres at once, usually with an art-historical influence. His intellectual curiosity is part of what drives Nomenus Quarterly, a high-end cultural magazine he founded in 2007 that has featured artists and designers such as Dries Van Noten, Helmut Lang, and Jean Paul Gaultier.

In 2011, PDN selected Erik for its annual “30” list of photographers to watch. He has also been featured in WWD, American Photo, Another Magazine, and Russian Vogue, and his work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Ion Studio in New York City will host a reception on Thursday, September 1, for January to August, Heck’s debut monograph. The book, which has been printed in a limited first edition of 2,000 copies, features personal documentary work, images from Heck’s “Artist as Muse” series for A Magazine, and this collaboration with British fashion designer Mary Katrantzou, among other bodies of work. Ion will also be hosting an exhibition of Heck’s photos that will be on view through November 25.

Whether he’s shooting food, still life, or lifestyle images San Francisco photographer, Scott Peterson brings his unique vision and relaxed demeanor to every project he takes on. Scott got his start as a theatre director. After moving to LA to pursue filmmaking, he turned his attention to still photography. Twenty some years later, he has an impressive list of national advertising and editorial clients and he’s produced images for countless cookbooks. This is a new personal series inspired by Dutch still life paintings of the 17th century. You can see Scott’s most recent work on his new blog.

Supergirl

Photographer Alejandro Maureira was born in Chile, but is now based in Madrid, Spain. He received a Masters in Photography from EFTI Academy, Madrid in 2010. This work is part of an ongoing series, Heroes and Heroins, in which he photographs parents dressed as super heroes.

Darth Vader

Peter Pan

John Wayne

Zorro

Atenea

Batman

Catwoman