Andi Vollmer

Jan Kempenaers is an Antwerp based photographer and is attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at the University College Ghent in Belgium where he is working on a PhD in the visual arts about the picturesque landscape.

Kempenaers undertook a laborious trek through the Balkans in order to photograph a series of these mysterious objects for his book Spomenik.  These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place, or where concentration camps stood. After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.  Kempenaers did not set out as a documentary photographer, but first and foremost as an artist seeking to create a new image. An image so powerful that it engulfs the viewer. He allows the viewer to enjoy the melancholy beauty of the Spomeniks, but in so doing, forces us to take a position on a social issue.

Photo by Hannah Whitaker

Jaime Martinez was born in Monterrey, Mexico and is currently living in Mexico City. His work is influenced by his many fashionable friends and surroundings. Jaime’s photographs have been featured in many magazines including Fifi, Subterra, and Rolling Stone (Germany).

Céline Clanet is a photographer based in Paris, France.  About her series, Máze, she writes:

Since 2005, I have been traveling regularly to Máze, a small Sámi village located at the highest point of the European map, far above the Arctic Circle, in Norwegian Lapland. There, I met quiet people who are very proud of their village and territory. They often have binoculars at hand, even in their homes, to gaze at these beautiful landscapes.

I have photographed Sámi people, houses, land and reindeer that were almost not here today. They barely escaped being flooded by the waters of a hydroelectric dam project that the Norwegian government planned in the early 1970’s and thanks to Sámi people’s protests and resistance was fortunately aborted. But I have also photographed a reality that will undoubtedly transform in the coming century, due to global warming and cultural integration. To me, Máze is an ambivalent symbol of resistance and helplessness.

Pride as well as suspicion, solitude and great beauty prevail there. In the most beautiful tundra of the Arctic region, I tasted Ante’s and Ole Ailo’s favorite season, when days get longer and temperatures become milder. The perfect moment, when time doesn’t exist anymore and night is gone, when they immerse themselves in their favorite activities: fishing through ice holes in Lake Suolojávri and riding thesnøskuter in the tundra. And all these hours spent with friends, family, outside on a reindeer skin, in a hytte or under a lávvu, talking, joiking, or lying down doing nothing, saying nothing. Just being.

Filip Dujardin is fine art and architectural photographer based in Belgium. Dujardin’s Fictions is a series of fictional structures created using a digital collaging technique from photographs of real buildings in and around Ghent, Belgium. Some of his architectural creations are structurally impossible or implausible. Some of the most intriguing buildings seem perfectly ordinary at first glance, revealing their fictional nature as the viewer registers missing or incongruous details.

Anne Hardy is a London-based photographer known for her large-scale photographic work of unusual interior spaces. She completed an Masters in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2000, having graduated from Cheltenham School of Art in 1993 with a degree in painting. Hardy lives and works in London and is represented by Maureen Paley.

Hardy’s images appear to be photographs of existing places but they are quite the opposite.  Working in her studio, Hardy builds each of her sets entirely from scratch; a labour-intensive process of constructing an empty room, then developing its interior down to the most minute detail.  The interiors combined together with found objects transform the spaces into unusual, almost dreamlike, environments which can be unnerving with their themes of abandonment and desolation.

Bernhard Kristinn is an advertising and fashion photographer centrally located in Reykjavik where he runs a studio and rental company. These are his photographs of Iceland’s Northern Lights.

The book on Berlin and architecture Schinkel in Berlin and Potsdam by Gerrit Engel uses subtle color photography – following the Becher School concept of photographing buildings in such a uniform way that each image and with it the building can easily be compared with the others in terms of both design and shape. He captures all of the buildings by renowned architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) that still stand in Berlin and Potsdam today, bringing them together in one comprehensive guide.

Of all the buildings designed by the great architect to the Prussian State – who with his own works and those of his students shaped the architectural face of Berlin in such an inimitable way – a mere 26 survived the Allied bombing raids that destroyed much of the capital city or were rebuilt owing to the severe damage. The book depicts these historical edifices in photographs by Gerrit Engel, with explanatory texts contributed by architecture historian Detlef Jessen- Klingenberg.

All photos are from Schinkel in Berlin and Potsdam: © 2011 Gerrit Engel courtesy Schirmer/Mosel

Claire Oring is a 22-year-old conceptual photographer based in Los Angeles. Of her untitled underwater series Claire writes:

‘I approached this underwater series equipped with an underwater SLR camerapac. All the photos were either taken with a birds eye view of my models floating on the water surface or underwater. It was a grand experiment. The main objective was to observe the properties of water. The way it behaves under different conditions, the way different materials adapt to it, the way light reacts beneath it, the way it filters out certain colors. I hoped a combination of that and weightless gesture would give the illusion of flying or floating in an imaginary daydream-like world.’