Andi Vollmer

Emma Hardy is a photographer based between London and Suffolk. Sparse landscapes with unexpectedly vast skies and dramatic light provide constant stimulation for her photographic eye and a backdrop for her fashion, editorial and portraits alike.

Describing her aesthetic as raw but tender, Hardy finds beauty in imperfection, and polish in the detail of everyday life. ‘My photography reflects genuine instant, it’s about recognition of and surrender to a moment, catching it and letting it go’, she says. Through her lens, the most ordinary of moments appear steeped in romance and intrigue, as if her subjects are characters in a movie playing in her head.

This post was contributed by photographer Andi Vollmer.

Isa Leshko is a photographer based in Philadelphia. Leshko grew up in Carteret, an industrial town situated off the New Jersey Turnpike. She received her BA from Haverford College, where she studied cognitive psychology and neurobiology.

These images are from her series, Elderly Animals, which she began after spending a year caring for her mother who has Alzheimer’s disease. Instead of photographing her family, she found an outlet for her experience in a series of portraits of aging farm animals. Her luminous photographs are a moving expression of empathy, but also a celebration of life.

This post was contributed by photographer Andi Vollmer.

Petrina Hicks is a photographer based in Sydney.

Her images gently subvert the pervasive language of photography as it is used in advertising and publicity, creating edgy images that intrigue and disturb. While she primarily works with people, her works transcend the boundaries of portraiture as she finds beauty in perceived imperfections and renders idealized beauty strange.

Her images are mostly of adolescents and elegantly capture the ambiguities of youth. Whilst she uses digital interventions, they are almost imperceptible, creating instead a polished hyper-reality. These subtle contrasts within the image play with photography’s dual capacities as both a revealer of truths, and a perpetrator of lies. Hicks’ photography embraces the scope of what it means to be human.

This post was contributed by photographer Andi Vollmer.

Peter Lundstrom is a photographer and art director based in Sweden. Lundstrom studied web design and video production, and began his photography career after a bad snowboarding accident. This selection of his images were shot for Sweden’s innovative tourist attraction, Treehotel.

Located in Harads, a village in the northern part of the country with only 600 inhabitants, the Treehotel has made the forested region a touristic attraction. Designed by some of Scandinavia’s leading architects, the hotel, which first opened in July 2010, consists of five tree-rooms which were made to reconnect their guests with nature. All of the rooms harmoniously blend into the natural environment, with the exception of the ‘UFO’, and aim to make a minimal ecological footprint.

This post was contributed by photographer Andi Vollmer.

Kevin Twomey is a commercial photographer based in San Francisco. Twomey’s use of light comes from a background in theatrical lighting, where he learned the ability to control light to set the mood and evoke emotion. He further developed his creative eye studying fine art photography at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Twomey delights in raising the most mundane of objects to an iconic level. This selection of images are from his ‘Low Tech’ series.

This post was contributed by photographer 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.