Posts tagged: fine art photography

Valley of the Meadows is San Francisco-based photographer Geoffrey Ellis‘ depiction of the Las Vegas that existed in the 1970s and 80s, a time when he says “the city was in a depressing downward spiral and the criminal entities running the city were slowly losing their grip.”

Adam and David

“Both David and I have Ocular Cutaneous Albinism. This leads us to have just below 10% vision with nystagmus (involuntary eye wobble), very pale skin and we burn very easily.  We have both had the condition since birth but have both adapted to it as it is only what we know. The background in the photograph relates to us because as a family we love to travel. Unable to sit in the sun, we have to find other things to do on holiday.  A few years ago we decided to try scuba diving, and that has now become a family passion. When we are under the water (20m down)  we are protected from the sun, thus can’t be burnt.  Being underwater is a safe world away from the sun and somewhere where we can forget all about our eye condition. (Even though we may not see everything everybody else does underwater).” -Adam and David

As a photographer, London-based Julia Fullerton-Batten could think of no more life-changing event than losing her sight. With her father-in-law slowly becoming blind, she was haunted with wondering at what it must be like to lose such a precious sense.

Picture You, Picture Me is Irish born, UK-based photographer Emer Gillespie‘s collaborative project with her 11-year-old daughter Laoisha, who has Down syndrome. An ongoing project since 2008, Gillespie says it emerged while photographing Laoisha as part of another series, Two Homes, that explores her daughter’s experience living between two family homes.

Luggage.

“These photographs function simultaneously as an acknowledgement to the ephemeral nature of life and as an indulgence in man’s unwillingness to give in to this understanding—his desire to arrest time, to counter anonymity, to leave something behind, to be immortal.”—Andrea Tese

Inheritance is a sincere yet unapologetic documentation of one man and the many parts that make up his life. A New York City native, photographer Andrea Tese has dedicated the last two years to archiving her grandfather’s possessions after his passing in 2011. An often daunting and melancholic task to surviving relatives, Tese sorts through her grandfather’s property with an acute anthropology, compiling like objects into various still lifes and displays. Though deeply personal, Tese is neither tender nor sentimental towards this abandoned inventory. Each categorized memory feels heavy with consciousness while simultaneously remaining extremely vacant, resonant with a life gone forever. Inheritance asks no questions and begs no answers, but rather acts as an intimate chronicle of personal identity through a history left behind.

Longing for a deeper quiet than our contemporary world can provide, Hungarian photographer Daniel Kovalovszky retreats into nature in his series Green Silence. The images are arresting in their surprising stillness, each unique landscape awash with a beauty and calm untouched by humanity. It is in these distant spaces where Kovalovszky seeks solace from the noise and anxiety ever present in city life. Recognizing our preoccupation with the miniscule and mundane, Green Silence explores locations where time seemingly stands still, anchored in place yet slowly evolving with the larger, more infinite world.

Far surpassing common aerial photography, Brooklyn-based photographer Zack Seckler transforms southern Africa into living landscapes pulsing with color and wonder in his series Botswana. Using an ultra-light aircraft, Seckler photographed the entire series less than 500 feet above ground. The low elevation allows Botswana to blossom with exquisite detail while painting a poetic whole, each image bursting with a roaming vitality. The photos feel fluid and moving, each creature dotted across a textural abstraction of vegetation and glassy waters. Here we are given an omnipresent vision, examining a lush world with fresh perspective when captured at this bird’s-eye view. A delicate balance that is both miniscule and infinite, Seckler allows the terrain of Africa to breathe free, each magical landscape running wildly into the blue.

“I am I and my circumstance, and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
— José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote

Spanish artist Oscar Parasiego illustrates the transformation of cultural identity in his ongoing series Diaspora. Inspired from his own move to the UK, Parasiego uses the notion of “photography as truth” to blur the complex osmosis of the many thousands of immigrants looking for a better life abroad. Each portrait is altered to be a silhouetted reflection of the environment around them, the person present but unknown when thrust into the alien world of a different country. For many immigrants seeking opportunity away from home, what begins as a practice of assimilation and cultural ease quickly becomes an evolution of personal identity. The former self transfigures anew, a stranger to both their past and present, uncertain how to hold on while moving forward in the foreign landscape before them.

Polish photographer Maciek Jasik uses sprays of limitless color to deflect from the reality of an image and express a more emotive interpretation of the scene before us. In his ongoing series The Cycle, each photograph is drenched in fluid punches of neon and crimson to highlight the loneliness and pain of young people roaming the desert in an act of self-abandon. Describing the tragedy of losing both brother and mother at a young age, Jasik explores the infinite landscape with his camera in a confusion that is both searching and devouring. Color permeates every image like heat rising from the rocky ground, the figures disappearing into a desolate horizon unknown.

With a love for the textural and the absurd, Italian photographer Giacomo Favilla and designer Francesca Lombardi team up to create the series One of Us. Favilla’s black and white portraits are obscured by the addition of Lombardi’s intricately folded origami masks, giving the sitters a strange, abstracted identity. Their poses are full of an austere Victorianism, ever unknowable and out of reach. Declaring that the “other” is more similar than we would like to believe, One of Us is a surreal hybrid of both man and beast.