Vee Speers was born in Australia and has been living in Paris since 1990. Her portraits have been exhibited and published world-wide. Speer’s most recent work ‘The Birthday Party’ is a series of short stories linked by the theme of an imaginary birthday party. In a conceptual and technical departure from her previous work it is partly a self portrait, sometimes woven with threads from her own childhood. Speers also wanted to use the imaginary birthday party backdrop to address both our collective human experience of war and our need to retreat from it into fantasy.
Yu Xiao was born in 1984 in Zi Bo, Shandong, China. She received her M.A. in Photography from China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. She has won many awards and has exhibited in China and America. In this work, ‘Never grow up’, Yu Xiao digitally creates child versions of herself as a commentary on China’s one child rule and the intense focus on childhood that results.
Photographer Sarah Small lives and works in New York city. Her photography, with it’s enchanting people, animals, and candy colors, documents the human drama created when disparate visual elements and emotions collide. From her artist statement, “I examine human interactions with one another and with animals without reference to environmental cues or social markers like occupation, class and revealing context.” This examination has led to a body of work that is rich in such things as color and composition, but more importantly, examines the complexity of human emotions. In her spare time, Sarah maintains a daily diary of polaroid self portraits and sings in a Balkan A Cappella quartet, Black Sea Hotel.
Elena Chernyak began her photography practice two years ago while taking courses at Faculty of Photojournalism by the Russian Union of Journalism, along with working as a freelance photographer. During the last six months, she has been dedicated to personal photo projects. These photos are from her new series, My Mom’s Friends, which was made in her native town in South Siberia.
Where did the idea for this series, My Mom’s Friends, come about?
‘This project was made in December, 2009, in a Siberian town called Novokuznetsk. It is my native place, where I grew up, and I used to visit it twice a year. It’s a great source for inspiration because you find something new every time you go there. So my main subject was the exploration and comprehension of my native environment. My Mom’s Friends is one of the pieces of this process. I know all these women from my childhood years and I understand them quite well. So I decided to tell about them’.
Can you talk about the camera you used for this series and how that influenced the look you were going for?
‘I used 35mm film Minolta XG-M, which I really love. I’m not crazy about equipment at all. The camera should just be comfortable and simple. In this series, I also used a flash, which helped me to accent these amazing textures.’
The interiors play a large part in this series. Are all the women shot in their own living spaces?
‘When planning My Mom’s Friends, I knew how it should look and where it must be shot. In Siberia, people adore textures — silky, shiny, fluffy, animal-like patterns, cozy colors … Interiors are very bright reflections of local life. So the living spaces of the women seemed to be the best background for their portraits.’
Vikky Wilkes graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in 1998. She specialises in portraiture and documentary projects and currently lives in Canberra. Vikky has contributed to Kilimanjaro, DayFour and Rosebud magazines as well as the Colors Magazine Notebook Project. She has exhibited in Australia and the UK.
Laurie Sermos began taking pictures at age 9, shooting polaroids in her backyard while growing up in Randolph, New Jersey. She attended Pratt Institute and earned a BFA degree, with honors, in photography (1999) and later earned a Master’s degree from Bard College (2006). She also studied independently in a Master Class with Stephen Shore (2004–2005). Laurie’s work has appeared in magazines such as A Gathering of the Tribes, Four Seasons, Mass Appeal, Sex (Sweden) and Trendsetter (Japan). Institutional and advertising clients include: The National Film School of Denmark, Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Creative Resource Exchange and Wasam clothing company. She has taught photography for the University of Georgia Studies Abroad Program in Cortona, Italy (2006). Laurie lives and works in Berlin.
Saku Soukka is a Scandinavian photographer living and working in Helsinki, Finland. Saku’s photographs, diverse in subject matter, give a healthy nod to his Scandinavian heritage and provide a view into his active lifestyle. His work displays both a keen sense of color and a great appreciation for composition. Saku has had solo exhibitions at Lanterna Magica in Helsinki as well as the Northern Photography Center in Oulu.
Born and raised in Shanghai, Yijun Liao is a fine art photographer currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Liao’s photographs have been exhibited at L Ross Gallery (Memphis, TN), Medicine Factory (Memphis, TN), Jen Bekman Gallery (New York, NY), Center of Photography at Woodstock (Woodstock, NY), Camera Club of New York (New York, NY), Photography at Center of Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Shaluohua Gallery (Beijing, China), China Pingyao International Photography Fest (Shanxi Province, China), and China Lianzhou International Photography Fest (Guangdong Province, China). Her first solo show was at Adam Shaw Studio (Memphis, TN) in 2008.
Toronto-based photographer Simon Willms’ recent series ‘Minor League’ takes us inside the world of talented young ballplayers in the Dominican Republic. The images capture the determination-and vulnerability-of boys who have grown up with dreams of making it in the big leagues. Willms documents a pivotal point in their lives that pause between childhood and adulthood-when everything is still possible. The formal portraits offer fascinating insight into the boys world on the island, where they live and where they play. The final compositions are spare and direct, brought into focus with an old Graflex four-by-five camera.
Timothy Briner was born in 1981 in Chesterton, Indiana and currently lives in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of the Hallmark Institute of Photography Grant and this project, Boonville, has been supported by Cannery Works. Publications including the “Collectors Guide to Emerging Art Photography”, “Pause, to Begin” and numerous small town newspapers have catalogued his travels across America. Briner grew up in a small town in Indiana and uses his memories as inspiration for this project that weaves the images of six small towns into “Anytown, USA”. He spent a year traveling from Boonville, New York to Boonville, California making stops in Boonville, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana and Texas. He would initially camp out or stay in a low budget motel and hang out at the local watering hole until he found someone that would offer free lodging and an entry to the community. From there he would spend about a month or month and a half getting to know the citizens of the town and photographing them and their landscape. The result is a sensitive body of images of the people that exist coast to coast. Boonville will be on display at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (NYC) through February 27. For more on this series, see this excellent interview with Briner on Too Much Chocolate.
