Posts by: Maja Daniels

She was fourteen years old when she moved to Mombasa, Kenya. She was alone and looking for work. Within a year she became a prostitute. Her mother believes that her daughter works at a hotel, and that the money the daughter brings her once a month comes from that work. She rents a single room where she sleeps, eats, cooks and brings her customers.

Sofie Amalie Klougart is currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark where she works as a freelance photographer. At the age of 22 she went to Kenya working for a humanitarian organisation and the Danish paper Dagbladet Information. These pictures were taken during her stay. Sofie Amalie is now studying Photojournalism and Journalism and works mainly with portrait and documentary photography.

Chad States currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. His series ‘Cruising’ was recently published as a book by PowerHouse Books.  About the series States writes:

‘With my photographs of cruising, the search for anonymous gay sex in parks and public spaces, I am interested in confirming and celebrating the sexual intimacy, however fleeting, that happens there. While a majority of the population see quick sex, especially among homosexual men, to be amoral and dirty; I see it as potentially romantic. The landscapes in which these men make sexual connections in are not dark and terrible places but tranquil and beautiful. When the way that people interact in the world is increasingly virtual I want to reconfirm the desire to enter the natural world and make physical contact with a stranger.

Born in Ukraine, Dina Litovsky came to New York in 1991. She completed an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts and she is currently working on personal projects and teaching at the International Center of Photography. Litovsky’s project ‘Untag This Photo’ deals with the interesting change that we have all witnessed within public behaviour and personal representation since the explosion of electronic media and the arrival of social media networks such as Facebook. About the work she writes:

Danish photographer Thilde Jensen came to New York City in 1997. Six years later her life and career was cut short by a sudden development of severe Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS). The urban life she had previously navigated with ease transformed into a toxic war zone. Her immune system crashed, forcing her unto a survivalistic journey, unravelling the comfort and construct of her previous life. The ensuing years were a lesson in basic survival – camping in the woods, while wearing a respirator when entering supermarkets, doctors’ offices, and banks. To her surprise an otherwise invisible subculture of people emerged who shared this isolated existence. Her photographs are a personal account of life on the edge of modern civilization as one of the human canaries, the first casualties to a ubiquitous synthetic chemical culture. Of her series ‘Canaries’ Thilde writes:

Nick Ballon is based in London where he works as an editorial and commercial photographer. He was born to the idiosyncratic parentage of a Bolivian restaurateur and an NHS chief executive from Petts Wood. Due to a developed interest in his mixed origin, Nick frequently ventures to Bolivia – a country he’s never permanently lived in – to pursue personal projects.

Since Nicks working aesthetic is shaped by a fascination with location and the hidden stories behind them, his exploratory quests brought him to the Chacaltaya glacier.

Nelli Palomaki is a portrait photographer based in Isnas in Finland. She writes about the making of her portraits in a dreamy, somewhat otherworldly way that I find very suitable to her images:

The complexity of portraiture is based on its power relationships. Each and every portrait I have taken is a photograph of me too. What I decide to see, or more likely, how I confront the things I see will inevitably determine the final image. But more than that, the intensity of the moment shared with the subject controls the portrait as we stand there with our grave faces, breathing the same heavy air, acutely aware of each other’s details. One is blind and lost without seeing his own appearance, the other is desperately trying to reach the perfect moment. The way people act in front of the camera is truly fascinating. They are desperately searching for their mirror-face that, paradoxically, only exists in their mind. Everyone is aware of their better side and even more acutely of their flaws that they are unsuccessfully trying to hide. They recognize the same in me, and this realization makes me feel extremely insecure, I need to hide myself from their gaze.

Ricardo Cases lives and works in Madrid, Spain. He spent three years photographing this series Paloma al wire based on Colombiculture which is a sport played out by middle aged men and pigeons in the north of Spain.

The sport is based around one female pigeon that is released along with dozens of young male pigeons that fly around her, competing for her attention. None of them will manage to attain a high level of intimacy with her but the winner is the one who manages to stay close to her the longest. It is not the most athletic, the toughest or the purest breed that wins. It is the most courteous and persistent pigeon that has the strongest reproductive instinct. The winning pigeon will carry home large amounts of money from the betting to its master.

Murray Ballard is a photographer based in Brighton, England. His series The Prospect of Immortality is the product of five year’s unprecedented access and international investigation into the practice of cryonics: the process of freezing a human body after death in the hope that scientific advances may one day bring it back to life.

Ballard takes us on a journey through the tiny yet dedicated international cryonics community; from the retirement town of Peacehaven, England to the high-tech laboratories in Arizona, United States, through to the rudimentary facilities on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia. Approximately 200 people worldwide are currently suspended in liquid nitrogen, with a further 2,000 signed up for the process after they die.