What goes on behind closed doors? It’s a curious thought that might pass our minds when walking through familiar or alien territory, though we seldom get a glimpse inside the bedrooms of strangers. And yet the bedroom—a space synonymous with intimacy—may well offer the best impression of a person stripped of all the personas that we wear in public.
For the past two and a half years, Maine photographer Barbara Peacock has been travelling across the United States photographing people in their bedrooms. Her ongoing series American Bedroom is a sensitive, anthropological portrait of individuals, couples and families in the private dwellings we seldom see; the possessions with which they’ve surrounded themselves provide insight into their character, while the familiar environment and unthreatening presence of the photographer allows them to drop their guard. Each image is accompanied with a quote from the person portrayed, providing the viewer with a deeper sense of the subject’s character.
To witness the myriad of different cultures and personalities portrayed by Beacock that coexist in this vast territory—and vary regionally and based on factors such as class—the image of a homogenous cultural landscape that one might associated with this capitalist country is shattered.
Indonesian photographer Aji Susanto Anom still carries with him the stories he heard as a child. In Javanese mythology, he says, the river is where people cast off their bad luck. When people make offerings here, evil spirits and unfortunate thoughts are thrown out into the water and left behind. At night, they linger there like ghosts.
Walking down the stairs that lead from a concept store in Bastille, Paris, into Totem Collective’s showcase of Ren Hang’s last commission for them creates an unexpected impression. Little more than a week since his death, I had expected a different mood from the scene that greeted me: a well lit underground space, blasting pop music, filled with glamorous, almost exclusively young people. There is a sizeable queue for a bar making free drinks, and posters being given away. There’s a palpable buzz, an air of excitement; not the kind of memorial you might expect.
Valentina Del Aguila Vasquez, Iquitos, Peru
Valentina Del Aguila Vasquez is considered to be the most beautiful woman in the Amazon. She won the Miss Amazon Confraternity beauty pageant in Leticia, in which Brazilians, Colombians, and Peruvians all participate. The first prize includes an envelope with U.S. $1,000, an orthodontic treatment, and cosmetic surgery at a reputable clinic in Bogota.
Turtle shell cap, Bolivar community, Peru
After the meal, the turtle shell becomes a toy for the children. Turtle meat is a favorite dish in the communities along the banks of the Rio Curaray.
Yann Gross was the winner of the first LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award at Arles 2015, and the result was the publication, by Aperture Books, of his first photobook The Jungle Book: Contemporary Stories of the Amazon and its Fringe. As the title describes, Gross’ photographs explore the clusters of community that spread along the length of the gargantuan South American river. As the introduction of the book explains, the Amazon is an agglomeration of cultures and peoples due to its length and the resulting dispersal: “this land” – the Amazon as monolithic whole – “doesn’t exist.” Gross’ project is witness to the extraordinary breadth of the Amazon’s component parts, the fragments that make up a wide and ever-shifting entity.
“I just took pictures, always finding some beauty in the dark side,” Belgian photographer MagLau says of his three year documentation of fetish parties throughout Europe (Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam) and Japan (Tokyo).
Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most prolific artists worldwide, having published over 350 photobooks in Japan and internationally. For the Japanese artist, “photography is, above all, a way to exist”, and this is evidenced in his work; equal attention is given to a nondescript street scene as to a rope-bound woman. To view his photographs is to feel oneself immersed in his world, one which is by turns hilarious, banal, disturbing and tender.
BJ Robinson, 1983 © George Dureau, Courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery and Higher Pictures
Roosevelt Singleton, 1974 © George Dureau, Courtesy Arthur Roger Gallery and Higher Pictures
“My photographs are family pictures. Very sentimental,” the late photographer George Dureau explained to journalist Jack Fritscher in 2005. He called his models, discovered in the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans, his “darlings.” His darlings were street hustlers, outcasts, and those with disabilities. Some were his lovers.
Lilla Kneeling
Jessica and Kurt
New York City-based photographer Michael Dweck remembers vividly the time he went to Montauk at the age of seventeen. It was 1975, and there was the sand, the surf, and girls who, in his words, “looked, well, like they didn’t belong on Long Island.” Visiting Montauk was like falling in love for the first time a thousand times, and he would return to the beach some thirty years later, publishing his book The End in 2004.
Looking into the eyes of our own lover, can we really ever fully understand what they are thinking beyond their outward appearance? Hamburg-based photographer Hayley Austin’s fascination with the connection between corporeality and love stems from her own experiences during her early to mid-twenties, a period when sexual desire and attraction pervaded her life. Driven by a personal longing to freeze time and capture those fugitive moments of desire which fade as quickly as they arrive, in 2013 she turned her lens towards young couples whose love was relatively fresh. The resulting series Narratives of Desire offers the viewer a glimpse into some of the most intimate moments between young lovers in their private spaces.
Described as one of the “rising stars of Chinese photography” by Ai Wewei in 2012, Beijing-based Luo Yang is gaining international recognition for her candid photographs of women in contemporary China. GIRLS began in 2007 as a deeply personal series, for in her subjects, Luo observed emotions and questions very similar to her own. The intimate photographs that constitute GIRLS alternate between carefully staged portraits depicting an emerging Chinese subculture that defies our expectations, and snapshots that favour a raw, blurred aesthetic. The photographer simultaneously manages to convey the girls’ defiance and ultra-cool composure, alongside their vulnerability, shyness and insecurities. Luo elaborates: “I can’t say that they represent a whole new generation of women in China, but they are absolutely a group of women who represent independence and freedom”.
