┐ Will Jennings └

Posted on November 5, 2012 by N

“As an intuitive response to the sudden death of my mother last summer I walked down the Suffolk coast, reconsidering the landscape of my childhood through the eyes of an adult, mourner and artist.

Concrete cubes sporadically emerged along the route, sole man-made interjections in a landscape of permanent flux. As I walked through fog they offered perspective, their staccato rhythm implied passing time, their angular form suggested a grid and attempted rationalisation of chaotic, uncontrollable nature.

I read the cubes as monolithic stelae. Blank vessels into which I store memories, emotions and idea – vessels as fallible as both body and mind, also falling prey to the forces of nature and time.” Will‘s statement

more of Will’s work here

┐ roots & fruits #12 – Gonçalo Figueiredo └

Posted on October 25, 2012 by N

These portraits are part of a series made back in the Winter of 2009 and it depicts a group of students from the Photography Department to which Gonçalo also was part, both as a technitian and as a student. In December, confronted with the lack of conditions and materials the course lacked to offer, they decided to camp at school and endure a silent and peaceful protest until they were heard.

“Let us now consider the time exposure, of which the photo-portrait is a concrete instance. Whether of a live or dead person, the portrait is funerary in nature, a monument. Acting as a reminder of times that have died away, it sets up landmarks of the past. This means it reverses the paradox of the snapshot, series to series. Whereas the snapshot refers to the fluency of time without conveying it, the time exposure petrifies the time of the referent and denotes it as departed. Reciprocally, whereas the former freezes the superficial time of the image, the latter releases it. It liberates an autonomous and recurrent temporality, which is the time of remembrance. While the portrait as Denkmal, monument, points to a state in a life that is gone forever, it also offers itself as the possibility of staging that life again and again in memory.

An asymmetrical reciprocity joins the snapshot to the time exposure: whereas the snapshot stole a life it could not return, the time exposure expresses a life that it never received. The time exposure doesn’t refer to life as process, evolution, diachrony, as does the snapshot. It deals with an imaginary life that is autonomous, discontinuous, and reversible, because this life has no location other than the surface of the photograph. By the same token it doesn’t frame that kind of surface-death characteristic of the snapshot, which is the shock of time splitting into not anymore and not yet. It refers to death as the state of what has been: the fixity and defection of time, its absolute zero.

(…)

Time exposure implies the antithesis of trauma. Far from blocking speech, it welcomes it openly. Only in time exposure (portrait, landscape, still life, etc.) may photography appear with the continuity of nature. The portrait, for example, may look awkward, but not artificial, as would be the case of a snapshot of an athlete caught in the midst of a jump. When continuity and nature are perceived, speech is apt to body forth that perception in the form of a narrative that meshes the imaginary with the symbolic and organizes our mediation with reality.

The word now, used to describe the kind of temporality involved in time exposures, doesn’t refer to actual time, since it is abstracted from its natural link with here: hic et nunc. It is to be understood as a pause in time, charged with a potential actualization, which will eventually be carried out by speech (or memory as interior speech), and is most probably rooted in the time-consuming act of looking.” excerpt from the article Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox, by Thierry de Duve, published in October, Vol. 5, Photography (Summer, 1978), pp. 113-125

More of Gonçalo’s work here

┐ roots & fruits #9 – Miguel Godinho └

Posted on October 20, 2012 by N

Miguel Godinho’s (b. 1984) photography is not easy to describe, not because it is abstract, overly conceptualized or devoided of content, but because it is simple (albeit symbolic) and unpretentious.

Miguel’s body of work fluctuates between intimate moments and a sterile portrait (in the composition) of the world around him. The domestic scenes reveal some kind of obsession with the question of identity, dependent on family history and memory. On the other hand, the outdoor photographs accentuate the distance between nature/landscape and an environment built/invaded by man.

While the images vary from landscapes, portraits and still life, the empty spaces within the narrative allow us not only to understand the author’s personal journey as well as how it forms part of a sociological portrait of his country and its culture.

More of Miguel’s work here

┐ Scott Alario └

Posted on October 19, 2012 by N

“I’m in the process of building a folk tale for my daughter. It is a paternal inevitability to make up stories for one’s children, and for me, doing so has recently become the passion in my creative practice.

There are two photographs I remember from my childhood that play directly into this work. The ﬁrst is a studio portrait of my father’s mother, made immediately before leaving Italy to immigrate to the United States. We would call the photograph the “gypsy picture” while I was growing up, and in doing so the image has taken on a magic, epic role. In the picture, my grandmother stands stoic as an eight year old. Her timeless eyes represent so much to me. In her face is the face of the 100-year-old woman I know now and it’s the face of my daughter. It is one of wisdom and will, and it ﬁlls me with awe.

The second picture that I carry in my mind is a portrait of a Sami family, reindeer herders of northern Scandinavia. Magic ﬂ ows out of this image, too. It comes from my mother’s mom, whose Norwegian bloodline is only ﬁ ctitiously connected to the Sami. Although I imagine being related to these people, the image hangs in the house like an offering to our ancestry. I see the face of my late uncle in the proud, piped and weathered hero of the portrait. Having a child has got me thinking about the importance of cultural myth and ideas of ancestral wisdom. In my baby I can see our connection to the past, as well as the potential to leave bits of ourselves to posterity.

My recent work deals with my fear of failing as a father, and attempts to make something of the successful moments. I use photography to engage my daughter. Together we construct images, she leads at times, and at others I beg her to stay still. She has become, simultaneously, the impetus, a participant, and the audience. Ideas for pictures come through play; dressing in costumes we make, becoming characters, going back into nature, erecting forts, and telling stories. Inspired by those two relic-like portraits, and driven by a deep love, these images are a collaboration with my whole family through time.”

Scott’s statement. More of his great work here

┐ roots & fruits #8 – Diogo Simões └

Posted on October 18, 2012 by N

Influenced by current-events (this is a circumstantial analogy) Diogo’s (b.1988, Miratejo, PT) photographs remind me of a kind of portrait of youth that makes me think of Gus van Sant’s universe. If I had seen this series a few months ago I would probably relate it to projects within the realm of the medium itself and think about the meaning of portrait and nostalgia in the history of photography.
Besides Gus van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant, I think of Mathieu Kassovitz’s works La Haine and Assassin(s). Then I’m reminded of a bunch of texts I read last year about riots in France and in the UK and I reread a few . Somehow the associations are too subjective to be treated slightly and I give up. Now I’m looking at these pictures again and I keep thinking youth, nostalgia, ambiguity, inconsequence, insurrection and rebellion. There’s a sense of coolness and fatalism in the air and that’s what brings me back to the suspended effect a film still can have when it hangs over your head.
Finally, these associations lead me to the text that follows and hopefully it will all make sense:

“Elephant depicts a world untethered from certainties and authority, and in this way it can be seen to reflect postmodern anxieties. Slavoj Zizek’s comment offers a relevant critical perspective. The quote cited at the beginning of this essay [below], taken from an interview at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001, is Zizek’s response to a question about his concept of “foreclosure”: the idea that contemporary society prohibits a real articulation of the subject.

[…] precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

According to Zizek (and philosopher Alain Badiou, from whom he borrows the French term), the “foreclosure” of the subject has an inevitable flip-side: “la passion du reel” or “the passion of the real”. Elephant demonstrates some of the implications of Zizek’s notion, and through its poetic strategies affords the viewer an opportunity to piece together some of the elements in the bigger picture. We might regard the killers Alex and Eric as embodying the disenfranchisement that many teens (and not just in the US) feel. Viewing their apparently left-field violence in this context reveals a failure within society to deliver a secure place for their emerging sense of identity.

In the same interview, Zizek compares the idea of foreclosure and its implications with the Nietzchean opposition of active and passive nihilism. He describes passive nihilism as that state of apathy resulting from “living a stupid self-satisfied life without great passions”, which invokes the opposite form of conscious self-destruction. Zizek argues that freedom in contemporary society is devoid of the more “radical dimension” of true democracy, existing instead as the watered-down freedom to choose lifestyle. Zizek also sees in the pervasiveness of virtual realities (such as the Internet) a further disconnection from authentic experience.

In Elephant we can roughly align the characters according to the idea of active and passive nihilism. The adult characters present varying forms of apathy or disconnection; their lifestyles – particularly Alex’s parents, as revealed through the lifeless atmosphere of the family home – suggest an arrival at an unquestioned comfort zone, or passive nihilism. We see Alex and Eric attempting to break out of their transparent, but nonetheless prescribed realities: a bid for active nihilism.”

excerpt of Neera Scott’s Sublime Anarchy in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, in Senses of Cinema.continue reading here

Diogo’s website (currently under construction) is here

┐ Moyra Davey └

Posted on October 1, 2012 by N

I’d say that these pictures are about the life of objects. I had a funny revelation recently–and in a way this takes me back to my art school days as a nascent photographer–that my Fridge picture is very similar to Edward Weston’s toilet. In his diaries and notebooks, which I read in my early 20’s, and loved, he talks about photographing his toilet over and over, each time refining the composition until he attained a formalist perfection. And he writes about his exaltation at finally getting it right. Perhaps it’s odd to be identifying with Weston at this point in my life, but I have to admit that my process with the fridge was strangely similar. It involved a slow, methodical deliberation, a stalking of light, of waiting for the precise moment of solar illumination in an otherwise dim room. To get back to your question about the concepts in my work, maybe this comparison to Weston speaks to the idea of ‘slow time’, “the cyclical and durational” that Miwon Kwon mentions in relation to my photographs.

(…)
JTD: Can you speak about your interest in everyday objects, including objects that are often overlooked or regarded as a nuisance, such as dust and empty bottles, and how these objects influence your photographs?

MD: Bottles, especially the clear glass ones, refract light in beautiful and surprising ways. I began the bottle series because of an accident, a blurred Johnny Walker bottle that turned up at the tail end of a B&W contact sheet. I loved the look of it and began to take intentional pictures of empty whiskey bottles consumed in my household, and did this for a period of five years, realizing at the end of this term that the totality of the images constituted a kind of calendar, a finite block of time denoted by the consumption of a particular type of spirits. I followed the B&W series with a color series, also documenting five years of consumption.

JTD: What is your attraction to dust, and what do you believe it conveys to the viewer about human nature?

MD: I’m kind of obsessed with dust as this nuisance substance, and just the whole Sisyphean nature of it that Simone de Beauvoir talks about in relation to the futility of housework, the housewife’s ‘endless, hopeless battle against dust and dirt’. Beauvoir says that the only way out of this trap is to embrace the “life in death” in decay. Dust is made up of dead matter, but it’s also totally alive in its entropic, inescapable fashion. If you can find a way to make your peace with it then you won’t be doomed to “the general and the inessential.(…)

excerpt of an interview by Jess T. Dugan, in Big Red & Shiny. continue reading here

more of Moyra’s work here

┐ Helga Härenstam └

Posted on September 3, 2012 by N

The Society is a fictious documentary, trough which Helga Härenstam has been looking for and/or constructing environments, scenes and events, that are based on memories from the small society where she grew up. The people photographed in these series are Härenstam herself, her family and other people that she is close to.

The series is a puzzle of pictures dealing with the borders between documentary and staged, the real and the unreal and the past and the present. The title The Society, is inspired by a place, where Helga Härenstam partly grew up. This place does have a name, but is simply called ”the society”. Härenstam found the ambiguousness of the word society interesting though it refers to a context of world politics and states that shut in and shut out citizens depending on where they are considered to belong. At the same time it refers to this small community, which basically functions in the same way, just on a minor scale.

The Society tells several stories about growing up in a rural area that slowly becomes abandoned. A transitional place is formed between the past and the present ways of how the society functions and between the past and the present way ones memory functions.

taken from HIPPOLYTE STUDIO

more of Helga’s work here

┐ Maya Rochat └

Posted on July 20, 2012 by N

@ Maya Rochat, Siren (terrorist), 2010

@ Maya Rochat, Siren (III), 2010

More of Maya’s work here

┐ Julie Hascoët └

Posted on July 10, 2012 by N

@ Julie Hascoët, Untitled, from the project Tenir/Rester

@ Julie Hascoët, Hug, from the series 4 Months

@ Julie Hascoët, Emilie, from the series 4 Months

More of her work here

┐ Natasja Maria Fourie └

Posted on July 10, 2012 by N

@ Natasja Maria Fourie, from I didn’t want to be your ghost

“I have an obsession with the naked portrait. The most beautiful and vulgar things are produced by the human body. The naked body raises intense psychological issues. My portrait work deals with all those complex feelings when one is stripped naked, the feelings of shame, amusement or indifference. Nakedness deals with being human, with being mortal.” Fourie’s work revolves around how we share our lives and bodies. She is very conscious to establish where her naked portraits stands in relation to a growing tide of pornographic and voyeuristic imagery, aimed at a mostly male audience. Although much of her work employs voyeurism, Fourie has allowed her own life to be put on display through numerous self- investigations in her diary work. Fourie believes her work portrays her obsession with the relationship between the human mind and the universe, life, love, and the naked portrait and can collectively almost be seen as a poetic self-portrait.

She employs photography not to produce documentary transparency, but ambiguities … Some of these encounters are real, most are accidents and some are absolute fantasy, but at the end they are all born from the same place -the doubts and demons she carries inside herself. Most of her portrait work conveys the power of the natural surroundings that embrace both creation and ruin, while Fourie contrasts them with the force of the imagination. In her search for identity and intimacy the body becomes a compelling signifier of the lived experience.

Since 2010 Natasja Maria Fourie has had no settled place of residence but has explored and travelled with her partner and created work inspired by their love affair. Her work has been featured in various publications including GUP, Eyemazing, ART das kunstmagazin , Vice, Colors, Design Indaba and Dazed and Confused .

via Poncz blog

more of Natasja’s work here

┐ Duarte Amaral Netto └

Posted on March 17, 2012 by N

Duarte’s new work is in a rare place between verity, intimacy and honesty and the exciting and self obsessed world of fiction. The narrative constructed is that of “Z”, a physician said to have gone to Germany to specialized in facial surgery. We’re then introduced to the idea of the family album and presented with historic images of very significant relevant, both in time and the place they occupy, as in relation to their place amidst a personal account of things: which events matter, what isn’t being showed, etc? Unfortunately the work isn’t up at his site yet, but I’m sure it will be available soon.”

His website here

┐ Carla Cabanas └

Posted on March 13, 2012 by N

“What remains of what once was – Cabanas Álbum), the artist invokes memory imprecision through erasing, scratching, and fading away of images belonging to her closest surrounding: family. The photographic processing torn off – accumulating in the bottom of the frame – erases information on spaces, context and characters. Just like we all unwillingly discard our personal history, until what remains is but ashes from times gone by.”

by Valter Ventura

More of Carla’s work here

┐ Sasha Kurmaz └

Posted on February 23, 2012 by N

“I consciously seek to avoid the trap of the “author’s style.” The world of art requires us to underscore originality and authorship, a certain manner that will distinguish you from all and make you unique. Today, I think authorship and style are boundaries for any artist. I strive constantly to look for something new – don’t stop anywhere, constantly experiment. This refers for all that I do: photographs, collage, graffiti, objects… Maybe it’s just searching for myself, I don’t know.”

excerpt from an interview led by Christopher Schreck, that can be read at All of this is rocket science

Sasha´s web place, full of what seems to me a very honest portray of how he sees the world and those close to him.

┐ El Plus En └

Posted on February 1, 2012 by N

“We wanted to focus on the ‘in-between’, the volatile state of mind in which instability manifests itself, where an uncertain state of mind can produce dark and bizarre outcomes,” says Norman. “The idea is all about letting go; you have to fall out of reality to engage with the pictures – the pictures are there to trigger thoughts inside your head,” adds Adam. “I think the best way to view this work would be to spend an evening with it. It’s a very tricky project to explain because, essentially, we were looking into our own thoughts and what occurs in our own minds. But hopefully the essence of the picture is captured, and therefore a viewer can translate that to their own thoughts and interpretations.”

source: British Journal of Photography, article by Diane Smyth

More of their work here

┐ Amanda Tinker └

Posted on January 16, 2012 by N

Palladium Print 8″x10″

“My latest work, still in progress, explores the intersection between the psychological landscape of family relationships and the body’s physical form, compromised, intact and otherwise. This work deals both specifically with the physical effects of a degenerative nerve disease in my family, and generally with the anxieties, joys and ambiguities of family life. I want to confront my own anxieties over my children potentially developing a debilitating illness, but at the same time appreciate the simplicity and overwhelming urgency of childhood.”

More of Amanda’s work here

Nihilsentimentalgia

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